Shop Talk
Session One
Exploring the Legendary Hero in the Comics and in Reality
Can the Ethiopian change his skin,
or the leopard his spots?
then may ye also do good,
that are accustomed to do evil.
(Jeremiah 13:23)
As a youth in Jamaica, between 1948 and 1952, I was an avid “viewer” of newspaper comics and a collector and reseller of American comic books. My favorite was “Leandro,” a single-frame “jive turkey” who spoke patois, or, one might say, the vernacular of the country people. Leandro didn’t say much or act comparatively and uppity with white men all over the seven seas. I read—not “viewed” him deeply and laughed.
http://www.jamaica-allspice.com/shop_ja.htm
There was “Plastic Man,” “The Phantom,” “Spider-Man,” “Wonder Woman,” “Batman,” and “Superman.” Insidiously, there was “Mandrake the Magician” and “his black magic” freak, “Lothar.” These recollections are hardly monuments to a spiritual past but rather bouts with the devil. Even at ten years old, my built-in shit detector recoiled at the “character” Lothar. I hated the Mandrake strip with a conscious Garveyite passion. I felt my dignity diminished to “view” this ball-headed, kiss-ass, white man’s “eunuch,” a shameful embarrassment that made my skin crawl.
Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the process and expression of life imitating art, that sort of “subliminal seduction” to an identity crisis of self-hatred and negation. Sad to say, the mystifying image of “Lothar” kept pace as a leitmotif reminder each time I see a black man, shaven head, young or old. Isaac Hayes and Michael Jordan readily come to mind as would-be “role models” for this fashion or trend of ball-headed kinfolks. This seemed to be a probable cultural identity crisis within a binary context of “cause and effect,” one might easily surmise.
Yet the dilemma of a two-faced, Janus stereotype continued to haunt me. Hayes and Jordan present the “positive” side, so be it. But how about a ball-headed, transmuted Magic Johnson showing up in Iowa with Bill Clinton to announce? “No rookie in the white house!” Is he being subliminally directed by script to tell us? “Vote for maRsa’s wife. She’s brain and ruling experience; all black rookies are brawn and naughty, promiscuous emotion.” Here are some ironic pairings of contradictions for us all—didn’t Magic win a championship as a “rookie’ himself? How about the legendary Larry Bird?
As to immediate impressions, politically and media-literacy-wise, what is hidden behind Magic’s staged endorsement of Hillary Clinton? If one is a Barack Obama fan, Magic conjures up a likeness to Mandrake’s lackey, maybe, for getting called out by campaign-strategist, “boss” Bill Clinton, for adulterously contracting “aids,” and for facetiously being a spoil N-word who heightens racial and moral “differences” via self-analogy in a classic testimonial to a servant’s traditional and subordinating confessions to a lesser white sinner who had eaten the forbidding “nooky” in the White House or Big House—as black folks in the quarters usually call that aphrodisiac fruit.
In terms of life imitating art, negative denotations and connotations keep mounting. Some black men want to look like their “hero,” granted. Some have balding problems they may hide with an all-over “shine.” Some hate the sight of gray hair and hassle with weekly dye jobs for that fountain of youth appearance. Some fear age give-away discrimination or “assaulting the elderly” intimidations—hell, look strong, youthful and virile.
But “Lothar” just would not go away as a clandestine, subliminal mindset and key link to a deliberate design to induce servility and to foster subjugation via white supremacy. There is a common myth-structure underlying both Mandrake’s LOTHAR and Star Wars’ DART VADER. In Subliminal Racism Essays (2005), I wrote:
James Earl Jones, a Big Negro in Black skin and behind black costumes and black skull armor, is cast in the role or “voice of Dart Vader,”a Death’s-Head, Dart of Death, or “dark father” figure with a thundering voice and a commanding, satanic presence. (p. 74)
The likeness is both astounding and revolting. But what have identity formation and positive self-esteem to do with this aesthetic pair? Lothar is considered the “first heroic black character” in American comics and the first in a “biracial integrated cast of crime-fighters.” All things considered, thus, the positive side of the freak metamorphosed into the white man’s idea of the “nigga in his place.”
Essentially, Lothar, with all his imposed attributes, beginning with the “cursed be Biblical LOT” name, is the prototype of the white hero paired with his “sidekick” servant buddy on the positive side of crime and evil fighting, etc. In 1939, the first to depict or “play” Lothar in the cinema is AL KIKUME, followed by JUANO HERNANDEZ in 1940-42. In 1954, WOODY STRODE was cast in an NBC television pilot as Lothar. And in 1979, Ji-Tu Cumbura played Lothar.
