Slick but dumb film "about" racism

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2012)

"One cannot separate economics, political science, and history. Politics is the control of the economy. History, when accurately and fully recorded, is that story. In most textbooks and classrooms, not only are these three fields of study separated, but they are further compartmentalised into separate subfields, obscuring the close interconnections between them." - J.W. Smith
Most films supposedly "about racism" are covertly racist or promote racial stereotypes ("Monster's Ball", "Color Purple", "Sayonara", "The Blind Side", Sidney Poitier vehicles etc etc). Alan Parker's "Missisippi Burning" is no different (Parker directed the equally dubious "Midnight Express" a decade earlier).
Loosely based on the real life murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi, the film stars Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as a pair of FBI agents who journey to Jessup County. Here they interrogate, investigate and trade blows with the local townsfolk, most of whom are KKK members, racist, or believe in a form of white exceptionalism typical of 1960s America. The film takes place in 1964, a year before steps were taken to dismantle America's Jim Crow Laws, which promoted racial segregation and white supremacy.
Like most of these films, black characters are marginalised, a white character is our entryway into the tale, the black experience is ignored and white racism is caricatured or treated as a "personal belief" rather than a systemic/structural phenomenon. This being Hollywood, racism is also understood entirely as an issue of "race" rather than class (racism is a key mechanism for the stabilisation of capitalism and the legitimisation of inequality). Indeed, as the economic forces which cause such things continue to exist today, contemporary society is every bit as racist as it was in the 1960s. Minorities face tougher court sentences, are overwhelmingly sent to wars, there are more black men in prison than were used as slaves at the height of chattel slavery, and minorities dominate homeless/poverty/mental-ill-health/incarceration statistics. And as the core of the system stabilises, new forms of racism are pushed outward, other country's and cultures demonized to foster further accumulation. Ironically, the end result of this is an increased persecution of whites and the middle classes: capitalism has to come for them next.
Racism is itself more than an ideology, a belief system or a negative attitude towards others arising out of prejudice. If that alone were the case then racism would be reduced to something which takes place inside human heads. But such an understanding ignores a chief factor behind racism (as well as sexism): Power and the capacity to act. Or as the old civil rights mantra went, "racism equals prejudice plus power".
In our era, though, the most important factor in reinvigorating a whole new round of global racism is the resurgence of a certain brand of Reaganite conservatism (or neoliberalism), whose hallmark was the reinstatement of laissez-faire economic policies and rhetoric. Subject to such "unchecked capitalism", the poor got poorer, the middle class was destroyed, debts exponentially increased, and the great big national Ponzi scheme was forced to go abroad, often violently with wars, Uncle Sam's Mickey Mouse Club desperately sucking up new members for life support. But beyond this, the Reaganite doctrine of inequality gave the official seal of approval to ideas of racial superiority that right-wing extremists had used for years to rationalise the exploitation of minorities. If the economic gap between whites and non-whites was growing, if most non-whites live below the poverty line - well, that just proved that there was a racial component in the free-market's Social-Darwinian selection process; minorities "deserved" their poverty because they were "less fit" and "winners" "deserved" their gains because of personal merit, hard work and intelligence. The logical corollary of this is that whites who are "less fit" also deserve their poverty.
But the most insidious thing about "Mississippi Burning" is its valorising of FBI agents, who are painted as moral guardians and heroes of the civil rights era. In reality, the FBI and CIA have always been racist organisations (see Costa Gavras' "Betrayal"), responsible for countless unlawful operations against Civil Rights activists, unions and progressive movements. The forces behind numerous assassinations and coups across the world, both parties have the blood of millions on their hands. Indeed, in the period depicted in the film, the FBI would routinely sit back and watch while local mobs or police patrols beat down on gays and blacks, just as after the Civil War blacks were left at the mercy of Southern power/plantation owners by Northern politicians who made deals with the South. Unsurprisingly, one of the first acts of the FBI, which was actually tentatively set up by the grand nephew of Napoleon in 1908, was to prosecute Jack Johnson, a black man, for a now banned law that was both sexist and racist. Parker is so steadfast in his attempts to white-wash this history that he creates a black FBI agent. But there were NO black persons in the FBI in 1964, unless they were doing janitorial or chauffeur work. No surprise then that the film omits one large fact: the FBI and Federal Government were warned in advance that killings in Mississippi would happen, and activists and law experts explained to the federal government weeks in advance that it was their constitutional obligation to send protection down to Mississippi prior to and during several planned civil rights protests. These demands went all the way to the White House, via Attorney General Robert Kennedy, but where ignored. While these demands for a few hundred marshals went out, 40,000 soldiers were being shipped to Vietnam. Twelve days later the three victims of this film disappear. End result: a film about racism which turns the historical racists into heroes.
5/10 - Worth one viewing.