(HOST) Given recent political news, filmmaker, teacher and commentator Jay Craven has been thinking about racial rhetoric – and the way it’s most often represented in the visual media.
(CRAVEN) A friend of mine recently used a phrase I hadn’t heard before. She talked about how ideas can – quote – "fire all over the room." And it reminded me how some ideas can spread like dangerous wildfire.
Like many Vermonters, I was fearful that Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s racially-charged rhetoric would set fire all over the room as it were – to a nation already polarized in this heated election year. Reverend Wright was Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago pastor and we’ve heard his fiery words non-stop in selected media clips dominating the voracious electronic news cycle.
Cornered, Senator Obama rejected Wright’s volatile comments but failed to quell the controversy. Rejecting advice from key backers, he made a major address on race in America.
I was dubious that a long-form response could ever compete with Wright’s rapid-fire sound bites. Still, Obama’s speech caused many to pause and reflect. In polls, 40% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats applauded it, while many TV outlets continued to repeat Reverend Wright’s inflamatory comments.
This is not the first time that visual media have set "fire all over the room." Pioneering film director D.W. Griffith reportedly apologized on his deathbed for depictions of marauding blacks in his film, "Birth of a Nation." Griffith’s picture ignited a revival of the dormant Ku Klux Klan – even here in Vermont where, lacking much of a black population, Klansmen targeted French Canadians and Catholics.
I learned about this when I toured my film, "A Stranger in the Kingdom," based on Howard Mosher’s novel, and inspired by the true-life "Irasburg Affair," where an African-American minister had his house shot up soon after arriving here in 1968.
After one "Stranger" screening a Northeast Kingdom police officer told me how his French-Canadian parents had been terrorized by the Klan in the 30s.
After a Boston show, an African-American described arriving at his central Vermont home one Sunday after church in the early 70’s, to find his house in flames and his dog killed.
Vermont was the first state to abolish slavery, Vermonters supported the underground railroad and joined the Mississippi freedom rides, and we graduated America’s first black student, native Vermonter Alexander Twilight, from Middlebury College, in 1823.
Still, during the late 1990’s, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission reported that racial harassment continues to occur in every Vermont school that enrolls children of color.
In his speech, Senator Obama sought to empathize with white people’s fears and asked that we work to better know African Americans. Challenged in an ABC-TV interview Obama said, quote – "White folks need to understand that blacks don’t think of their American experience as a marching band playing John Philip Souza. Their experience as Americans is more like jazz, with blue notes."
Fair enough. Regardless of one’s candidate preferences, I hope that we will all think about Senator Obama’s comment that race remains – quote – "a part of our union that we have yet to perfect."