Lothar, supposedly an African Prince of Seven Nations, “gives up his claim to kingship” and is depicted as the “world’s strongest man.” Here then is the “three-fifth of a white person” (1775 Continental Congress), physical and moral designation, which amounts to a “cock-of-the-walk-less,” strong animal, an hegemonic myth of emasculation being projected onto Africanized blackness as pure emotion, “slavishly” reacting to the “black magic” and “mystical theology” of the suave white hero, Mandrake, and his cutie pie girlfriend, Princess Narda.
This popular comic-book modus operandi of voluntarily relinquishing crown or wife and family ” is central to the cultural myth-structure that gives “narrative force,” for example, to Morgan Freeman’s frequent characterization as “return of the peculiar volunteer to fight crime” in service to “the Man, Clint Eastwood,” as seen in movies such as Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiving (DSE, 105). Here is the purely European invented Lothar on the cover of an early comic book:
As it was first recognized and classified by Graham as “sign and symbol” of a recurring, color-coded Death’s-Head, note in this “it” instance the “leopard skin motif” (costume) worn by Lothar, who is always one step behind his lord and master. A possible historic model-kingdom and its prince are being transmuted and demonized—the Mau Mau of Kenya and leopard-clad Jomo Kenyatta who was tried and convicted for waging war against the colonizing British. Waging vicarious battles on the school grounds and on the soccer fields, voyaging Leandro’s “comics” folks would meet and greet each other by exchanging spirited salutations: “Mau Mau!” … “Dey pon dem!!” Then someone in our “secret society” would bust out real loud: “Praise de lord and pass the ammunition and we’ll all be free!!!”
In solidarity, we cheered the Mau Mau’s struggle for independence on to victory. In regard to the opposing, Union Jack Flag (1801) with its “conjoined crosses” of “trinity colors” which are similar in different nations such as France and the United States, observe that Mandrake is in red-white-and-blue, much like hero-coded Superman who appeared later.
Indeed, even by schoolboy fantasies, a cultural and conscious counterforce to the loathed imagery of Lothar’s leopard-skin motif was activating each body and vibrating every soul. Sankofa sophistication of our “collective consciousness” of this ingrained and subliminal leopard-skin motif—as seen seeded and planted in these childhood recollections—has now ripened from work and study within the pilgrimage depths of adult maturity.
See William R. Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-1859. Chicago, 1960; and The Manichean Leitmotif, p. 105, endnote #1 reference to Reginald Horseman's "Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," in American Quarterly, XXVII, May 1975, pp. 152-168.
Consistently and persistently, from 1934 and even down to this December 2007 day in the mass media, Mandrake “the enemy,” with devastating racist effect, kept doing trick after trick of turning Lothar into an allegorical monstrous double to achieve his heroic stand, relegating Lothar, as always, to the dark side. See the following frame, for example, in one episode where: “Mandrake gestures … Lothar seems to turn into a huge mouse.”
In the1950s, Mad Magazine spoofed “Manduck” [Mandrake] to pull off “the (enviable!) trick of turning Lothar into a six-foot-tall blond woman.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_the_Magician
Take fateful and serious note that this enviable, comic-counter-comic trick pulled on the African “eunuch” is spelled “blond” and not “blonde.” (Most recently, within certain anti neo-colonial circles, particularly in the State of New Jersey, it is said: De Purple Phantom is a Batty-Man, hiding ina governor closet.)
In a recent review of Will Smith’s I AM LEGEND, critic Pearl Jr. drew our attention to the fact that Smith is confronted by some mannequins (one black and one white) and drew sexually and romantically near the blonde or “white” mannequin; as she screamed “Black Women Need Love Too” but gave high praise to the blockbuster movie and to promises of Academy Award for Mr. Smith.
At the 78th Academy Awards, Smith presented the Best Foreign Language Film award to a fabricated story about a South African black criminal turned “messiah” of the aids epidemic. In Discrete Silence Essays, Graham dissected Will Smith’s sublim-directed presentation as a “comic darkie” spouting aids propaganda from a so-called updated Athol Fugard’s 1950 novel about apartheid. Keep the “aids” Death’s-Head on the Africanized side of humanity.
