I know, I'm late. But I just listened to the Fresh Air interview with Sam Pollard. Who's he? He just made the film "MLK/FBI." And in the middle of the interview, Pollard talks about the racist / groundbreaking movie, "Birth of a Nation" by DW Griffith. And he talked about one crucial propaganda clip.
You know the scene. Black men are occupying (!) the sacred halls of legislative power. And are they doing the serious work of governing? No, course not. They're trashing the place. Feet up on desks! Eating chicken in the chamber! Carousing, giggling, destroying, rampaging! Never mind that it isn't true--it's truer than true. It's what you'd expect from subhumans. It's "history written in lightning," darn it!
No wonder we'd need another Klan to come rescue us.
Pollard's description struck me. I've seen that clip. It's angered me and saddened me for decades. And then I've forgotten about it. The movie was a long time ago.
Except I don't think I will this time. It came true... with one little exception.
On Jan. 6, people trashed the sacred chambers of our republic. But they weren't Black.
They were WHITE. (I swear, the supremacists I know would own that all-caps title.) Aside from the face paint, of course.
Griffith was a prophet. He just got one detail wrong.
I've long thought that white privilege has more than a touch of projection about it. We "protect" our innocent women from the rapacity of the Other because then we don't have to deal with our own. We joke about the sloth of the Other to distract from our own. We resent the earthy pleasures of the Other because we are envious.
And what would the Other do with power and self governance? They'd wreck the place irresponsibly. Endanger lives. Endanger democracy itself. That's what the Other always does.
But if WE do it, it's patriotic.
I am struck by this. Hard. It's absolutely true that a Black Lives Matter protest would have met a vastly different response from military forces. But that's not all. Had the protests of last summer not happened, it would still be the case that when WHITE anger rose up, it took the very form Griffith foisted onto Black folks as propaganda. Dumb, ignorant fools messing around and destroying sacred space. Can't we get them under control?
And, sadly, the propaganda is slipping back in. You've heard the theories: antifa. After all, what would you expect? WHITE people would never do such a thing!
Just ask DW Griffith.