Bright Sheng, a music professor from the University of Michigan, has been removed from a teaching post for showing his students the 1965 film version of Othello, with Laurence Olivier as the eponymous Moor.
The Shanghai-born composer, an accomplished conductor and pianist, had been teaching a class on musical adaptations — specifically how Verdi had turned Shakespeare’s text into an opera. He showed a film version that had been nominated for four Academy Awards and eight Oscars. But — and you can guess where this is going, can’t you? — it was a version in which Olivier played Othello in dark makeup.
A student complained. Sheng, obviously upset at having hurt her feelings, issued a lengthy apology. The students, as is now usual, refused to accept it. Sheng, stung by the accusation of racism, had recalled several occasions in which he had cast nonwhite singers, but this only served to drive his inquisitors into paroxysms of self-righteous fury.
“Professor Sheng responded to the events by crafting an inflammatory ‘apology’ letter to the department’s students in which he chose to defend himself by listing all of the BIPOC individuals who he has helped or befriended throughout his career,” read a complaint signed by 40 students and staff. “The letter implies that it is thanks to him that many of them have achieved success in their careers.”
It did no such thing, but naturally, slighted feelings were deemed more important than facts. One of the characteristics of campus wokery is that it leaves no space for apology, forgiveness, or generosity of any kind. One graduate student told the Michigan Daily that stepping down from his post was “the bare minimum” that Sheng should do. The bare minimum? What else was he meant to do? Retire to an uninhabited island in Lake Huron? Commit ritual suicide?
Nothing very remarkable in any of this, you might say. Just another everyday tale of authoritarian political correctness. But it is a telling reminder of how, with unconscious imperialism, the woke expect the entire world to see race relations through American eyes.
When the original 1965 movie came out, it got a far more hostile reception from American critics than British critics — and for the most obvious of reasons: Blackface has peculiarly ugly connotations in the United States. In Britain, it had no such connotations until they were imported from America. In Shakespeare’s time, all actors were white men. They would wear wigs to play Cleopatra, humps to play Richard III, paunches to play Falstaff, and black makeup to play Othello. Well into the 20th century, white actors played Othello in Britain for the same reason that Japanese actors played him in Japan — because there were no other actors. When Olivier’s film was made, black British actors were starting to take to the stage, but not in anything like today’s numbers.
Olivier, playing opposite Maggie Smith as Desdemona and Derek Jacobi as Iago, took over two hours every night to put on his makeup, dying his tongue and the palms of his hands, using drops to accentuate the white of his eyes, lacquering his fingernails. He lowered his voice by an octave. He spent hours practicing his body movements.
The effect on a modern viewer is not so much sinister as cartoonish. Olivier was the greatest stage actor of his age, but he never properly managed the transition to camera. Even in close-up, he is still projecting to an imaginary back row his peculiar idea of how black men walk and talk.
Shakespeare was writing at a time when Muslims were seen, not as menacing foes, but as exotic allies against France and Spain. The relatively positive portrayal of Othello would have been unthinkable in any European production of that era, and Olivier does his best to play Othello as a brave soldier. There is nothing belittling in the performance. It is simply, to modern eyes, cringe-making — like watching your father dance.
Since Olivier’s day, Britain has started to see all racial politics through the prism of the American South, an anomalous subculture even within the U.S. The vocabulary now used by supposed anti-racists in Britain, including “house negro,” “KKK”, and “Uncle Tom,” is not just offensive — it is alien. Yet it is an incontestable fact that young people in Britain are more familiar with Rosa Parks, after whom primary school classrooms are named across the country, than with, say, John Lilburne. Naturally, they see Olivier’s performance through American eyes as a form of offensive minstrelsy.
And now, Chinese-born musicians are expected to do the same.
Is this really progress? Surely the liberal ideal is not one in which Olivier’s film cannot be screened without controversy, but one in which people of all colors can chuckle together over its absurdities. Isn’t it?
