Frankly, My Dear ...

In August 2017 the time-travelling author of these pages anticipated that one day Gone With The Wind would be withdrawn from circulation due to its complicity with America's racist history. That moment grew closer yesterday when the movie was withdrawn from streaming services as a painless casualty of the Black Lives Matter movement. The lionhearts who removed it “said the 1939 film was "a product of its time" and depicted "ethnic and racial prejudices" that "were wrong then and are wrong today", which does raise the question of why it was licensed and broadcast by the service in the first place. In the eighty years since it was made, how was its manifestly inappropriate nature overlooked by anyone able to turn a profit on it?

Sordel doesn't care about Gone With The Wind and (in a they-first-came-for-the-Communists stylee) is unlikely to lose much sleep over its reversal of fortune, but consider the plight of the first African-American to win an Academy Award in an acting category. Hattie McDaniel, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at a segregated ceremony in 1940, should surely have known that the depiction of her character was “wrong then”, and in taking the role she was arguably as complicit with the racism of 1939 as Mammy was with the culture of the antebellum South. If, as I sincerely hope, her achievement continues to command some respect going forward, what will it mean that the film in which she appeared is reviled by later generations, joining Birth of a Nation and Song Of The South (together with every film associated with Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Woody Allen) in cinema's Book of the Damned?

In one sense, it should be crystal clear that black lives matter or, to put it more pertinently, that black deaths matter. All deaths at the hands of the police matter, which is why Sordel remembers the case of Ian Tomlinson, the newspaper vendor who was meted out an unintentional on-the-spot death penalty for mouthing off to a riot policeman.

In another sense, however, the BLM movement unpicks history statue by statue, removing the context in which future generations might learn about it. Black lives, in the sense of their biographies, matter, but theirs is past that we have reason to discover only because of the visible history from which they were so often excluded. I strongly doubt that anyone in Bristol actually revered Edward Colston because he had his name on stuff. But while his name was on stuff it gave parents the opportunity to point out to their children that Edward Colston made his money in the slave industry. Alfred Nobel (at the time of the premature publication of his obituary) was described as “The Merchant of Death”. Cecil Rhodes remains an antagonistic figure, prompting people to research the history of colonial rule in South Africa, precisely because he remains relevant to us as a philanthropist. If you really want people to understand how the morally-compromised wealth of the past gives rise to the inequality of the present, you need the past to remain present rather than sanitising it.

When all this is gone with the wind, many careers that might have been celebrated by the new social order will have gone with it. If you think that an acting achievement will be written in stone, consider that the first African-American actor to win an Academy Award was James Baskett, who won an honorary Oscar for playing Uncle Remus in Song of the South. If you don’t know who that is, Sordel can hardly blame you.