UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS

Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson

I was coming into this film as a pretty big Ken Burns fan. I’ve found the numerous episodes of The Civil War, Baseball, and Jazz to be responsible for some of the very few moments in my life when I felt that America was a narrative, a grand story, a story with a meaning . . . and not merely a catalog of atrocities, greed, narrowness, and superficiality rouged up Tammy Faye Baker style in the colors of the flag. Not only have these films rather boldly implied that there is a narrative of America and then convinced me of the fiction, they also (in doing so) made me feel like an American, like I could see myself in relation to the national drama . . . not wholly alienated from it, but as one of its billions of cells. Ken Burns’ vision of America is one large enough to accommodate real individuals . . . even when America, as it has been defined by its powerful elite, has chosen to attack, reject, and destroy some of those individuals. America, a nation antagonistic to its real heroes and mythmakers, the actors in its theater, has grown its soul by opposing these inconsumable creatures, by trying to wolf them down its throat, and then gagging on them. America (as controlled by its elite) has always been a monstrous whale, but its Jonahs, surviving in spite of its appetite, end up being the real heroes of the American story who define the real American consciousness.

This tendency has its pitfalls, of course. For instance, the powerful elite have increasingly learned how to use our mass overanxiousness to focus too much attention on highly-visible individuals so as to establish a politics of misdirection (e.g., Republican NeoCon hawks courting the religious right with talk of “values”, usually prejudicial intolerances, to build up enough voter support to finance their true goals of colonial global corpocracy . . . which is not at all in the interest of the majority of the Republican voter base). When the individual in the spotlight is a meaningless, non-dangerous, petty indulgence and distraction, some celebrity or rich fool, all the better for the powerful. But, there is always a chance this approach will backfire, because individuals are not necessarily damned to be beholden to groupthink or to serve the whims of those “in charge”, to play as willing pawns. America has granted individuals a substantial right to power, and the elite have hoped that those empowered individuals simply wouldn’t recognize an enemy in the wealthy elites. But when the occasional American harnesses some of his or her mythic individualism and directs it against The Powers That Be, all of the players can come forward to the front of the stage, and the disguises fall away. Where the masks have fallen, America flashes its elusive, unadorned visage, and we get to glimpse the strangely familiar features lining its face . . . and the sudden truth of our parentage pours down on us like a bucket of ice water.

Jack Johnson was that kind of player, that theatrical individual, unswallowable, who pricks the country into looking straight back at us, into briefly revealing itself on some essential level. Ken Burns is a master of illuminating these moments, pointing each out as a nexus where numerous threads of the American story tie together into a knot. He is a maker of the proverbial “picture that’s worth a thousand words”. His best films are both a mirror for the American everyman and everywoman and a portal into that smithy where America is forged. They achieve what is, in my mind, maybe the highest purpose of art: the connection, the unification of various disparate and opposing things under the eye of a consciousness that transcends individual or party perceptions, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs.

Of course, it isn’t just the writing or interpreting of these American stories that Burns does so well, he also tends to get great interviewees, chooses excellent pieces from literature, newspapers, correspondence and puts these pieces into the mouths of the best voice talent available. And, of course, he locates an abundance of superb film and photo footage out of which he creates narrative motion and emotional gravity. To my inexpert eye at least, he seems to pull all this together into a film in a way (with a formula) that is incredibly simple, but never cowardly or cheap.

Unforgivable Blackness struck me as on par with his best work. In Jack Johnson, Burns finds a microcosm of a stage of American stagnation. White bigotry, after being shaken by Johnson’s “outrageous” defiance, unquashable individualism, and undeniable supremacy in the sport of boxing, finally got to actualize its fantasy of his defeat . . . but in winning that battle it ended up losing the war. But it takes a portrayal of the man like the one Burns gives him to expose this. It was an ugly, ugly episode in our history. One in which, as the Jungians might say, the white man’s shadow rose up to land a stinging blow on the cheek of unconscious white prejudice. And, as always happens in the face of the shadow, the white man overreacted and proved with all available force that he himself is, in fact, the dark, raging animal, brutal, stupid, hateful, wrong.

Jack Johnson became the archetypal symbol for white fear of blacks in his time, the ultimate scapegoat for the evil of racial hatred, which had persisted beneath a shellac of pseudo-civilized posturing and political, “intellectual” rationalization. I’m not sure there was ever a more widely hated man in America. And it wasn’t just the whites who hated Johnson. The middle class blacks could be just as bad, just as intolerant . . . and in some ways, their attitudes toward Johnson were even more damaging to black consciousness at the time. Burns casts the two main black ideologies of the time as a conflict between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, who advocated approaches toward black consciousness that were more humble and compromising or more defiant and demanding of equality, respectively.

We don’t have any individuals in our society today that are so large or so dangerous (to the establishment) as Jack Johnson, but to look back on a time when a man could rise so high and do so in the face of horrendous oppression and hatred, to do this and come to mean so much . . . to his race, to the country, to individuality, and to humanity . . . casts some light on the American myth of the individual: the individual as the maker of American consciousness. Maybe this will never be possible again as the powerful become wiser and more adept at suffocating or marginalizing the voices of individual dissent, yet I think it should be looked on with a least a crumb or two of hopefulness. We are, each of us, responsible for making America. Our individuality is not just lonely, fruitless navel-gazing. We are not worthless when we defy or refuse to serve “the system”. Our country may be looking increasingly Orwellian, but ultimately, there is still a chance of keeping it from utter self-annihilation (and the annihilation of the rest of the world) by, first of all, being unpalatable, by thinking and evaluating individually, by seeing America and Americaness not as its cumulative material wealth or global might, but as the drama of its story of consciousness, as its characters and conflicts. The good story, the transformative story woven from American individuals, not the propaganda, not the PR of the wealthy elite.

As in any scenario where story is the “truest truth”, we need, desperately need, great storytellers, men and women who can take stock of all the characters and events and weave them into a narrative of consciousness by seeing the potential connections, comprehending their worth, and by staying vehemently opposed to pimping for some political force demanding partisanship. I think Ken Burns does that as well as anyone else I can think of. He is one of . . .maybe even the greatest American storyteller of our time, this time in which big stories, like the myths before them, have largely faded into the subconscious of the language, and agendas, party platforms, self-serving think tanks, and other rhetorics of power are defining all the words we use to think, to create ourselves, our own Americas, our consciousness.