Taylor on Micheaux

In his chapter on "Black Silence and the Politics of Representation" Clyde Taylor argues that no longer should the original aspect of racism in Classic Hollywood Cinema history be ignored. Rather, cinema studies should inquire into why such racism became so prevalent in the early stages of US cinema as it would illuminate racial history in the United States.To analyze this, Taylor draws from political theorists Samir Amin and Walter Rodney to exemplify the "underdevelopment" of black cinema in the United States. Namely, he articulates the variables of the market of film and the monopoly that film studios and producers such as those from Universal Studios held over the film industry and minor film companies such as the Lincoln Studios, which was a primarily African American studio dedicated to the creation of "race films." Such checks as corporate laws and censorship oftentimes allowed such large film companies to easily outsell and "buy" actors such as Noble Johnson, who could have helped African American cinema to really take off.

Another aspect of his argument circles around how African American cinema was used to portray African American women as a part of the early century's "Cult of Domesticity," which popularly subscribes to the idea that women are fragile and delicate and central to the conception of the family and home. Yet in popular cinema, that role was systematically withheld from the African American female actor. As such, studios such as Lincoln's studio cast African American women in fragile damsel-like roles, which allowed the African community to address their womens' absence from this female role and promote the concept of African American men able to protect African American women from racial violence. It is interesting to note however that the majority of African American women cast in these particular roles are described by taylor as "lighter" in skin color.

How can we reconcile that while the country and consequently the Hollywood film industry banned the representation of "miscegenation" in films and yet they preferred to employ, work with and cast African Americans who had lighter skin, despite the fact that that lightness itself exemplifies the history of amalgamation in the United States?