ABSTRACT
In a National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast appreciation for Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner for fiction and one of America’s greatest writers, author and English professor Tayari Jones mentions that Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye indicts the “compulsory whiteness” of the Dick-and-Jane American educational system that prevailed in the 1950s, in particular the “sickening effect” it has on children. Multiple early popular motion pictures stigmatized members of racial and ethnic categories. Many of the earliest films, made by white producers and directors, were infused with racism, whether non-conscious or conscious, as well as representations that supported white supremacy. “Race pictures” were produced only in the United States and nowhere else, and only during this narrow window of historical time.
