After reading through the assigned Birth of a Nation readings, I am
extremely bothered by the content, but I do appreciate Leon Litwack's take on
the controversial text. He seemed to make clear his disagreement of the film's
focus on the ""...South's "final solution" to the
"race problem""" (pg. 140). As I'm unsure of this text's
actual publication date, Litwack seems to definitely take a more progressive,
less bigoted point of view than one in the time period of the original
release of the film, in my opinion. To be honest, I see it as a stronger grasp
on reality as well as a stronger sense of equality and humanization of blacks.
Perhaps I am interpreting it wrong still, but I would much rather be friends
with Litwack than with Dixon...
I am extremely appreciative of Litwack for his description of the film
being “misleading” to Americans, emphasizing only the negative stereotypes and
beliefs of any non-Caucasian race, specifically African Americans in this film.
In my opinion, the film is a definite piece of propaganda, as Litwack
describes in the first sentence of his article, for the South to promote their
mission that had recently been discouraged.
As a biracial American, I guess I could consider myself a
"mulatto", only doing my part to "mulatto the whole
Republic" (pg. 136), which is obviously my biggest aspiration in life! I
am literally only here to ruin the white race- thanks for taking the words
right out of my mouth, Dixon. As anyone would be in our society today, I think,
I am extremely offended by the content in the film The Birth of a Nation. I
myself have never watched the film, knowing that it would be a remarkably
difficult experience, but as I am older (and more opinionated), I look forward
to viewing it in class tomorrow. I hope that we can identify the comparisons
and contrasting ideals between the film and the world we live in today...I am
sure there will be plenty of both.
I know this is our history; people were uneducated and fearful, and for
those reasons, easily manipulated into thinking that this information was this
information was true. Even despite of that though, I am honestly astonished
that this occurred at all, that a film this derogatory and misleading could be
presented to a public that ate it up without a second thought. I don’t think
that I will ever get over that, and I am hopeful that will future generations
will never fully comprehend it, either.
UPDATE**
Well, the film turned out to be absolutely everything that I thought it'd be, which I WOULD NOT consider to be a good thing. I think I speak for most of my classmates when I say the content of the movie was disgusting and ridiculously wrong/bigoted/propagandist..but it was interesting to watch. The whole time I was asking myself, "How in the world could people accept and BELIEVE this to be true?! It is so inaccurate and biased!", as you can see above though, I knew that I would question that aspect of the film.
I really enjoyed our discussions in class afterward, comparing the film's ideals to that of Tarzan and even those of our own society today.
Your last paragraph is very true. More and more it seems that people are becoming educated to know what propaganda is - yet when they are actually faced with it, they don't know what they're seeing/reading/hearing. People pretend they are educated, but in reality, most of society is still naive. That's the reason snopes.com and the like exist; to debunk fake stories that the public takes for granted and passes around the like common cold. It's a sad truth.
ReplyDeleteCaitlin,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that it is astonishing when you think about the fact that people actually enjoyed Birth of a Nation and "ate it up." What I found particularly disturbing about it, though, is the fact that this occurred a mere 100 years ago. If you think about it, many of our great-grandparents were alive in 1915! Only about 4 family generations have passed since Birth of a Nation first appeared! Although 100 years may seem like a long time, when you stop to consider the history of the world it really isn't. In high school I always thought of problems with racism and slavery as something that occurred such a long time ago, but in reality they are much closer to home than that.