Lately I have been working researching Walter White.  White was brought into the national office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people in 1918 as an assistant for James Weldon Johnson.  He served the NAACP for the rest of his life first as Johnson’s assistant and then as acting executive secretary of the the Association and actual secretary from 1929 till his death in  1955. Over the period of his service he helped shape the NAACP and the national civil rights agenda more than anybody else in the country. Hardly a saint he bullied people, sometimes acted ruthlessly, and had an off and on affair throughout most of his marriage. He was thoroughly narcissistic yet utterly devoted to the advancement of African Americans.  As W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote,

“He was absolutely self-centered and egotistical to the point that he was almost unconscious of it.  He seemed really to believe that his personal interests and the interests of his race and organization were identical.”

Yet, because of what some would see as a character flaw, not in spite of it, he was in many ways an admirable man. He was an untiring worker putting in many hours, traveling many miles, speaking and writing in many forums to see that his cause and the cause of his people was brought to politicians and the general populace.  His narcissism led to his intensity and probably the limited though amazing success he had against overwhelming odds. His overwork probably led to the heart trouble which felled him in 1955 and caused the breakup of his marriage. All of this is further complicated by the fact that Walter White looked white. With his dirty blond hair and blue eyes he could have passed for Caucasian and avoided all the caste infirmities of being black in the America of the first half of the twentieth century.  Despite this he steadfastly continued to wear his blackness as a badge of honor even when others considered him white.

To their credit his biographers Kenneth Janken and Thomas Dyja have not tried to conceal his weaknesses.  They have examined him in his totality and complexity.   To be sure there is a long history of the imperfect hero.  The ancient Greek heroes  had a tragic flaw, that is, a weakness that also made one great.  Oedipus’s search for the truth is what made him discover that he had killed his father, married his mother and thus reach his tragic fate. The hard boiled detective heroes of Dashiell Hammet and the like maintained their integrity in a world of questionable ethics and immorality. The modern anti-hero, the ambiguous and “accidental” hero are staples of contemporary text, stage and screen.

However in today’s atmosphere of “gotcha” journalism and media glare there is also a practice of putting heroes on pedestals then gleefully watching them fall as they demonstrate human frailties. Once brought low there also seems to be some limited rehabilitation if they come clean, admit their transgressions and seek forgiveness from us. Marion Barry was re-elected mayor of Washington D.C. when his transgressions were caught on tape. Those who are unrepentant about their fall from grace are confined to the purgatory of fallen heroes or forgotten. Think O.J. Simpson here. Rarely the heroic actions are so great and the transgressions so small like with Martin Luther King’s infidelities that they do not tarnish the hero at all but also time lends some historic perspective and so William Jefferson Clinton remains a hero to some..

The question I face is how much of his weakness and how much of his strength to show in my online project about Walter White. My historian’s knee jerk reaction is to present him warts and all so that the chips will fall where they may. This is especially true for Mr. White whose weakness “narcissism” is the source of his greatest strength “tenacity.” If he were a Greek hero it would be his tragic flaw. However the audience for this online project is a large and general one.  Would high school or younger youth be better served by emphasizing his strengths and achievements or  how his flaws made him a control freak micro-manager,  difficult to work with if you differed with him, and ended his marriage? His narcissism wedded him to the Progressive era tactics he had grown up with and prevented him from making the Association more democratic and concerned with economic issues as Du Bois said in the 1930’s and later others would counsel. As Janken points out the slow legalistic tactics of the NAACP under him left the Association ill prepared for the the mass action civil rights movement that was to come after his death.

At the end I guess I come around to the position that his weakness was his strength and the shortcomings of his tenure were what they were.  This is probably true of all of us (including me of course) and it may be the most important lesson any biography can teach. I’m going to present it all.

