The good white fairy of Hollywood and Wall Street has waved her wand: A white
aristocratic woman bequeaths her property to her Negro nurse. The town’s outstanding
attorney, a former judge, takes Pinkey’s case, without retainer. A Southern judge
rebukes the ranting lawyer who seeks to rob Pinky of her legacy. A Southern white
courtroom mob sits and only mutters; even when the court rules in favor of the Negro, the
mob does not act. After the court decision, Pinky is prevented by no one from opening her
nursery center on the inherited estate, presumably with fairy gold. And, final triumph of
the magic wand: The Ku Klux Klan never arrives!
Variety (November 23, 1949) reports that at one sequence, both Negro and white
members of the Atlanta audience applauded. (The audience was separated by segregation, of
course.) That was the scene in which Pinky won the court fight. How should this be
explained? For the Negroes, that scene was the only moment of victory–false and illusory,
contrary to all realities, as it was. While for a section of the whites this scene
undoubtedly expressed their approval of just decisions for Negroes, for many others it
"proved" how nice and how decent Southern white justice "really is,"
Indeed, the point about the Atlanta audience opens up for consideration the calculated
effect of the focal courtroom scene on the varying class and social elements among
American moviegoers.
Insofar as the film addresses itself to the worker in the audience, the depiction of
the lynch-eager mob, shown to be predominantly made up of poor whites, insults the working
class and makes it out to be the social villain of the piece. By deliberately screening
from view the lynch-law guilt of the "better classes"–the landlords,
industrialists, and bankers–the film aims to break down in the worker his self-confidence
and self-respect, and to retard the development of his class consciousness.
To the white middle classes the film addresses itself through the courtroom scene
somewhat as follows: The workers, clearly, are uncouth and Klux-ish. Your alliance cannot
be with them. The "superior" class forces in the film–all the way from landlord
to lawyer–they are the ones who battle m the cause of justice, against the white workers
and farmers. Here is the road for your alliance!
To the Negro members of the audience the film, through the courtroom scene, seems to
say: Your enemy, you can see, is the camp of the poor whites; your protectors and allies
are the others, the "best" whites. With these you must work out your destiny.
Shun struggle and Negro-white unity. Under the aegis and paternalistic protection of the
plantation rulers and their courts of justice, resign yourselves in permanence to your
"racial inferiority."
Bourbon justice has been flattered. And Pinky’s magnanimous attorney, now that her
victory is achieved, solemnly states: "You’ve got the land, you’ve got the house,
you’ve got justice; but I doubt if any other interests of this community have been
served." This is a dramatic and ideological high point of the film, artistically
underscored. Actually, those are the only memorable lines in terms of idea content. In
other words, the picture raises the question: Is the whole thing worth while? We white
upper-class people have been very decent and courageous in showing the problem. But in the
final analysis, isn’t it perhaps all a mistake? And since these words come from the lips
of Pinky’s white defender, whose "goodness" has been dramatically established,
their calculated impact is indeed cogent.
Who is Pinky?
A key to knowing her is to know the reason for her return home. She has left the North
because of her inability to go on in her ambiguous position of concealing her Negro
identity from her admirer. She is embittered because she has had to run away. She has not
come back to her people. When she walks through the streets, she walks with her head up
past the Negro children, past the Negro houses and people.
Yet her very running away has forced her to see herself as belonging to the Negro
people. This conflict within her explains her declaration in the arrest scene that she is
a Negro. It enters into her refusal to accept her white suitor’s conditions for their
marriage. it is a factor in her sharp emotional outburst against serving Miss Em, who has
for many years exploited her grandmother. Pinky’s initial rebellion against this
arrangement which her grandmother seeks to effect is confusedly motivated. On the one
hand, there is her resentment at being treated as a Negro and even considered as one
despite her light complexion: "I’m as white as you are!" she cries out to Miss
Em. On the other hand, her emerging sense of identification with her people, together with
her newly acquired sense of professional independence, suggests a socially conscious
element in her resistance to the paternalistic summons of the over-bearing old white woman
in the Big House.
Aunt Dicey sees the conflict in Pinky and seeks to mold her granddaughter in her own
image. She is motivated by the desire to survive and to protect her own. But in her
abjectness bred of fear and unconsciousness of any way out, she urges upon Pinky to
resolve the conflict within her by kneeling to white "superiority." When, at the
outset, she reproves Pinky for her "passing," it is not because she holds that
her granddaughter should be conscious of the dignity of her people, but that she should
"know her place" as a Negro.
