Core Post #5 - Cailin O'Brien

While Jackson poses an interestingly ambiguous profile of himself for the public to interpret, I found Dyer’s discussion of Robeson most intriguing this week. After watching Show Boat in class I had not caught on to half of the more obvious white narrative aspects that occurred throughout the film. While watching I was happy to see acknowledgement of African American struggles in US history which hadn’t necessarily been addressed in this time, but as Dyer goes into detail about, we are not actually being presented with the realizations slavery & oppression, but instead by a feeling of universal or general suffering one African Americans part. Rather than directly express the cruelties & realities of what African Americans went through during slavery, and acknowledge ripping these people from their homeland, it is easier for white writers to look at the surface layer of it all; black suffering within America. It is almost as if we forget that African Americans were taken from Africa and forced over seas. It is not just the oppression that African Americans struggle with, but the desire to escape from their current position and return home where they can live as they please. One last thing I would like to mention in this vein is how Dyer states white people use “the humble patience of the negro race” as a way to explain how African Americans have fallen as vulnerable victims to oppression (page 82). They leave out the idea that these same people were dragged across the ocean into this oppression; it did not naturally come across them.   

       Also interesting to me was the notion of black people being primitive in nature as opposed to their civilized white counterparts. We can see this idea of primacy for instance in the dance scene in Show Boat where Magnolia is being taught a hip popping shoulder throwing dance number by all of the African American workers around the kitchen. What is even more intriguing about this scene is the way that in comparison to the other African Americans Robeson’s character, Tom, is not engaging as enthusiastically in this song & dance number. Dyer mentions this disengagement on Robeson’s edge from the “animalistic” dancing scene in Heavenly Bodies saying that “he refuses the coon style performance, and is left with the purity and simplicity of mere presence” (pg. 124). Dyer discusses the importance of stillness within this moment on Robeson’s part, as well as his still acting demeanor in general. Keeping Robeson still within the moment seems to estrange him from the rest of the African American characters; he is not as much of a threat to whites in this way because he doesn’t completely embody what they would stereotype African Americans to behave like. While upsetting to realize, it is necessary to acknowledge these discrepancies between white and black portrayal of what it was and still is like to be an African American in American society. While putting into light some of the hardships blacks had to go through, these films and scenes that Robeson was involved in allowed white viewers to leave with a feeling of acknowledgment of black's suffering but no acceptance of blame for it really.