Color Correction
Linda Williams traces the manipulation of race and image through American pop culture

mel·o·dra·ma n. A drama, such as a play, film, or television program, characterized by exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts

Inspiration often comes from movies, for Berkeley professor of film studies and rhetoric Linda Williams. But her most recent book burst forth from a true-life media storm that gripped the nation. Like many Americans, Williams found herself caught up Los Angeles' most famous crime drama of the 90s.

"This O.J. Simpson trial was just sort of tugging at me," Williams says. "I had so many reactions, like outrage that a man was guilty of murder and was getting away with it."

Simpson, after his arrest in 1994

Williams had to step back from her initial response to the criminal trial verdict, in which Simpson was found not guilty of murdering Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. For Williams, her reaction had grown out of long-established notions of race that have been internalized not just by her, but by America at large.

"You can't feel that way without plugging into all sorts of complicated racial issues of victimization and villainy," she says. "There was a particular racial melodrama being played out in the O.J. Simpson case, that I thought I should probably get my attention to."

Williams turned her attention to it indeed, resulting in Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. In the book, she hoped to explain both her own reaction, and the reactions of others to the murder and trial.

"Where did we get to the place in American culture where I, as a white woman, would watch this ongoing racial melodrama that played out day after day in a courtroom trial that was mediated and televised?" Williams asks. "How was it that I was caught up in that every bit as much as, let's say, the black women who were on the jury, who were outraged at the LAPD and their mishandling of evidence and very sincerely felt that the victim was not the white woman who had been murdered, but the black man."

The Simpson verdict pushed Williams to dive into America's pop culture history and dig out the racial melodramas that still inform the American consciousness.

She started with Harriett Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which she calls the "first popular story that everybody in the nation knew." Second in sales only to the Bible during its day, Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary because it was the first time that white Americans on a massive scale had been pushed to feel sympathy for the plight of African-American characters. It's of crucial importance that a white woman wrote the novel; it is a white-created image of black life, and of black suffering.

Archetypes of good and evil, from an 1853 illustrated edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin (image courtesy University of Virginia, Special Collections Department)

Uncle Tom assumed positive, Christian connotations. He was a black image of good, afflicted by white evil. (For the purposes of her argument, Williams sidesteps the negative image the character carries for African-Americans, as a figure of subservience to whites.)

The image of evil Simon Legree, Uncle Tom's terrible master, was similarly seared into the collective consciousness as the prototype of the cruel, despicable white man. Americans have carried these stereotypes, Williams argues, through history, working and reworking them, subverting and reinforcing them over the generations.

D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, was perhaps the earliest cinematic racial melodrama. This film offered a counterbalance to the benevolent image of blacks that Uncle Tom's Cabin had wrought, Williams says. She calls it "nothing but an upside-down version of Uncle Tom's Cabin." Here, African-Americans (largely played by whites in blackface) personified an evil to be feared, and the Ku Klux Klan became the heroic savior.

Al Jolson,blackface in The Jazz Singer (photo courtesy Museum of Modern Art Film Still Archive)

Williams traces racial depictions and what they tried to say about America through the 1927 talkie, The Jazz Singer, in which Jewish singer Al Jolson puts on blackface in order to become a Broadway star. Even the revered classic, Gone With the Wind, doesn't escape Williams' criticism, nor does the 1970s TV miniseries Roots.

"There's a long history of racial melodrama that has been played out in American culture that has probably been the most powerful and influential story that America has told itself," she says.

The persistent images of blacks and whites leapfrogged across various media through the years: from the page to the stage, then into silent film, the early talkies, onto TV drama, and finally into the televised trial of O.J. Simpson.

The fact that these racial melodramas had spilled over into real life doesn't mean the Simpson trial -- or the Rodney King beating, another subject of Williams' scrutiny -- is any less melodramatic. America's reactions to the trial were a product of the sympathies and antipathies that earlier fictional racial melodramas had created.

"The lesson of the book, if there is a lesson, is that we're still caught in the grips of this archaic melodrama that we all know better than to believe in," Williams says. "When I was getting angry at that verdict, I was having knee-jerk reactions that were very much a part of that melodrama. And so were the black women who were on that jury."

Williams sees racial melodramas still at work in passing along images of African-Americans in the American consciousness. And despite the increasingly multicultural, multiracial character of America, we remain hung up primarily on images of black and white. It's a hard legacy to give up, apparently.

"It's not just because of the history," Williams argues. "It's because of the melodramatic stories we have told ourselves, that have become our way of trying to understand race." But perhaps by understanding how we've been taught to view race, Williams argues, we can gain a truer sense of the real qualities all Americans are really bringing to the table. -- Todd Dayton