{"id":52856,"date":"2017-03-24T19:53:52","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T19:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=52856"},"modified":"2017-03-25T01:37:51","modified_gmt":"2017-03-25T01:37:51","slug":"race-and-civil-rights-dramas-in-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=52856","title":{"rendered":"Race and Civil Rights Dramas in Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race and Civil Rights Dramas in Hollywood<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Black Perspectives<\/a>
\n2017-03-24<\/p>\n

Justin Gomer<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of American Studies
\nCalifornia State University, Long Beach<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nKatharine Houghton<\/a> and Sidney Poitier<\/a> in \u201cGuess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner<\/a>.\u201d Photo: Columbia Pictures.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

This year marks the fiftieth\u00a0anniversary of Stanley Kramer\u2019s<\/a> Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner<\/em><\/a>, starring the iconic Sidney Poitier<\/a>. During the 1960s, when the film was released, Hollywood<\/a> produced few movies about the political activism that comprised the civil rights movement<\/a>. Instead, the movie industry turned to Sidney Poitier to offer representations of black middle-class respectability and colorblind racial discourse<\/a> in hopes of changing the hearts and minds of whites across the country. Yet, Hollywood\u2019s most celebrated civil rights drama debuted three years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964<\/a> and two years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965<\/a>, amid a very different political climate. The film\u2019s premiere in December 1967 was fourteen months after Huey Newton<\/a> and Bobby Seale<\/a> founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense<\/a>, and nearly eighteen months after Stokely Carmichael<\/a>, director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee<\/a>, began making calls for \u201cBlack Power<\/a>.\u201d James Baldwin<\/a>, writing in July 1968, noted<\/a> the contradiction between Hollywood\u2019s images of black respectability vis-\u00e0-vis Poitier\u2019s roles and the desires of the burgeoning Black Power movement, \u201cwhite Americans appear to be under the compulsion to dream, whereas black Americans are under the compulsion to awaken.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2016 Hollywood year wrapped up a few Sundays ago with the Academy Awards<\/a>. While the record six black actor nominations and the Best Picture Oscar for the black queer film Moonlight<\/em><\/a> is reason to celebrate, Baldwin\u2019s assessment of the movie industry endures. Indexing Hollywood\u2019s \u201cdiversity problem<\/a>\u201d strictly to volume fails to fully comprehend the movie industry\u2019s problematic relationship with black lives broadly, and with black history explicitly…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year marks the fiftieth\u00a0anniversary of Stanley Kramer\u2019s Guess Who\u2019s Coming to Dinner, starring the iconic Sidney Poitier. During the 1960s, when the film was released, Hollywood produced few movies about the political activism that comprised the civil rights movement. Instead, the movie industry turned to Sidney Poitier to offer representations of black middle-class respectability and colorblind racial discourse in hopes of changing the hearts and minds of whites across the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8413,8,20],"tags":[26485,26673],"class_list":["post-52856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-communications","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-black-perspectives","tag-justin-gomer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52856"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52882,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52856\/revisions\/52882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}