A comment on race

kip_w is working his way through a bargain-bin collection of motion picture musicals from the 30s and 40s, and recently reached an Amos and Andy film, Check and Double Check. ("Years later Gosden was quoted as calling Check and Double Check 'just about the worst movie ever.'", says the Wikipedia.) Kip's key sentence is "It would have been interesting to know what the black extras in the Mystic Knights of the Sea Lodge felt about standing behind poorly made-up Anglos saying stupid things in ridiculous accents."

One of the things which continues to amaze me about the world is that the radio show of Amos & Andy was quite popular among American blacks, to the point that Gosden and Correll, the white actors who played the eponymous characters on the radio, were honored by black organizations like the Chicago Urban League and the DuSable Club, and praised by black leaders like Roy Wilkins (later head of the NAACP).

My first roommate in college was black--a fellow named Maurice Parks, who attended Duke on a scholarship, and, unrelatedly, died a few years later from a chronic autoimmune disease. Mo would invariably watch the few black-populated sitcoms which were available, which at that time basically meant Good Times and What's Happenin'?. I hadn't realized before then that there were American blacks who were so starved for representations of people who looked like them that they'd actually watch What's Happenin'?, but it was so. In the years since, I've learned that, without fail, the top-rated TV shows among blacks are shows that have black main characters, while the top-rated TV shows among whites have primarily white main characters.

So, on some level, it's clearer in hindsight; blacks liked Amos & Andy because, stereotyped and ridiculous as it was, it was about people like them, acting, often, like people like them.

(By the way, sarah_ovenall, I think you and kip_w would enjoy reading each other's movie reviews.)

PDFs

grahamsleight earlier this week about a program to turn Microsoft Office documents into PDFs, which reminded me that not everyone knows about the freeware program PDFCreator. This is a really simple program which turns Ghostwriter (an open-source Postscript/PDF tool) into a Windows printer, so that instead of sending pages to the printer, it sends them into a PDF file. The result is dirt-simple PDF--you won't get things like text-imput fields--but for a lot of documents, it's a great solution.

(Incidentally, Graham is now the editor of Foundation, the main British journal of sf criticism, blessings unto him.)