Racism - what is wrong with this movie?
[PART 1] RACISM
Being not from the US, this black-white racism strikes me every time. Choosing this movie I thought - Claudette Colbert - another very funny and romantic movie. Then, soon there was this black actress ringing at the door. Immediately my racist radar was blinking. Ok, how can the first thing I think of is racism even racism, just because a black actress enters the scene and the movie is old? But - some scenes were really hard to take.
Delilah somehow just fulfills the stereotype black mammy - whose greatest pleasure seems to serve. She is just the embodiment of subordination! I mean, her face has sold millions of pancakes radiating over the city’s skyline - and she does not even join the party of the pancake queen. What’s wrong?
It sucks that Delilah already prepares breakfast although just incidentally dropped in and then asks not even to be paid for work.
Years later, there are servants in Bea’s house - and still Delilah massages Bea’s feet. Oh why?
And yet -
would you join a party where you probably would receive is humiliation? You would need to be a very strong person to do this.
Consider - you went through a lot of hardship, refusal and humiliation in your life and then you find yourself in a nice place with friendly people and the chance you can stay together with your daughter. In the end many of the Delilahs of the 1930ies would have considered it luck to get into the position Delilah gets.
Bea and Delilah know each other and lived together for more than 10 years. When I give a back massage to my sister it is definitely not an act of flirting or servantry, but a way of friendship to make her feel comfortable. So yes - the role Dilalah plays is hard to watch - but it is just not everything is all “black or white“! And then, what is hard to watch: how society expected certain people to behave and what this society makes out of these people. And the movie shows this in a very critical sense!
If the situation is difficult for you and not fun - it is the easier way to stick to situations where you can find at least a bit pleasure. To take at least one role in society is easier than being endangered to loose even the last moments of happiness.
In the society I grew up - women in the kitchen bound to their oven - this is the past, unthinkable today!! And yet I met housewives in more traditional settings proud of being good cooks. Society decided being a housewife is their identity. And now they would get an identity crises, if they had to stop doing what they were trained to do and made to believe of doing best in this world. Don’t get me wrong - it is wrong that they do not have alternatives - but it is wrong to the same extent to blame them to embody these roles. So I can understand that there are Delilahs who do not want to sign a contract that endanger a position they are feeling lucky to be in, a contract of several pages which most would not understand independent from sex, gender or race - now or in the 1930ies.
For both, Delilah and Jessie being black is an issue - Delilah accepted her fate with all consequences long before she met a woman with a little girl and a quak quak. She is backing away from all white privileges even if offered and staying true to what she believes she can be 100% sure of: the love of her daughter and the kindness of the few people ever kind to her. Then there is Jessie and she tries to solve the issue by hiding away from what she is. Being differentiated although visually not different is what is so hard to bear for Jessie. It is not her skin color but only her origin - her mother, who made her different in this society. Do you think it makes it easier for her that Delilah keeps on calling her “baby“? The Jessie at the end is not even a child any more. She has all the possibilities her mother hadn’t and not half of the hardship of her mother. She so desperately wants to live her possibilities, but this seems not possible as long she is her mother’s “baby“.
Ok, it is a movie, so it was white people who wrote the characters and decided of the social code and censored what was “harmful“ to this (white) society. Ok, I read about the ‘black’ uproar against this movie in the 1930ies - if you go to the movies for sure you want to see the world you’d like it to be and not a mirror of a (white) reality.
But maybe think this way: Next to Delilah, Peolas attempt to break out is even stronger and more striking than if her mother was the strong black woman who receives all the privileges she should have. If Delilah was presented as this strong and independent woman who stands above the racist society - Peola would just appear as a spoilt brat. Oh, it would have been good to see a strong independent black leading character in a 1930ies Colbert movie - but this is not the topic here. For me it really hurts seeing what became of Peola and this is the movie’s intention - and it is just because the characters are developed the way they are!