Resist The Self-censorship Bug | City Journal
Why stop there? Let s ban screenings of Al Jolson s performances in black face, and reruns of Norman Lear s brilliant All in the Family, the 1970s sitcom whose racist, sexist, homophobic, working class antihero, Archie Bunker, was must-see viewing. Let s throw Shirley Temple movies under the bus. We can t have doorman Bill Bojangles Robinson, one of America s greatest tap dancers, teach little Shirley how to do a time step to the strains of My Old Kentucky Home in The Little Colonel. Forget about seeing the 1937 classic The Good Earth, whose apparently racist producers chose white actress Luise Rainer rather than Anna May Wong to play the sold slave and prostitute in her Oscar-winning performance. Should The Wizard of Oz be seen by impressionable Americans, given its portrait of dwarfs? PETA would surely object to Alfred Hitchcock s The Birds for portraying our feathered friends as mass killers. And don t The Godfather films suggest that Italian-Americans are in thrall to the mafia?
Don’t forget the Irish in whatever that movie is with John Wayne in it.