Flashbacks in Black and White

The U.S. Congress isn't likely to approve reparations for black people — not this Congress, anyway — but, just now, pop culture has fallen in love with the idea. In movies, the critically laureled Far from Heaven has a restless '50s housewife fall in love with her noble black gardener. On Broadway, the musical Hairspray is wowing 'em with its perky parable of interracial love set at a teen dance party in 1962 Baltimore. On TV, NBC's American Dreams makes Dick Clark's Bandstand a focus for the conflicted feelings whites in Philadelphia had for blacks circa 1963.

The show-biz community's idea of reparation is, guess what, mere nostalgia. It revives not the centuries of slavery and abuse but a more recent era of liberal piety, when some suburban whites discovered race shame. It reminds the mass audience that 40 years ago black people were saints — not only for the atrocities they endured but also for the grace with which they bore them.

As history lesson or homily, this is unobjectionable. But as drama, the Manichaean tussle of good vs. stupid is too often a recipe for stock characters, lazy thinking, easy exits from thorny issues. It also dodges a question many blacks posed: Who says we have to be the stalwart ones? Why can't we be as selfish, superficial, even prejudiced as everyone else? Equality in mediocrity: an American ideal that anyone can attain.

It's axiomatic that the first generation of insurgent minorities — blacks, women, gays — felt obliged to prove their similarities to the oppressive majority: that they were as white, manly and straight as Joe Sixpack. It was the next generation that got to celebrate their differences. They felt free to be who they were, and that was cool too.

But so much mid-cult drama is stuck in Phase One. And that's because the new race parables (whose main creators happen to be white) are not about the black struggle. They are fables of reassurance for white folks: your parents, who dared to be tolerant.

A good movie might be made about the feelings of an African-American gardener pressured from both sides of the racial divide when a white woman becomes attracted to him; but Far from Heaven isn't it. Similarly, the blacks in Hairspray and American Dreams are mostly props for their white neighbors' learning curve. An orphan child or stray puppy would serve the same function.

Can pop culture offer instruction in race relations? It did, in the 1972 All in the Family episode about Sammy Davis Jr.'s visit to the Bunkers. When Sammy kissed Archie, the cleansing shock of laughter was the smartest possible reparation for the impulse to turn racial anguish into kitsch.