Mystery solved
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Yesterday, I expressed surprise and bewilderment that “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was being disappeared from TCM’s catalogue. Don Surber explains.
Sidney Poitier: Enemy of the People
In September 2019, the network hired film historian Jacqueline Stewart and made a big deal about her being black and female. Her books include Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity and L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema.
TCM is purging its movie library. Breitbart reported that among those on the "troublesome and problematic" list are Hitchcock's Rope (the villains are homosexual) and Psycho (the villain is a man in drag) as well as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and My Fair Lady.
[…...]
The trouble with Sidney Poitier?
He’s too white.
Via Breitbart, hostess Stewart said, "His career is so important for the ways that white Americans really started to have more sympathy and understanding of black people. But at the same time, there are aspects of his films that are clearly oriented primarily to white audiences. That opens up all kinds of complications for black viewers who felt that he wasn’t a representative of the race as a whole."
In the 1960s, when it came to black actors, he was it. Ivan Dixon did a good job in Nothing But A Man (and of course on Hogan's Heroes). But Poitier was only black star in Hollywood at the time. He did a bang-up job in A Raisin in the Sun, Lilies of the Field, To Sir with Love, In the Heat of the Night, and of course Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Those 5 films advanced racial equality far more than any of today's virtue signaling.
[…]
Surber concludes with this warning:
The point is not to erase Poitier but to erase the role of white people from emancipation and civil rights. Poitier served his purpose, now he must go. The same happened to Stalin. The same will happen to Obama.
They pose the problem Lincoln does by casting white people in a good light. Their rewrite of emancipation holds that while white people busied themselves with a civil war over states rights, those clever black people liberated themselves from slavery on Juneteenth. Liberals now make the same argument the Ku Klux Klan did in denying the civil war was about slavery.
Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to allThe point is not to erase Poitier but to erase the role of white people from emancipation and civil rights. Poitier served his purpose, now he must go. The same happened to Stalin. The same will happen to Obama.
Demoting Poitier to Stepin Fetchit status should serve as a warning not just to Will Smith and Obama, but to all black people. You may not be next, but you are on the list.
