Race and Media in 21st-Century Classrooms

Racial regimes are subsequently unstable truth regimes.

– Cedric Robinson¹

The Problem of Online (Film) History

During a class screening of the 1961 film Raisin in the Sun (Dir. Daniel Petrie, Columbia Pictures) in a course I was teaching last year called “Blacks, Film & Society,” I had a sudden realization that none of the fifty students in the room had ever seen the film. The class was composed mostly of seniors, students of every description—engineering students to future businessmen or women, a crew of artists/activists who always sat together and commented loudly during screenings, males, females, black, white, Asian-American, several Latinas, and one or two Europeans. Many of the seniors were there to fulfill an ethnic studies requirement. I could see from my perch on the lecture stage that they were riveted to the screen in a way that had never before occurred. There was no glow from the laptops in the back of the room, no heads looking down at a hidden phone. Most were unaware until that day that the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose work was the basis for the film, had attended their university, and had marched and protested at their university as they now do.

I had a second thought that I too was having a new experience: After seeing the film many times and numerous productions of the play since my first encounter with it as a child, I had never seen Raisin in the company of people who did not know either the film, the play, or the story. My students had no idea what would happen. When I had to interrupt the screening, several students yelled out asking if they would later see the rest. For me, Raisin is part of the American canon, part of the cultural literacy of the last century that could be taken for granted. It has turned out to be my tool for introducing students black and white to their first experience with black actors portraying black life dilemmas in which the stakes are high and every character has a compelling need to influence a decision to be taken about the future. For that reason, it is in a way their introduction to the power of the performing arts to allow us to identify with human beings we do not know in a darkened room where we are free to internalize the struggle of others.

I was once told by a theater director, in the 1990s, that a play about a race conflict could not open with a black character speaking because the audience would not identify with her. He also said it would not do to open with an orthodox Jewish woman for the same reason. It was a strangely shallow comment because the actress playing either character was a black woman. The fact that the character would have to reveal her ethnicity made him sure that members of a New York audience would get up and leave. Even though it seemed odd to say so, I explained to him that the idea of theater was that anyone could abide with, and possibly even identify with, anyone speaking—an Iago, a Lady Macbeth, the daughters of King Lear, Richard III, the gods of the Mahabharata, Durrenmatt’s old whore come to exact revenge on a village, a despised Caliban. One might feel a deep pain as Richard Pryor relates how one could laugh at him setting himself on fire. I even threw in that all the black boys in the U.S. who came to idolize John Wayne from Saturday movies, despite his distaste for our race, proved this. So I stuck with my belief in the special freedom of darkened rooms.

Since my first screening of Raisin, I have asked students in subsequent classes any number of questions about what they have and have not seen when it comes to films by, about, or including a majority of black actors. The answers were as follows. Comedies featuring a cast that is mostly African-American: two-thirds of the students. Gangster movies: two students...