Dignity, decency, moral suasion vs. vulgarity

Bookworm brings us a 1940s movie entitled The Negro Soldier.

The blacks in this movie are dignified, striving people, yearning for education and success. Yes, I know it’s propaganda. But the fact that’s it propaganda actually makes my point. Propaganda’s goal is to reach out to people in the most effective way possible to affect their thinking. In 1944, those who made The Negro Soldier looked at black culture and concluded that the best way to reach out to blacks was to present them, not as hip or cool, not as victims, not as rage-filled revolutionaries, but as people of intellectual and moral substance. Moreover, as I noted above, that approach worked for both blacks and whites who saw the movie.

I find it hard to imagine a filmmaker today using dignity as a means to convey propaganda to American blacks. Madison Avenue, Hollywood, and those blacks who create their own images (Beyonce springs to mind), rely upon entirely different approaches to using media — movies, television, music, newsfotainment — in order to affect their black audiences. Whether these propaganda purveyors are selling products, themselves, or some ideology, the modern approach to blacks runs the gamut all the way from selling sex to foul language to perpetual victimhood to raw anger and race hatred.

Bookworm then brings us a sampling of videos black stars today.

Please note that I’m not challenging the messages, whatever the heck they are, in the above videos. I’m challenging the presentation. These fabulously successful black people have concluded that the way to sell their message downstream is not through dignity, decency, moral suasion, facts, or anything else appealing to the higher mind. Instead, they channel their products and messages through a lowest common denominator vulgarity.

...I think it’s a great loss to America generally and to American blacks specifically that dignity is a forgotten virtue. Dignity lifts people up. It means that, when people treat you badly, this bad conduct reflects solely on them. You are not humiliated because your own dignity raises you above their bad behavior. As Martin Luther King, Jr., showed, dignity is both a sword and a shield.

Read and view more here.