Dorothy Dandrige

The story of America is race, even when that story is hidden or buried. Pretending otherwise does not make it go away. The historical reasons for this are obvious, and do not need repeating. That the history is not history but on-going American life, does bear repeating, even with Obama in the White House. I mean, the dude is half-white, which in America, to an awful lot of people, means that he's black. At the point when one's racial makeup will be so far down the list of descriptors that it never even comes up, this story will have ended. But we're not there yet.

Hollywood has ever been a good reflection of America's racial prejudices in general. In the first half of the twentieth century, the roles open to African-Americans were essentially that of menials. To provide entertainment for the black audiences, there were entire lines of race movies with all-black casts, showing in special theaters to all-black audiences, a sort of shadow Hollywood, if you will. Today, of course, we have plenty of blacks in films, but if a film is mostly blacks, well, it might as well be a race movie because it's ghettoized as such. (Ditto television.)

We applaud those who have broken color lines, but not every pioneer was successful. The wonderful Dorothy Dandridge, for instance, would have owned Hollywood if she had been white. Instead, she died of an accidental drug overdose at the age of 42 with $2.14 in her bank account. Anne Helen Petersen's telling of the tale of Dandridge for Hairpin.com, Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Dorothy Dandridge vs. The World, is both sad and illuminating, and well worth reading.

From that article, I pulled this clip, which I re-post to cheer us all up. I mean, who can see the Nicholas Brothers (one of whom young Dorothy married) without a smile (aside from, of course, the audiences of the southern theaters at the time, for whom clips like this were expunged from the films so as not to upset their tender little bigoted hearts)? That's Dorothy in the middle, holding her own until the brothers really go to town and she slips off into the choo choo. She reappears at the end of a series of their trademark splits, no doubt wondering, as we all do, how they've managed to protect their private parts from the potential damage.


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