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Spike Lee and the Sympathetic Racist - DAN FLORY

Know thyself. Inscription on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi!

In his recent book White, Richard Dyer argues that racial whiteness has operated in Western film and photography as an idealized standard against which other races have been judged. Making his case inductively using instruction manuals, historical theories of race, and tradi- tional lighting and make-up practices, as well as the dominant ideals for human beauty uti- lized in developing film stocks and camera equipment over the last 150 years and more, Dyer maintains that Western visual culture has presented whites as the norm for what it is to be “just human” or “just people,” whereas other human beings have been presented as raced, as different from the norm.? This manner of depicting whiteness has invested the category itself with the power to represent the commonality of humanity. Furthermore, Dyer argues that this historical function of whiteness’s normativity continues to be pro- foundly influential in current practices and instruction.*

Dyer’s argument is in accord with what phi- losophers such as Charles W. Mills and Lewis R. Gordon have advanced in broader theoretical terms regarding the operation of whiteness as a norm against which nonwhites—and particu- larly blacks—have been negatively judged.* Like Dyer, Mills and Gordon argue that pre- sumptions of whiteness institutionalize racial beliefs at the level of background assumptions that most would not even think to examine. Based on this claim, these philosophers reason that whiteness functions not only as a social norm, but also at the epistemological level as a form of learned ignorance that may only with

considerable effort be brought forward for explicit critical inspection?

Similarly, many of Spike Lee’s films place into question presumptions about the normativ- ity of whiteness. A crucial aim in his ongoing cinematic oeuvre has been to make the experi- ence of racism understandable to white audi- ence members who “cross-over” and view his films. Because seeing matters of race from a nonwhite perspective is typically a standpoint unfamiliar to white viewers, Lee has sought to make more accessible such an outlook through the construction and use of specific character types. One way he achieves this goal is by offering depictions of characters who function as what I will call “sympathetic racists”: charac- ters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts. By self-consciously pre- senting white viewers with the fact that they may form positive allegiances with characters whose racist bigotry is revealed as the story unfolds, Lee provokes his viewers to consider a far more complex view of what it means to think of one’s self as “white” and how that may affect one’s overall sense of humanity.

Lee thus probes white audiences’ investment in what might be called their “racial alle- giances,” a dimension of film narrative pertain- ing to the manner in which audiences become morally allied to characters through categories and presumptions about race.° Foregrounding racial allegiances allows him to depict the way in which ideas of race may affect characters’ and audience members’ behavior at much deeper levels cognitively, emotionally, and morally than many of them realize. By offering a critical perspective on their investment in race, Lee issues his viewers a philosophical

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challenge, both within the context of their narra- tive understanding and their lives generally. In focusing audience attention on a character toward whom they feel favorably while also revealing that character’s racism, Lee constructs a film that philosophizes by developing a con- ception of what it means to be racist that funda- mentally challenges white viewers to inspect their own presumptions about how they see themselves and others.

Lee depicts sympathetic racist characters so that viewers may initially forge positive alle- giances with them in spite of those characters’ anti-black beliefs and actions, which in earlier stages of the narrative seem trivial, benign, unimportant, or may even go unnoticed. He then alienates viewers from such characters by revealing the harmfulness of these typically white beliefs and actions. Through this tech- nique, Lee contests the presumed human com- monality attached to being white by providing viewers with an opportunity to see their concep- tions of whiteness analytically. By introducing a critical distance between viewers and what it means to be white, Lee makes a Brechtian move with respect to race. As Douglas Kellner points out, he “dramatizes the necessity of making moral and political choices” by forcing his viewer “to come to grips” with certain crucial issues and “adopt a critical approach” to the emotions and cognitions involved.’ The oppot- tunity offered to white viewers who cross-over to see Lee’s films is that of experiencing what they have been culturally trained to take as typi- cal or normative—being white—and see it depicted from a different perspective, namely, that of being black in America, which in turn removes white viewers from their own experi- ence and provides a detailed access to that of others. Exploiting this kind of anti-egoist strat- egy regarding fiction’s capacities to give audi- ences access to the perspectives of others is something that philosophers such as Kendall Walton, Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, Alex Neill, and others have long recognized.® It is just this strategy that Lee takes advantage of in his films.

Given this characterization of Lee’s goals, I would argue that we should recognize the opportunity he offers white viewers as a chance to imagine whiteness “from the outside”—see it acentrally and sympathetically, as opposed to

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

imagining it centrally and empathetically. Both kinds of responses are modes of imaginative engagement; sympathy, however, is generally a more distanced attitude in which we imagine that such-and-such were the case, whereas empathy calls for something closer to imagining from one’s own situation.” By encouraging viewer response to be more sympathetic than empathetic, Lee promotes a mode of detached critical reflection that is not merely Brechtian, but philosophical, for it involves reflectively considering presuppositions of the self and humanity that are among the most fundamental in contemporary conceptions of personal iden- tity, namely, those regarding race.'* In this sense, Lee challenges his white viewers to know themselves along the lines of the Delphic inscription made famous by Socrates.

Lee’s crucial insight here regarding his use of sympathetic racist characters is that, analogous to white viewers’ generally favorable “internal” predisposition to white characters, such viewers also have trouble imagining what it is like to be African American “from the inside’”—engag- ing black points of view empathetically— because they often do not understand black experience from a detailed or intimate perspec- tive. It is frequently too far from their own experience of the world, too foreign to what they are able to envision as ways in which human life might proceed. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill have argued that this limitation in imagining other life possibilities may inter- fere with whites knowing the moral thing to do because they may be easily deceived by their own social advantages into thinking that such accrue to all, and thus will be unable to perceive many cases of racial injustice. Hill and Boxill note that such a cognitive insensitivity may affect even well-meaning sincere individuals who wish for nothing more than to act morally in situations where questions of racial injustice might arise, a phenomenon that Janine Jones refers to as “the impairment of empathy in goodwill whites.”!!