Pinky is a "white" Negro, a Negro who can "pass." She is presented
in total effect as the "unusual" Negro. She has trained herself in the
mannerisms of the whites. She is always conscious of the fact that she has acquired a
profession, a skill which is denied to the masses of the young Negro men and women. She is
so deliberately contrasted to the other Negro characters as to appear obviously
"superior" to them all, and worthy of doing "uplift" work among her
people. Because of all this, in Hollywood’s alchemized South, a white ruling-class court
could not find it out of keeping with its sense of "justice" even to award a
verdict to her.
To give the finishing touch to Pinky’s "superiority," Hollywood assigned her
role to a white woman. Not a Fredi Washington or any one of a score of unquestionably
qualified Negro actresses of light complexion was chosen for the leading role of Pinky,
but the white actress Jeanne Crain was cast for the part. With all due appreciation for
Miss Crain’s creditable performance, this fact bears significantly on our evaluation of
the film’s central character. For, clearly, it would be going "too far" to
let an actual Negro woman, even in a film pretending to have a Negro heroine, defy, in a
white man’s court, the white supremacist code of robbery of the Negro’s right to
inherit; or to let an actual Negro woman be seen in a white lover’s embrace, even though
that love remains, by the taboo of the Hollywood racist code, unconsummated. If a degree
of concession must be made in a Negro character, let it at least be made to a white
player, says Hollywood. The logic is plain. The logic is cruel.
Pinky is a character capable of resolute decision and sustained, unflinching action.
Hollywood cannot permit her initial rebellion against Miss Em to be a basic rebellion. The
film, in effect, sets down that act of defiance against her white benefactress-to-be as
merely a mistake of impetuous youth. The New York Times adds the touching comment:
"It also presents a tender aspect of the mutual loyalties between Negro servants and
white masters that still exist in the South."
1949!
What solution does Pinky offer to the Negro "problem"? It is given by the
reformist Negro doctor, representing the Booker T. Washington ideology of gradualism and
accommodation to the white rulers. Pinky, let us remember, is schooled; she is a graduate
nurse. She cannot be expected to grow into the stereotyped bandanna-wearing
"Mammy." Aunt Dicey needs to be "renovated," cast into a new mold. And
so, through the ghetto path of "cultured" acquiescence and segregated
"uplift" work, Pinky’s potential rebelliousness is channeled away from the
course of significant struggle, away from the Negro people’s movement directed essentially
toward national liberation. She moves "forward" into a segregated existence in
which she administers a segregated school–a nice, well-mannered, trim Negro woman who
"knows her place"–and is liked and helped by the "best" white folk.
Here is the "modern," "streamlined" version of the "Mammy"
clich?. Hollywood reverses the old stereotype to create the New Stereotype.
Yes, Pinky offers a solution. A reformist, segregationist, paternalistic
solution. It is a "solution" which, as in all past Hollywood films, builds on
acceptance of the "superiority" of the whites and ends in endorsement of Jim
Crow–in this case, "liberal," "benevolent," Social-Democratic Jim
Crow.
Pinky, perhaps for fear that the New Stereotype is as yet imperfect for the
function of Pinky’s role, abounds in hideous stereotypes of the past. Pinky’s
grandmother, Aunt Dicey, who has accepted her oppressed status and moves about with an
Uncle Tom loyalty to the "good" white folk, fulfills the old-style
"Mammy" clich?, notwithstanding Ethel Waters’ brave attempt to invest the part
with some dignity. Another stock-character Negro, Jake, is the "bad’ shiftless type,
the loose loafer and money-loving schemer, with "comic relief." Then there is
Jake’s "woman," who "totes a razor." The arrest scene, in which Nina
Mae McKinney is made to raise her skirt and the white policeman extracts a razor from the
rim of her stocking, is reminiscent of the shameful, vilifying tradition of The Birth
of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.
How true is the insight of Robert Ellis who wrote in the progressive Negro weekly, The
California Eagle, on October 20, 1949:
One really must judge harshly here of Darryl Zanuck and Elia Kazan and Philip Dunne and
Dudley Nichols (the producer, director, and writers respectively). For theirs is the main
responsibility, and although they had good intentions, and are, I’m sure,
"liberals"—yet they appraoched this picture with too much money in their
pockets and too much condescension, patronization, paternalism, in their hearts and minds.
