re: #77 Jenner7

Holy crap, I feel dumb. My Mom was watching Holiday Inn and I walked in when Bing was doing a song in black face. My jaw dropped. She said, oh yeah, you didn’t know that was in it? She says they do almost the same thing in White Christmas, during the Minstrel Show scene. I was like, WHAT?? So, I go to Youtube and watch it. Holy shit! I didn’t even notice. Here I am singing to it and watching the amazing dancing, not realizing the blatant racism. White Christmas is my favorite movie. I love the singing and dancing and now I’m really disturbed by it.

I was listening to NPR the other day. They were talking about a recording of a night club performance by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr, from about 1962. They pointed out that two white guys performing with a black guy, at the time, was groundbreaking. But the whole time, Sinatra and to a lesser extent Martin are saying things like, “Get outta here!” to Davis, and then the songs that are performed are really racist - like ‘Me And My Shadow’, with Sinatra and Davis.

If you tried to do a show like that today, it would be considered totally racist, but at the time it was considered the cutting edge of good race relations.