This week’s Video Thursday is a flashback to 1965, and a movie whose distributors sold tickets by using blatant racial scare-tactics.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy-zVlB4mvA&w=475] Via Shani Hilton guest-blogging for Ta-Nahisi Coates via PostBourgie via Oscar Willis.
Reading a little more about it, the NYTimes description of the movie (which is French) says it’s “more thoughtful and less exploitive than its American release title would lead one to expect,” but, frankly, that’s not saying much because it’s harder to get less thoughtless and more exploitive than “My Baby is Black!” And, of course, the trailer proudly proclaims that the movie is “For Mature Adults Only.” I haven’t seen the movie itself, but what the trailer is saying is, “Adults, a black man with a white woman is risqué and exotic, come be titillated—but don’t bring the kids, they might get the idea that an interracial relationship is okay.”
It’s jaw-dropping to jump back a couple decades and see how open and public race-baiting was. But then we’re reminded that we’re not done with racial stereotyping yet:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNwjY5FxzPA&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
