Film Studies Daily Log

Thursday, October 7

We continued to address questions raised in students' minds by Birth of a Nation.  Discussion of the strange spectacle of whites in blackface playing blacks led to an examination of the film's use of the spectre of miscegenation as the ultimate bete noire (so to speak).  We traced the history of anti-miscegenation laws and the "one-drop rule" in the post-slavery U.S.