"Fantasies" of Reality

Susan Courtney’s Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation is framed in a way that argues Hollywood’s attempt to illustrate and portray interracial coupling is only a mere fantasy or spectacle of the mind because Hollywood’s assertion of miscegenation does not accurately reflect true life. On page 11, Courtney says that “While the reported (real) violence sparked by Hollywood fantasies of miscegenation has fortunately never approximated anything of the catastrophic magnitude of lynching, these texts have nonetheless long fed and solicited anxieties, desires, and beliefs of considerable consequence.” So it isn’t enough to say that Hollywood’s depiction of miscegenation was inaccurate, but that it was troubling because the mere illusion put on made reality all the more dangerous. The ‘contradictions’ on screen were made not as a depiction of reality for miscegenation or even a desire of the way it could be, but they only served as further evidence to build on very flawed views such as that of the ‘myth of the black male rapist’, etc. Films that showed interracial, sexual, or even emotional interaction and coupling showed black men as a growing threat to the white supremacist structure and illustrated black women as mere sexual beings (within a complex of being able to be both desired and denied by white men at the same time). Hollywood’s simple disavowal of the real and pressing consequences miscegenation had for people of color (and more specifically men) made it difficult to be able to address the social structures that created those circumstances.
When I started reading this book and came to read the many references to the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner(1967) starring Sidney Portier and Katharine Hepburn, I immediately thought of the more contemporary remake of that film Guess Who (2005) starring people such as Ashton Kutcher, Zoe Saldana, and Bernie Mac. I was intrigued by the actual role reversals that were made in that in this new film, it was rather a black woman bringing home a white man to meet her black family. I wondered given all the circumstances such as that and the time period, did that change the level of acceptance that the family had for the potential beau being introduced, or did it feed into those same ideals of miscegenation in Hollywood being mere fantasy. Does history continue to repeat itself along those lines?
Courtney makes the argument that the “regular policing of miscegenation [on cinema]” are what created the black and white races themselves (107). As sexual relations began to be defined, so did actual ideas of blackness and whiteness alongside that in society. And within these notions of color in sexual relations, there were always the notions of power that played along with that. The conversation of miscegenation along sexual lines led me to a comment I read about from musician John Mayer in a subscription of Playboy Magazine in which he was asked by an interviewer if black girls had a tendency to throw themselves at him. His response was “I don’t think I open myself to it. My dick is sort of like a white supremacist. I’ve got a Benetton heart and a fuckin’ David Duke cock. I’m going to start dating separately from my dick.” Although these are only personal feelings from one individual and in no way am I suggesting that his reflect a whole race of peoples. I just like to take his comments as having some sort of historical value and note how it may play in to issues of power in sexual relations involving black women.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail?entry_id=56999#ixzz0fATPxtVU
(A link to the John Mayer interview for any who are interested)