Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (review)

When George W. Bush recently dubbed certain nations an "axis of evil" he was evoking some of the moral terrain that Linda Williams explores in Playing the Race Card. The president's polarizing rhetoric aimed to give our complex, ambiguous world the clear moral legibility that remains the hallmark of melodrama, the durable nineteenth-century stage aesthetic that Williams traces in key works in American popular culture. That these "evil" nations are also largely nonwhite and non-Christian likewise recalls how issues of racial otherness have long been a staple of melodrama in all its media and forms from the nineteenth century on.

This book would be valuable just for its scholary insights, sharp contextual readings, well-selected illustrations, and imaginative genealogy of melodramatic practices across various eras. What gives it special urgency is that by locating those moments when new media (print, film, TV, video) were shaping new ways of conceiving race, Williams creates a moving picture of racial melodrama in the United States that manages to connect the polemic of Uncle Tom's Cabin to the nationwide, if divided, fascination with the televised O. J. Simpson murder trial. Ultimately Williams wants to show that images of race and the American melodramatic tradition that generates them have implications for our legal system: specifically, that the race card is always being played in one way or another, and that pursuing the ideal of color-blind justice actually undermines real justice by failing to take these images into account. This is rigor and erudition in the service of pointed social commentary.

Williams focuses on a handful of key works or moments in American culture, each a landmark in its medium: Uncle Tom's Cabin (and its many offshoots); D. W. Griffith's still-controversial film Birth of a Nation; the first film "talkie," The Jazz Singer; the stage musical (and subsequent film) Show Boat; the film version of Gone with the Wind; the TV miniseries Roots; the videotaped beating of Rodney King with its ensuing jury trials; and Simpson's relentlessly televised double-murder trial. Williams follows the archetypal, if often appropriated, image of the victimized African American male from Uncle Tom to Simpson, while arguing that the iconographic inversion of Uncle Tom's sentimentalized home into O.J.'s demonized Brentwood estate amounts to the "end of white good will toward assimilation" and the "end of affirmative action."

These claims may seem extravagant, and indeed in the O. J. chapter Williams's argument seems a bit looser than elsewhere, as when she equates Simpson's attempts to achieve free agency in the NFL to a slave's quest for freedom. But Williams keeps her analysis on track with a focused overview of the American melodramatic mode in chapter 1 (drawing on such theorists of melodrama as Peter Brooks and Christine Gledhill) and, in subsequent chapters, by repeatedly referencing the definitive melodramatic elements in her key texts, especially Uncle Tom's Cabin, as she moves into new texts, eras, and media. She is equally astute in finding ironic continuity between Harriet Beecher Stowe and D. W. Griffith, presenting Birth of a Nation as an "anti-Tom" story that nonetheless preserves the melodramatic imperative that has persistently managed this country's deeply conflicted feelings about race.

As Williams reminds us, melodrama masks contradiction as clarity. Its success as a modern moral aesthetic can be attributed to a powerful capacity to balance outrage and reassurance, empathy and distance, realism and fantasy. Melodrama subsumes social conflict and moral contradiction within such estimable values as home, motherhood, and the human heart, making the human subject and its sufferings a compelling diversion for audiences assured of a morally redemptive moment. The subjects on stage are therefore always other, no matter how powerful the sympathetic bond between actor and...