Topic: racism

Although this film is regarded by many as a masterpiece, it is also highly problematic as those who study it are faced with the challenge of dealing with a piece that simultaneously contains innovative artistry and questionable moral and political views. The racism that permeates The Birth of a Nation clearly depicts African Americans as inferior to their Anglo American equivalents and establishes the notion that African Americans are to blame for all of America’s problems from before the civil war up until the film’s present. While the black community is discriminated against, it is made clear that the Klu Klux Klan are the heroes, thus the film is explicitly racist existing as both a source of pride and shame, so forward-looking and so backward at the same time. “The subject matter of the film caused immediate criticism by the newly created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its racist and “vicious” portrayal of blacks, its proclamation of miscegenation, its pro-Klan stance and its endorsement of slavery” (Dirks). Such racism is evident from the intertitle which introduces the story reading: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seeds of disunion”. This intertitle along with the following scene showing that New Englanders brought the slaves to America establishes the idea that all of the subsequent problems in the film were created by the slaves who spurred such a great and noble land towards civil war. The position of The Birth of a Nation as a melodrama accentuates the racist attributes it contains, in particular concerning the personification of good and evil through exaggerated characters, which in this case is visible through racist stereotyping. Such stereotypes contribute to what make The Birth of a Nation so overtly offensive as they are quite prominent throughout the film. Through the medium of film it became possible to visually express propagated stereotypes of the black community in a clear way which could be shared by the audience. One of the most damaging and controversial stereotypes of the African American endorsed by Griffith was that of the buck, or brute, which as Bogle describes “revealed the tie between sex and racism in America”. In order to promote the idea of white supremacy The Birth of a Nation exploits the sexual stereotype of the buck who is personified for example by the character of Gus. This character, displaying the betrayal aspect of melodrama, turns against his former masters by joining the revolt and causing the suicide of one of the Cameron daughters. This stereotype of the buck, depicting black males as ceaselessly vicious sexual predators, was additionally harmful as the early audiences reacted to what they saw as if it was real, in other words they were unable to distinguish propaganda from the truth and thus the film “spoke to the emotions through the eyes. It showed for all to see that the south was “right” about the Negro” (Reddick). Other stereotypes which Griffith made use of which remained in American films for years to follow included “the noble, loyal manageable Toms, the clownish coons, the stoic hefty mammy, and the tragic “troubled” Mulatto” (Bogle). Although such stereotypes had already existed and had appeared in many different types of media before, they had never been used to the extent introduced by Griffith, or appeared in a film as popular as The Birth of a Nation. What made such depictions found within Griffith’s film more disturbing was the fact that the major black roles were played by white actors in blackface which accentuated the grotesque nature of the racism.