Via Smitty at The Other McCain, the Morgan Freeman solution: once in a while we should just shut up about race.
I’m of two minds about the history dealio, though: after all, a lot of social history is more likely to be fleshed out through learning about women and minorities . . . after all, the farther away you get from the “Presidents and generals” approach, the more you’re likely to learn about George Washington Carver—his name notwithstanding.
But very few people learn about the biographies of really interesting figures who are female or black, or even white and male, because they saw them on a stamp the the U.S. Postal Service issued in honor of This Month’s Once-Oppressed Group.
Ultimately, Freeman is right: American history is American history. Despite my gratitude at having taken women’s history in high school and college—and black history at UCLA—our story isn’t complete if it’s chopped up into black and white and American Indian and Irish-immigrant and female and male and West-of-the-Rockies and East-of-the Mississippi and Eskimo and Chinese-American and Episcopalian and Southern Baptist and Pacific Rim and trailer-white and Jewish and all the rest of it. Eat the whole chopped salad.
In other news, Freeman is one of those men who will just never get old, like Sean Connery: there’s something about a really rich accent that just . . . it’s ageless.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Miss Attila,
See if you can score a video of that beautiful speech that Morgan Freeman did as the judge in “Bonfire of the Vanities” where he was called “racist” by the unruly mob.
He rants, lectures, and then ends up kindly and sweetly telling the crowd that it’s all about decency and that their grandmothers taught them decency, and that they should all go home..
..and try to be decent.
An excellent bookend to this 60 Minutes piece.
I posted a link to this clip last year. It’s amazing how intelligent comments like Freeman’s continue to be timelessly relevant. The race issue just keeps coming back again and again.
It goes to show that there will always be people like Mike Wallace who are entrenched in a mindset and in 100 years there will still be people like him. We can only hope that there will be a lot more people like Morgan Freeman.
oops! Messed up my link.
http://nonsensibleshoes.blogspot.com/2009/03/morgan-freeman-owns-mike-wallace.html
Shut me up please, show me the numbers and that will shut me up!
His voice and accent are unusually appealing. It looks like he grew up all over the South and Midwest, but it’s the timbre of his voice more than the specific Southern lilt that’s so nice.