INTERRACIAL VOICE - Guest Editorial

Guest Editorial

Politically Correct Revisionism:
Or why mixed-race heroes blacken over time
By Susanne M.J. Heine S. Heine

Here in Sweden where I live, I have access to many of the cable-TV stations that people in America can also tune in to. When I've finished my work for the day and feel like relaxing, I sometimes watch dramas on the Hallmark Channel. For the most part, Hallmark seems to strive for a very socially conscious -- though nevertheless entertaining -- policy when it comes to the material they present. With the exception of a few costly dogs (like their production of Cleopatra, which featured a stunning actress whose Valley accent and vapid schoolgirl pout somewhat diminished her credibility as the Empress of Egypt), their films tend to be morally uplifting, spiritually satisfying, and dramatically valid. They don't seem to shy away from controversial themes, and their frequent use of black actors and actresses in stories that deal with the "black experience" can only be commended.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I was happy to see that they were presenting a dramatisation of Anne Rice's novel, A Feast for All Saints. I have not read the novel myself, but the blurb in the TV program promised an intriguing piece of Americana -- the story of a mixed-race family in the city that the French called Nouvelle Orléans. At the time in which the story is set, New Orleans was still the jewel of the Louisiana Purchase, a bargain-basement deal that the USA pulled off neatly because Napoléonic France needed money for its war-emptied coffers.

I know a thing or two about those days (the early 1800s) -- things that I have picked up, as it were, along the way, my mother's people being from Charleston by way of Louisiana. (Charleston closely resembled New Orleans in its racial makeup.) One of the most unusual aspects (from an Anglo-Saxon point of view) of race relations under the French before Louisiana was sold to the United States, was the fact that the French saw the "civilising" of the blacks as one of their most important cultural missions. And not only the civilising of blacks, but the lightening of their colour through deliberate interbreeding. My own mother's people were "gens de couleur libres", in other words, "free coloured people", who, under the French, were seriously expected to be more capable of, and more disposed to, emulating their white betters by virtue of their relation -- by blood -- to them than pure blacks could be expected to be. In other words, they were "créoles". ("Créole" is a word that comes from the same root as "create"; thus, a créole is someone whom a master has created in his own image.)

The film featured some of our handsomest mixed-race stars (granted that there aren't that many of them; mixed-race seems to scare Hollywood off.) The cast included the exquisite Gloria Reuben (whose performances in ER we so enjoyed), the blindingly beautiful Jennifer Beals, and Pam Greer, who seems only to become more gorgeous with the years. (The first film I ever saw Ms Greer in was Fort Apache, the Bronx, where she played a strung-out, heroin-junkie hooker who blows two cops away in cold blood in the first scene of the movie. It occurred to me at the time that her performance was one of the best I've ever seen, and that with her serpentine grace and Native American good looks she was probably one of the five most beautiful women in Hollywood. She's a matron now, but by God, she still is beautiful.)

The bone I have to pick is with the casting of the lead character, who is played by a young actor called Robert Ri'chard. In the story, the business of "plaçage" is explored. Plaçage was the keeping of part-black mistresses by rich French plantation owners. These men often kept parallel families, one white, one black, paid all the coloured family's expenses and saw to it that they enjoyed a relatively comfortable life, but only on the condition that they never interfered with the "white" life of their patron.

For those who would argue the moral decrepitude of this arrangement, I can only say that it is part and parcel of French life as a whole, even to this day. The latest public figure known to have pursued this way of living was the late Prime Minister, Mitterand, whose parallel family came to light only after his death. In other words, plaçage has very little to do with race or colour; it is a common feature of French life at high levels, and something that the French inherited from the Roman legions that once dominated their world.

In "A Feast for All Saints", the main character is a young man whose mother is a high-yellow New Orleans woman kept by a Frenchman. The boy and his sister are supposed to be white enough to pass, and in the case of the actress chosen to play the girl, Nicole Lyn, this is so. However, on casting the boy, the producers chose a completely negroid-looking young actor, whose only claim to resembling a white man is his blue-green eyes, fair skin and kinky, lightish hair (which was obviously peroxided into a whole new dimension for the role). Now why or how a Mediterranean-looking Frenchman and a mixed-race woman with at least three-quarters French ancestry herself (both of the actors cast were altogether physically believable in their roles), neither of whom is either green-eyed or blond-haired, could give birth to a child with kinky blond hair, green eyes and a physical appearance far more African than his mother's, is a total mystery to me.

