This summer as I wrap of this undergrad experience, I'm in a Film Class at Michigan which deals with the brief history of Blacks in Cinema. As a African American Studies Major and lover of all Black Arts (except Tyler Perry Films) I wanted to be able to use my blog as a forum to talk about the films we watch, what other films I recommend, as well as put some of my more critical and "scholarly" writing on the blog. I've even thought about putting up old essays on here, but I don't want people to search and use my stuff for reference (or plagiarism) like I know I could of others. lol
Anyway, a few years ago I did an independent study project with professor Robin Means Coleman at the University of Michigan ( I was actually published and had my research presented at the University of Michigan UROP symposium in 06) on the film Candyman as the modern representation of A Birth of A Nation and the the Brutal Black Buck character.
While the Brutal Buck character featured within "Birth of A Nation" presents an argument that Black males are Bloodthirsty savages whose sole purpose is the consumption and destruction of white women and their purity, "Check and DoubleCheck" presents a paralleled image of Black males being childlike buffoons.
Check and Double Check is a 1930 comedy based on the "Amos & Andy" radio show. Instead of hiring Black actors for the roles, the creators of Check and Double Check hired program creators Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll to perform the roles themselves in Blackface. Amos and Andy are actually secondary players in their own movie. Amos and Andy operate a bare-bones taxi service in Harlem, struggling to keep their vehicle running and their tires inflated. When their lodge-master, Kingfish, offers them a lucrative job ferrying Duke Ellington and his Cotton Club Orchestra to a gig in the Upper West Side, they jump at the chance. At the party, the two men run into an old friend, Ralph Crawford, who needs help finding the lost deed to his deceased father's house in order to prove his worth to his prospective in-laws. Like A Birth of A Nation, Amos & Andy: Check and Double Check works to promote White Supremacy and the stereotype of Black Americans being less intelligent than White Americans. Throughout the film, the characters introduce each other as being "incompetent." The arguments between Amos & Andy in reference to who is in charge of their the taxi company suggest a theme that Black males are power hungry and manipulative within their interpersonal relationship. The slapstick nature in which they operate the business echos A Birth of A Nation's suggestion of the ludicrous idea of Black control and self determination.
The White American actors in the show this ludicrous nature of Blacks in society by attempting to capture the Black American vernacular heard and the stereotypes associated. The actors do this by using bad grammar and by mispronouncing and chopping words and making it the punchline of the joke. There is never a "g" at the end of verbs ending in "ing. Many of the Black characters studder and their lack of formal education is the center of jokes within the film.
Both A Birth of A Nation and Amos & Andy: Check and Double Check operate on fictionalizing the idea of Blacks as anything other than subservient. In A Birth of A Nation, D.W. Griffith shows that a Black South is cause of alarm and uses the white womenhood and humanity as the target of Black consumption. Black politicians and communities are seen as a problem. Check and Double Check furthers this suggestion in that all of the Blacks are either manipulative or incompetent and need to help of Whites (as Andy mentions in that the best times of their life were on the plantations of Georgia).
These films work to position whiteness as the social norm and Blackness as the other. As in Birth of A Nation and previous Blackface minstrelsy, stereotypes are used as important anchors where the performers are able to suggest what reality is and what Blackness is within this reality. Amos and Andy and D.W. Griffith in A Birth of A Nation present a statement that Blackness is a social imperfection and its men are inferior to White men and are incomplete without White society.
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