Clinton’s sublim-intent could very well be: “Magic” is a proven champion of “use-the-strongest-condom-prevention program we will fund” with him becoming HNIC among you people. Update Mandrake’s Lothar to an I-am-ethnic-legend, sexually active, aids transmuting boogieman. Call Magic’s agent; acts do improve with a bit of coaching.
Detrimentally, ethnicity emerges as provoking, taunting, and haunting. Critics may differ, but for a grim and gruesome, ethnic analogy, we invoke the Death’s-Head icon (Morgan Freeman as medium designate, DSE), by way of Arthur Graham’s unique explications of the ideology and psychology of the force of contrasted extremes or life by comparison, which is acquired through cultural perceptions and hegemony he termed, subliminal racism. Presently, through this process of ethnic analysis, we are able to grasp the essence of those sinister sources and analogues to this recurring, doctrinal icon or “brother of death,” Lothar.
As to revelation of this “hidden history,” in Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, Christopher Knowles “examines the enormous influence religious, occult, magical beliefs and ancient mythology had on the creation of legendary characters” such as Spider-Man and Superman.
http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12453
Today, when it comes to so-called inclusion of “legendary ethnics” like Lothar, we extend this myth-structure probe, by way of Graham’s tetranalysis, into a seminal mindset of subliminal racism and sexism. We learn, for example, that “Mandrake the Magician” was created in 1934 by Leon Harrison Gross (1911-1999), pen name Lee Falk. Falk “took his surname from the middle name of his stepfather,” Albert Falk Epstein.
http://www.mysteryfile.com/blog/index.php?=script
Incidentally, the borrowed name “Falk” recalls the historic Dr. Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk (1708-1782). In Nesta H. Webster’s Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1921), we learn also that Dr. Samuel Falk “was far more than a mason, he was a high initiate—the supreme oracle to which the secret societies applied for guidance.”
http://freemasonry.bcy.ca/anti-masonry/webster_n.html
More or less leaning toward the Africanized liberal left, the surname “Epstein” recalls Sir Jacob Epstein (1880-1959), a fan of Walt Whitman and a sculptor who celebrated “nakedness” by constructing controversial decor “busts” in London in the early 1900. Described as a Bohemian, Sir Epstein was part of an in vogue era of fashion and taste for African Arts and Sculpture that also engrossed White Star Line heiress, Nancy Cunard (1896-1965), who was ostracized and vilified for her “shameless” affair with black lover, musician Henry Crowder (1895-1954). [See endnote #15, p. 229, The Manichean Leitmotif]
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_gx5229/is_2003/ai_n19146306
http://www.bookrags.com/biography/jacob-epstein-sir/
For a detailed investigation of media transmuting along the lines of the era’s racial divide, see Patricia Clements’ article: “Transmuting” Nancy Cunard, Dalhousie Review, Spring/Summer 1986. According to Clements, “transmuting artists include John Banting, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen, and Richard Aldington.” See, also, Ernest B. Speck’s article: Henry Crowder: Nancy Cunard’s ‘Tree,’ Summer 1979.
Within this demonstrative, cultural context of genealogical, assumed and applied associations of family names and imagery transmuting, and leaning toward the Africanized demonizing right, Lee Falk stated that “Greek busts inspired the idea” of “the pupils” of his purple “ghost that walks,” The Phantom. Falk borrowed family names to affix to some of his characters; however, it is doubtful that a “stepfather” named “Falk” ever existed outside the realm of a deliberate, FBI-intimidating doublespeak that was fashionable with the Hearst Corporation that published Lee Falk’s comics. (Recall Orson Welles’ film debut, Citizen Kane 1941, a thinly transmuted “story” of William Randolph Hearst and others in real life.)
