4.6 • 639 Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2016
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Author Julia Lee joins Elvis Mitchell to discuss how an American children's television show from the 1920's attempted to transcend racism in her book Our Gang: A Racial History of "The Little Rascals."
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0:00.0 | On To the Point, we try to make sense of the policy debates and the political side shows on the campaign trail. |
0:05.8 | You have this kind of asymmetrical warfare coming from a guy who's great at a soundbite, lousy at an answer. |
0:11.4 | Are you looking for your own billionaire? |
0:13.2 | Nope. No, I don't want my own billionaire. I'm going to raise the vast majority of the money. |
0:17.0 | Race yourself America for what? |
0:19.3 | King Trump. |
0:21.1 | I'm Warren Alney. |
0:22.1 | To the Point has you covered for the 2016 campaign. |
0:25.2 | Find the To the Point podcast on KCRW's iTunes page. |
0:30.1 | From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment. |
0:46.6 | Welcome to the Treatment. |
0:52.7 | Some say it began the O'Don Doctor's novel Ragtime, where he mentions the group of kids that became the Little Rascals. Some say it was |
0:55.6 | the natural reaction to kids being not judged in the same way adults were when it came to race. |
1:01.6 | These are all things that play a part in Julia Lee's terrific book, Our Gang, Racial History, |
1:07.5 | A Little Rascal. She's sitting right across me, hi, Julia. Hi, Elvis. How are you? |
1:11.6 | I'm well. How are you? I'm good. But the fact is that this was such an interesting time, |
1:16.7 | because in terms of racial reaction to children, America was in such flux, wasn't it? |
1:23.5 | Right. I mean, this was a period where you had the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. You had increased racial violence, a series of race riots called Red Summer. And yet at the same time that you have all of this friction among black and white communities, you have these little kids on screen getting along as if there is no such thing as race at all. |
1:44.5 | And also still what D.W. Griffitha called, you know, his terrible mistake, |
1:49.8 | Birth of a Nation, which is still informing the way adults were depicted in film at that time, weren't that? |
1:55.2 | Absolutely. Birth of a Nation had a revival around the time. |
1:58.4 | Our gang first began. This was in the 20s. And a pretty big revival at |
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