To counteract such an imaginative limitation in film viewing, Lee offers depictions that invite a deeper imagining with respect to black- ness. Not only does he provide numerous detailed representations of African-American characters in his films, but he also offers sym- pathetic racist character types who provide a

conception of how it might be possible for a white person to act favorably toward blacks but still be racist toward them. In this sense, Lee constructs the sympathetic racist character type as an “alloy” of morally good and bad charac- teristics, in the terminology developed by film theorist Murray Smith in Engaging Characters and elsewhere.'!? As Smith notes, the moral complexity of such characters can force us “to question certain habits of moral judgment,” which is precisely what Lee achieves in many of his films.'?

What Spike Lee offers, then, is a more acen- tral access (that is, detached access “from the outside”) to white characters so that white view- ers may look at these characters more critically. This type of access might be thought of as the first step in giving whites a sort of “double con- sciousness” regarding their own race. If W. E. B. Du Bois was correct in observing that African Americans possess a sense of “‘twoness” regard- ing themselves racially in American society, then the “single consciousness” of whites would make them particularly susceptible to narrative allegiances based on whiteness and resistant to seeing white characters from other perspec- tives.'* The presupposition of white racial experience in much film narrative, then, contin- gently predisposes viewers, especially white viewers, to understanding characters from a racialized point of view. Thus, counteracting this phenomenon and creating an incipient white double consciousness might be conceived as another way to think of Spike Lee’s overall aim with regard to his white viewers. As Linda Martin Alcoff has explained, such a perspective would involve a critical sense that white iden- tity possessed a clear stake in racialized social structures and inequalities as well as some sense of responsibility for helping rectify these ineq- uities.!° In this sense, the technique of self-con- sciously depicting sympathetic racists throws into question white racial allegiances, for the self-conscious use of this character type pro- vokes in white viewers a philosophical exam- ination of why one might feel favorably toward such characters, in spite of their racist beliefs and actions.

Lee also encourages his viewers to reflect on how whiteness possesses specific characteris- tics that make white experience different from nonwhite experience, and vice versa. African-

American experience, for example, is consti- tuted by specificities that involve a history and legacy of racialized slavery, as well as the ongoing “scientific” research project that has time and again ranked blacks at the bottom of what was claimed to be an empirically verified racial hierarchy, and that frequently served as grounds for arguing that blacks possess lesser capacities to be moral, intelligent, and law-abid- ing. African Americans have been subject to the burden of representation established across dec- ades (one could also now say centuries) by ster- eotypes that arose out of blackface minstrelsy as well as a history of having been subject to lynching on the basis of one’s skin color.!® These features need to be kept in focus when thinking about and assessing the actions, beliefs, and emotions of black American char- acters in many films, as it is not unusual for blacks to have the capacity to imagine that whites who are sympathetic toward them might also harbor racist beliefs or act in racist ways. History provides many examples of African Americans having to deal with such individuals, among them Abraham Lincoln.!? Thus it would not be difficult to transfer this cognitive capa- city over to understanding film narratives. On the other hand, neither this history nor its related imaginative capacities are generally shared by whites. Lee’s self-conscious use of sympathetic racist character types, then, aims to assist whites in acquiring the rudiments of these imaginative competencies.

Spike Lee is not the only filmmaker to employ the narrative technique of constructing sympathetic racist characters, but his work seems to be the locus classicus for such figures in the new “black film wave.”!® From Do the Right Thing (1989) to Clockers (1995) and Summer of Sam (1999), Lee’s films have self- consciously foregrounded allegiances with sympathetic racists or similar morally complex “good-bad characters” for the inspection and contemplation of his audiences.'? In this fashion he has sought to make white viewers more criti- cally aware of anti-black racism and fear of dif- ference. I should add here that I do not believe that Lee and other filmmakers necessarily devised these narrative techniques with exactly the theoretical goals I describe or by using the philosophical considerations I outline in this essay. Rather, while I assume that there is some

overlap between their goals and the ones I describe, filmmakers use these techniques because they work well in depicting certain characters and narrative situations. In contrast, what I provide here is a theoretical explanation and clarification of what these techniques are, how they work cognitively, and why they achieve the effects that they do.

Even as Spike Lee offers his white viewers an opportunity to contemplate their racial alle- giances, it is important to note that one problem associated with the depiction of sympathetic racist characters is that their critical use may not always be evident to viewers. Some audience members may not detect such narrative figures as racist; others will. What I offer next is a detailed analysis that makes clear what Lee seeks to accomplish by presenting this character type as well as an explanation of the fact that some viewers are unable to apprehend it as racist.

I. WHO—AND WHAT—IS SAL?

In an otherwise astute examination of auteur theory, Berys Gaut argues that the character of the Italian-American pizzeria owner, Sal (Danny Aiello), in Do the Right Thing is not a racist figure (p. 166).7° Aiello’s performance, Gaut asserts, overcomes Lee’s explicit directo- rial intention of revealing racist beliefs in a character who is for many viewers the film’s richest, most complex, and sympathetic narra- tive figure.”! Despite Lee’s clearly stated aim to portray this character as a racist, Aiello alleg- edly trumps that aim through his rendition of Sal.?? Gaut sees this conflict between director and actor as an “artistically fruitful disagree- ment” that contributes to “the film’s richness and complexity” (p. 166), in spite of Sal’s “complicity in a racial tragedy culminating in a horrifying murder” (p. 165). Gaut quotes film scholar Thomas Doherty to support his point, noting that, “‘on the screen if not in the screen- play [Aiello’s] portrayal wins the argument’” by depicting Sal’s character as someone who is not racist.”

Other viewers, however, have regarded Sal’s character differently. Film scholar Ed Guerrero argues that despite Sal’s humanity and reasona- bleness through most of the film, when con-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

fronted with Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin’ Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) demands at the end of a long, hot day, “Sal’s good-natured paternal persona quickly cracks and out comes a screed of racist invective about ‘jungle music,’ accompanied by egregious racial profanities, the likes of ‘black cocksucker,’ ‘nigger mother- fucker,’ and so on.”** Guerrero’s point is that by using these terms nonironically and ascrip- tively with respect to black characters in the narrative, Sal reveals himself as a racist. Simi- larly, African-American studies scholar Clyde Taylor notes that it is Sal who explicitly racial- izes this confrontation by insulting his adversar- ies’ choice of melodic accompaniment with the angry exclamation: “Turn that jungle music off! We ain’t in Africa!”” From this point on, racial epithets explode from Sal’s mouth.