It's as if Hollywood (which is to say, "the entertainment powers that be") cannot get through their thick heads that an octoroon is -- dare I say it? -- white, for all intents and purposes. That's the whole damned point! Had they used a white-looking actor instead, the entire story would have been more focused, even more understandably cruel in a way. The young hero of the story is a white man, the son of a French aristocrat, whose tragedy is that he is denied the privileges that otherwise would have accrued to a man of his birth, because he is sullied by his mother's origins, her "black blood". Instead of focusing on that aspect of the tale, the producers of A Feast for All Saints chose to pander to a modern-day black audience by casting an obvious mulatto in the role. I would guess, having lived in Scandinavia for 38 years and seen his type many times before, that this young actor is the child of an African and a Scandinavian, or a couple who conform to those phenotypes. (Incidentally, one of the more interesting aspects of genetic research is that it has been found that Europeans and Africans are far more closely related to each other than either group is to yellow-skinned Asians [Chinese, Japanese and Koreans] who are descended from the very first group to leave Africa. It seems the forefathers of Europeans were among the last to leave; thus, blacks and whites share a number of very specialised genes -- among them, genes for blondness and light eyes -- even though these genes are more or less latent in Africans. That's why one can see first-generation mulatto children with these traits, whereas the same traits are extremely rare in the children of white-and-Asian unions.)

The young actor, whom I found quite bad -- given to petulant pouting and a delivery of lines that was incredibly uneven, pendulating between the period-language of the role and the up-to-date black street-dialect that he obviously speaks privately -- was totally unbelievable as the son of a French aristocrat. As he was portrayed, he was a "black" boy, which robbed the role of any dynamic it could have had, or any clue to the blatant absurdity of the racial dilemma that we are still in the throes of. All subtlety was abandoned.

My fellow IV contributor A.D. Powell has written at some length about the revisionism that seems to have overtaken "black" history over the last thirty years. As if overnight, people who were in fact quadroons and octoroons -- in other words, "mixed-race" people -- are being called "black" and made to decorate the pantheon of "black" heroes and heroines, regardless of whether that designation would have been applicable to them in their time or not. Thus, we have the spectacle of a quadroon ship's captain who was considered a "white" man in his day, being extolled as "one of the first black captains of a ship", when in fact, had he been considered "black", he would never have been assigned that commission. The same is true of the selfless Louisiana nun who sacrificed herself so completely during a time of plague; had she been considered "black", she would never have been allowed to take part in the contexts in which she figured so prominently. In the TV film of her life, she was played by Vanessa Williams, a beautiful woman, certainly, but hardly one who could be taken for "white".

In 1932, Standard Oil sent my uncle Edward, a corporate lawyer, to Venezuela to handle their business there. Edward, like my mother, was a quadroon, but he was extremely fair-complexioned with wavy blond hair, green eyes and decidedly European features. If we are to acquiesce to the current demands for political correctness, it can be said that he was the first "black" lawyer to be employed by Standard Oil, but that would, in fact, be an outright lie. Standard Oil had no idea that he was anything but just as lily-white as they themselves were. They sent him to Venezuela because he was fluent in Spanish, charming, elegant, well-versed and a damned good lawyer, not because they were trying to fill some kind of equal opportunity quota. The truth is that had they known that he had "negro blood" they would no more have sent him to represent them abroad than they would have sent Steppin Fetchit. We must bear in mind that the thirties were a time of some of the most turbulent, virulent race hatred that the American nation has ever suffered through. So in the film of my uncle's life, if I write the script, who will they get to play him? A fair-skinned but recognisably "black" actor? In that case, the whole story falls apart like a house of cards and becomes a complete non sequitur -- just like A Feast for All Saints.

Revisionism is devastating in its lack of respect for the times that it misrepresents; it reduces everything to politically correct, up-to-date, comic-book simplicity, when in fact a quite different and more complex reality obtained in the past. It's wrong of us to dismiss that reality, no matter how unpleasant or painful or incorrect we may find it. Take the quadroon captain, for example. Thanks to his more or less white face, his black blood obviously meant nothing in the light of his gifts as a navigator. But, had that black ancestry been more physically evident, it is unlikely that he would have been allowed to pursue his craft, except in a very subordinate role. Markin' on the twain!

What's wrong with reality? Why do we have to re-invent it to make it more palatable? Why do we have to re-write history in order to believe it? And why are the mixed-race heroes and heroines of America being co-opted into a context that they themselves never would have recognised, and which the mores -- that is to say, the customs and attitudes -- of their own times would never have made possible?

Also by Susanne M.J. Heine: