Don’t Censor Racism Out of the Past
The classic movie The French Connection was stealth edited to remove an offensive exchange.
The first time it happened, I assumed it was a misunderstanding. After the third, fourth, and fifth time, I realized that something had shifted since I had last—prior to the summer of 2020 and the racial reckoning—faced a group of undergraduate students, making sense together of a text from a previous era. We were taking turns reading from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. When it was time to pronounce out loud the word Negro, which arises frequently in a piece of writing from 1845, the student hesitated with visible discomfort and then said, almost in relief, “N-word,” before proceeding to the next sentence. Once this precedent had been set, each subsequent student to encounter the ethnic descriptor Douglass applied to himself without shame made the same adjustment.
“Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence!—fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thraldom!—fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty!—fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless!” These proud words, carefully selected by their author and capable of transporting us in that 21st-century classroom to another social reality, were being reformatted on the spot without explanation.
“You know,” I said at last, “no one will be forced to say anything they are uncomfortable saying in this classroom, but you need to understand that Negro is not a slur or term of disparagement.” The students stared at me blankly. Most of the authors on our syllabus, I continued, preferred to conceive of themselves as Negroes, some well into the 21st century, including my dear friend the essayist and jazz critic Stanley Crouch, who insisted on the nomenclature until his death in 2020. “It is not an insult,” I stressed to them. (I should have added: Treating Negro and the actual N-word as equally unsayable diminishes the severity of the slur that so offends us.) “Stanley was dissatisfied with terms like Black or African American because he believed they lacked the specificity to capture the historical circumstances and achievements of the people in America who had called themselves Negroes.” When we resumed reading, the very next student paused for a moment and said, in a hushed tone, “N-word.” At that moment I knew that Stanley and even his mentor Ralph Ellison would be powerless to dissuade them.
The students were not merely reflecting an admirable expansion of sensitivity to markers of past brutality, but an impulse to retroactively change the past instead of merely learning from it. I thought of this jarring shift in sensibility this week as perceptive audiences noticed stealth edits made to the 1971 classic The French Connection, which is owned by Disney and being streamed by the Criterion Channel and Apple TV+. Someone had deleted a six-second exchange between the detectives Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy “Cloudy” Russo (Roy Scheider), which contains an actual racial slur, not a descriptor:
Doyle: “You dumb guinea.”
Russo: “How the hell did I know he had a knife?”
Doyle: “Never trust a nigger.”
Russo: “He coulda been white.”
Doyle: “Never trust anyone.”
The back-and-forth is crass and demeaning, no question. Yet does anyone doubt a New York City police officer might speak like that in 1971? Does anyone doubt one might speak like that today? Instances of such cleansing are becoming more frequent and blatant. In February, the Roald Dahl estate unleashed hundreds of clumsy alterations to his classic works of children’s literature, effacing words such as fat and ugly. These cases demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding not only of what is unjustifiably offensive but of the very purpose of art.
Creative expression of any quality, which is to say efforts that go beyond the merely propagandistic or ideologically motivated, must perform several important functions that are not reducible to advocacy—even and perhaps especially when it comes to groups that have been mistreated. Setting aside the idea that intellectuals and artists ought to be free to state even ugly and mistaken sentiments, it is downright odd to presume that any idea conveyed within a work of art benefits from its endorsement. The cliché exists for a reason: Art holds up a mirror to society, one that does not and ought not merely reflect back its most flattering aspects. Through honest engagement with impure reality, we can perceive and also confront our deepest failings.
James Baldwin famously argued that “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Axiomatically, a history of racism that is not preserved cannot be faced. The people and institutions who attempt to wash away all past ugliness are condescending to audiences, and the audiences who accept these erasures are self-infantilizing. In the most extreme instance, we all grasp why Holocaust denialism, what the French call négationnisme, is morally reprehensible. Society is duty-bound to remember certain ideas and experiences, attitudes and perversions. Such negationism is obviously insidious because it ignores hatred in order to preserve it. But what we might call “positive negationism” is nearly as disturbing. We cannot accurately gauge how far we’ve progressed as a culture since 1845 or 1971, or even the beginning of the 21st century, when epithets against minorities disappeared from common utterance, without an honest record of that cultural progress.
For that reason, in moments of cynicism I wonder if this is the actual motivation behind all of the catastrophizing and revisionism. There is a strange comfort in believing that the world does not change and that the struggle against racism and other forms of oppression is never-ending. The depravity of previous eras is wiped away and, with nothing to compare it to, we proceed to believe that our contemporary traumas are equally significant.
William Friedkin, the director of The French Connection, was certainly aware that he had cast Gene Hackman to portray an unsavory character from “grungy, pre-gentrification New York City,” as NBC described the era in a 2021 article. Friedkin told NBC that rewatching the film on its 50th anniversary had transported him back to that challenging moment. “I lived for a long time in New York,” he said. “About six months before I made the film, I rode around with the two cops [who inspired it], one in Bedford-Stuyvesant and the other in Harlem. It was devastating … The film reminds me of the different nature of New York back then. Nothing about the city was embellished in the film.”
In a documentary on the making of the project, Roy Scheider recalled that a Black audience in Harlem had expressed satisfaction when Hackman uttered the now-censored dialogue on the big screen. Finally, a reality they knew to exist was being acknowledged, a bittersweet confirmation of a painful experience. Today, the patronizing assumption we make to our detriment is that they wouldn’t be able to handle it.