Except for a fortunate few who got to see Willie Mays play in person, most Americans of my generation fell under his almost mesmerizing spell while watching him on TV.

Mays’ unmatched skills—and the unaffected, nearly childlike exuberance he brought to the game of baseball—quickly won a multitude of white fans, even in the South where I grew up amid angry calls for “massive resistance” to school desegregation. It’s fair to ask whether Mays could have managed this so readily had his early career not coincided so closely with the emergence of television as a national medium. Mays, his biographer James Hirsch explained, “always saw himself as an entertainer first,” and television “gave him the ideal stage” for the amazing things he did—on the field and later off of it, as a sought-after guest on popular programs from Today and The Tonight Show to The Donna Reed Show and Bewitched. A surge in TV ownership, from 9% of American households in 1950 to 65% in 1955, gave millions of Americans their first chance to see the miracle of Willie Mays with their own eyes. What they saw on their screens helped to blur the color line at a crucial point in our history.

Until the mid-1950s, most Americans could find live baseball only on their radios. The 1947 World Series pitting the New York Yankees against the Brooklyn Dodgers and featuring MLB’s first Black player, Jackie Robinson, was the first to be televised—but only in Washington, D.C., and three select urban markets in New York and Pennsylvania. Only one in 10 American homes had a TV in May 1951, when Willie Mays made his New York Giants debut. By that point, 16 black players had already appeared in a major league uniform and more than a third of teams were integrated. The color barrier had been breached, but the great majority of fans still couldn’t see the results for themselves.

This was true especially in rural areas. Scarcely 5% of households in the rural Georgia of my youth had television sets in 1950. Everyone knew that Jackie Robinson was Black—but radio broadcasters rarely identified any players by race.

One of my great uncles was known both for his love of baseball and his hostility to Black people. Family legend has it that listening to Giants games on the radio left him quite a fan of outfielder Monte Irvin, one of two Black players who joined the team in 1948. When a mischievous family member asked him if he realized Irvin was Black, the old man flew into an apoplectic rage at the broadcasters, for concealing this critical information from him.

This was but one of many tragicomic absurdities wrought by the Jim Crow mindset in the South of my boyhood. Still, the episode foreshadowed the importance of television in allowing white Southerners to see the reality of racial integration in their most beloved sport.

Seeing integration didn’t mean all whites in the South or elsewhere were ready to accept it, but Willie Mays was about to make that easier for many of them. Giants fans sensed his enormous potential in 1951, but he missed the next two seasons due to military service. By the time he returned in 1954 to bat .333 and hit 41 home runs, fans across the country could take in his dazzling feats at the plate, in the field, and on the basepaths courtesy of ABC’s “Game of the Week.” Many of the record 23 million viewers who watched NBC’s broadcast of the 1954 World Series between the Giants and the Cleveland Indians were seeing Willie Mays play for the first time. He did not disappoint.

In Game 1, after a long rundown and over-the-shoulder-grab of a blistering Vic Wertz liner, Mays pivoted on a dime and made a laser-beam throw to the infield to hold a Cleveland runner at third. All of this made for a stunning visual that was vintage Mays, down to losing his cap and coming to rest sprawled on the outfield grass. What would soon be known simply as “The Catch” became one of the most replayed film clips in sports history.

Mays thought he had made better catches, including a couple of barehanded grabs during his rookie season. But with millions watching, “The Catch” made the 23-year-old Mays an instant—and enduring—legend. It also marked him as the ideal athlete for the television age: The things Mays did had to be seen to be fully appreciated. Radio play-by-play simply could not do justice to his on-field artistry. Al Helfer, the veteran calling the 1954 series for the Mutual Radio Network, could only describe Mays’ play on the Wertz drive as “a beautiful, beautiful catch.”

I did not see “The Catch.” It would be another year before my parents could afford even the cheapest Emerson TV. I was only 8, but I had already listened to enough Giants games on the radio and devoured enough box scores to qualify as a prepubescent Willie Mays groupie. Stuck out in the country with no siblings to distract me, I rarely missed the CBS “Game of the Week,” anchored by the impressible Dizzy Dean and his broadcast partner Buddy Blattner. Chances were good that I’d be tuned in regardless of the matchup, but I was certain to be glued to the screen whenever the Giants were playing.

In the rural South of that era a little white boy who openly sang the praises of any Black man was enough of a rarity to attract some teasing from friends. But my mother loved Willie too, and other adults seemed to assume that my ardor would cool as I grew older and wiser to the racial proscriptions of the “Southern way of life.” That would not happen: My shame at boarding a school bus while the Black kids who lived nearby trudged a mile or so up the road to their weathered two-room schoolhouse assured that much.

Though few of Mays’ fellow Black players seemed to begrudge his fame and stature, some challenged him to make better use of the bully pulpit they afforded him. As the first Black major leaguer in 1947, Jackie Robinson had run the gauntlet of racial abuse, both physical and psychological. He redirected some of his smoldering resentment at Black players who did not join him in openly attacking racial discrimination. Mays’ enormous popularity made his reluctance to mount the soapbox even less forgivable to Robinson, who stopped just short of calling him an ”Uncle Tom,” but reminded Mays of how much he had benefited from the “battles fought by others” before him, and accused him of turning his back on the suffering inflicted on Blacks during his boyhood in Birmingham.

Neither charge was accurate, nor fair. Willie Mays needed no reminder of what Blacks were up against in Birmingham.  He got a very personal taste of that in October 1951 when Eugene “Bull” Connor, the city’s notoriously racist police commissioner, waited until the very last second to pull the permit for a long-planned “Willie Mays Day” parade honoring the National League’s Rookie of the Year. He was the biggest star in baseball 12 years later when a Birmingham TV station refused to air a documentary on him.

Robinson surely had it worse, but Mays was no stranger to the segregated restaurants, hotels, and buses that still awaited Black players in some major league cities well into the 1950s. Even after the Giants moved to San Francisco, Mays had to stubbornly stand his ground until the owner who initially refused to sell him the house he wanted in a white neighborhood finally relented.

Still, rather than attack discrimination publicly, he pursued Black advancement in his own understated and indirect way, steering younger Black and Latino players—from Willie McCovey to Bobby and Barry Bonds—clear of pitfalls that might derail their careers.

Biographer Hirsch suggests that seeing Mays become an overnight sensation prompted other franchises to add Black players to their rosters. Three years after he joined the Giants, the number of teams with Black players had doubled, from six to 12. The boyish, down-to earth superhero often seen playing stickball with Black kids in the streets of Harlem might not have been grooming future activists, but he sent a message that humility and openness were neither signs of weakness nor detriments to getting ahead. Former president Barack Obama thought Mays’ easy rapport with white fans had “change[d]  racial attitudes in a way political speeches never could” and credited Mays’ exemplary career for allowing “someone like me to even consider running for president.”

Bull Connor was not there to thwart last month’s planned three-day salute to the old Negro leagues at Birmingham’s historic Rickwood Field, which was to conclude with a game between the San Francisco Giants and the St. Louis Cardinals on June 20. Yet the real highlight of the affair promised to be an expected appearance by Mays, whose professional baseball career began at Rickwood in 1948 with the Birmingham Black Barons.

A heartbroken Mays revealed on June 17 that his health would not allow him to be there. When he died the next day, the salute to the Negro leagues blossomed into a full-blown celebration of his life and career.

But the most fitting tribute came from the 2.4 million television viewers, a huge audience for a Thursday night game, who tuned in to bid Willie Mays farewell through the medium that first brought his magic into the lives of so many Americans, including my own.

The post How Television Made Willie Mays a Star appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Racial hate and discrimination are serious problems in California’s Inland Empire—and solving them begins at the most fundamental levels. This was the conclusion of a panel of people who study and fight against hate crimes at “How Does the Inland Empire Strike Back Against Hate?,” a Zócalo/California Humanities event at UCR ARTS in Riverside, California. The speakers agreed that acts of racism and hatred go underreported across the region, and that building strong institutions that promote understanding begins in schools.

The discussion was moderated by Brian Levin, professor emeritus at the Cal State San Bernardino School of Criminal Justice, who studies extremism and hate crimes. He opened the discussion by noting that hate crimes “increased at double digit levels in major American cities” in 2023. This year isn’t likely to get better given that hate crimes have increased in every election year since 1991. Levin asked the panelists to speak to how California—which perhaps should be “a shining city on the hill for the rest of the country”—is combating hate.

California State Assemblymember Corey A. Jackson said that his goal is to build anti-racist, anti-xenophobic infrastructure around the state. He pointed to two bills recently signed by Governor Gavin Newsom—AB 1078, which pushed back against book banning (and which Jackson wrote) and AB 1955, which bars schools from notifying parents about student gender identity—as well as the state’s Civil Rights Department’s Commission on the State of Hate as examples. “Overall, what are we saying in the state of California? Not on our watch. We are making sure we are upholding what other generations did for us. When hate, racism, [or] xenophobia raises its ugly head, we are going to beat it back in the shadows where it belongs,” he said.

Turning to Candice Mays, project director of Black Voice News’ Mapping Black California, Levin asked how local institutions are fighting hate, and what they can do to combat skepticism and distrust of law enforcement and government.

The first hurdle, said Mays, is “How do you tell the police on the police?” Currently, the responsibility to report an incident is on the victim—who may not want to report a violent interaction to the organization perpetrating it. And law enforcement itself might not tick the proper boxes to characterize a violent act as a hate crime. Who holds the people who are mandated to report hate crimes accountable for their reports? Mays asked. She added, “It’s not as much as, how do we fix the Black community’s opinion of law enforcement; it’s how does government hold law enforcement accountable, so it’s not on us to deal with that.”

Levin concurred, pointing out that over the last few years, the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department—the nation’s 10th largest law enforcement agency—has reported just a handful of hate crimes each year, while the Los Angeles Police Department reported over 800 in 2023.

Xenophobia has a long history in the Inland Empire, said ACLU Southern California Inland Empire Office senior policy advocate and organizer Luis Nolasco. He sees his work as “ensuring that the Inland Empire is welcoming and is not anti-immigrant,” he said. “The hate comes from lack of knowledge or interfacing with the group.” He added, “A lot of that can be solved by talking to a person that’s an immigrant.” Some of his work has been with young people—including a lawsuit challenging how law enforcement and schools punish Black and brown students—but he is also working on recognizing racism as a public health crisis.

Mays said that unequal healthcare access is a major issue in both Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, though it’s significantly worse in the latter. She said that people by and large have health insurance. But new arrivals from Los Angeles County—many of them Black and brown, and without local networks—lack access to resources and providers. They often end up going to urgent care, for instance, instead of a primary care doctor.

Levin turned the discussion toward solutions. “What can we do to hone allyship?” he asked.

Jackson said that Black people are always at the top of any list of hate crime victims—but they are not alone there. “We are all on the menu. It depends what the dish of the day is. As a matter of fact, this is starting to become a buffet, when it comes to hate,” he said. He urged people to band together—but also to “hold onto your own humanity. Speak up against other people who are being targeted, even if you have nothing to win or lose.”

In the face of extreme hate, allyship has to be active, said Nolasco. “We’ve lost that sense of really putting ourselves on the line for our other communities,” he said. “This is something we all need to do for each other.”

Mays echoed that sentiment in response to a question from an audience member about helping people who want to fight hate but feel too overwhelmed to take action.

“I’m exhausted, too. I look at bad numbers all day,” she said. “It’s important to work in collaboration and connection with other people because then you’re restoring each other.” Surround yourself in community, she added, and remember that other people did this work before you.

Another audience member asked the panelists whether anti-hate, anti-racism movements needed better marketing—slogans like “Occupy,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Defund the Police” are triggering, or easy to push back on.

Mays didn’t deny the need for better marketing but pointed out that “desegregation” and “integration” got pushback in the civil rights era. “Whatever we’re going to push for next, no matter how we word it, is going to upset people, she said. “Honestly if it’s not, I don’t think we’re pushing the right things or pushing hard enough.”

The post Fighting Hate Is the Ultimate Group Project appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For over 25 years I have asked my students in U.S. history courses the same questions about Jim Crow:

“Where does Jim Crow ‘live’?”

“When did it begin?”

“How does it work?”

Their answers almost always focus on Southern states. I have taught in California, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, places with well-documented histories of racial segregation and discrimination. A wealth of scholarship shows Jim Crow was everywhere. Still, students cling to a belief that the history of white supremacy is a Southern history.

To push back against these simplified notions of racial discrimination in the U.S., I’ve made it my job to write and teach about Jim Crow in unexpected places—including California. The state embraces its reputation as a site for progressive thinking, the birthplace of the hippies and the Black Panthers, and a “free” state from its 1850 inception. Yet the state also developed innovative methods for containing and restricting people of color in public and private spaces—methods that continue to stoke racism in California and throughout the U.S. today.

One of the most successful people who fought back against those methods was Loren Miller, a lawyer who worked with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in Los Angeles. Using Miller’s mid-20th-century career as a lens to examine Jim Crow in California offers a sense of the breadth of this discrimination—and of the importance of acknowledging and understanding it.

Miller was born in Pender, Nebraska, in 1903 and earned his law degree from Washburn Law School in Topeka, Kansas, in 1928. By the time he moved to California in 1929, the NAACP had been the leading civil rights organization in the nation for two decades, fighting to end discrimination, segregation, and lynching. The organization established a branch in Los Angeles in 1914.

In housing, neighborhoods, and schools, California had always excelled at creating white-only institutions. Its history of segregation began in the 1850s, when the state adopted so-called Black codes. These laws and practices kept African Americans out of a variety of places, from streetcars, theaters, and restaurants to political parties and witness stands, where they could not testify against white people until 1863. The state was especially proficient at creating white-only neighborhoods as it applied restrictive covenants and lending practices with aplomb.

Miller’s legal career took off quickly, fueled by the sheer volume of discrimination to fight in California. Between 1938 and 1948, when the Great Migration pulled thousands of African Americans to California, Miller appeared as the attorney in approximately 75 lawsuits involving discriminatory real estate practices. In December 1945, he won the Sugar Hill case, a decisive victory at the California Supreme Court that deemed restrictive covenants a violation of Black homeowners’ 14th Amendment rights. The case received extensive media attention, in part because one of the plaintiffs was the Academy Award-winning actress Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. In 1954, along with Thurgood Marshall, Miller argued Shelley v. Kraemer, a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices declared that the enforcement of racial restrictive covenants was unconstitutional.

Miller became the NAACP’s foremost expert on restrictive covenants’ legal intricacies and harmful effects in the U.S. In lectures to civic and human rights organizations around the country, he argued that the answer to most of the problems confronting Black Americans was “to find a solution to the complex housing problems that plague the urban Negro,” as he told a National Urban League audience in Pittsburgh in 1954. Housing discrimination led to other anti-Black practices and segregation, Miller noted—which kept Black people from achieving equality in education, the workplace, and beyond.

Miller never missed an opportunity to emphasize how dismal the situation was in his home state. “[M]ore Negro children attend all-Negro schools in Los Angeles than attend such schools in Little Rock, Arkansas, or Jackson, Mississippi, combined,” he told an audience at the Lake Arrowhead Conference on Equal Employment Opportunity, in a 1963 talk titled “The Problems of The Negro in Southern California.”

And Miller knew, firsthand, that California’s Jim Crow, despite its legalistic and genteel packaging, could be as violent as that of the South—and as hard to combat. In 1946, his law firm had taken on one of the state’s most devastating instances of racial violence.

In December 1945, refrigeration engineer O’Day Short, who was Black, moved with his wife Helen and their two small children to a previously all-white part of Fontana, in California’s San Bernardino County, to take a job at a Kaiser Steel mill. Days after the Short family moved into their home, a menacing posse warned them to leave the neighborhood. The Shorts stayed put. On December 16, their house burned to the ground. Helen and the children died from “shock from extensive burns” shortly after arriving at the hospital; O’Day died several weeks later.

The threats, arson, and murders of the Shorts were almost certainly the work of Ku Klux Klan vigilantes. The so-called Second Klan had been active in the area in the 1920s and months after the fire at the Shorts’ house, the group staged a major recruitment drive in San Bernardino County.

Miller and his law partner Ivan J. Johnson worked diligently on the Short case, but it never went to trial. The San Bernardino County Coroner quickly ruled that the deaths were caused by a fire of “unknown origin,” refusing to admit the threats against the Shorts as evidence.

Rumors circulated among white neighbors and local law enforcement that the Shorts had started the fire when they lit their stove; the Black press, including the California Eagle (which Miller later purchased), devoted considerable coverage to debunking that claim. An interracial coalition of civil rights workers, labor unions, and religious leaders pushed for justice, turning the murders into a rallying cry to stop residential segregation and the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. In 1946, California Attorney General Robert W. Kenny promised an independent investigation into the murders, but the grand jury adjourned without issuing a report.

Miller and Johnson had a stellar record fighting Jim Crow in the Golden State. But in the Short case, there were no victories. As the Black newspaper the Los Angeles Sentinel put it back in 1946, “All the Shorts are dead…Only Jim Crow is alive.”

When I teach my students about Miller and the Shorts, they begin to see that white supremacy had—and has—a long reach. The violence that Black Americans face today is rooted in their own backyards, and not just in the South. Understanding the pervasiveness of white supremacy and its “strange career” in unexpected places is crucial if we are to understand its resurgence today.

The post Look to California to Understand Jim Crow appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

South Africans got it right when they made “kuning,” the isiZulu word that roughly translates to “it’s a lot,” one of the defining words of 2023.

It was a lot this year.

2023 seemed an epoch of crises: the highest number of global conflicts in three decades, myriad climate disasters that claimed more than 12,000 lives, and the erosion of democracies worldwide.

Amid all of it, Zócalo was here—sifting through the pressing stories and providing context, perspective, and humanity.

Our favorite 15 essays of the year, selected by the Zócalo staff and you, our readers, remind us that even in overwhelming times, people forge ahead. They think deeply. They ask questions. They create. They build community. And they even have some fun.

May you enjoy revisiting these writings as much as we did, as we ready to ring in a new year.

Boxers Know the Power of an Entrance

By Rudy Mondragón

Can anyone make an entrance like a boxer? Before moderating the Zócalo panel “What Does Boxing Owe Its Champions?,” scholar Rudy Mondragón made the case that the boxing ring entrance is the most important ritual in sport. More than a mere act of bravado, he writes, a ring entrance communicates everything from pride to dignity to political protest—in just a few ephemeral, glittering, bombastic moments.

A boxer’s entrance is more than just flash. It’s how they make their mark in the sport and the world, scholar Rudy Mondragón writes. Above, William “El Gallo Negro” King wears a Mexican sarape with a rooster and a sombrero de charro, embracing his Afro-Mexican roots. Photo by Rudy Mondragón.

How Is a Poem Like a Political Campaign?

By Derek Mong

Most of us haven’t given much thought to how poetry and political campaigning might be alike. But Zócalo contributing editor Derek Mong, who won a National Arts and Entertainment Journalism award for this essay, has given it serious thought. Aside from the obvious—that “both benefit from a clipboard”—he unearths deeper threads tying the pursuits together.

My Work as an In-Home Caregiver Shouldn’t Be This Hard

By Alva Rodriguez

Alva Rodriguez is one of more than 550,000 caregivers in California’s In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program—workers who help an estimated 650,000 disabled, blind, or elderly Californians continue living in their own homes. Writing from Fresno for our The James Irvine Foundation-funded series “What Is a Good Job Now?,” Rodriguez describes the deep precarity of the job—“one of the toughest and worst-paying you will find”— and reflects on ways to improve this essential line of work.

What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park

By Wendy Cheng

On January 21, 2023, a gunman opened fire and killed 11 people at Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park, resulting in the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history. Wendy Cheng writes about the outpouring of community support and solidarity in the wake of the attack, and the ways a public memorial for the victims reflected the city’s unique multiethnic and multiracial history as a home for “immigrants and lost ones.”

Whose Sedona Is It, Anyway?

By Tom Zoellner

During the pandemic, Sedona, Arizona, temporarily stopped advertising in high-end travel magazines. In the place of well-heeled visitors have come day travelers and overnighters from nearby cities that some residents say are destroying “Slo-dona”—and the town finds itself stuck in a fierce debate about whether it should “yank back the welcome mat to the middle class,” writes Tom Zoellner. Published in the fall, the piece generated enough chatter that just recently the city and the chamber of commerce put out a joint statement in response.

Intellectual Snobbery is for the Birds

By Tim Birkhead

Ornithologist Tim Birkhead shares how an encounter with a hobbyist birdkeeper who breeds bullfinches (who are, if you aren’t aware, “humbly endowed”) led him down a new line of research into the phenomenon known as sperm competition, and a better understanding of reproduction in birds. While the subject of Birkhead’s essay might make a middle schooler giggle, the story itself makes a powerful point: Researchers need to listen to people outside academia’s ivory tower.

Tim Birkhead, one of the world’s leading bird biologists, shares why being open to learning from people outside of academia’s ivory tower—in this case hobbyist birdkeepers—can lead to “unexpected and exciting results.” Photo by T.R. Birkhead.

Dianne Feinstein’s Most Important Job Was an Unofficial One

By Joe Mathews

Zócalo columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews has made some big proclamations this year. That San Diego is California’s “finest college town.” That we should call it the California, not the Colorado, River. That the Santa Cruz otter absolutely should have bitten back. But one of his most memorable takes came in the wake of Dianne Feinstein’s death. Reflecting on her long tenure in U.S. political life, Mathews makes a case that her greatest role in office was as California’s “last ambassador to the American government.”

Reckoning With Racist ‘Lynch Law’ and Rape Charges, a Century Later

By Margaret Burnham

For two years, Zócalo has worked on a project supported by the Mellon Foundation that asks: “How Should Societies Remember Their Sins?” This essay by Margaret Burnham, director of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, shows how such reckonings can lead to action and change through the story of John Henry James. In 1898, James, a Black man in Virginia, was accused of raping a white woman, murdered by a lynch mob, and posthumously indicted for assault. Burnham details how, 125 years later, a judge dismissed the indictment thanks to a campaign by historians, lawyers, and community members. The decision opens a “path forward for a crucial American reckoning with a thousand-plus state executions of Black males accused of assaulting white females,” Burnham writes.

The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago

By Mike Amezcua

Historian Mike Amezcua explores the parallel struggles of mid-20th century Black and Latino Chicagoans overcoming segregation and making space for their communities. “This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King,” Amezcua writes. “But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history.” Readers were passionate about Amezcua’s piece, writing it in as a favorite in our audience survey.

My Mom is Out of Prison, But I’m Still Not Free

By Angel Gilbert

Most young people look forward to college as a time of independence, but when Columbia University student Angel Gilbert started school, she had already been on her own “for far too long.” In her Zócalo essay, Gilbert, one of millions of young people who have had an incarcerated parent, shares what it was like to grow up with a mother behind bars. “My emotional pain will never truly heal,” she writes. However, she adds that once she reaches her goal of becoming a lawyer, all of her experiences ensure that she will fight harder for her future marginalized clients.

Destined to Be Trans, Muslim, and Indonesian

By Amar Alfikar

Growing up in a traditional Muslim neighborhood in Java, Indonesia in the 1990s, Amar Alfikar, a trans man and activist, shares how he leaned into family and faith to understand—and embrace—his true identity. “If it was not for my family’s acceptance, I would have left my religion,” he writes. “Instead, I am pursuing an academic career in theology and religious studies and have become firm in my faith and thinking about gender diversity in Islam.”

Can Two Friends Agree to Disagree on Abortion in Post-Roe America?

By Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox

Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox found sisterhood raging about injustice—but they disagree about abortion. Read how they’ve worked to maintain their bond in post-Roe America. “Being truly pro-life or pro-choice requires us to knock down rhetorical barriers and focus on the areas where we wholeheartedly agree,” they write, “that every child has a right to be placed on a path to success and that no mother should have to sacrifice her own success to make that happen.”

Where I Go: The Candy Wrapper Museum

By Darlene Lacey

Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting old candy wrappers. Eventually, she turned her hobby into an online museum. For our series “Where I Go,” she gives truth to the adage that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, and shows the power of appointing ourselves as the curators of the things that matter to us the most.

Candy Wrapper Museum curator Darlene Lacey was 15 when she started collecting for her “roadside attraction.” Building the online museum has led to all kinds of surprises—including being sent a Necco scrapbook saved from a dumpster (pictured above). Courtesy of author.

Zócalo’s Diaspora Jukebox

As part of Zócalo Public Square’s 20th birthday celebration, we’ve been sharing the sounds of the Southland with “Diaspora Jukebox,” a series of playlists that celebrate the unique communities and musical traditions that represent greater Los Angeles. Our first “drop”—which had us moving to the rhythm of the city, dancing like it was 1982, and partying like a Zacatecano—culminated in an IRL dance party we threw at the Port of L.A. 

The Human Costs of Building a World-Class City

By Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap

And, drumroll please: Our first-ever audience choice award goes to authors Ankush Pal and Anubhav Kashyap! They take a clear-eyed look at New Delhi’s effort to “polish” the city ahead of this year’s G20 summit, at the expense of poor and working-class people. “Rather than improving life in the city for everyone,” they write, “the beautification projects funnel public resources into creating a cosmopolitan bubble for a few.”

The post Our Favorite Essays of 2023 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To most, tax policy is boring—somewhere between the weather and cryptocurrencies. I study, teach, and write about taxes, mostly because I believe they are the price we pay for civilized society. But for decades, economists and analysts have ignored the racial effects of how the government raises revenue. And it looks as if the introduction of race into the tax equation seems to have blown things up just a bit. That’s a good thing.

This month marks the 45th anniversary of the most significant piece of tax policy in California history. Proposition 13, passed in 1978, did a number of things to keep all taxes, and especially property taxes, low across the state. It was the start of what would be called the Great Tax Revolt, which libertarians and conservatives would celebrate as a critical step to limiting the size of government. At last count, 45 states followed suit in some form—but California’s version, arguably, is the most restrictive.

Although the impact of Prop. 13 on the state’s public finance landscape is far-reaching and mostly negative, the capping of property tax assessments is its signature element. It essentially creates a property tax subsidy that increases the longer you own your home. I will spare you the math and just have you contemplate this idea: As long as the value of your home grows faster than 2% a year, you come out ahead. As a result, homeowners living in the same neighborhood, owning very similar properties, can pay vastly different amounts each year in property taxes.

Let me offer an example drawn from the real estate website Zillow. In San Rafael (Marin County), I can find a pair of three-bedroom/two-bath houses that were part of a 1960s development. They list at an identical 1,416 square feet and are about one block apart. One homeowner, who just moved into the neighborhood, paid $14,500 in taxes their first year (2021). The other owner—whose family bought the house in 1985— paid a whopping $9,000 less, with a property tax bill of $5,500. Both houses get the same level of public services—streets, roads, public safety—but one pays 2.5 times more in taxes.

That difference—the amount of tax a homeowner pays compared to the amount they would have paid if the property had been assessed at anything near market value—is what people like me call a subsidy. It is a benefit that one homeowner receives on a yearly basis simply because they have owned their home longer than their neighbor. Meanwhile, other Californians pay more in taxes to offset that difference.

Now, just comparing tax bills off the internet isn’t very comprehensive nor systematic. Which is why colleagues of mine at the Opportunity Institute and Pivot Learning collaborated on a report, “Unjust Legacy,” that examines Prop. 13 and its impact across racial and ethnic groups. They used data from the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey to compare property taxes and home values in an effort to estimate how the Prop. 13 subsidy is distributed. Their investigation found that the subsidy that Prop. 13 creates is larger for whiter, older, wealthier Californians.

The finding, when you think about it, isn’t very surprising. California is a very different place than it was in 1978. Its population is larger and much more diverse. And the Prop. 13 subsidy grows the longer you own a home–a benefit that you can pass on to your children.

Nonetheless, the reaction to the report has been swift and hot. Jon Coupal, longtime head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association—the multi-million organization that exists to defend Prop. 13—responded by offering up the argument that was the rationale for the ballot initiative in the first place: The cap on property taxes enables low-income homeowners to stay in their homes. His evidence? A woman in Texas who was forced out of her home because of high taxes. As evidence goes, it is pretty thin. In fact, in the 45 years since Prop. 13 passed, we still haven’t seen a systematic analysis to support this contention.

Dan Walters, a fixture of Sacramento politics who now writes for CalMatters, also rejected the findings of the report by arguing that income and wealth disparities among Californians “stem from multiple reasons that have nothing to do with Proposition 13.” He goes on: “White homeowners benefitted heavily from property tax limits because they were more likely to be homeowners in the first place.”

It is a position that feels a lot like the country club president who defends a lack of diversity among the membership by arguing that people of color don’t really like to play golf and tennis in the first place.

What is notable about the responses is the sense of attack embedded in their rush to defend the status quo. “The policy wasn’t designed to be racist” isn’t an acceptable rebuttal, particularly in a state such as California, where “colorblind” policies and analyses do not align with our laws and values and will continue to exacerbate inequities.

The findings of the “Unjust Legacy” report were one of a recent string of analyses on the intersection of race and taxes. A group at Stanford, working with IRS researchers, found that the IRS audited Black taxpayers at 2.9 to 4.7 times the rate of non-Black taxpayers. And, folks at the Tax Policy Center calculated that Black couples pay more in individual income taxes if they are married and white couples pay less—an annual advantage of $662 for white married couples relative to Black married couples.

We can argue all day about legislative intent, but the fact that a tax system systematically benefits one race or ethnic group over another is, at best, problematic. What could be done to change that in the case of Prop. 13? An obvious place to start is with commercial real estate. Assessing commercial properties at market rate is something that every other state does. Other options include limiting the subsidy created by Prop. 13 to a person’s first home or assessing vacant lots and homes owned by investment funds at the market rate. One more option would be to eliminate the assessment cap while expanding the state’s homeowners’ exemption—a tax break for first homes—but shielding the first, say, $250,000 in home value from taxes, making the whole property tax system much more progressive.

At any rate, I think many Californians can agree that reexamining how the government collects revenue through an equity lens is long overdue.

The post Yes, Prop. 13 Is Racist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June of 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference headed north to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement in a series of marches through all-white neighborhoods intended to take aim at the city’s deeply-entrenched residential segregation.

They marched through Gage Park and the surrounding neighborhoods of Chicago’s Southwest Side, where rows of bungalow homes provided a perfect visual. The modest houses were within buying reach for many Black families, but decades-old restrictions and discriminatory practices by real estate agents barred African Americans from purchasing there. Dr. King guided his supporters with a powerful sermon that had a simple message: “My place is in the sunlight of opportunity, my place is in the comfort of the good house, my place is in Gage Park.” But the presence of the civil rights activists soon ignited a violent backlash by white Chicagoans.

At the same time as King was putting Southwest Chicago in the national spotlight, Latino Chicagoans were in the midst of their own parallel struggle for access to restricted housing and urban space. Long before King’s arrival, Mexican Americans had been prevented from purchasing homes in Gage Park and surrounding areas by housing discrimination and threats of violence. So while the violent response to King’s marches was directed at civil rights activists and the idea of integration, it also shaped Latino Chicagoans’ community-building efforts. The powerful white backlash prolonged restrictions on urban space, forcing Latino Chicagoans to anchor their residential, civic, and economic lives on the boundary lines of segregation.

The struggle for a Latino place on the Southwest Side began in the 1910s and 1920s, when thousands of Mexican immigrants poured into Chicago to work in stockyards and slaughterhouses. A Mexican enclave formed behind the Union Stock Yards, part of a larger area known as the Back of the Yards. The neighborhood was already internationally infamous, as the setting of Upton Sinclair’s jaw-dropping 1906 novel The Jungle, an exposé of the unsanitary conditions in which America’s consumer meat was produced. Its working class, predominantly Central and Eastern European residents reluctantly allowed the Latino enclave to exist, as long as it remained tightly contained within a few city blocks.

White Chicagoans often fortified neighborhood boundaries through real estate industry practices that prohibited Black Americans from buying in their neighborhoods. Racial violence also wrought terror, and Mexicans quickly learned from the white mob violence perpetrated against Black homebuyers. “We were isolated there—we dared not move out of that district,” recalled Monico C. Amador, who grew up in Back of the Yards in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1944, his father was shot and killed just outside the neighborhood by a white man who resented the presence of Mexicans there.

For working-class white residents between the 1920s and 1950s, the old, hard-scrabble Back of the Yards neighborhood and its packinghouse jobs served as a gateway to nicer parts of the Southwest Side. Neighborhoods like Gage Park, Chicago Lawn, West Lawn, and Marquette Park were only blocks away from the stockyards but represented—as one former resident put it—a “move away from the immigrant experience.” Their coal-heated, octagon-shaped, brick bungalow homes, sitting on identically-sized lots, provided the comfort of suburban-like sameness within the city. But everyone knew that these neighborhoods were completely off limits to anyone who possessed dark skin, spoke Spanish, or both.

In the 1950s and 1960s, years before Dr. King arrived, both Black and Latino Chicagoans began to challenge this unspoken rule, seeking to escape the overcrowded environs of their respective segregated landscapes, pushing further west and south in search of better homes. These efforts to challenge housing restrictions provoked an intense campaign by whites, parish groups, homeowner associations, and the lending industry, who banded together with real estate agents in the mid-1950s to draw a new restrictive boundary along Ashland Avenue, a major north-south thoroughfare, agreeing to keep homes west of Ashland all-white.

Like previous racial boundaries, the Ashland covenant was enforced through discrimination and violence. The Southwest Side of the 1960s simmered with white power groups, including a large chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, Operation Crescent (which championed “white community control”), a youth gang called the United Patriots, the John Birch Society, and an openly segregationist Gage Park Civic Association. All these groups fed Southwest Side residents with fears about the nearby presence of Blacks and Latinos.

In 1966, when King’s Freedom Movement arrived, that fear erupted into racial mob violence. “The racists … threw rocks and bottles and cherry bombs at the marchers, carried signs advocating White Power, and chanted invectives,” historian Simon Balto writes. During one march, a thrown brick struck King himself in the head, causing him to bleed.

In August, King retreated. The Chicago Freedom Movement ended its campaign for open housing, walking away with few if any gains, and went down in history as a setback for the civil rights leader and Black Chicagoans.

Though Chicago’s Mexican and Mexican American communities were also affected by housing discrimination and racist hatred, by and large its members did not join King’s supporters in their demonstrations. Some Latino activists took to the streets throughout the 1960s, but far more Mexican Chicagoans pursued a parallel but divergent path, working within the limits of segregation restrictions to lay crucial groundwork for Latino politics and placemaking—an effort to build a social infrastructure of inclusion, familiarity, and relevance—with the hope that successful business and political power would gradually erode housing restrictions.

During the 1960s, the Mexican community built commercial, cultural, and political institutions right up to Ashland Avenue’s colorline. By the late 1960s, the avenue was home to the headquarters of both the Mexican American Democratic Organization and the Mexican Chamber of Commerce, two key organizations that would build relationships not with the civil rights movement but instead with the all-powerful Richard J. Daley machine, seeking political inclusion no matter how minor the concessions the city’s powerbrokers offered. That push for limited inclusion won out over more direct participation in the Chicago Freedom Movement—or at least over a more forceful challenge to segregation and the violence of white supremacy.

This history of Latino placemaking is far less known than the civil rights struggle led by King. But it remains an important context for later developments in Chicago’s urban and political history. Perhaps most notably, the Latino community in Chicago helped secure the 1983 election of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first Black mayor, whose support came from a broad, multiracial alliance for which shared housing discrimination and political neglect were key catalysts for action.

Today, Chicago’s Southwest Side is a wellspring of grassroots organizing by young progressives who challenge the current political-economic system that keeps working-class nonwhite Chicagoans struggling. These residents value Gage Park not for its exclusivity or legacy of white power, but instead for its roles in King’s active advocacy for broad structural change. And on any given day, along the area’s commercial corridors, one can hear regional Mexican music blasting from giant speakers and see Black Lives Matter signs on storefronts—a far cry from the summer of 1966, when the two communities, in spite of shared struggles, stood apart.

The post The Struggle for a Latino Place in Chicago appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The jarring musical number demonstrates how blackface minstrelsy embedded itself in popular culture long after the practice itself became taboo, and how, by cloaking its message in nostalgia, incarnations of the same hateful genre have continued to perpetuate sentimentality for a racist past to this day.

The blackface minstrel show is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in the United States. The spectacle, which began roughly around 1830 in the urban North, saw white performers blackening their faces to mock enslaved Africans on Southern plantations in a manner that depicted “the Negro” as lazy, stupid, hypersexual, and violent. These offensive performances helped white spectators justify enslavement and the general mistreatment of Black people while reinforcing already circulating myths of Black inferiority.

Blackface and minstrel shows successfully moved from stage to screen, where they proved central to many Hollywood plots for the first half of the 20th century. They elicited a strong sense of nostalgia for an uncomplicated past while maintaining a longstanding set of racial and social hierarchies. The 1927 film The Jazz Singer—the story of a Jewish blackface performer, played by and based on the life of Al Jolson—shepherded in the sound era. Through jazz music, it also offered blackface tied to sound as the key to national integration.

Over the next three decades, visible blackface within a minstrel context largely disappeared from American entertainment. But by then, the soundtracks accompanying blackface had become so recognizable that they could refer to the minstrel stage even in the absence of visual cues. The history of Irving Berlin’s song “Mandy,” famously performed by Crosby, Kaye, and Clooney in White Christmas, offers some clues as to how this came to be.

Irving Berlin wrote “Mandy” (originally named “Sterling Silver Moon”) for the 1918 army-themed live musical revue Yip Yip Yaphank. The song itself was a jaunty marriage proposal:

So don’t you linger
Here’s the ring for your finger
Isn’t it a humdinger?
Come along and let the wedding chimes
Bring happy times
For Mandy and me

Yip Yip Yaphank called for the song to be performed in blackface as a cakewalk, or walkaround. This type of number often ended minstrel shows and was an imitation of an imitation: a dance enslaved people invented that poked fun at plantation owners’ mannerisms, who then appropriated it for themselves without understanding its meaning.

“Mandy” became a hit a year later as part of a 10-minute minstrel segment in Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies of 1919, a revue packed with vaudeville stars. Eddie Cantor and Bert Williams, both in blackface, opened the segment. The popular comedy duo of Gus Van and Joe Schenck (also in blackface) sang “Mandy” as part of the first act finale—known as “The Follies Minstrel”—alongside 45 shimmying choristers known as “The Follies Pickaninnies.”

The song resurfaced 15 years later in the 1934 Eddie Cantor film Kid Millions. The biggest differences between the “Mandy” number in Kid Millions and its previous uses was the sheer quantity of blackface and its place in the plot. Unlike the minstrel segment of Ziegfield Follies, only one performer—Cantor—was depicted in blackface as he performed in a recreated minstrel show that is only tenuously connected to the overarching story.

Eddie Cantor performs “Mandy” in blackface in Kid Millions. Courtesy of author.

By the time Kid Millions debuted, Hollywood was facing public backlash from the country’s cultural and legislative leadership for the content of its films, namely provocative imagery but also racism. The industry adopted the Production Code, popularly known as the Hays Code after its creator William H. Hays, to regulate the “purity” of motion pictures, pushing everything from nudity and profanity to interracial relationships off the screen. But as Kid Millions demonstrates, the policy mostly censored matters that directly concerned the Catholic church, which is why instances of blackface and other forms of racial caricature occasionally managed to slip past the censors. Eddie Cantor is a perfect example of this subjective censorship: because blackface minstrelsy had become indelibly tied to his stage and screen persona, his use of such racial caricature almost always made it into the picture.

“Mandy” returned in a 1943 World War II film, This is the Army. The staging modeled that of Yaphank and Millions, but the use of blackface was more subtle—a reference to something nostalgic from the past. This whole performance is bracketed as an homage to Berlin’s original use of blackface in Yip Yip Yaphank. Just as Cantor’s stage performance of “Mandy” in Ziegfield Follies gave him “cover” to use blackface in Kid Millions, Yaphank’s use of blackface within an army-themed musical lessened the backlash the “Mandy” scene received from film censors in This is the Army. Furthermore, most of this 1943 production removed prototypical, derogatory minstrel show elements and instead packaged the whole number in patriotism. Jim Crow stereotypes were replaced by over a hundred white men dressed in uniform, ready to fight for America.

The New York Times called the film “the freshest, most endearing, the most rousing musical tribute to the American fighting man that has come out of World War II,” and a “warmly reassuring document on the state of the nation.” Almost 80 years after the passing of the 13th Amendment, This is the Army shows how the white press was still giving the minstrel show a standing ovation.

“Mandy” made its final appearance in 1954’s White Christmas as the film’s big holiday spectacular: a minstrel show that dressed the old racist classic up in ebullient costumes, familiar voices, and lots of bare, white skin. Twelve scandalously dressed women outfitted like Christmas gifts replaced the traditional ensemble of white men in blackface. Clooney played the role of interlocutor, and Crosby and Kaye adopted the traditional minstrel tropes Mr. Tambo, who played tambourine, and Mr. Bones, who rattled bones as clappers, respectively. Vera-Ellen’s theatrical jazz dancing replaced the minstrel show’s conventional use of tap dance, offering a more mid-century take on appropriation.

By the time Americans saw White Christmas, the blackface mask had become a superfluous part of the minstrel show. “Mandy” has always been connected to the minstrel stage, its notes deeply embedded in a complicated nostalgia for white theatergoers. The long-entrenched pairing of “Mandy” with minstrelsy had laid the groundwork for perceiving racial caricature even in the absence of grotesque costume and speech. Race performance, and specifically blackface minstrelsy, need not be visible to be effective. And even as the civil rights movement began to pick up steam, these references to the minstrel show still had the ability to remind white theatergoers of a time when a good laugh and putting down “the other” shaped collective identity without fear of consequence.

Today, it’s still easy to get swept up in the nostalgia White Christmas is selling: lovers at a cozy Vermont cabin for the holidays, set against a backdrop of World War II service. But when romance and patriotism get tied up in the Christmas spirit, questioning even one part of the equation can feel downright sacrilegious. Rather than taking a jingoistic attitude toward what we feel the most nostalgic toward, let’s accept that American history is complicated, and that the American songbook can be rather unsettling—even, and maybe especially, at Christmastime.

The post The Blackface of <i>White Christmas</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But watching The Rings of Power (which, for the record, looks immaculate, sounds even better, and has a great cast to boot) dive back into this medieval fantasyland—one it populates alongside contemporaries like House of the Dragon (HBO’s Game of Thrones prequel)—is also a reminder of how lily white the medieval space continues to be imagined as. After both shows debuted more racially diverse casts than their predecessors, a vitriolic cry rang out from the corners of the internet where a fire-breathing dragon can exist, but a Black elf cannot. The torrent of racist hatred that’s followed is part of a longer-simmering problem that’s demanded a reckoning on the fictional (and real) stories we’re telling about Europe’s Middle Ages.

The roots of the medieval world that all these fantasy stories are pulling from was constructed in the mid-20th century by the so-called Oxford School or group. Writer Jessica Yates first coined the name for the group of fantasy writers 50 years after the release of The Hobbit, in a 1987 article for a popular British children’s book magazine. In the piece, she traces this literary and academic cradle back to Tolkien and his friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, who in the 1950s lectured future fantasy writers such as Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Kevin Crossley-Holland, and Alan Garner (the latter being the first to achieve fame with the 1960 publication of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen).

In Re-Enchanted: The Rise of Children’s Fantasy Literature in the Twentieth Century, author Maria Sachiko Cecire dates the origins of the Oxford School two decades further back, when Tolkien and Lewis pushed a reformed curriculum in 1931 that ensured that all English students at Oxford studied the Middle Ages and Anglo-Saxon literature. Cecire argues that this “medievalist and faerie-touched” pedagogy was part of a larger ideological battle. By reaching back to an idealized past—”not the past as England actually was in the Middle Ages,” she writes, “but even more ‘real’ in a spiritual-Platonic sense: as English (and proto-English) poets had imagined it to be”— Tolkien and Lewis were pushing back against the “cult of modernity,” something they viewed as not just estranged but hostile to their belief system. The mythology they created to combat this naturally reflected who they were, and she argues, should be understood through that lens. Their works, published as the British empire’s power began to sunset, can be seen as advancing the morals of the time they grew up in: A time, she writes, of “noble bloodlines carry[ing] magic and maintaining the social hierarchies of conservative tradition.” And as Tolkien and Lewis were both white, English, Christian men, their medieval fantasy was, in turn, populated by “implicitly white, English or broadly British, Christian or proto-Christian men.”

But this was a fantasy of the medieval world. The roughly 1,000-year period of the actual Middle Ages was, in fact, notable for its cultural, racial, linguistic, and religious diversity. As historians of medieval Europe Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry write in The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, however, the vibrant diversity of Europe’s Middle Ages that placed it within a wider global story was intentionally de-emphasized starting in the 18th and 19th centuries. The reason? “[I]mperialist European powers and their intellectuals (often the forerunners of, or scholars in medieval studies themselves!) sought a history for their new world order,” they write, which is what first established the myth of a racially and religiously uniform Middle Ages. It preserved a false history that lingers to this day, especially in the medieval fantasy space, which has long provided cover for nationalists who take the pseudo-medieval worlds as a confirmation of their ideology. The latest to seize Tolkien being Italy’s prospective future prime minister Giorgia Meloni, the far-right nationalist politician who was recently quoted by the New York Times calling The Lord of the Rings series “a sacred text.” “I don’t consider The Lord of the Rings fantasy,” she continued.

But if medieval fantasy helped to prop up that myth of the homogenous Middle Ages, the genre might also be the most poised to dismantle that story today.

As medievalist Andrew B. R. Elliott writes in Remaking the Middle Ages, which considers cinematic portrayals of the time period, our ideas of the medieval world are based on how we are used to seeing it reflected in the culture, which is why, he argues that “audiences and filmmakers both come to play a role in the construction of the authentic medieval past—perhaps far more than historians and medievalists ever can.”

We’re seeing this in action today as this new crop of medieval fantasy seeks to depict more historically accurate versions of the Middle Ages, and call out medieval misinformation, like earlier this month, when The Rings of Power denounced the racist ideology of the trolls waging a hate campaign against its cast. “Our world has never been all white, fantasy has never been all white, Middle-earth is not all white,” a statement posted on its official Twitter handle read.

A new age of medieval fantasy is possible, one that can offer us a wider notion of what, in all its contradictions and intricacies, the Middle Ages was—and can be. But this can only come to pass if we are committed to imagining it first.

The post Why Is Fantasy Stuck in the Middle Ages? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The joke is on Shatner, or rather on an old tweet from the actor, who is best known for playing Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the original series. Considering that Star Trek has never not been political, responses to the meme have predictably flooded social media. (The best being “1966”—the year Star Trek debuted.)

Today, there is more Star Trek on air than ever before, courtesy of streaming service Paramount+. Amid this renaissance, the franchise, at its best, continues to serve as an arena for political thought, mining the events of the past and present to imagine what the future could look like. I’ve been especially interested to watch how several plotlines have lately been converging around eugenics, suggesting how heavily the subject will weigh over the future of modern Trek.

The debunked theory of eugenics gained widespread attention and influence in the first half of the 20th century until Nazi Germany’s passion for it made it politically nonviable. Nevertheless, today it still influences policy and thought around the world—including here in the U.S., where the dangerous legacy of the American eugenics movement remains embedded in the national discourse. But eugenic themes were long pushed off the screen and out of the public eye following a silent-era film debacle.

Back in the early 1900s, the eugenics movement was ubiquitous in American popular culture. State fairs hosted “better baby contests” that rewarded the healthiest and strongest (white) offspring. Op-eds pushed for doctor-approved marriage licenses in the name of “public health.” And traveling lecture tours warned of the dangers of children inheriting the supposed “weaknesses” of their parents, under the rationale that “inferior types” were a biological threat to the future.

All of this was reflected in movie plotlines of the day. But while dramas like Heredity (1912) and The Inherited Sin (1915) promoted eugenics ideals, progressive comedies like Wood B. Wedd and the Microbes (1914) and The Eugenic Boy (1914) pushed back, critiquing and debunking the movement. “Eugenics was an intrinsic part of early movie culture,” literary scholar Karen A. Keely argues in “Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen,” noting that film studios and directors in the silent era often “used their medium to argue the merits and deficits of eugenic theories and policies.”

Then came the 1916 silent film The Black Stork.

It was a plot ripped, literally, from the headlines, starring Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden as himself. Historian Martin Pernick’s excellent 1996 book The Black Stork, which resurfaced the eponymous film and Haiselden from obscurity, recounts the story. In 1915, Pernick writes, Haiselden advised the mother of a baby born with deformities to forego necessary surgery and let the newborn die, lest it grow up with lifelong health conditions. After the so-called Bollinger Baby’s death, Haiselden called a press conference to announce what he had done—and would do again—for the genetic “well-being” of the nation. To Haiselden, the choice not to operate on the baby was part of the “Greater Surgery”—“the surgery that cuts away the vileness and decay and leaves only the sweet and clean and wholesome in this life of ours.”

National media covered Haiselden like a celebrity: “SURGEON LETS BABY, BORN TO IDIOCY, DIE” read a New York Times headline after Haiselden refused to perform another live-saving operation on a different newborn, with a subtitle noting the decision came “FROM ALTRUISTIC MOTIVE.”

Haiselden was a sensation, but after he appeared in The Black Stork, a fictional film version of the Bollinger case, he lost control of his message. Promotional material for the film billed it as a “eugenic love story” and “eugenic photoplay,” intended to elicit good feeling for the mother’s choice not to save her child after seeing the future he would grow up to have. But audience members empathized with the baby. Unlike the pro-eugenics op-eds or lecture tours that spoon-fed policy messages to audiences, movies and fiction gave the public more freedom of interpretation. And seeing the dead boy’s alternative life in The Black Stork unsettled them.

Those who did sympathize with the eugenics movement, meanwhile, also objected to The Black Stork: They did not want to see graphic depictions of physical deformities on the screen. All of this, Pernick argues, led to a backlash that ultimately led regional and national censorship bodies to ban or regulate eugenic themes, whether the subject was shown in a positive or negative light.