I recall taking my son to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie when he was just a kid.  After the movie he asked me what I thought of it and I had just started started into a long discourse on the racial stereotypes, sexual politics and racial implications, when he interrupted me and said, “Dad, it was just a movie.” Nowadays after making a couple of documentaries, studying film criticism at two major film studies programs and having written college papers about films, television and even social media, he has of course changed his tune.  We can have long conversations about how each member of an audience brings to the film life experiences, knowledge of other films and cultural baggage that make film viewing a different experience for each viewer. I am reminded of this because I just saw the latest Planet of the Apes movie. As “just a movie” it is pretty good.  It uses its computer graphic effects to build character and contribute to the story rather than  just to blow things up. The first half hour is so tightly written and directed that it just flies by even though it has to do a lot of exposition. Once it hits its stride the film does slow down to let the script, tropes, stock characters and metaphors do their job to carry the story along.  It has some great visuals (the leaves falling to indicate the passage of the apes through trees rivals Speilberg’s vibrating glass of water in Jurassic Park) even though apes crashing out of windows is done once or twice too many times. It slyly mixes in references to the original movie not only so that film buffs and nerds feel included, but also to provide continuity as this prequel and its inevitable sequels lead to the original movie. Finally Andy Serkis’s motion capture acting is exquisite and the moments without dialogue rival the best silent acting. The special effects here are amazing and make you forget they are there.

It seems not in my nature, however, to let the film be “just a movie” and I would argue it is in no one else’s nature either. I inevitably bring my own life experiences, film knowledge and cultural baggage to the film. The images of the apes stolen from Africa, the ape raised by paternalistic whites, incarceration, brutality by and against them, ape on ape violence, even spear throwing, make me reflect on centuries of images of Africa, Africans and African Americans that were for thirty years part of my stock and trade. The movie itself tries to avoid any accusation of racism by having a multiracial cast.  Its main villain, a stock greedy corporate executive, is played by an African American, whites play all the other villains and a beautiful Latina plays the underwritten lead female role. The history of African Americans is however the elephant in the room.  In both films we are led to identify with the underdogs (under-apes?) and it is the greed, brutality and shortsightedness of the human race (particularly the Western society branch) that is the real villain. Unlike the first film in which Charleton Heston was the protagonist, an ape is the protagonist here.  This skews the film so that it is the revolutionary apes with whom we sympathize even though we could just as well call them terrorists. Can this be a metaphor for potential revolution but perpetrated by the crass Hollywood machine to turn even potential opposition into money (see music, hip hop)?  Is it just a fantasy for animal rights activists, sixties black radicals, or class revolution proponents warning us of a possible reaction to our society’s callousness, greed and brutality? I choose to believe it is more than either. The lesson for the apes in the movie is that they have to be smarter, realize their common interests, work together and sacrifice to get anything done. Hmm…I wonder if that is not a metaphoric lesson intended for all of us that I can live with.

I have given up on Hollywood producing any film about racism that is worth anything.  The demand that it must appeal to whites to be profitable skews any film.  Most often such films must have a white protagonist who learns about the effects of racism and whose story usually overshadows that of any people of color in the film. Not only must it have this “white gaze” it must present racism as something which an individual can overcome simply by not being racist one’s self. The “monster” must be reduced to something the individual can handle in order for the demands of the happy ending to be satisfied, individual success to be achieved, and order restored. I thus checked out the new movie “The Help” with few expectations to be entertained. While it has its flaws I was impressed by how much it put the maids’ story in the foreground. I expected that it would be just another “wasn’t racism hard for white people” story. It has its villains but racism is not only the work of “bad people”. Many others (both black and white,) accept it just as “what is.” Yes some of its characters are just stereotypes like the villain “Hilly” but good acting overcomes many of the limitations of the roles.  The four lead actresses, two black and two white, do excellent work to make their characters full blooded people. The parallelism between both white women and black women being caught in societal roles that constrain and belittle them is clearly made. Yet the hardship that white women heap on black women in their conformity to their roles is also firmly pointed out. At the end both one white woman and one black woman are able to make it out of their roles even though the differences in their off-screen economic futures are not discussed. The ending of the film satisfies the Hollywood requirements and produces the desired feel good effect.

My criticism is that racism is seen only as an individual thing (which can be confronted and overcome on an individual basis) rather than a social process which must be tackled on a societal scale. The movie’s individual acts of rebellion are childish, only temporarily satisfying and do not really change the social or economic positions of blacks and whites. The acts of individuals choosing a new life leave the system intact though they opt out. I have long made this argument to students.  Racism is not just an act of individual behavior that can be cured by purging that behavior in yourself. Of course we should not knowingly commit racist acts but even if every individual in the country had an overnight enlightenment against racism in their personal behavior, the United States would still be the most racist country on earth.  Racism has produced a political economy in which race has a major influence on class position, health care, education and opportunity. This is something Hollywood will probably never explore.  There are no easily identified villains and no one individual’s efforts (even an American Nelson Mandela’s) are going to produce the required happy ending. It is only painfully slow efforts by millions of people that is going to produce change if indeed it ever comes.