REFORMING THE UNREFORMABLE (from POP-EU)
Sidney Poitier joined comedian Bill Cosby in a trio of films (Let’s Do It Again, Uptown Saturday Night, and A Piece of the Action), in the 1970s that celebrated the everyday working man in Black communities. In the last of the three, the duo portray a pair of high-scoring con artists forced to work at a Chicago community center after their crimes are solved by a lone detective, played by James Earl Jones. The men, Manny Durrell (Poitier) and David Anderson (Cosby) face exposure, imprisonment, and retaliation from a group of mafiosos, if they are unable to bond with and find employment for a group of wayward teens assigned by courts to a local community improvement center. Like The Blackboard Jungle and To Sir With Love, A Piece of the Action labels the teens as angry, unruly, aggressive, and a moral danger to society.
Sarah Thomas, who works directly with the students takes much of her frustration in failing to teach them on one particular student, Barbara Hanley (played by Sheryl Lee Ralph) whom she constantly derides. Hanley eventually defends herself, leveling accusations against Thomas as a sexually-deprived, "poverty pimp" who makes a living off of the weak and socially defective Black people she's charged with helping. Reduced to tears, Thomas leaves the classroom in defeat.
Later, over lunch with Durrell, Thomas alleviates her middle-class guilt and instead blames the school system for the failures of the youth to develop into fit citizens. The parents are not framed at all in the conversation – only the school system and the community center. A child’s first teachers are the parents; the first schoolhouse, the home. Beware, this is not the language of “it takes a village to raise a child,” but a eugenic placement of how best educators can fix the failing Black family or more importantly, keep the progeny of broken and pathological households from negatively impacting the rest of society.
The logic wreaks of the neo-Lamarckian influence on educational environments that held institutions – including community centers – served as instruments in combatting the physical, psychological, and cognitive weaknesses manifested in young people believed to be weak or “at risk.” By withholding judgment on the parents or even the larger community, Ms. Thomas holds fast to the ideals of eugenic reformers, of all races, that while the children of unfit parents may carry the same propensity for degeneracy, it is the school system (and by extension, the community center) that must fix the contaminated germ plasm of youth.
FOR MORE ON A PIECE OF THE ACTION, REGISTER FOR ONE OF OUR POP-EU LECTURES WITH
DR. SHANTELLA SHERMAN & THE ACUMEN GROUP TEAM & PICK UP A COPY OF POPULAR EUGENICS IN TELEVISION & FILM.
Comments