Christopher Harris: During the Jim Crow era, white supremacy was thoroughly integrated into every institution including popular culture. Racist caricatures were manufactured, sold, displayed, and used in homes all over America, most often in the form of salt and pepper shakers and kitchen utensilsβobjects associated with the domestic sphere. More to the point, lynching was widely celebrated and not just by clandestine, hooded night riders like in the movies.
White men, women, and children gathered for the lynching in broad daylight and posed for pictures with their victims. They smiled, laughed, and celebrated during these festive events. They tortured their victims, who were black men, black women, and black children.
They hung and burned them, and cut off body parts genitals and toes for souvenirs, and sold postcards documenting the lynched bodies. This was ordinary and accepted by the white working class and white elites so I find the absence of blatant racism in cinema of the Jim Crow period completely and utterly baffling. How is it that in the cinema of the day, evidence of white supremacy is erased from the record? What I mean by contemporaneous revisionism is: what was otherwise pervasive and normalized in daily life was effaced in cinema.
Harris: Right. The same law just as easily leads to mass incarceration of black and brown people, which Finch would accept as legally sound. Basically, the production of this film about the rule of law, tolerance, and so forth benefitted from the displace ment of mostly Latino and poor communities. Berry: That leads me to a film you made that gives background to slave daguerreotypes. I believe it was originally a part of an installation?
Harris: It was a two-part video installation. What made you think of that? There so many famous slave daguerreotypes and I think about that often reprinted photograph of an older African American man whose back is completely scarred up [The photo is of a man identified as Gordon or Whipped Pete. I always associate it with that. Berry: I associate it with a different book that my father had!
