A friend recently, and rather inexplicably, sent me the first season of Saturday Night Live on DVD. I'm not sure why. We hadn't talked about it, and I was never a consistent viewer. But I thought it would be fun to take a look at this phenomenon, this long-running show, to see what all the fuss was about.
In the first episode, Randy Newman was one of the musical guests. He sang his lovely "Sail Away", a song I've heard many times. For some reason, I'm not sure why, perhaps because of my growing political awareness, I heard it with sharper ears this time, and discovered an element of the song I'd previously missed. I don't know if it was the lyric "You'll be as happy as a monkey in a monkey tree", or the refrain "We will cross the mighty ocean into Charleston Bay" that made me perk up and pay attention, but I suddenly understood that this song is sung from the point of view of a slave trader trying to convince Africans to come to America, where they would, of course, not be as happy as monkeys in monkey trees but would be sold in auction, Charleston Bay being a notorious slave trading port back in the bad old days.
I've mentioned this observation to friends since then, and for some of them it is a revelation, as it was to me, and to some, it is more "You're just now recognizing that?" Sly Randy Newman, hiding a harsh, devastating message in a lyrical, sweet-sounding song. Makes me wonder what else I've missed, in Newman's songs and in other artworks in general. Artists always have something to say; pretty pictures are never pretty only.
And speaking of observations, this next one is from a bit longer ago and has not been accepted by everyone I've shared it with. I grew up watching and delighting in the classic old Disney animated films. and as an adult have collected them on DVD. Many of them contain cringe-worthy moments or characters, such as the awful "What Makes a Redman Red?" musical number from my beloved "Peter Pan". As a child, of course, I had accepted that song as a fun characterization of Indians. But watching and hearing it as an adult, I actually gasped at how insulting it is to native peoples.
Anyway, when I purchased "Dumbo" and watched it for the first time in more than a half-century, again watching with more politically awakened eyes, I saw something which once again made me gasp with understanding. The adult elephants in the movie all have small ears, which makes them Indian elephants. These are the female elephants who ridicule Dumbo and his mother, Mrs. Jumbo. Dumbo, of course, is ridiculous to them because of his big, floppy ears. Those ears mean he is an African elephant. Oh my gosh. Mrs. Jumbo had sex with an African.
Could it be that this is the actual reason he and his mother are unacceptable and unaccepted? Was this racist element conscious in the minds of the writers? It seems pretty obvious to me now, and there are those characters the crows, clearly supposed to be Negroes, to cement my belief that this story is racist in the most casual, and therefore the most dangerous, way. Which is exactly how racism has lived in this country for centuries: acceptable, unexamined, usually not even conscious, and all the more insidious because of it.
Wow.
The Randy Newman stuff is new to me. I don't even know who that is; don't recognize the name. But I seem to recall hearing the song once or twice many years ago.
ReplyDeleteBut YES. That's how casual and insidious racist remarks are and how the ideas behind them have been perpetuated and kept alive. xoA <3