GWCTD - Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

The movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (“GWCTD”) is typically hailed as an advance on perspectives on race, wherein the attendance by a Black man at a supper hosted by White people is deemed excitingly, culturally advanced by the people of what is called often America.  However, this movie is actually very racist.  Incredibly, monumentally racist.  Its racism is mountainous; paramount, even.  

How?  Well, Sidney Poitier (the actor playing the protagonist in GWCTD) had dark brown skin, but the actors portraying his parents in GWCTD both had much lighter brown skin.  The people making GWCTD deemed this acceptable—they probably didn’t even notice it—because what they were trying to do is say that Black people were all the same.  I.e. they were incredibly racist.  Hugely racist.  Massively racist.  And so on.  

This dissimilitude of genetics was deemed acceptable for multiple reasons.  Firstly, and most repugnantly, because the moviemakers—as well as most of the audience—believed that all Black people were alike.  Since they were interchangeable un-persons in the makers’ eyes, it was quite acceptable to have any Black person play the parent of any other Black person.  This dehumanization of how the younger, darker-skinned actor came to be a character, and of how the older, lighter-skinned actors came to be each a character, is paramountly racist.  

In realistic terms, the younger darker-skinned actor playing the son in the movie possessed ancestors who, for many years, spent time outdoors in sunnier climates than those of the other actors.  As a result, natural selection favored more tanninic skin.  Eventually, hundreds of thousands of years later, the actor was born with a darker brown skin.  

Implying via cinema that his parents had the lighter skin, both of them, is exceedingly racist.  It decrees that any Black person is as good as any other, and that the many sunburns and cancers developed by the actor’s ancestors prior to the ones with more tanninic skin being more successful in mating are irrelevant.  This denial of suffering, and of death, has come to characterize the modern “anti-racist” industry, which is greedily, callously presenting itself as showing the definitive path to follow to not be a person who denies the terrible facts of someone’s heritage.  I.e.,. decreeing that slavery was bad while encouraging complete ignorance of worse suffering and death.  This practice is very like the way that “gun control” is used to redirect people’s good feelings about wanting to keep infants from being killed.  Those are good feelings—good motivations—but those who have them have been tricked into misdirecting them, and all their passion, all their feelings about being humane and correct, are misguided.  

This bears emphasizing: the attempts to not be racist become expressly racist when the denial of suffering and of death itself becomes part of a purported crusade against that denial.  Treating Black people as tokens; as pawns; as creatures who have no value except as looking like something is what this movie does.  Usicans (“Americans”) tend to consider GWCTD a narrative of racial togetherness when in fact it is quite exactly the opposite.  The idea that racial difference is only skin deep is itself even violated by this movie.  Expressing that “any Black person is as good as another,” which GWCTD does, is extremely foul.  Moreover, this attitude is foul in exactly the way that the movie is supposedly contesting.  It is thus hypocritical when the movie is presented as showing that White people should not misjudge or tokenize Black people in that way.  

GWCTD supposedly shows the ideas that the races are not really different and that Black people should be treated like White people.  However, because that movie actually casts people with lighter skin as the parents of a man with darker skin, and treats them all the same (“Black” people), it tokenizes them.  It makes them like numbers.  

A common theme in entertainment has been to say that a person is not a number; that a person is not interchangeable.  However, GWCTD is terribly hypocritical.  In the same way that other programs which try to remedy the evil of identifying things by type are actually literally the most type-identifying that anything can possibly be, so is GWCTD.  Recall affirmative action: completely explicitly racist policy presented as the cure for warnings of hypothetical racist policy.  “You shall choose based upon [category] to redress the badness of choosing based upon [category].”  That is clearly ridiculous, yet it has been very powerful.  One does not need to be particularly intelligent to tell that affirmative action is racist, but that has not stopped affirmative action.  

Compare affirmative action to treating A.I.D.S. with AZT.  To combat the supposedly immune-destroying virus (which virus has beaten the human immune system as many times as Jesus has created this planet) people turned to AZT, a drug which destroyed the human immune system.  Many people died as a result of taking AZT but were said to have died because of A.I.D.S., just like many people have died as a result of the claimed struggle against anti-Jesus elements (think of the crusades).  This is one of the faults of White people: producing the thing which they are supposedly fighting against, just because they so badly need the imagined struggle.  Like affirmative action, the crusades, and the battle against A.I.D.S., GWCTD is yet another indication of a certain type of people producing badness so they can tell themselves they are heroic for battling that badness.  

GWCTD was a mid 20^th Century production.  Consider now an advertisement from the century after, namely the 21^st century.  The advertisement, for this or that financial service, portrays a happy Black man returning home to his adoring White wife, using the sidewalk that splits the grassy field out front of their house, on which their many half-Black, half-White children are playing.  He is wearing a dark blue suit, a very light blue shirt almost white, and a blue tie.  The picture of confidence, his fiscal worries alleviated presumably by the service for which the advertisement hopes to generate custom, the Black man is the picture of fitness and happiness.  

Why is this ad racist?  Well, like GWCTD, the ad uses images of White happiness to sell the image of racial togetherness.  It seems not to be racist, because it shows a person of the White race consorting—with implied sexual intimacy—with a person of the Black race.  However, it is racist because it implies everything the person of the Black race dreams of and to which he aspires is exactly the same as of what people of the White race dream and to what they aspire.  This can seem nice only if you so narcissistically assume that White dreams and aspirations are better.  The advertisement also jams the Black man into a ridiculous, movement restricting costume designed by and for White people: the suit.  That Black man being shown in that stupid European costume expresses the belief that things developed in Europe are better, and would be chosen by other groups.