Racism is an ugly, profane quality in any human being.
It's ugliness is obvious to anyone with a brain that functions as the warranty guarantees.
The profanity comes in knowing that racism is not genetic, a physical pre-disposition, nor is it the tragic result of some malfunction of our physicality, a disease or virus.
In other words, it can't be "inherited".
But it can most surely be passed down.
Find a copy of the song "Carefully Taught" from "South Pacific" and give it a listen.
Back story bordering on editorializing aside, here's what I'm thinking today.
I am not a racist.
I grew up in a home that did not perpetuate the stereotypes or prejuidices that provide a fully functional petrie dish of hatred/stupidity that almost inevitably spawns a contempt for one race, creed, color or another.
I do not consider myself superior in any way to anyone.
And I think, as I have thought all of my life, that Amos and Andy is some funny shit.
Check out Wilkipedia for the full history, but, in a nutshell...
The program was created by two white guys and was a big hit in the pre-TV heyday of radio.
In the early 50's, with the arrival of television, the show, like many other popular radio shows, made the transition from little box to big box, where it became even more popular than it had been to date.
Sometime during the early to mid 60's when the civil rights movement was burning white hot (pun noted and conceded), the decision was made, in one of those offices where those kinds of decisions are made, that the program was offensive, perpetuated racial stereotypes and needed to be banned from the airwaves.
It was.
Banned, that is.
There is a particularly well done doc on the subject "Amos and Andy-Anatomy of A Controversy". You can find it on You Tube. Check it out.
Since that day in the 60's, despite the evolution of television into a medium with thousands of channels and, literally, twenty four hours of programming per day, the program remains available only online and/or for sale in various incarnations at places like Amazon or Ebay.
I think the time has come to let Amos, Andy, Kingfish, Sapphire, Mama, et al out of the box and, well, back on the box.
Naysayers will center the saying of their nays by offering that the show was/is lightweight, slapstick, even juvenile in its humor and/or presentation.
Damn right.
But no more so than at least half the movies Will Ferrell has done.
And as far as that insidious "RS" factor is concerned?
Racial stereotype?
Illusion.
Do some/most of the black people in this series (all black, by the way, which if you stretch the point makes it a landmark historical event given the times in which it appeared) act like idiots and/or clowns?
Uh, yeah.
Pop in your copy of Eddie Murphy's "The Nutty Professor" and enjoy, once again, the five minutes of farting at dinner that makes us all laugh without fail.
Or just about everything and anything that Tyler Perry produces.
Juvenile? Idiotic? Buffoonish?
Ya, you betcha.
The common thread in all of this is that Eddie and Tyler, et al, live and work and create their characters, stories, etc in a time in our history when most of us see the humor in the juvenile, idiotic, buffoonish behavior.
But we don't see the color.
They're not black idiots.
They're just idiots.
Amos and Andy was banned in a time when blacks were trying to get a large chunk of white America to wake the fuck up and realize that we are all, underneath it all, created equal.
And they didn't need the additional burden of easing the concerns of whites who feared that letting blacks sit next to them at the lunch counters would result in having to put up with that buffoon who was "part of da bruthahood of da Mystic Knights of da Sea..."
But that was a long time ago.
And a world that isn't offended by farting Klumps or jive talkin Medeas isn't likely to take to the streets in protest of the buffoonish behavior of Andrew H. Brown.
If they do, so be it.
That doesn't make them white idiots.
It just makes them idiots.
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