Furthermore, Falk, who worked as a language propagandist for the “Office of War Information” (WW II), invented biographical data of being an “experienced world traveler who had studied with Eastern mystics” which offered him credibility to create Mandrake and the Phantom. Like the historic Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk, Lee Falk was inspired by myth and legends. The suspicion here is that Lee’s farfetched idea of a transmuted stepfather was grafted from the life and works of Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk, “the supreme oracle” that Lee somehow imagined himself to be—particularly, the crime-fighting legend in his own mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Falk
Similarly, from inspired Greek legends to American superheroes, the movie Wizard of Oz takes cues from the occult and mythology. Professor John Algeo presents a mystical breakdown of this “archetypical American fairy tale” in the article. “The Wizard of Oz: The Perilous Journey,” the Quest, Summer 1993. In Image Coverage (1995), I wrote:
In an interview titled “Story Structure Based on Mythology”
featured in the Hollywood Scriptwriter Issue 69, February 1986, one of Campbell’s disciples, Phil Cousineau, stated that “The Wizard of Oz” is an example of the mythological model used in a screenplay. [p. 92]
The key point here is the “shop talk” recognition that myth structure of American design is real; but a deeper awareness takes us into the seminal levels of Greek and Roman sources and analogues for models used in the structuring of the juxtaposed “binary” of master-slave, Janus-faced stereotyping. In Discrete Silence Essays (2007), I wrote that Morgan
Freeman’s stereotyped castings reflect components and processes of forging a contemporaneous myth structure within the arts and sciences of staging Greek aesthetics at the 78th Academy Awards ceremony. [p. 110 DSE]
As to “dark side” aesthetic symbolism, the Mandrake movie serial is laden with explicit terror and death-related titles and metaphors that sustain a succession of endemic allegories which tend to reinforce “blackness” as consummate evil and negation. Note carefully, for example, the followings listing as such: Shadow on the Wall; Trap of the Wasp; City of Terror; The Secret Passage; The Devil’s Playmate; The Fatal Crash; Gamble for Life; Across the Deadline; Terror Rides the Rail; The Unseen Monster; At the Stroke of Eight; The Rewards of Treachery.
These compounded, “terror and Death’s-Head” images of “Lothar” led me to a current update on the “media” longevity of the original in continuity down to this day in December 2007. Some sort of soporific chant gave me an “old tomato” which inadvertently led, furthermore, to The Rotten Tomatoes, [ a founder?] being Jake Tracer and a “case study” of a subliminal mindset in Discrete Silence Essays, p. 86- p. 87. As the reader may recall, Tracer mocked “black actors” with his piece in the UCLA Daily Bruin on Hustle and Flow with its “black pimp” Academy-winning song, by lamenting “It’s hard out here for a monkey.”
In the article appearing November 1, 2007, in the Rotten Tomatoes entitled: “Jonathan Rhys Meyers IS Mandrake / Chuck Russell bringing classic comic to the screen,” Jeff Giles added euphoria to this “news and editorial” with passionate glee by stating: “we can’t wait to see who’s chosen to play the world’s strongest man – Mandrake’s best bud Lothar, the fez-and-leopard-skin-wearing African prince who gave up the throne to bust heads.” This cock-sucker imagery of the Africanized castrated man tends to energize the mindset that is “accustomed-to” Manichean inventions of “the servile other.”
Unwittingly or not, as we go about absorbing daily doses of subliminal messages from the mass media through determinants and functions of dark side aesthetics, we invite the reader to turn to Graham’s extended discussion on “high and low culture” points of view, on juxtaposed “leitmotif” portrayals, on levels of mastery of the craft of fiction, and on the writer’s esoteric consciousness thereof, in the article, “Art for Art Sake: Autotelic Structure,” Subliminal Racism Essays, pp.52-55. Through Graham’s philosophically designated tetranalysis comprising the four aesthetic elements—form, motion, sound, and color—we acquire vital insights into the processes and implementations of craft conventions—especially by way of Samuel Gilman’s doctrinal (narrative) force of contrasted extremes—which tend to approbate the genesis and continuity of legendary ethnics like “Lothar.” [See The Manichean Leitmotif, chapter two.]
Taken on an associative and compounded note, the “first” legendary ethnic crime fighter in the comics; the timely, Uncle Tom “loyalty in service to the white man” appearance of Magic; and the anticipated “casting” of the “world strongest man” amount to perpetuation of painful, resentful and disdained servile images. Real and/or imagined, these servile images enter the subliminal mindset as eschewed components of our collective consciousness within the Black Tradition of African-centered aesthetics and criticism. Within the American Tradition, on the other hand, these peculiar and persistent “ethnicity” presentations in the mass media impact contentious issues of positive and negative attitudes and behaviors. Within the overall history of ideas, these legendary ethnics have been met with resentments and challenges as to authenticity and relevance and are best explained by the rubrics of the Manichean dualism.
