Skin Game Take Down
Dear Readers,
The 1971 film, Skin Game, contains a clue
that helps us understand white on black violence of all kinds.
Here is the story.
James Garner pretends to sell Lou Gossett, Jr. to various white people, then steals him back. Lather. Rinse. You get it.
They do well and make loads of cash until the wrinkles the movie recounts occur.
For a 1971 film, they are trying hard to probe the slavery thing us white folk have been so uncomfortable with since the Civil War.
Sure, abolitionists were uncomfortable with slavery for a long time before the Civil War, but the War ended slavery. The abolitionists got what they wanted but society couldn’t handle the change back then. We are still trying to handle it now.
This movie contains a KEY scene that brilliantly shows the social power differential between whites and blacks that persists to this day and is probably why white police shoot black men in the same situation they would take a white man without firing a shot.
The key scene is thus: several characters are trapped in a burning barn.
Lou Gossett, Jr., a recently acquired slave to one of the antagonist characters, can’t get them out without help.
He runs down the road to find help, and runs into the overseer, he who wields the whip.
Lou speaks with the power and force of a white man when he is interacting with James Garner, but when he does this to the overseer in an attempt to get help, the guy pulls his gun and prepares to shoot him right there.
Lou gathers his wits in 300 milliseconds and begins to say,
“oh massah massah, don’t hurt your poor boy, the barn is on fire and the young mistress is in there…help me massah massah,” he virtually sobs, while bowing pathetically in the overseer’s direction and pointing at the burning barn.
The overseer sheaths his weapon and the trapped folk are rescued.
When black people talk or act anyway except massah massah in a crisis situation with a white cop, odds are the white cop will have to stop himself from shooting, or he might lose control and shoot.
White people.
Black people can talk to us any way they happen to talk to us whenever they happen to talk to us.
We will engage with them as though they were a white person talking to us that way.
Make it Real!