Pushing eugenics practices off the popular screen wasn’t exactly a win for the anti-eugenics camp. In the years following The Black Stork, eugenic films could still be screened for health professionals—and these works, hidden from public view, continued influencing policy that would become responsible for some of the most vile compulsory and coercive sterilization laws in the U.S. targeting Indigenous, Black, brown, poor, disabled, unmarried, mentally ill, and incarcerated people, among others. This “firmer distinction between education, medical, and social films and entertainment films” that obscured eugenic sterilization campaigns from the public came just as the “professional powers to intervene in the bodies and lives of the ‘unfit’ continued to expand,” as scholar Angela M. Smith pinpoints in Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema.

In 1927—the same year censors approved a heavily-edited version of The Black Stork for rerelease under the title Are You Fit to Marry?—the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s state-enforced sterilization law, ruling 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that 18-year-old Carrie Buck could be legally sterilized for being “feeble minded,” a decision that influenced Adolf Hitler when he designed the eugenics system for Nazi Germany. (“There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.)

After World War II, when the full extent of the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich were revealed to the world, the eugenics movement lost momentum. But its influence continued on—the U.S. sanctioned mass institutionalization and forced sterilization policies into the 1970s. (Oregon’s last state-sanctioned forced sterilization occurred in 1981.) Today, the advancement of the “great replacement” theory—the racist ideology that there’s a conspiracy to “replace” white Americans—is yet another callback to a eugenics-based belief set, and is reflected in everything from the fight over abortion rights to the Buffalo mass shooting in May.

That’s why it’s important that shows like Star Trek—which has touched on the dangers of eugenics since the introduction of its greatest antagonist, the genetically engineered Übermensch Khan Noonien Singh, back in 1967—continue to put a spotlight on the subject.

As researchers who studied genetic engineering in film and television from 1912 through 2020 recently concluded in the Journal of Literature and Science, the visibility of this theme in film and television matters “not because it determines the attitudes of the public” but because it “furnishes the public debate.”

Too often, the science—or in this case, racist, classist, ableist, long-debunked pseudoscience—that shapes policy has been argued behind closed doors. Looking back on The Black Stork and its impact, is a reminder of why it matters that we don’t shy away from confronting it on screen.

The post Why It Matters That <i>Star Trek</i> Is Confronting Eugenics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But despite its nearly three-hour run time, Elvis, the new Baz Luhrmann biopic, stays about as black and white as the racial divide it seems to suggest Presley alone could cross.

Most baffling is how incurious the movie is. It never engages on more than a surface level with the racism of the Mason–Dixon-lined country that catapulted Presley to fame. Nor is it interested in thinking deeply about the class and regional dynamics that shaped Presley, whose formative years were spent in poverty in the South.

Even the star’s own demons are given a cursory pass; the closest we get to pedophilia allegations is a mention of Priscilla Presley’s age, 14, when she meets the star. And though Presley reportedly struggled with substance abuse and was hooked on prescription opiates and sedatives, his addiction is treated mostly as a plot device.

The one clear point that the film (which has been rubber-stamped by Presley’s family) wants to make is that Presley was a peerless talent taken from us too soon, because he trusted the wrong people along the way.

There is a deeply sympathetic tale to be found in this, of course—it’s a truly American sadness watching a person commodified and used as a cash grab until they have nothing left to give. To see how little the dial has turned since Presley’s time, one only needs to look to what Britney Spears has endured.

But the film isn’t willing to do the real work of getting at who the complex figure beneath the sideburns was. Instead, Elvis’s creed seems to be borrowed from the personal philosophy of the star’s long-time manager, Colonel Tom Parker: “Don’t try to explain it; just sell it.” Parker, naturally, is the narrator of the film, where he’s presented as a carnival barker who’s found his meal ticket (the less said about Tom Hanks’ performance in the role, the better).

Through Parker’s point of view, Presley becomes just the attraction, a talented object whose strings Parker is pulling, which instantly absolves the young singer of any responsibility—or agency. That’s too bad, because the contradictions of race, class, power, and consumerism (the film does at least do a good job of showing how the Elvis brand understood there was a burgeoning youth market waiting to be tapped into through merchandise sales) that made Presley a megawatt star holds deep relevance today.

For a hint of a different film that could have been made, one only needs to listen to the Doja Cat song “Vegas,” which was released with the movie’s soundtrack. The song samples from “Hound Dog”—not Presley’s 1956 version, but the original—recorded four summers earlier by a 26-year-old Black rhythm-and-blues singer from Ariton, Alabama, named Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton.

In her rendition, Thornton growls after a man who sponges off of women—her voice: playful, angry, rich—sending him away after he comes “snoopin’ ’round” her door.

Jewish teenagers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller had penned the empowering lyrics specifically for Thornton. “She looked like the biggest, baddest, saltiest chick you would ever see,” Leiber later told Rolling Stone, of the gender-non-conforming singer. “I had to write a song for her that basically said, ‘Go f— yourself.’”

In Little Labels-Big Sound music critics Rick Kennedy and Randy McNult dub the song rock ‘n’ roll’s first “multicultural experience,” noting that in addition to Leiber and Stoller, people involved with the recording included Black label owner Don Robey and Greek American band leader Johnny Otis.

Big Mama’s “Hound Dog” went on to inspire a number of artists before Presley, including Freddie Bell & The Bell Boys, a white lounge act at Las Vegas’ Sands hotel who turned the song into a comical account of a literal hound dog. Theirs was the version that spurred Presley to record his own track.

“Hound Dog,” the 21-year-old’s follow-up to “Heartbreak Hotel,” went on to go No. 1 on Billboard’s pop, R&B, and country charts, and would become one of the most recognizable songs of all time. But Presley never directly credited Thornton for her work, robbing her of name recognition and lucrative deals (she would later say in interviews that she made less than $500 off of “Hound Dog”).

None of this weighs heavily on Elvis. The only plot point around “Hound Dog” is when it is used to show how Presley himself was punished for reaching across the color line in his performances. We see Presley humiliated on stage for it, as he is forced to serenade a basset hound on “The Steve Allen Show” while wearing a tuxedo.

There’s a reason so many in power were so threatened by what Presley was doing and put pressure on him to show white America a “new” Elvis. His act “undermined the myths and stereotypes that sustained Jim Crow segregation,” as historian Michael T. Bertrand put it in the 2007 article “Elvis Presley and the Politics of Popular Memory.”

Still, as Doja Cat sings, “There’s more sides to the story.”

As honestly as Presley came by his own love of the music he performed, and though he regularly spoke about how rock ‘n’ roll was not something he started—“Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. Let’s face it: I can’t sing like Fats Domino can. I know that,” he said in 1956—his legacy is forever tangled in the racial politics that catapulted his mythic rise.

Later, after Presley’s death, the great author Alice Walker put words to this in her short story, “1955, or, You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.”

First published in Ms. magazine in 1981, Walker’s story fictionalizes what happened with “Hound Dog.” The author has the Presley character publicly recognize Thornton for the song, even bringing her on “The Tonight Show” to perform. Still, the fans only have eyes for him—and he is haunted by receiving the credit for someone else’s work.

Reading the story now, it’s as timely as when it was originally written.

After the Presley character dies young—“some said heart, some said alcohol, some said drugs”—the Thornton character learns of the public outpouring of grief, but doesn’t want to see it.

“They was crying and crying and didn’t even know what they was crying for,” she reflects in her final monologue. “One day, this is going to be a pitiful country, I thought.”

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