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Unmasking Racism in Long Black Song
By
Halford H. Fairchild
Synopsis: Long Black Song, an HBO production directed by Kevin Rodney Sullivan (2004), is set in 1938
in rural Georgia. Silas, and his wife Sarah, sharecroppers, eke out a modest living on their family farm.
Silas takes a load of corn to town to sell to Mr. Harper, a blatantly red neck merchant who treats Silas
with condescension while setting up his law-school bound son, David, with merchandise for his summer
job as a door-to-door salesman. While Silas dickers with the merchant—eyeing a ring for his wife—
David, per chance, stops at Silas’s farm, meets Sarah, and she and he have a sexual encounter. On his
return, Silas discovers his wife’s infidelity and she takes the baby and spends the night in the field. The
next morning, David returns to retrieve a forgotten “graphaphone” (“You can tell time and hear music at
the same time!”), only to encounter an enraged Silas (“Don’t you already have everything?”). Their fight
is stopped by a pleading Sarah (“Don’t you listen to that Long Black Song, you’re better than that”);
David leaves, and Sarah returns to the man that she truly loves.
Unmasking Racism
Long Black Song exposed the many dimensions of racism. When Silas arrived in the town, the
scene showed a sidewalk with a prim White woman walking with a young African American youth
scurrying behind her, carrying her purchases. It thus showed the ordinariness of racism.
The shopkeeper, in admonishing his son to insist on racial privilege in dealing with “those
people,” and in his condescending arrogance toward Silas, showed the ugliness of racism.
The setting in the rural south, with the stark contrast between the halves and have nots—the
Whites and the Blacks—revealed racism’s deep roots in the social culture.
But Long Black Song was really about the “accident waiting to happen”—the one day affair
between Sarah and David—and what it said about racism.
Many of us have a racism radar: we can tell within a few minutes whether a (White) person has
a racist bone or two. The shopkeeper was racist all the way through to the bone. But David, curiously,
was not racist. His attraction to Sarah was both accidental and genuine—at the end he even offered to
take Sarah with him.
By showing moments of intimacy between David—rich, White, propertied—and Sarah—poor,
Black and female—is testimony to the essential humanity of both David and Sarah.
Racism is about denying the humanity of African people—as if African people were subhuman.
But when these polar opposites—Sarah and David—can discover their human commonalities, it
is testimony that we are not all that different after all. If we can be open and honest, we can be
attracted to each other—we can love each other—across racial, gender and class divides. Racism, thus,
is ultimately unmasked as false.
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