Unlike these critics, however, many white viewers tend not to notice or acknowledge this dimension of Sal’s character. Instead, like Gaut and Doherty, these audience members often see him as a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, but not as someone who is a racist.” This form of explanation also seems to have been actor Danny Aiello’s own understanding of Sal. In St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing”, Aiello remarks during an early read through of the script that “I thought [Sal is] not a racist—he’s a nice guy; he sees people as equal.” In a later discussion of his character, Aiello further explains: “The word [‘nigger’] is distasteful to him.” Finally, after acting out Sal’s explosion of rage that sparks Raheem’s attack and brings down the New York City Police Department’s fatal interven- tion, Aiello summarizes: “Is he [Sal] a racist? I don’t think so. But he’s heard those words so fucking often, he reached down... If it was me and I said it—I’m capable of saying those words; I’m capable-——And I have said them, but I’m not a racist.” Aiello thus consistently believed, in developing and acting out his char- acter during the production of the film, that Sal was not a racist, but rather a fair and equal- minded character who in this one case made a mistake and did something that was racist. In his anger and fatigue, he “reached down” into himself and found the most insulting words he could to throw at those who made him angry and thus ended up acting like a racist, even

though he himself was not one. This under- standing of Sal would thus seem to be a com- mon strategy for white viewers to use in explaining the character.

Such a conflict in viewers’ understanding of Sal presents an interpretational dilemma, which, I argue, the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to resolve. Accordingly, the explanation for why many white viewers— and Aiello himself—resist seeing Sal as a racist might be formulated in the following way. A white audience member’s understanding of a white character’s actions often accrues from a firm but implicit grasp of white racial experience, which presupposes the many ways in which the long histories of world white supremacy, eco- nomic, social, and cultural advantage, and being at the top of what was supposedly a scientifically proven racial hierarchy, underlay and remain influential in white people’s lives. After all, the circumstances that resulted from hundreds of years of pursuing the goals of presumed Euro- pean superiority—namely, global domination by whites in economic, cultural, social, religious, intellectual, national, governmental, and various other ways—remain structurally in place.?’ Such dimensions of white experience are part of the “co-text,” what Smith refers to as the internal system of “values, beliefs, and so forth that form the backdrop to the events of the narrative,” for individuals raised in white-dominated cultures regardless of their race.78 As dimensions of white experience in particular, they operate as implicit, nonconscious presumptions and expectations that form the background for viewing narrative fiction films. For white viewers, this co-text is part of what Smith calls their “automatized” or ““teferentially transparent belief-schemata, which here I take to form a crucially important and racially inflected ground for understanding and empathizing with white characters.’ This system of beliefs, values, emotional responses, and so on amounts to a set of readily available, albeit largely unconscious, cultural assumptions concerning what it is to be white that have been implicitly built into much Western visual media like film.

Because white viewers are rarely called on to imagine their whiteness from the outside, they tend to have difficulty looking at it critically. This circumstance of rarely having their back- ground beliefs put to the test means that many

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white viewers find it hard to question or give up their racial allegiances, even to characters like Sal. In fact, they resist not empathizing with him and seeing him from a nonwhite perspec- tive. Unlike nonwhite viewers, who, often out of necessity, develop a critical sense of race or double consciousness merely to function and survive in cultures like America’s, most white viewers lack the cognitive tools that would allow them to recognize and question the typi- cally presumed cinematic viewpoint of white- ness. Their life experience as well as their viewing experience are such that they ordinarily have neither opportunity nor need to develop such forms of cognition. Thus, when confronted with narratives that call for them to utilize such cognitive forms or to incorporate new information concerning them, they may react in confused or myopic ways. They resist the possibility of race being an issue and overlook crucial pieces of information that would require them to revise their typical ways of thinking about race because their previous experience has prepared them cognitively neither for the possibility of changing their standard ways of thinking nor for properly incorporating such information.

Clearly, it is not that such audience members are logically incapable of doing so, but rather that given their strongly ingrained and rein- forced “initial schema” for conceptualizing race, there is little or no cognitive space for per- ceiving certain crucial details offered by Lee’s narrative. Were this flaw pointed out and explained to them, no doubt many audience members would modify their viewing stance toward race and seek to properly absorb the crit- ical points advanced. From a cognitive perspec- tive, this epistemological limitation should not be particularly surprising; as E. H. Gombrich noted decades ago, sometimes when our initial belief schemata for art works “have no provi- sions for certain kinds of information... it is just too bad for the information.”?° We simply lack the requisite tools for absorbing it, although with some conceptual assistance we could make the necessary changes.

Because many whites may easily live lives oblivious to how matters of race have had and continue to have an impact on their lives, it is quite possible for them to wholeheartedly embrace the belief that race is no longer a major

factor in anyone’s existence. This de-racialized outlook is one version of the cognitive insensi- tivity stressed in the work of Hill, Boxill, Jones, Mills, Gordon, and others.*! As they point out, absent from such an outlook is a sense that race could be of any major importance in human life experience. Those who believe otherwise, by contrast, appear to be paranoid, morbidly focused on the past, or otherwise psychologi- cally impaired.

