Precious: Worse than Birth of a Nation?

Here's a pretty good article by Ishmael Reed about the Lee Daniel's Precious, on the Counterpunch website:

http://www.counterpunch.com/reed12042009.html

The Color Purple, Siskel & Ebert, Mo' Better Blues, Spike Lee, Do The Right Thing

I remember years ago when The Color Purple came out. Siskel & Ebert reviewed it without mentioning the controversy about it. Then they came back a few weeks later to discuss it. And they both agreed, the movie was not racist. There may have been a time, they said, when there should have been a balanced view of Black characters in movies, but this was no longer needed. Even though The Color Purple was the only "Black movie" Hollywood had put out in years.

A few years later, this happened again. Siskel & Ebert reviewed Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues without mentioning the attacks on it by Nat Hentoff and others who claimed it was "anti-Semitic" because it had a couple of Jewish guys in it who were on screen for only about two minutes and were jerks.

And, again, a few weeks later, Siskel & Ebert came back to the movie to discuss the controversy. Again, they both agreed. But this time, they agreed that the movie was anti-Semitic for not providing a balanced picture of Jewish persons.

So. Jews are so underrepresented in Hollywood that they need to be carefully protected, but, according to them, anti-Black racism just isn't a problem anymore.

My guess is that Siskel & Ebert also had some idea that Black audiences watching a Spike Lee movie would be more impressionable, more easily influenced by a movie than Whites watching The Color Purple.

It was Nat Hentoff who started the anti-Semitism smear against Spike Lee. Hentoff claims to oppose censorship in any form. He defended racist college students who he claimed were being persecuted by universities. He defended an Israeli who screamed at a group of Black women, "Shut up, you black water buffalo. Go to the zoo." The Zionist explained that he was probably thinking of a Hebrew-language slur commonly directed against Palestinians. I doubt pro-Zionist Hentoff saw any problem with that.

There had been attacks on Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing---accusations that he had libeled Italian-Americans. These attacks came to an abrupt end when a mob of Italians murdered a Black 16-year-old who walked into their neighborhood to look at a used car.