The bedrock of this school of thought within the Black Tradition is Ralph Ellison’s essay, “Change the Joke ad Slip the Yoke” (1958), in which he declared that white folks’ “malignant images of black men” resulted from the Manichean dualism that tends to “Yoke” blackness as absolute evil, imposing a certain mark of “criminality” on the African person., even “the criminality implicit in the broadening of freedom itself,” both in art and in reality. [See The Manichean Leitmotif, 19-20.] Sadly enough, the 1934 invention and the 2007 invitation to a “classic” re-invention of legendary ethnic “Lothar” contentiously aggravate the racial divide in these United States of America.
From Ralph Ellison’s critical approach and perspective in continuity within the Black Tradition and from annals of scholarly acumen and researched precision, we contend that the “Yoke” imagery stemming from the Manichean dualism has evolved into what we termed, a Janus-faced “servile other,” a conqueror’s imagery that was first imposed on the once enslaved and colonized African and is now conveyed surreptitiously throughout the Diaspora as a de-stabilizing Death’s-Head icon within the hidden language of subliminal racism and sexism.
The Rotten Tomatoes may be described as an auxiliary propaganda machine in service to an entertainment industry whose main concern on the “ideological” bottom line is feeding us subliminal directions into the flow of bullshit like “leopard skin clad’ Lothar. Under the banner and guise of practicing various “crafts” within the American Tradition, these organ grinders collectively dispense a consistent and cunning, vicious and vacuous, identity of the African Other—namely, a sublim identity to which those within major professional organizations such as the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and the Modern Language Association (MLA) have endeavor to be “discretely” silent about the industry’s manipulation or “handling” of black folks depicted in white folks’ works of art and award ceremonies. A classic case in point is the “handing history” or manipulation of Morgan Freeman’s “ethnicity” in art as well as in reality. [See Graham’s Discrete Silence Essays, 2007.]
Together, consciously or unconsciously, professionals serving within the American Tradition compound, refine, and deliberately set before all of us legendary ethnics through a host of prevailing “craft unions,” publication and distribution outlets, cultural and linguistic repositories, and award-granting ceremonies—regulated and controlled, accordingly—in order to inculcate and sustain European self-preservation and white supremacist doctrines.
When transmuted from the comics to “life imitating art” situations, these legendary ethnics usually are juxtaposed in contemporaneous societal and political settings which reflect all-in-the-family continuity and accommodation for a black person like Magic Johnson to fit in the “racial profiled imagery” of a “Lothar,” who is seldom, if ever, spoofed or transmuted into a considered sus generic white person like Larry Bird. Should there be doubts or reservations about this peculiar and controversial, “imaginary and real” association of ethnics, keep eyes and ears open to behold a Larry Bird cast as the “world strongest man” who answers to “Lothar” or who trips to the ghetto for aids counseling, warmth, and bosom-like companionship among the cursed children of “Lot.” As sure as there are “enviable” exceptions to the rules, be reminded of Mad Magazine’s spoofed, six-foot tall “blond” sidekick to “Manduck.”
Contingent to these foregoing observations of activities and approaches within the American Tradition and the Black Tradition, Jeff Giles’ “bust heads” job announcement or casting call may be categorized as a testimonial increment to a sublim and sublime worldview that encompasses manifestations and expressions of parody, mockery, ethnic contempt, ironic ridicule, and profiling. In addition, this worldview entails stereotypical detection, economic hegemony, and psycho-social containment. Unfortunately, this sort of Manichean “job offering” usually progresses from aesthetic juxtapositions to mass media criminalization and animalistic debasement. As Jeff Giles' colleague once lamented about the black pimp and criminal imagery: “It’s hard out here for a monkey.”
For a balancing act of “craft-counter-craft” or a “jive-turkey spoofed” wake up call, we suggest that Mr. Russell cast Prince Charles (remove his testes) as Prince “Lothar” and have Mandrake transmute him into a permanent, blue-eyed, albino alligator. Until this bye and bye shall come to pass, we just can’t wait, also, to see this “ball-head” (whoever “it” is) become a “huge mouse,” expressing and manifesting a subliminal and racist, “TRUE CLASSIC”—or, for damn sure, a revisionist ass of himself.
Back that ass up! Having confronted the hidden language of white supremacy, what can or must be done about the changing of the mouse? To get the Ball on a Buckingham Terrace rolling, we suggest the following “prompts” and set “paintings” to get us in Mercy Seat (lionized) “character.”
Exercise
“Ship of the body, ship of the soul, voyaging, voyaging, voyaging.”