When watching films, then, many white viewers may strongly resist the invitation to reconsider their racial allegiances because, from their perspective, such a reconsideration does not make sense. It flouts a system of beliefs, values, and emotional responses presupposed by their everyday lives as well as their typical film viewing and would require a fundamental upheaval in their overall belief-schemata if those elements needed to be substantially revised or abandoned. Such an invitation asks them to consider as a problem something that they believe to have been resolved long ago. To accommodate a character like Sal and make the least disruptive changes in their system of belief—which unconsciously presupposes aspects of white advantage and power—trather than seeing Sal as a sympathetic racist charac- ter, they view him as an empathetic and morally good character. The hateful, bigoted dimensions of his racist beliefs and actions drop out; these aspects of his character are seen as not really racist. Perhaps for some viewers, these matters are explained away as an accurate reflection on “how things are” with respect to nonwhites and are therefore not thought to be racist because they are thought to be true, alluding back to explicit racial hierarchies of times gone by. More frequently, however, such viewers explain away Sal’s racist actions at the end of the film as not truly representative of his char- acter. Instead, his actions are seen as an aberra- tion, an exception to his overall good character. Many white viewers thus empathize with Sal and do not understand him as a “good-bad” moral alloy, but simply as a morally good char- acter who is trying to do the right thing—an “amalgam,” in Smith’s terminology.** He becomes a good person who does a bad thing, or a rational person defeated by an irrational world, as some reviewers described him, a char- acter who is not racist but through a bad moral

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

choice toward the end of the narrative is unfortunately complicit in a racial tragedy that culminates in a horrifying murder? Such explanations of the character fit better into their existing schemata for viewing racial matters on film as well as in life than do alternative expla- nations, such as that Sal is a sympathetic racist.

A major task facing viewers of Do the Right Thing is that of constructing Sal such that his actions, beliefs, and characteristics fit together coherently.*+ However, white racial allegiances can distort this process in such a way that Sal’s racism may seem peripheral or temporary rather than central and ongoing. An ignorance of the fundamental role race plays in currently exist- ing versions of human _ identity—especially white identity, as explained by the philosophers noted above—may prevent viewers from seeing racism’s centrality to Sal’s character. Again, the monocular nature of white racial consciousness may well prevent viewers from constructing Sal’s character in a way that coherently assem- bles his actions, beliefs, and primary character- istics.

A careful examination of the film, however, indicates that such an approach would be to misunderstand Sal as the narrative presents him. A variety of cues provide ample support for the idea that the film directly addresses the matter of anti-black racism at the core of Sal’s charac- ter and militates against the interpretation that Sal is merely the victim of a bad moral choice. In closely watching the scene depicting the con- frontation between him, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out, for example, audiences may detect Lee sig- naling to the audience that the issue of racism will be explicitly raised. As Buggin’ Out and his associates stand in the doorway of Sal’s, one hears on the soundtrack Raheem’s boom box playing once again Public Enemy’s song “Fight the Power.” Specifically, the lines sung by Chuck D. blast forth, observing that “Elvis was a hero to most but he never meant shit to me... a straight-out racist sucker; it’s simple and plain.” The function of the music in referring to Elvis Presley, who appropriated from black culture the music, clothes, and movements that origi- nally made him famous, is to foreshadow what will be presented as the scene unfolds—namely, that issues of race that normally remain hidden will be brought to the surface and scrutinized. In other words, the music operates as a textual

as well as a narrative prompt employed by Lee to encourage viewers to imagine that the sequence to follow will address anti-black rac- ism.*° Moreover, during the sequence itself Sal’s insults to blacks are underscored by other characters repeating them indignantly and resentfully. Sal’s initial racializing of the incid- ent through the use of the terms “jungle music” and “Africa” to denigrate Raheem’s choice of acoustic accompaniment is explicitly noted by Buggin’ Out, who argues that such terms are irrelevant regarding what pictures should hang on the wall of Sal’s Famous Pizzeria. “Why it got to be about jungle music? Why it got to be about Africa? It’s about them fucking pictures!” Buggin’ Out doggedly protests, refusing to let Sal get off the subject. Similarly, Sal’s use of the term ‘nigger’ is repeated indignantly and resentfully by the group of teenagers waiting for one last slice before the pizzeria closes. Lastly, after Sal has smashed Raheem’s boom box, he looks its erstwhile owner in the eye and unapologetically declares, “I just killed your fucking radio.” By explicitly stating that he has destroyed the source of the “jungle music,” the origin of the unwanted “African” melodic pres- ence, as well as Raheem’s pride, joy, and sense of identity, Sal underlines his own violently imposed and racially inflected dominance.

Perhaps most damning of all, however, is Sal’s immediate reaction to Raheem’s death. With the eyes of the entire community looking to him for some sort of appropriate response, Sal can think of nothing better to say than the tired old saw, “You do what you gotta do,” as if he had just stepped out of some John Wayne movie, rather than offering any hint of an apol- ogy or regret for his complicity in the events that led to Raheem’s death. Sal’s response self- servingly portrays his violent destruction of Raheem’s boom box as justified, as the best and most appropriate reaction to the situation, given the circumstances. His listeners in front of the pizzeria shout him down in anger and resent- ment at the outrageousness of such a stance. Getting Raheem to turn down his boom box did not require Sal to destroy it, then rub his tri- umph in with a humiliating remark. Plus, in no way does Sal’s alleged justification of his actions speak to the events that ensued, specifi- cally, Raheem’s murder at the hands of the police.

As much as any other factor, Sal’s breath- taking callousness at this point of the narrative in seeking to exonerate himself and unfairly justify his actions as appropriate brings on the riot that follows. His moral insensitivity is at least threefold. First, Sal lacks an understanding of the racial issues involved in his own response to the confrontation between himself, Raheem, and Buggin’ Out. Second, he does not grasp the racial dimension of Raheem’s death by means of the famous “choke hold” that urban police forces long argued affected African Americans more lethally than whites. Third, his overall lack of compassion over Raheem’s death sparks the neighborhood’s revulsion, which surprises him to such an extent that he has no further response except to exclaim, “What'd I do?” and yell for the crowd not to destroy his business. In this way the narrative shows that Sal values his property over Raheem’s life. All these factors mix and combust to the point that community members lose control and riot, burning and gut- ting the pizzeria in an angry riposte to Sal’s racial and moral callousness.*’