And the same incisive critic puts the question to the film makers responsible for this
Jim-Crow practice:
Have you ever stepped down from a railroad car and hunted for the colored toilet–gone
hungry because there was no colored seat at the counter–walked along the street and felt
the hatred and coldness in most people’s eyes merely because of color? . . . How can a
studio, how can an industry that doesn’t employ Negroes as writers, producers,
technical directors, cameramen:–how can they write, direct, produce, or film a picture
which has sincere and real sensitivity (shall we say artistry) about Negro people?
Who can challenge this bitter truth?
[. . . .]
Adding Up the Score
Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, Intruder in the Dust must be labelled
clearly. Taken together, they constitute a new cycle of films that seem to arm, but
actually attempt to disarm, the Negro people’s movement; that seem to promote the
Negro-and-white alliance, but actually attempt to set divisions between Negro and white.
They are films that, in the guise of "dignity," introduce a New Stereotype–a
continuation of the Uncle Tom tradition, in "modern" dress, while retaining the
old stereotypes. They are films that attempt to split the Negro people’s solidarity with
promises of "rewards" from the "best" whites–"justice" and
"positions" for light-skinned, in distinction from dark-skinned, Negroes;
"respectability" and "social station" for Negro middle-class
professionals, in distinction from working-class Negroes. They are films that seek to
prevent the Negro workers from advancing to leadership in the Negro people’s liberation
movement.
They are films that through distortion and dramatic misrepresentation of fact attempt
to shift the blame for Negro oppression to the Negro people themselves. They are films
that attempt to inspire in the Negro people trust in their worst enemy–the white ruling
class, by portraying that class as the Negro’s benefactor and legal protector, while
arousing in them mistrust, fear, and hatred against the white working people, who are
depicted as the would-be lynchers, as the camp of the lynchers. They are films that seek
to make the Negro feel beholden to the white free-enterprisers and to be on his best
behavior in expectation of "gradual" emancipation. They are films that attempt
to deprive the Negro people of self-confidence in its capacity to struggle, to divert
Negroes from collective, mass action, from the Negro people’s movement, into individual
grapplings with oppression, into efforts at personal "adjustment." They are
films that attempt to deny the objective existence of the Negro question, by making
lynch-law appear a "moral" problem of the "better class" whites, by
making Negro-baiting appear a matter of the Negro’s "sensitivity" due to
"guilt feeling" and of his baiter’s "unhappiness" and sense of
"insecurity." They are films that seek to weaken the Negro people’s
understanding of the source and nature of their oppression, by means of the
Social-Democratic thesis of "no difference" which leaves the Negro masses
defenseless against their double oppression, class oppression and national oppression.
Apart from positive features already discussed these films aim to undermine the Negro
people’s struggle for national liberation from the "master race" domination of
landlords, industrialists, and bankers, and to blunt any struggle against the monopolists
and their war-and-fascism program.
In terms of the white audiences, similarly, this cycle of films expresses a reactionary
ideology. In their total impact, these films would have the white masses believe that the
ruling class is concerned over the Negro people’s plight, that it seeks to promote their
welfare, is democratically minded toward them, and aims to do away with lynchings and
discrimination. Implicit in such propaganda, insofar as it is directed to white workers
and progressives, is the negation of the mutually vital need for the alliance between the
working class and the Negro people’s liberation movement. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the Social-Democratic, labor-reformist, and liberal publications joined with the open
bourgeois press in acclaiming these films. They said in effect: Leave it to the ruling
class, leave it to the Truman government, leave it to the courts leave it to the churches,
leave it to the moral sense of the "right-thinking," "better-class"
whites.
This film cycle in an over-all sense leaves to the white masses the ideological residue
that the Negro must "know his place," and that whatever rights need to be
accorded him must be given within the framework of that idea. The white spectator is
taught to regard the Negro people as "unfortunate" beings, toward whom the
whites should exercise "tolerance" and to whom they should give moral
"hand-outs." By means of this patronizing, white chauvinist
"morality," such films seek to perpetuate the myth of Negro
"inferiority" and to beguile the white masses with the fiction of "white
superiority"–that deliberately- and artificially-fostered ideology from which only
the white rulers profit.
These films, moreover, in presenting the poor white masses as the lynchers, attempt to
make them appear responsible for the Jim-Crow segregation and oppression of the Negro
people, to make them appear the breeders of white chauvinism. Thus, white chauvinism, the
ideological weapon with which imperialism buttresses its national oppression of the Negro