The environmental, or broad cultural racism in the first half of The Birth Of A Nation finds expression in two ways. The first is the general depiction of blacks under slavery as well-treated and happy. It can be argued that some blacks under slavery were well-treated, insofar as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be well-treated, and that some blacks under slavery were happy, insofar as anyone held in involuntary servitude can be said to be happy. But presenting such blacks as the only representatives of slavery in a film with the epic scope of The Birth Of A Nation cannot be seen as merely an act of dramatic selection. All the characters in the film are emblematic of broader social realities, and the view of slavery presented here, as part of the "gracious" Southern social order that will be swept away by the Civil War, has an ideological dimension -- and the ideology is based on a lie. Whether or not slavery was a "necessary evil" or a crime against humanity or on balance a benign institution, it did not even remotely resemble the portrait of it offered up in The Birth Of A Nation.
The second expression of environmental racism is more complex. It lies in Griffith's decision to have all blacks who are presented as individuals in the film played by whites in blackface. In this he was following conventional theatrical practice. We know, from his testimony in a censorship hearing for the film, that he considered the issue before deciding on the blackface solution, but he probably wouldn't have been terribly self-conscious about it, so common was the practice. But its very commonness raises interesting issues.
On one level, the blackface caricature of an African-American by a white actor carries its own critique within it. There is no theatrical deception involved -- the glaringly obvious make-up reveals that the convention is a convention, and one of the things expressed in the convention is that whites have appropriated the image of the black, that whites will control the image of the black. The image must be, therefore, on the blackened face of it, constructed. The convention announces that whites feel empowered to construct, to control, the image of the black, but also admits that the image is inauthentic. It leaves open the possibility that blacks might construct other images of themselves, if they had the power to do so -- and that they might not participate willingly in these particular constructions of their images. There are more questioned raised than answered by the convention of blackface, at least on an unconscious level.
The pathological, psycho-sexual racism of The Birth Of A Nation doesn't emerge until about 16 minutes into the film, with the first appearance of Austin Stoneman's sluttish maid. Previously, Stoneman has been established as a grotesque figure, with a club foot and an ill-fitting wig. Suspicions about him have been aroused by revealing that he spends a lot of time in his library, where his family never visits. He's never shown in his own home -- his sons even march off to war from that home when he is not present. This is Victorian code for the fact that Stoneman is a creep -- at the very least a deeply problematic figure. Devotion to the home was an essential element of male rectitude in Victorian fiction.
With the appearance of Stoneman's maid we learn the dark secret he is hiding -- an illicit sexual relationship with his maid, a mulatto woman. Stoneman is a thinly-veiled stand-in for the great anti-slavery statesman Thaddeus Stevens. Stevens' radical views on Reconstruction can be, and have been, criticized as over-zealous and impractical, but Griffith is suggesting that his polity was the direct result of sexual perversion, the impulse towards unbridled sexual lust in general and miscegenation in particular. The mere fact that his slovenly maid is a mulatto, the product of miscegenation, sets up the association of black enfranchisement, even black aspirations towards dignity, with an undiscriminating, animalistic sexuality. The maid is offended when a visitor to Stevens' library treats her dismissively, as a mere servant -- after he leaves she flings herself to the floor and writhes in anguish, her shoulders immodestly bared, her hands playing over her breasts. Her behavior is not just indecorous -- it's positively bestial.
There is no evidence that Thaddeus Stevens ever had an affair with a mulatto maid, or that he engaged in sexual misconduct of any kind. What we have here is pure, and very bizarre, fantasy, which can only be explained by the pathological association of black enfranchisement and equality with the destructive unleashing of the libido. A title card announces that we have witnessed in the scenes described above "the weakness" -- Stoneman's lust for a black woman -- "that blighted a nation". The entire Civil War and the complex moral and economic forces that led to it, the entire abolitionist cause, is reduced to sexual "perversion" in the form of miscegenation.
Meanwhile, down South, the Civil War has broken out and almost immediately the Cameron home is threatened by Negroes gone wild. "Renegade" black soldiers, in Union uniforms, attack the town where the Camerons live, and the Cameron home itself. Griffith concentrates dramatically on the threat to the two Cameron sisters, hiding out in their basement. Any viewer of the time would have recognized the sexual component of the threat. The girls are clearly in danger of being raped by the maniacs assaulting their home.
There were, in fact, no bands of renegade black soldiers running wild in the South. A title tells us, misleadingly, that the first black troops were enlisted in South Carolina, which is true -- but none of them ever behaved the way these blacks troops do, which is what the title implies. A title also tells us that the blacks have been incited to their behavior by an irresponsible white commander. Griffith often uses this device in the film to show he's not blaming blacks for their behavior -- only the white trash who spur them on. But this muddles what's really being said between the lines. The bad whites in these cases have failed to exercise proper patrician supervision of and control over their black charges, they have misdirected and unleashed the animalistic tendencies of the blacks. The important point being driven home -- and it's driven home throughout the film -- is that this potential for animalistic behavior by blacks is always there and always needs to be controlled. This is the white man's burden -- his first duty in protecting the home and its women.
A detachment of white Confederate soldiers rescues the Cameron girls and their home -- white actors in blackface help put out the fire in the house and embrace these soldiers in gratitude. But in the course of the film, the white deliverers won't always get there on time . . . indeed, their failure to do so on one crucial occasion will lead directly to the dramatic climax of the film.
The first half of The Birth Of A Nation ends with the assassination of Lincoln, dramatically and quite accurately recreated onscreen. This assassination has become a tragic, iconic component of America's national myth, and in the film it is greeted by sorrow on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line -- with one exception. Stoneman's mistress exults as she strokes Stoneman's arm lasciviously and tells him he's now the most powerful man in the country. Her villainy and inhumanity could not be asserted more forcefully -- a more direct connection could not be drawn between the "history" we're about to watch unfold and the sexual "perversion" of miscegenation. To this woman, and perhaps to Stoneman, Lincoln's death only removes the greatest obstacle to the sexual union of the black and white races.
It's really impossible to fully appreciate Griffith's artistry in this film without recognizing how skillfully he inflects his national epic with psycho-sexual themes, appealing to patriotism, nostalgia for a more gracious age, reverence for the home, in order to set all these things against the perceived horror of the pollution of the Aryan race by admixture with inferior blood.
The environmental racism of The Birth Of A Nation is not egregious by the standards of its day. It wouldn't even have been egregious by the standards of 1939, the year of Gone With the Wind, which simply used cleverer and more sophisticated means to distract us from thinking too seriously about the horrors and the enduring moral stain of slavery. And in the first half of The Birth Of A Nation, the more disturbing and pathological racist element is almost overwhelmed by the lyric beauty of the film in its celebration of family and home and gallantry and innocent courtly love.
But we will see that the pathological element has been carefully interwoven into the fabric of the film's first half precisely in order to set up its emotional ascendancy in the second half -- and there is no question that this strategy was deliberate. The Birth Of A Nation prides itself on historical accuracy -- with some justification. The film is historically responsible and convincing in visual terms, and in many of its recreations of actual events. The only times it departs conspicuously from historical accuracy, the only times it unashamedly distorts and falsifies the historical record, are in those passages where it seeks to promote its psycho-sexual racist agenda. That agenda will come to dominate the second half of the film, but it was painstakingly and strikingly foreshadowed in the first half.