Spike Lee foreshadows Sal’s subtly racist character earlier in the narrative as well. When describing to his openly racist son Pino (John Turturro) why they cannot move their business from the African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant to their own Italian-Ameri- can neighborhood of Bensonhurst, Sal refers to the community’s residents as “these people,” thereby using language that distances himself from them, that “others” them. Earlier still in the narrative, when Buggin’ Out first questions the absence of African Americans on the “Wall of Fame” in Sal’s restaurant (“Hey Sal, how come you got no brothers up on the Wall here?”) and suggests that Sal put up pictures of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, or even Michael Jordan because African Americans are the mainstay of the business, Sal ridicules the black vernacular use of the term “brother,” scorning it so maliciously that even his mild-mannered, passive son Vito (Richard Edson) tells him, “Take it easy, Pop.” A moment later Sal threat- ens Buggin’ Out with the same baseball bat that he eventually uses to destroy Raheem’s radio. We should note that, particularly during the late 1980s in New York City, baseball bats were symbolic of white on black violence due to their use in a number of racist incidents involving

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whites beating blacks for being in the wrong neighborhood, being there at the wrong time, dating the wrong (that is white) girl, and so on28

After Sal commands the expulsion of Bug- gin’ Out from the pizzeria for suggesting that the Wall of Fame might display famous people of color, Sal’s delivery person Mookie (Spike Lee) defends Buggin’ Out’s freedom of expres- sion by declaring: “People are free to do what- ever the hell they want to do.” To this very typical American declaration of freedom, Sal replies, “What ‘free’? What the hell are you talking about, ‘free’? ‘Free’? There is no ‘free’ here. What—I’m the boss. No freedom. I’m the boss.” For Sal, the application of freedom has limited scope. Although he couches his response in the terms of a businessman setting the rules for frequenting his establishment, because of other factors—primarily, the racial one that Sal and his sons are virtually the only whites consistently in the neighborhood and his customers are almost exclusively nonwhites—it amounts to saying that in his establishment only white Americans like himself may exercise freedom of expression, not his African-Ameri- can patrons. They, in contrast, must abide by his (the white man’s) rules, dictates, and desires. For African Americans then, there is no free- dom inside the confines of Sal’s Famous Pizze- ria. Sal is the boss. No freedom. As Guerrero notes, “Sal is the congenial and sometimes con- tentious, but always paternal, head of what amounts to a pizza plantation, a colonial outpost in native territory.”°?

Given these redundant narrative cues, I would argue that utilizing the concepts of racial allegiance and the sympathetic racist help to make better sense of the character Sal in Do the Right Thing than other possible interpretational strategies because such an analysis coheres more completely with what the film actually presents, even if it does not cohere with typical white presumptions regarding race. Seeing Sal as a good-bad character, an alloy who possesses both positive moral traits as well as negative ones, synthesizes his character much more con- sistently and comprehensively than competing possibilities. This narrative figure coheres better if one attributes to him a racist character, even if he is also sympathetic in other ways, than if one seeks to explain away his actions late in the nar-

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

rative as that of a morally good character who makes a bad decision that leads him to do racist and immoral things, even though he himself is not racist.

Many white viewers tend to miss or overlook the details of Sal’s anti-black racism because these particulars do not easily fit into their pre- conceptions of where their moral allegiances should lie. They tend to more readily empathize with white characters like Sal than black char- acters like, say, Mookie or Raheem, who, in spite of his intimidating character and bullying ways, was nevertheless murdered by the police and therefore deserves something more than to be forgotten or valued as less important than the destruction of Sal’s business, which is what many white viewers did.*°

Some empathy for Sal, of course, must be attributed to nonracial factors. To present a nuanced sympathetic racist character for whom viewers might initially establish a solid favorable outlook, Lee makes him narratively central and treats him compassionately much of the time. This strategy carries with it a cer- tain risk—namely, that viewers will find it dif- ficult to judge him negatively as a racist because they know him well and have become firmly attached to his character. White viewers in particular might be inclined to overlook or excuse the depth of Sal’s wrongdoing because their attachment to the character—based on both racial and nonracial elements of the narra- tive—is too powerful. On the other hand, it should be noted that Lee counterbalances this possibility by making the film an ensemble piece. The story focuses not just on Sal, but on the whole neighborhood, including numerous African-American characters who receive significant screen time, such as Mookie, Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), and Mother Sister (Ruby Dee). I would argue that this narrative counter- balancing aims to keep viewers from investing themselves too heavily in Sal by presenting other, nonwhite characters with whom viewers might also ally themselves. Of course, these other character allegiances may be partly or even wholly blocked by racial factors as well, but one can see that from the viewpoint of narrative construction, these figures operate to spread out audience allegiance rather than investing it in just one central character such as Sal.

From the point of view of epistemology, white viewers may resist developing a critical distance from Sal and instead find ways to explain his actions that downplay or eliminate the matter of racism as constituent of his character. Rather than questioning their own deep-seated habits of judgment and imagining whiteness from the outside, as the narrative encourages them to do, they find fault in the narrative’s inconsistency with their current, racially influenced beliefs and expectations. In this sense, the pull of empathy for Sal, the pull of white racial allegiance, is too strong for many white viewers to overcome and begin reexamining their habits of moral judgment. For these viewers, it seems less disruptive cogni- tively and emotionally to ignore or leave aside certain uncomfortable details in the narrative than to substantially change their belief- schemata—the narrative’s co-text—to accom- modate those details. Rather than working to develop a rudimentary white racial double con- sciousness, many viewers choose to embrace their already existing white single conscious- ness and use it as best they can to understand the film’s narrative, even if that white-privilege- influenced perspective requires them to ignore certain clearly presented details and can only poorly explain others. If Gombrich has accu- rately identified our typical use of “initial sche- mata” in understanding visual artworks, these narrative details would be precisely the ones that white viewers would tend to overlook in any case, given the cognitive background from which they work. Whites typically lack sensitiv- ity to the importance of these features because they tend not to see race as cognitively import- ant in the sorts of situations presented by the film. Thus Do the Right Thing tends to come up short when measured by means of such an inter- pretive stance.

