The second installment of Six Degrees of Song of the South is out. It looks at Hattie McDaniel, the first black actor to win an Oscar, in her role as “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind. McDaniel’s father was a former slave who emancipated himself during the Civil War and enlisted in the Union Army. The program looks at Hattie McDaniel’s life in Jim Crow America and in a Hollywood that limited roles for black women to keeping house for white people.
McDaniel played important supporting roles in the two best known Reconstruction-themed movies of her time, Gone With the Wind and Song of the South. You can listen to this episode on the player below. It is quite good and put out by You Must Remember This.
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The tern “Mammy” was not manifested as a minstrel caricature term, its a term of endearment and respect as a form of mother, and was used long before Minstrel shows ever occurred. This podcast of Six degrees of Song of the South is coercive propaganda. It reinforces stereotypes of White Supremacy as much as White Supremacy supposedly reinforced stereotypes of Blacks as Jim Crow. This blog and others like it are presenting a progressive racists ideology as much as it is intent on doing the right thing its doing exactly the opposite.