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
1. Is there some hint of a myth structure that is subliminally contrived from the “comic-book and reality” roles under discussion? Is it okay to act the fool as long you get paid for doing so? Point blank: Would you like to be cast as Lothar? Why? Does the leitmotif sound-byte “Africanized Killer Bee” ring well with you?
Who is the African? Is Lee Falks’ archetypical ethnic crime fighter, “African” Lothar, typical of the historic freedom fighter, Jomo Kenyatta? In terms of exploring the authenticity of “sources and analogues,” does the Lothar-Jomo analogy provide enough grounds to discredit and dispel Lee Falk as an audacious and consummate liar, whose sublim-intent is to transmute and to subjugate the “African”?
2. Chronicle all the roles you’ve played or have seen depicted by others. For example, in view of these comic art and political reality observations, are there grounds to discredit or approve Magic’s conscious or “ironic” behavior? Would Bill Clinton put Larry Bird in the same appealing and endorsing role, script and all? Is Bird just another “dumb” jock? What “race” has to do with it, or the quest for the so-called “black” and “female” votes?
Is dope using and perhaps dope selling rookie, Barack Obama, being ethnicity paired and biographically targeted, in addition, to get the white male, Reagan votes through this transmuted high profile (sublim-plant) Magic Johnson? Be reminded that media politics is a very cunning business. It is the most vicious and vacuous medium for conveying sublimated messages. Distancing media politics act: “I almost didn’t marry him.” Blink!
BTW, did someone “plant” a young lady to ask pre-arranged questions sometime back and was dismissed? Is Magic an unwitting “plant” with devious acting ability, or did he forget to wink at the former First Lady? Shall we sit down on the mercy seat for a race-card, media exercise called “jive turkey”?
3. Conduct a comparative analysis and note similarities, differences, repetitions, positioning within the frame, and colors of costumes and settings. What were your lines? What musical leitmotif was associated throughout the sequence or entire movie or “commercial ad” each and every time your character appeared?
4. Self-Inventory for getting into character: Was I cast subliminally as a “sublim” in juxtaposition to terror and death? Was I shown with animals, dead, alive, what color? What is the accompanying music [leitmotif] to my appearances? Did “my character” abandon kingship and loved ones to fight “crime” and to die for “the man,” or more likely to politically front for him or his kinfolks? Recall your gut-feeling and response to all roles.
Send in and share: Clips, Scene Capture, Excerpt from the shooting script, Director’s instruction, Links, Winks & Blinks!
5. Relate deeper into plot and story-line. Did you fit in as LOTHAR or Dart Vader or Morgan Freeman?
6. Ask each other to defend or amend questionable and/or absurd positions; engage the processes of analysis derived from the new paradigm and vocabulary offered within the context of the works on display at our Village Store. Be as fresh as the morning sunshine—see for self.
7. What can the individual as part of a concerned and intelligent collective DO about subliminal messages in the media? Become a subscriber and know first hand the subtle nuances and “arts and sciences” deceptions that subliminally feed our attitude and behavior into an uneven racial divide. Knowledge is our change agent. Integrity is our guide. The force is with you.
8. Reflect on these NEW INSIGHTS AND AWARENESS by way of our “gimme five therapy” [if you may], and think also about audience repercussions. What subliminal negating messages are we sending out unknowingly and “unaware” through our so-called “hyphenated professional status” of writer, producer, director, actor, and actress?
Our Shop Talk procession led by your ever-caring moderator, Jive Turkey, will commence with soul-searching and biting professionalism, confidence and steadfastness. We at Image Analysis All Media Services, as subliminal messages deconstruction experts, stand to penetrate the veil of the most sophisticated levels of symbolism, including racist typology and behavior modification. [Image Coverage, (IC), pp. 56-57]
We call on all practitioners, especially African American actors, to be cognizant …
that African Americans are rarely integral parts of white writers’ story
lines, and that when they do appear in movies they are frequently props
for negations—less harm will be done if black actors individually and
collectively refuse to play these self-effacing and deprecating roles. [54, IC]
And in general, each and every one of us must take into consider the realization that,
To bring about meaningful change in the portrayal of blacks, to bring about
balance and truth in filmmaking, there must be an all out effort to break with the
conventions of racist color coding and with the other technical devices that
are structured in works solely for negating comparison and contrast of ethnics.
[54, IC]
© 2007 by A. Joseph Graham
http://www.subliminalracism.com
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