This problem of cognitive insensitivity may be further clarified by means of Janine Jones’s analysis of empathetic impairment in goodwill whites. Jones argues that if whites—even whites of moral goodwill and in possession of the desire not to be racist—are unable to detect the cognitive importance of race in situations where anti-black racism impinges on African Americans in day-to-day interactions with whites (such as those depicted in Do the Right Thing), then they will also be impaired and

perhaps even unable to analogize from their own circumstances to those of African Ameri- cans. The construction of analogy between white and black experience, which would be critical to any sort of successful empathizing here, breaks down because certain crucial ele- ments of the former experience are seen as strongly disanalogous to the latter. White view- ers may empathize incorrectly or even not at all with black characters, and therefore misunder- stand the situations and outlooks of African- American characters. Empathy, Jones points out, requires being able to produce an accurate system of mapping between another person’s life and some aspect of our own. Empathic understanding thus begins with an appreciation of the other person’s situation.*! If that situation is not well appreciated or understood, then empathy will go awry or fail to occur.

This failure of “mental simulation” also makes clear why many whites fail to see Sal from what is for them the acentral, African- American perspective offered by Spike Lee’s film.” They empathize with Sal because they fail to grasp the importance of certain details that the narrative presents to them—namely, the way his actions and statements build up to a kind of subtle, mostly nonconscious racism that is a part of his character, as opposed to being attributable to a single bad decision or two. They empathize with him, even though Lee indicates time and again through narrative cues that they should ultimately want to distance and qualify their attitude toward Sal. The details of Sal’s character are meant to operate cumula- tively as signals to mitigate ultimate viewer empathy for him, even if the narrative to some extent courted that imaginative stance toward him earlier. Lee urges viewers to distance them- selves from Sal by the film’s end and look at his character critically, instead of embracing him as someone close to their hearts. Again, nonwhite viewers, who typically possess a more finely tuned racial awareness, tend to see this sugges- tion much more clearly, but it is by no means beyond the cognitive capacities of whites to develop this sharper racial awareness. It is just that socially and culturally, such an awareness is not encouraged in white viewers. Rather, as Dyer argues, Western visual media tend to reinforce presumptions of whiteness as the norm, even to the extent that racial whiteness

functions as the assumed standpoint from which to perceive popular film narrative. The typical viewer is presumed to be white or to at least have a full working grasp of what it is to engage films from a white perspective.

A further way to characterize this problem of audience asymmetry with respect to responses involving race is by comparing it to an example analyzed at length by Jones. She builds much of her case around the divergent ways in which many whites viewed the videotapes of the Rod- ney King beating on the one hand, and the attack on Reginald Denny on the other. Infa- mously, King, an African American, was stopped in 1991 for a traffic violation by the LAPD and was severely beaten by several police officers using riot batons. Denny, a white truck driver, was pulled from his rig by several black youths who used bricks and other objects to beat him during the riots that followed more than a year later in the wake of those same police officers being found not guilty of assault- ing King. Both men were hospitalized for extended periods and suffer from permanent disabilities as a result of their injuries. Both incidents were also secretly videotaped. What Jones noted was that in viewing the videotapes of these incidents, whites did not react in the same way toward both individuals, in spite of the similarity of their situations. As one white professor of law who viewed the tapes put it: “‘For King I felt sympathy; for Denny, empathy.’”44

I would argue that the difference in response to the two cases here may be readily explained as one of racial allegiance. White viewers of the videotapes felt closer to the situation, possibil- ity, and overall experience of Denny than to that of King, even though both tapes depicted brutal beatings of helpless individuals by multiple attackers using clubs, bricks, and other blunt instruments. Constructing an appropriate expe- riential analog in the case of Denny came much more easily for most white viewers due to a shared experience of whiteness, an analog not extended in the case of King. White viewers’ racial commonality permitted a much more immediate response—empathy for Denny—as opposed to the more detached attitude of sym- pathy for King.

Like the allegiance that many white viewers felt while watching the videotape of Denny’s

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

beating, responses to Sal often seem to be based more on racial allegiance than on close attention to narrative details. Thus these audience mem- bers are more inclined to empathize with Sal than to distance themselves from his character. They ignore, miss, reject, or downplay the Afri- can-American perspective offered by Lee’s film in favor of another racially inflected one already embedded in their typical responses to popular film narratives, in spite of ample evidence that this latter perspective fails to fully explain many details presented in the narrative. At the same time, this aspect of the film allows us to see how it aims to trouble the viewer into making a closer examination of background assumptions concerning film viewing, race, and personal identity.

Tl. CRITICAL REFLECTION AND SYMPATHETIC RACISTS

By self-consciously depicting a character who is both sympathetic and racist—and goading his viewers to think about how it might be possible for such a character to be both at the same time—Spike Lee casts a critical eye on the assumptions that underlie white racial alle- giance. In this manner he hopes to move white audience members toward a more complex per- spective on race. I would further argue that through this provocation to have his viewers confront and reevaluate the racial presupposi- tions of their film viewing, Lee summons his audience members to think philosophically about race. By means of Do the Right Thing’s narrative and the character type of the sympa- thetic racist in particular, Lee encourages many of his white viewers to reflect on and devise a new belief schema for understanding race. In ways perhaps not unlike many students in intro- ductory philosophy courses, however, some white viewers resist this invitation because the prospect of replacing their old way of cognizing would call for them to perform too radical an epistemological revision, require too much of a change in their existing belief structures for them to feel comfortable exploring such a pos- sibility. At some level, perhaps they realize that such a re-examination and replacement of unquestioned background presumptions would not only concern their film viewing, but also an understanding of their own identities and

humanity itself, thereby touching them at their core, so to speak.

As philosophers from Frantz Fanon to Mills have argued, our senses of personal identity in Western culture are strongly raced. For whites, however, this dimension of self-understanding is largely invisible and unacknowledged. To compel whites to recognize this invisibility, then, is a daunting and difficult task. Still, it is possible, and in fact many whites have done so, in film viewing as well as in their own senses of identity. But many others have not. Facilitating this possibility, which concerns cinematic as well as existential presuppositions, has guided Lee’s efforts, I would argue, to present and depict a sympathetic racist character like Sal. Through narrative characters like him, Lee encourages white viewers to look critically at their racialized sensibilities and assess what they see.

