Chapter 9 Bogle Reading Response
In chapter 9 of Donald. Bogle’s book, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: an interpretive history of Blacks in American Films, he discusses how the 80s began the era of tan. The era of tan described an era of film where black actors were portrayed on screen in certain way that would make the audience forget the blackness of black actors and their characters. These black actors played characters with no cultural identity or any directly black stereotypical traits. Bogel described these actors' black characters by saying, “all ethnic edges had been sanded down, so that while they looked black, everything about them seemed expressed in a white cultural context” (243). These black actors were being erased on screen in terms of cultural identity, they were being hidden behind a more “white friendly” portrayal on screen. Even with actors that were seen as neither white nor black, but tan was kept in the background often.
Black actors being kept as supporting characters and background roles was very visible in the interracial buddy motion pictures of the 80s. I found this topic during the 80s to be very interesting because we still have films like this today, while they are different from the films of the 80s there are still similarities. These interracial buddy films usually depicted a white and a black man as best friends or partners that are forced to work together before becoming close friends. The black man is almost always the sidekick, loyal to the white man, or provides advice to the white man to make him better. Bogle provides an example of this by discussing Rocky, “not only does Rocky eventually emerge as a successful white hope who defeats an Ali-surrogate, but he also is befriended by the former black champ” (245). This example perfectly illustrates the interracial buddy picture formula: a white man becomes greater than the black man, but its ok because they are friends now. More often than not the black man is only there to help improve the white character.