@Olivier5,
Gone With The Wind was racist (in my own outlook) just by the way they portrayed the "house slaves."
But here in the following is a better piece which explains what I mean. Bear in mind, I am talking about a movie I absolutely loved, in fact it was first full length romance I have read growing up; was so mad when Rhett told her he didn't give a ** .
Quote:Romance for the world of slavery is the book's setting as well as its philosophy:
"There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South... Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave... Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind..."
This is only the worst of the film's politically incorrect sins. Gone with the Wind contains the single most romantic vision of marital rape ever put onscreen:
The film more or less invented the concept of the sassy black friend, in Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, who was the first African-American to win an Oscar. The film explicitly talks about reparations, the famous 40 acres and a mule, as a vote-buying scam put about by Yankee carpetbaggers. There are good blacks and insolent blacks. There are house blacks and there are field blacks. Whenever African-American characters are articulate, it is always meant as a comic surprise. These are still the prejudices that bedevil representations of African-Americans onscreen.
But what is most fascinating about Gone with the Wind is the capacity for the story not to be about race. One would think that a story about the Civil War, about the liberation of the slaves, would naturally involve the discussion of the nature of enslavement, the nature of rebellion. But there is really almost none of it. Even after the war is lost, Mammy remains Mammy. The good blacks remain the good blacks. The carpetbaggers only appear in a tiny fragment of a scene, and they are not really given enough personhood to count as villains. That honor goes to white trash and the Yankees. The details of the material life of the Southerners is the key, and in that drama the black people amount to furniture. During a nap before the war, white girls sleep while black girls fan them with peacock feather fans. Whether those black girls have any feelings whatsoever is a matter of the strictest irrelevance to this movie.
esquire
It wasn't until after I grew up and was more aware of racism that I actually realized just how racist a movie it was. When I was kid, like the above paragraphs explain, it was all about the southern way of life. My cousins and my siblings and I played Gone With The Wind as kids, enacting running away from the "Yankees" on vines in my granny's woods a long time ago. The only thought we had about the way the blacks were portrayed was to repeat the scene "I know nothing about birthing babies." Of course it was said differently in the movie. So yes, Oliver, that movie and book was one of the worst movies and books with blatant racism around that I know of. Does it mean we should stay away from the book and movie now that we are enlightened? I don't know, my instinct says yes, but, I am not sure. In my mothers room, she is dead now, there is still a very big picture of the iconic scene of Rett and Scarlett hanging on the wall. There is no way I would even want to take it down.