In this sense, Lee presents his viewers with a philosophical challenge: to evaluate the con- tents of their souls, so to speak, and gauge how those contents influence them to perceive mat- ters of race. This critical self-questioning was one of Socrates’s highest aspirations, as evi- denced in the Apology as well as dialogues with Euthyphro, Meno, Laches, and others. It has also inspired philosophers through the ages to the present day, such as Alexander Nehamas.* Socrates aspired to meet, both in his own case and that of others, the old Delphic injunction used as an epigraph for this essay. More recently, Noél Carroll has argued that Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) stages a debate meant to “afford the opportunity for the general audience to interrogate prevailing cultural views of the nature of human life by setting them forth in competition.” The Welles film is “similar in purpose to many philosophical dia- logues” because it seeks “to animate a debate” about human life and personal identity. In the same spirit, we may justifiably recognize Spike Lee as encouraging viewers to take up that sort of philosophical task regarding race through his construction of character and narrative in Do the Right Thing and other films. One could say, then, that Lee not only induces his white view- ers to do something Brechtian—that is, criti- cally distance themselves from certain characters and narrative situations in order to

consider moral and political choices—but charges them with a properly philosophical task as well. By drawing them into a favorable stance toward Sal only to alienate them from his character by means of the realization that he is also fundamentally a racist, Lee has pro- duced a film that philosophizes, a film that calls on viewers to think philosophically about questions regarding race, identity, and cine- matic viewership. Through this narrative fig- ure, Lee urges viewers to critically reflect on their own senses of self, humanity, and per- sonal identity, which is a hallmark of most if not virtually all persuasive conceptions of phi- losophy.

In addition, Lee’s film offers indications regarding the proper shape that answers to such self-questioning might take. For example, having a fuller sense of the role race has played in the formation of one’s identity as well as one’s overall cognitive perspective is strongly implied as a better epistemological stance to take than one that does not possess these features. For all of Sal’s compassion and patience toward neigh- borhood members like Da Mayor or Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), his lack of racial self- awareness condemns him to incomprehension regarding much of what goes on around or even inside his pizzeria, and this incomprehension contributes significantly to his downfall. The film’s narrative thus suggests that having a greater racial awareness—a “double conscious- ness” about race, particularly for whites— would serve one better than lacking such a capacity. This attempt not only to pose but to shape fundamentally the answers to questions, to provide some sort of positive, in-depth con- tribution to the topic being discussed, is a fur- ther hallmark of many stronger senses of what counts as being philosophical, as this positive requirement implies that the film’s call for crit- ical reflection is solidly philosophical rather than merely social, psychological, or political.*° Some viewers may resist this invitation by means of alternative interpretative strategies but, as I have argued, the cost of that choice is failure to achieve full coherence in grasping characters and narratives like those presented in Do the Right Thing, to say nothing of the costs that such choices exact in one’s life or from the lives of one’s fellow human beings.*”

DAN FLORY

Department of History and Philosophy Montana State University

Bozeman, Montana 59717

USA

INTERNET: dflory @montana.edu

1. Plato, Phaedrus 229e-230a, in Plato: the Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 478. See also W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 183-184.

2. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1-2.

3. See Dyer, White, especially pp. 70-144.

4. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell Uni- versity Press, 1997), especially pp. 53-62, and Lewis R. Gordon, “Critical Reflections on Three Popular Tropes in the Study of Whiteness,” in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially pp. 175-176, 181-182.

5. See, for example, Charles W. Mills, The Racial Con- tract, especially pp. 17-19, 91-109, and Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Phi- losophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 22-26, 38ff. See also Peg O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Social Practices and Moral Theory (Pemn State University Press, 2002), especially pp. 1-59, 128-131.

6. The idea of a racial allegiance was suggested to me by one of my students, Calvin Selvey.

7. Douglas Kellner, “Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics in the Films of Spike Lee,” in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing,” ed. Mark A. Reid (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1997), p. 75, and Bertholt Brecht, Brecht on The- atre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), pp. 23, 101.

8. See Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 34; Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), especially pp. 64-67; Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially pp. 77-79; Alex Neill, “Empathy and (Film) Fiction,” in Post-Theory, ed. David Bordwell and Noél Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 179-180; Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 235-236.

9. For more on the distinction between central and acentral imagining, see Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), especially pp. 36-38; Richard Wollheim, On Art and the Mind (Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 58ff, and The Thread of Life (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 73ff; Noél Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 88-96; Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 76ff.

10. The claim that modern personal identity is intimately linked to race has been argued for by philosophers at least since Frantz Fanon. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White

Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy

Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), pp. 109-140; Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’Connor, Oppression and Responsibility, Mills, The Racial Contract.

11. Thomas E. Hill Jr. and Bernard Boxill, “Kant and Race,” in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 469-470; Janine Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for Afri- can Americans,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 65-86. Mills also notes this problem of empathic impairment; see The Racial Contract, p. 95.

12. Smith, Engaging Characters, pp. 209ff; “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes, or Apparently Perverse Allegiances,” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion, ed. Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith (Johns Hopkins Univer- sity Press, 1999), especially pp. 223ff.

13. Smith, “Gangsters, Cannibals, Aesthetes,” p. 228.

14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969), p. 45.

15. Linda Martin Alcoff, “What Should White People Do?” Hypatia 13 (1998): 24-25.

16. For more on the history and legacy of the racialized existence of blacks, see Mills, The Racial Contract, espe- cially pp. 81-89, 109-120.

17. See Emmanuel C. Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of a Postracial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 27, as well as some of the title cards in D. W. Grif- fith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)! Some in the abolitionist movement might be understood in this way as well; see Against Slavery: An Abolitionist Reader, ed. Mason Low- ance (New York: Penguin, 2000).

18. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Temple University Press, 1993), p. 1.

19. For essays that argue implicitly for the use of such characters in Clockers, Summer of Sam, and director Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992), see my “Black on White: Film Noir and the Epistemology of Race in Recent African American Cinema,” Journal of Social Philosophy 31 (2000): 82-116, especially 92-94, 101-104, and “The Epistemology of Race and Black American Film Noir: Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam as Lynching Parable,” in Film and Knowledge: Essays on the Integration of Images and ideas, ed. Kevin Stoehr (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), pp. 174-190. As Smith notes, the original source for the concept of the “good-bad” character is Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, The Movies: A Psychological Study (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), pp. 20ff.

