It’s regrettable that so much more is known about the Tuskegee Black laborers who were used as guinea pigs in syphilis experiments than about the Tuskegee Black pilots who fought as heroes during World War II.
But that’s about to change with the release this weekend of the epic movie Red Tails – so named because of the signature red paint the Tuskegee Airmen applied to the tails of their airplanes.
This movie chronicles the way a group of Black fighter pilots overcame prevailing presumptions about their intellectual and physical inferiority to acquit themselves with unparalleled distinction, killing more enemy fighters and losing fewer of their own than any of the all-White fighter groups during the war. Not to mention the racial irony that the fighter planes they shot from the skies were being piloted by members of the Nazi’s purported Aryan master race.
In fact, not since Toussaint L’Ouverture and a band of Haitian slaves defeated Napoleon (1791-1804) had any group of men done more to defy and destroy the myth of white supremacy than the Tuskegee Airmen did during WWII (1943-45). But we’ve come such a long way since then that this myth now has about as much credence as the one which holds that the world is flat.
This is why the appeal of this film has far more to do with the unbridled patriotism and triumphalism it evokes than with the racial segregation and Jim Crow laws that made it so difficult for these men to fight for their country. This, after all, is one of the best movies about aerial combat ever produced, putting Tom Cruise’s Top Gun to shame.
Mind you, it does not whitewash the galling injustice inherent in these black men fighting so heroically for the glory and survival of America in the skies over Germany only to be greeted with unvarnished racism upon their return home. Indeed, they could have been forgiven the nightmare impression that fascistic Germany, not democratic America, had won the war….
This brings me to another irony. Because the only reason Red Tails has made it to the big screen is that a white man fought for 20 years and put up $58 million of his own money to persuade the Whites who control Hollywood that a war movie featuring Blacks is commercially viable. And it speaks volumes that that man is no less a person than the great movie director George Lucas of Star Wars fame.(I wonder what race-baiting, only-Blacks-should-make-movies-about-Blacks director Spike Lee has to say about this….)
But this too is part of the backstory about lingering racism in America that requires no further comment. Instead, I urge you to pay tribute to the Tuskegee Airmen (and destroy this myth about featuring Blacks in movies) by helping to make Red Tails an unqualified blockbuster.
See this movie!