DesertFox
01-03-2008, 10:19 PM
Our popular culture has a lot of trouble delivering affirmative feelings about what we once considered good, basic values. Consumed by cynicism, we seem embarrassed by our own goodwill. We leap at every opportunity to dismiss the better angels of our nature as no more than corny - or as the way a simpleton might see the world.
The affliction can be particularly serious in the black community.
In that context, "The Great Debaters" - starring and directed by Denzel Washington, who plays a poet who leads an all-black East Texas college debate team - is an important American film. Set in 1935, it shows that there is a substantial intellectual tradition from which black people come. That tradition was nurtured by the many black colleges that sprang up throughout the South after the Civil War. Those schools were intended to do the heroic job of educating a mass of Americans who had been enslaved for 250 years in situations where being caught reading or learning to read could result in violent consequences.
In showing black people going to college, thinking about books and enjoying rich interior, intellectual lives, "The Great Debaters" refutes the lazy, narrow stereotypes that have become so common in our time. Those reflexes have been reestablished in hip hop, far too much black comedy and the ongoing denigration of black Americans in television and film, where the expected characters are almost always buffoons, knuckleheads or hoochie mamas.
Things have gotten so bad that black authenticity is regularly defined as rude, criminal, contemptuous of education and disrespectful. Any other vision of black American culture is dismissed as "white" or suffering from an overdose of "white middle-class values."
More (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/columnists/crouch/index.html)
The affliction can be particularly serious in the black community.
In that context, "The Great Debaters" - starring and directed by Denzel Washington, who plays a poet who leads an all-black East Texas college debate team - is an important American film. Set in 1935, it shows that there is a substantial intellectual tradition from which black people come. That tradition was nurtured by the many black colleges that sprang up throughout the South after the Civil War. Those schools were intended to do the heroic job of educating a mass of Americans who had been enslaved for 250 years in situations where being caught reading or learning to read could result in violent consequences.
In showing black people going to college, thinking about books and enjoying rich interior, intellectual lives, "The Great Debaters" refutes the lazy, narrow stereotypes that have become so common in our time. Those reflexes have been reestablished in hip hop, far too much black comedy and the ongoing denigration of black Americans in television and film, where the expected characters are almost always buffoons, knuckleheads or hoochie mamas.
Things have gotten so bad that black authenticity is regularly defined as rude, criminal, contemptuous of education and disrespectful. Any other vision of black American culture is dismissed as "white" or suffering from an overdose of "white middle-class values."
More (http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/columnists/crouch/index.html)