20. Berys Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 149-174. Page numbers in this paragraph refer to this essay.

21. See, for example, Vincent Canby, “Spike Lee Tack- les Racism in Do the Right Thing,” New York Times, June 30, 1989, sec. C16; “Spike Lee Raises the Movies’ Black Voice,” New York Times, May 28, 1989, p. 14; Joe Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 14-15.

22. See, for example, Spike Lee, with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Fireside, 1989), p. 45, and Marlaine Glicksman, “Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy BBQ,” reprinted in Spike Lee: Interviews, ed. Cynthia Fuchs (University of Mississippi Press, 2002), pp. 18-19. Gaut notes that Lee also makes this point during a read

through of the script with Aiello in director St. Clair Bourne’s documentary Making “Do the Right Thing” (1989); Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166.

23. Gaut, “Film Authorship and Collaboration,” p. 166; see also Thomas Doherty, review of Do the Right Thing, Film Quarterly 43 (1989): 39.

24. Ed Guerrero, Do the Right Thing (London: BFI Pub- lishing, 2001), p. 75.

25. Clyde Taylor, The Mask of Art: Breaking the Aes- thetic Contract—Film and Literature (Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 269.

26. See, for example, Richard Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight,” Time 134 (1989): 62; Murray Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!” New York Review of Books, September 28, 1989, 37; Stanley Kauffmann, “Do the Right Thing,” The New Republic 201 (1989): 25.

27. See Mills, The Racial Contract, especially pp. 140, 91-109; Eze, Achieving Our Humanity.

28. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 194.

29. Ibid.

30. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Hlusion: A Study in the Psy- chology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 73. This point is also noted in Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 121.

31. See Hill and Boxill, “Kant and Race,” pp. 469-470; Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans”; Mills, The Racial Contract, Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man; O’ Connor, Oppres- sion and Responsibility, Amold Farr, “Whiteness Visible: Enlightenment Racism and the Structure of Racialized Con- sciousness,” in What White Looks Like, pp. 143-158.

32. Smith, Engaging Characters, p. 203.

33. See Corliss, “Hot Time in Bed-Stuy Tonight”; Kempton, “The Pizza Is Burning!”

34. For more on the viewer’s need to construct charac- ters in ways that make sense of them as fictional agents, see Smith, Engaging Characters, especially pp. 120ff.

35. See, for example, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 191-192; Ray Pratt, Rhythm and Resistance: Explorations in the Political Uses of Popular Music (New York: Praeger, 1990), pp. 135-139; Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: the Rise of Elvis Presley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994), especially pp. 3-54.

36. I borrow here the idea of a textual prompt from Smith’s “Imagining from the Inside,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, p. 417.

37. It is worth noting that even after the riot, when Mookie (Spike Lee) returns the next morning to receive his week’s pay, Sal remains unapologetic and defensive about his role in Raheem’s death. Although he acknowledges that Raheem is dead (“I was there, remember?”), he blames Raheem’s death entirely on Buggin’ Out (“He’s dead because of his buddy”), rather than seeing himself as being in any way complicit.

38. Baseball bats are negatively charged symbols of anti- black racism due to incidents in the New York City neigh- borhoods of Bensonhurst and Howard Beach in the late 1980s. Young black men in these incidents were either beaten to death or threatened with bats in ways that led to their death. See Lee and Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, pp. 32-33, 46; S. Craig Watkins, Representing:

Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 157, 270, n.43.

39. Guerrero, Do the Right Thing, p. 35.

40. See, for example, David Denby, “He’s Gotta Have It,” New York Magazine, June 26, 1989, 53-54; Klein, “Spiked? Dinkins and Do the Right Thing.”

41. Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 71.

42. I use the term ‘mental simulation’ here with some reservations because, although I think that work by Robert Gordon, Gregory Currie, and others on this concept has greatly increased our knowledge of the workings of the mind in general and empathy in particular—especially with respect to literary fiction and film—I am not yet ready to embrace the claim that when we imagine, empathize, and so on, we run our belief systems “off-line” and operate as if our brains were just like computers, as in Currie’s Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially pp. 141-197. I find these descriptions of how human minds work like computers to be too literal to feel com- fortable endorsing them. For a fuller argument detailing reservations about mental simulation, see Noél Carroll, A Philosophy of Mass Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), especially pp. 342-356.

43. Cited in Jones, “The Impairment of Empathy in Goodwill Whites for African Americans,” p. 75. As she notes, her analysis is based on Joe R. Feagin, Hernan Vera, and Pinar Batur, White Racism, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 117-151, especially pp. 141-142. (It should also be noted that the white professor of law quoted here, David B. Oppenheimer, was sharply critical of his own responses to these images. His position is actually consistent with the one I outline. See his “The Movement from Sympa- thy to Empathy, Through Fear; The Beatings of Rodney King and Reginald Denny Provoke Differing Emotions but Similar Racial Concerns,” The Recorder June 9 (1992): 14.)

44. See Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (University of California Press, 1998), especially pp. 40, 106, 185-188.

45. Noél Carroll, “Interpreting Citizen Kane,” Persist- ence of Vision 7 (1989): 51-61, reprinted in Interpreting the Moving Image (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 163.

46. For discussion of philosophy’s capacities and whether film can mimic them, see Stephen Mulhall, On Film (New York: Routledge, 2002), especially pp. 1-10; Julian Baggini, “Alien Ways of Thinking: Mulhall’s On Film,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n24baggini>; Mul- hall, “Ways of Thinking: A Response to Andersen and Baggini,” Film-Philosophy 7 (2003), available at <http:// www .film-philosophy.com/vol7-2003/n25mulhall>.

47. An early version of this work was presented at the “Narration, Imagination, and Emotion in the Moving Image Media” conference sponsored by the Center for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 24, 2004. I thank audience members there, especially Lester Hunt, Amy Coplan, and Katherine Thomson-Jones, for comments and encouragement. I also thank Susan Kollin, Murray Smith, and Tom Wartenberg for reading and commenting on earlier versions of this essay.

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