The Wind Done Gone: The Opening Salvos of the Culture Wars

So, as I raise my head above the parapet of my Coronavirus isolation, I note that, as a friend of mine recently said to me, “it’s kicking off everywhere.” With the brutal killing of George Floyd by police during an arrest in Minneapolis on 25th May, protests against such violence towards black people erupted across the US and internationally.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement soon spread into the cultural arena, with protests not merely against present institutional racism, but seemingly an entire past of discrimination and subjugation. In Bristol in the UK, the statue of Edward Colston, who made most of his fortune as a member of the Royal African Company (RAC), which had a monopoly on the West African slave trade and branded slaves (including women and children) with its RAC initials, was torn down by angry protesters and unceremoniously dumped into the docks. At Oriel College in Oxford, the statue of Cecil Rhodes (Victorian imperialist and proponent of white colonial domination), which was already the subject of a lengthy student campaign to have it removed, became the centre of more protest and heated debate, with the college eventually acceding that it should be taken down. On 8th June the statue of Winston Churchill was defaced, protesters daubing the words, “was a racist” underneath his name. Later, various comedy shows, ranging from “Little Britain” and “Bo Selecta” to “The Mighty Boosh” and “Fawlty Towers” were reassessed in the face of the protests, with many being withdrawn from their streaming platforms. Even “Gone with the Wind”, the multi Oscar-winning 1939 film was withdrawn temporarily by HBO for its romanticised vision of the antebellum South and its portrayal of “ethnic and racial prejudices” which “were wrong then and are wrong today.”

As a film fan, I’ve long had my doubts about “Gone with the Wind” and indeed, its source, the novel of the same name by Margaret Mitchell. I was, therefore, intrigued to find that a black female author, Alice Randall, had written another version of the story entitled, “The Wind Done Gone”. In this book, Randall writes not from the perspective of the pampered Scarlett O’Hara, but from that of Cynara, a mulatto slave who works on Scarlett’s plantation and is the daughter of Scarlett’s father and Mammy, a house slave who is depicted in the film as loyal and happy with her lot. As events unfold, Cynara is sold from the O’Hara’s and makes her way back to Atlanta where she becomes the mistress of a white businessman, later leaving him for an aspiring black politician whom she lives with in Reconstruction Washington D.C. Randall’s version, then, seems to have more in common with a slave narrative written to bolster support for the abolitionist cause than any idyllic recounting of times in the South, and as such, one might say, is a more realistic and truthful account of the experience of slaves like Mammy.

Indeed, Randall’s novel opens up the notion that behind every whitewashed version of events lies another, hidden story. And, perhaps, far from airbrushing or obfuscating history, the tearing down of statues leads us to understand just what lay behind their initial erection. We are forced to assess what we wish to venerate and celebrate, for are not statues there as symbols of people and ideas we are supposed to hold in high esteem? As such, I can’t see much wrong with pulling down statues which for many must simply act as reminders of not only past, but present prejudice and violence. Centuries of oppression can’t be wiped out by tearing down such symbols, but it may be the start of a reassessment (not an editing) of history, a reclaiming of those hidden stories, and particularly, to my mind, a reassessment of how such things are taught in our schools. I think I now know more about our colonial and slave-trading past than I did before the protests, which doesn’t say much for my historical education, a point which would seem to prove that we don’t learn our history from statues, but from classrooms, and debates like the ones happening now.    

As for the wider issues of the portrayal of race in film and television, it seems to me that the “Black Lives Matter” movement could become bogged down in arguments over the politics of representation, arguments which already appear to have been raging for decades and which have clearly not resulted in more concrete progression. While such arguments rage on, it seems that real social, political and economic change might become a secondary thought, which it clearly should not be, and one hopes that this nascent movement achieves its aims and doesn’t become just another argument about identity politics on Twitter. The tragic death of George Floyd might perhaps then not just sound the opening salvos of a culture war, but also bring about lasting and concrete change. Otherwise, “Black Lives Matter” might just end up being, like other protests and stories of the past, gone with the wind.