Mixed Race Studies

More than a “Passing” Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 41, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013
pages 60-86
DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2013.0048

Ellen Scott, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

When we think of African American representations of 1930s Hollywood, we likely first envision the maid or butler—Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) or Gertrude Howard as Beulah Thorndyke in I’m No Angel (1933). These films arguably normalize black servitude as an inevitable part of an intractable and glamorous class system. Ramona Curry argues that Mae West’s maids “augment West’s featured—and fetishized—status, enhancing the star’s aura of power and sexual allure through their roles as servants and through their vividly contrasting visual presence, their dark skin, hair and costumes, setting off West’s shimmering bleached-blonde whiteness” (1996, 87). However, the composite image I describe above rests on a vague impression that black characters were uniformly servants and that onscreen servants always appeared in uniform. Take, as a counterexample, Morning Glory (1933), where maid Emma (Sana Rayya) seems to step out of the margins when she changes from her uniform into her fashionable leisure clothes. What is surprising is that despite Emma’s narrative insignificance, the transition is emphasized by lighting and framing—and an audacious saunter (fig. 1). Her placement at the center of the frame, between the arguing white protagonists, interrupts narrative attention, raising perhaps the ultimate cinematic question: who is she? The uniform, black and white and designedly nondescript, helps to set up the subsequent dramatic reveal of her flattering furs and hat, heightening the suddenness of the camera’s central attention to her and highlighting the inability of her uniform to contain or represent its wearer.

While the servant image was clearly the dominant black Hollywood representation during this era, it is also true that sometimes dress communicated a subtle roundness to black women’s characters and an interracial parity at a moment when censorship threatened overt statements of racial equality and images of white and black intimacy.

The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors of America’s Production Code of 1930 (commonly known as the “Hays Code”) famously repressed onscreen sexuality. But race was a part of a more daring, turmoil-ridden early Depression-era pre-Code cinema, which registered the desperate revolt of fallen women and forgotten men against a failing social system (Doherty 1999, 256). Accordingly, race also became a regulatory concern, as seen in the Code clause barring “miscegenation” and in the industry policy against racially motivated lynching (Courtney 2005; Wood 2009, 229). Costume, however, was a realm generally outside of censors’ close scrutiny in the 1930s and was thus a freer space of racial inscription than the narrative. Not only was costume essential to Depression-era screen narratives of class rise (and fall); it sometimes operated to complicate the narrative, threatening to distract viewers with its overwrought embellishment of a character’s affect and personality or glamorizing the “low” figures—the gold digger and the fallen women—that censors reviled (Gaines 1990, 188; Foster 2007; Jacobs 1997, 58-59). The lack of racial fixity in some 1930s Hollywood films revealed, if only incompletely, black women’s modern, urban personalities and small-scale revolts against the color line. Through motifs in dress—the quick-changing maid, interracial sartorial and sardonic parity, and stylized idealization of interracial spaces—aspects of these films silently normalized racial similarity and undermined the uniform servitude of the 1930s black image.

In these surprising moments black women stepped out of their prescribed subservience to glamorously become the center point of the camera’s gaze in ways that cast doubt on the naturalness of black inferiority and sometimes disrupted prevailing narratives of gender, race, and power. I begin with analysis of several pre-Code-era films and end with readings of Code-era films starring light-skinned black actress Fredi Washington, who became the vessel for dress-borne tensions about the color line latent in earlier films. Following Robert Stam’s call to resuscitate marginalized ethnic “voices” from Hollywood texts, I magnify those brief but arresting moments to which black spectators often attended where hidden worlds and selves come to the sartorial surface (Stam 1991; Everett 2000; Regester 2010). The unassuming configuration of an egalitarian ethos through…

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Scientific and colonial discourses of racial mixture first converged on the issue of interracial marriage in the colonies. Scientific conceptions of the negative genetic consequences of racial mixture were already an element of nineteenth-century German colonial policies as articulated on the issue of Rassenmischehe, or racially mixed marriages between white colonial settlers and indigenous colonial peoples. Only six years before the Rhineland occupation, Reichstag debates on racially mixed marriages prefigured many of the same arguments and fears voiced later in the newspaper protest campaign. Although interracial marriage was not illegal under German imperial law, colonial officials began refusing to register interracial unions in the colonies in 1890. In 1905 Governor Friednch von Lindequist issued the first such measure in the form of a decree banning interracial marriages in German Southwest Africa. Reflecting the dominant views of the scientific community at the time, he cited what he saw as the dangerous effect of racial mixture on the purity of the white race: “Such unions do not preserve, but rather diminish the race. As a rule the offspring are physically and emotionally weak and unite in themselves the negative traits of both parents.” In 1907, the colonial High Court in Windhuk ruled that the marriage bans were retroactively valid, effectively nullifying mixed marriages concluded before the 1905 ban. The court’s ruling stated, “Any person whose ancestry can be traced to natives either paternally or maternally must be viewed and treated as a native.” Consequently, many people who had been considered white Germans and who had considered themselves white Germans suddenly were counted as natives. Following Lindequist’s administrative order, similar decrees were passed banning mixed marriages in the German colonies of East Africa in 1906 and Samoa in 1912. In response to this 1912 decree, protests broke out in the Reichstag, prompting delegates to debate the legality of these colonial decrees in light of their conflict with imperial law. But the objections raised in protest against the bans did not focus in any fundamental way on juridical arguments regarding the question of the precedence of imperial over colonial legislation. Rather, delegates raised explicitly moral arguments against the bans, which presented marriages between German colonialists and nonwhite colonial natives as a threat to sexual morality and existing racial hierarchies of difference.

Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 43-44.