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• 1 2017-03-23T12:23:25-07:00 Tracing Post-Race Through Raced Eras: Guess Who's Coming 2 by Anna Louie plain 2017-03-23T12:23:44-07:00

  In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement that placed the subject of racialized bodies and violence at the forefront of news and television mediums, the film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) attempted to manage the conversation about race to negate the societal hemorrhaging of black bodies. In the midst of the hypervisibility of stark racial binaries, conflicts between highly visible black leaders and white oppressors, this film, starring Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn was released with the tagline, “a love story of today”. The film is about Hepburn taking her fiance to dinner to meet the parents, however doesn’t notify them that he is a black man. How this visual tool is used in the larger project for the post-race agenda, is that long before popular culture coined the notion of a post-race society, media apparatuses and visual cultures were already managing the image and creating the mold for a utopian human-over-race narrative. The film attempted to propose the idea of interracial marriage, significantly between a white woman and a “non-threatening” black man, in order to address– without truly addressing– the need for racial “harmony” in a time of violence, war and racial tensions. Despite the physical and concrete trauma that black bodies endured highlighted on consumer television screens, the film industry subscribed to the overarching narrative of bi-raciality and thus, integration without the violence that endured.

  The film poster used for promotional purposes places Sidney Poitier and Katharine Hepburn as the main subjects of the image, in black and white. Poitier is costumed in a black suit and tie, with a half smile on his face. Hepburn is dressed modestly, holding the crook of Poitier’s elbow, her gaze directed towards Poitier rather than the spectator. This choice of posing is important because it portrays Poitier as a non-threatening and smiling black man, which is also constructed throughout the film itself (Frank Rich 1). This usage of a biracial couple, depicted in proximity to whiteness over blackness, is wielded for the larger social comment that America was past violence in the streets because a black man can be welcomed to dinner in a white home(s).