Welcome to Black History Month.
The January/February issue of the media review Extra! features a compelling package on racism. Particularly recommended are two pieces by Jim Naureckas. The first, "Racism Resurgent: How Media Let 'The Bell Curve's' Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race," discloses that nearly all the research that 'Curve' authors Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein relied on for their central claims about race and IQ were funded by something called the Pioneer Fund, described by the London Sunday Telegraph as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics."
The fund's mission is to promote eugenics, the article says, a philosophy that maintains that "genetically unfit" individuals or races are a threat to society. The fund was set up in 1937 by a millionaire who wanted blacks sent back to Africa. The foundation's original charter set forth the group's missions as "racial betterment" and aid for people "deemed to be descended primarily from white people who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States."
The second piece, "50,000 Watts of Hate," documents the racist commentary of Bob Grant, who performs on the most listened-to talk show in the country on New York's WABC, the flagship of the ABC Radio Network.
The piece cites on-air quotes from Mr. Grant, particularly a predilection that he's demonstrated for referring to African-Americans as "savages." He has said the United States is inhabited by "millions of sub-humanoids, savages, who really would feel more at home careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya -- people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized." And that "if they didn't observe Martin Luther King Day, there would be trouble from the savages." He has referred to black churchgoers as "screaming savages" and has said that black fraternity members represent "the savage mind, the primitive, primordial mentality."
Mr. Grant has also advised a distraught listener to "get a gun" to redress what the caller perceived were social wrongs. Mr. Naureckas concludes: "Grant's expression of hatred for various groups is protected by the First Amendment."
ABC, of course, also has the right to decide it does not want to broadcast hate speech.
Blacks in print
High above and beyond the fetid cesspool of racist talk radio, we find novelist/poet/essayist/playwright/ publisher Ishmael Reed in the current Callaloo, the journal of African-American and African arts and letters, doing an extended riff with interviewer Shamoon Zamir about the depleted state of the culture. Mr. Reed says that the black male is being put in the position of the victim who's required to apologize "to a policeman for putting his head in the way of a broken nightstick," and he adds that he's trying to preserve the black male writing franchise by buying their novels from publishers and keeping them in print.
He also sees technology as "the black writer's boon." Video pioneer "Nam June Paik has said that rock and roll is the U.S.'s greatest export and [I think that] hip hop, rap and other manifestations of black culture, or black technology, are being marketed all over the world for billions of dollars, very little of which is being seen by its creators."
The right moves
The first issue of Scenario, a magazine that posits screen-writing as an art, is hot off the presses, and it's a beauty. It's expensive ($20), handsome, glossy and thoughtfully and artfully crafted. The issue contains the complete screenplays of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Silence of the Lambs," "Nashville" and "Bernard and Huey," an unproduced screenplay by Jules Feiffer. Screenplays are written to be seen, not read, so I turned to Robert ("Chinatown") Towne's keynote essay, which is -- unlike so much about the creation of movies -- serious, concise and intelligible.
Mr. Towne equates the movie actor with the British aristocracy (as in the saying that they "did nothing and they did it very well"). He says gifted actors affect us most not by "talking, fighting . . . killing, cursing or cross-dressing" but simply "by being photographed." His model is Gary Cooper in the vintage film "Sergeant York," and particularly Cooper's genius in "suggesting wonder" in his eyes.
Mr. Towne says that the actor's look and movement -- not action, movement -- convey more than dialogue does and that the screenwriter's obligation is to learn how to recognize that and to stay out of the way.
Weighty words
"Almost half of all Americans think they need to lose weight. A third actually do."
So begins Lisa Grunwald's (and Anne Hollister and Miriam Bensimhon's) lengthy treatise on fat in this month's Life magazine, which explores the relationship between worth and weight. The piece is threaded with factoids -- Americans aren't the fattest people in the world, Western Samoans are -- and a good precis on why the last 10 pounds are so hard to lose. Read this and take it off. Take it all off.