When he was a seventh-grader in Michigan, the teenager who would grow up to become Malcolm X went to the movies to see "Gone With the Wind." Many years later, he recounted what happened:
"I was the only Negro in the theatre, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug," he wrote in "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."
Fast-forward to Sacramento in 2008 and the controversy over a planned screening of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at a free movies-in-the-park series sponsored by City Councilman Steve Cohn.
Asian American activists protested Mickey Rooney's 1961 portrayal of the character Mr. Yunioshi as racist. Rooney, as the often-irritated neighbor of Audrey Hepburn's Holly Golightly, wears grotesque buck teeth and adopts absurdly "Asian"-accented English.
Both incidents point to a wider problem that movie fans have when viewing older Hollywood films that were made when racial and ethnic stereotypes – both virulent and more benign – were commonplace.
Thanks in part to the civil rights movement, many Americans are now more aware of and sensitive to images and portrayals that demean racial minorities. Yet controversies continue over the depiction of some ethnic groups – Muslims in particular – in modern films and TV shows.
This also poses a particular concern for parents who don't want to ignore the onscreen racism and stereotypes to which their children are exposed.
Jeff Adachi, a McClatchy High School graduate, San Francisco's public defender and a documentary filmmaker, wrote and directed "The Slanted Screen," about the portrayal of Asian and Asian American characters in Hollywood films.
"The Mr. Yunioshi character is a textbook example of a racist caricature," says Adachi. "The only purpose that he serves in the movie is to laugh at him."
Pat Hanson, a film historian at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, points out that "historically, there are many films that have racial portrayals that we would now consider very inappropriate."
Some from the 1930s and '40s, for example, included performances by African American actors such as Stepin Fetchit, Fred "Snowflake" Toones and Butterfly McQueen that many now consider stereotyped and demeaning. And other films, says Hanson, featured "little throwaway scenes where somebody dons blackface."
Patricia Turner, professor of African and African American studies at UC Davis, goes back even further in time. "African Americans have been dealing with this since the circulation of 'Birth of a Nation' in 1915," says Turner. D.W. Griffith's film, which is considered a milestone in moviemaking technique but which features evil blacks (portrayed by white actors in blackface) and noble white KKK members in the post-Civil War era, "faced boycotts even at the time it was released."
The controversy over the portrayal of racial and ethnic minorities is also as recent as 1999's release of "Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace," which introduced the character Jar Jar Binks. Peter X. Feng, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware and co-host of the Turner Classic Movies series "Race and Hollywood: Asian Images in Film," says "a lot of people thought that George Lucas' Jar Jar was subliminally a lazy Jamaican. And the trade guild that was causing the problems (in the movie) was Japanese-accented."
UC Davis' Turner sees the recent spotlight shone on "Breakfast at Tiffany's" as providing "teachable moments" – where "the current population and community has an opportunity to see what kind of racism was taken for granted and was accepted years ago."
"One of the things that happens in a university classroom is that we encounter students who don't quite get what kinds of ethnic stereotyping existed in the past, who don't get the way racism was manifested in popular culture," Turner says.
You can point out, she says, that "an actress of the caliber and stature of Audrey Hepburn didn't protest saying these lines and having this relationship with Mickey Rooney. I think it helps students understand a little bit of what their Asian grandparents had to endure in the 1960s when something like that was acceptable."
Call The Bee's Bruce Dancis, (916) 321-1112.
