The Racial-Ethnic Oscar

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, last week and the Wednesdays of February I’m providing a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2012, that would be: The Magic Kingdom (also the most visited post of all five years), with A Pragmatic Guide to Prayer coming in second.

In the controversy over the lack of black nominees for Oscars, one Academy member facetiously asked if we were now to have an ethnic category “for your consideration.” I doubt very much that the man who asked the question is racist; after all, he has a black adopted daughter and black grandchildren.

But what he missed entirely is that there is already a racial-ethnic category at play in the making of films, let alone the Academy Awards: Caucasians are favored in every category, from audiences to those who get to do the films, which to me is the crux of the problem, not just that other racial-ethnic groups are thereby excluded from consideration for awards.

Affirmative action has often been misunderstood to mean that unqualified people should get a job over qualified people. Affirmative action, rather, is better understood as providing opportunities for equally qualified applicants who are underrepresented in the industry they wish to enter.

Equal rights have also been twisted by dominant cultures to mean “special rights.” How many times have I had to argue with even the most open churchgoers that LGBT people, in seeking equal rights, were not requesting “special rights,” but the rights afforded every other citizen of our country, including the right to marry. That so many legislators and judges are now trying to curtail that right under the guise of defending religious freedom is reminiscent of the many ways the dominant white culture has tried to undermine civil rights and voting rights of African Americans.

I’m also surprised that many people have difficulty with stronger sentences for hate crimes. A crime is a crime is a crime, they think, when refusing to consider how a hate crime is a crime intended to harm and intimidate a whole segment of our citizenry, not to mention that hate crimes are characteristically far more brutal and wounding.

LGBT people have made tremendous strides in a historically relative short period because we had the advantage of being part of every family, neighborhood, congregation, congressional district, and political party. While African-Americans are yet to be fully integrated (i.e., welcomed), LGBT people began “integrated” even when not always welcomed. Knowing LGBT people personally as well as seeing us in film and on television helped our culture understand who we are.

When my mother visited me in Philadelphia in 1976, I took her to several plays, including one at the historic Academy of Music that featured Billy Dee Williams as a fiery Martin Luther King Jr. I was stunned to discover we were among a handful of white people in the packed theater. Why weren’t more white people interested?

Better was seeing The Color Purple at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood years later. For the first time, I saw a theater filled with black people and mostly white gay people, given the black and lesbian themes of the film.

Not just in the South where I live now, but in every city I’ve lived or travelled, it’s still true that 11 a.m. Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week, so Christians can’t really get on our high horse—even progressive Christians—and preach what we don’t practice.

And Washington and Wall Street and corporate offices, whose whitewashed tombs house overwhelmingly white and male power structures, cannot effectively legislate, invest in, or inspire a diversity they do not represent.

So I welcome Hollywood’s agonizing over what it can do to remind us “black lives matter.” This is a step toward recognizing the diversity that makes a country great.

Blog readings for Black History month in the U.S. (February):

 “Colored on TV”

Keep the Dream Alive!

Bayard Rustin Speaks

Knowing Your Place

Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

Black Lives Matter

Other relevant posts:

Redeemed from the Pit

Love Force

The Scariest Book I’ve Read

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

The Boy with Green Hair

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

I am convinced that films often serve as the “sermons” of our time, interpreting what Jesus was all about.

As a boy, I was sometimes left to entertain myself on Saturday afternoons. Watching TV, I happened onto a film that touched my experience even before I could name it. I knew I was different and was pained by my difference because, like most children, I wanted to be like everyone else.

The Boy with Green Hair was about a war orphan my age who woke up one morning and discovered his hair had turned green. Now, I had to gather this from the dialogue, because we only had a black and white television set. Besides my nascent sexuality, which I could hide, I had an analogous experience: I had bright red hair. My father affectionately called me “carrot top,” which I didn’t mind, but hated it when a stranger called me “red,” usually in a less-than-respectful way.

So I could understand from several vantage points the discomfort of the boy with green hair who wanted to fit in, but had schoolmates make fun of him, fear him, even scapegoat him. The boy had learned the day before his hair turned green the truth that he was an orphan, having never been told his parents were killed doing relief work in war-ravaged Europe. Passed around by various selfish relatives, he finally landed with “gramp,” a compassionate, retired vaudeville performer and magician.

The orphan has a mystical encounter with fellow war orphans in the woods, one of whom tells him his green hair may be a sign of something good, a way to tell others of the cost of war. No one believes him, of course, and he finally submits to the pressure of conformity and has his head shaved, an act which causes all who tormented him to be ashamed. When read a letter his father left behind, assuring him of his parents’ love and encouraging him to warn others of the price of war, he resolves to let his hair grow back green if it wants to. He accepts his difference. I identified with him because I knew I was different, though being gay was then more unspeakable than having either green or red hair.

Not many years ago I discovered a whole community online that had similarly identified with the boy, having seen the film on television in the 60s, themselves experiencing in various ways what it was like not to fit in, those whose differences “orphaned” them. I also learned that the director of the film, Joseph Losey, was blacklisted three years later for refusing to appear and refusing to cooperate with the inquisition known as Senator Joe McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities.

Another form of McCarthyism is expressed today by those who vilify “identity politics,” as if it were a new thing or a bad thing. But it’s nothing new, having been practiced by dominant cultures that required conformity to their identities to belong. And it’s only bad when refusing to welcome those of different identities.

A friend of mine, Mel White, used to do a series for churches entitled, “I Saw Jesus at the Movies.” I saw Jesus in this movie about pacifism and diversity and the courage and compassion required to achieve both.

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Chris will be leading “Claim the God in You! A Midsummer Retreat” in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13-15, 2012, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Various events may be attended singly or together. The public is welcome! See details on the church’s website, clicking on the far right box: MCCBR Retreat.

Tax-deductible donations to this ministry may be given online or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Readers are this blog’s only means of support. Thank you!