MELODRAMA IN BLACK AND WHITE: Uncle Tom and The Green Mile

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to watch the October 3, 1995 verdict in the trial of O.J. Simpson, I felt implicated—by both gender and race—in its melodrama. Though I wanted to think I was angry simply that a man had gotten away with murder, there was no separating my anger on that account from the fact that it was a black man who had seemed to get away with this crime and that it was a white woman he had killed. There was no isolating gender outrage from racial outrage. From the moment I became angry at O. J., I was implicated in a dialectic of racial sympathy and antipathy running through American culture and going back at least as far as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The  ip side of this antipathy was the sympathy I had felt for Rodney King, the black man who almost three years earlier had so visibly been the victim of white police violence. While I was caught up in what felt like positive racial sympathy for the suffering black man in my reactions to the King verdict, I was also caught up in negative racial antipathy in my reaction to the Simpson verdict. Each of these trials encapsulated a powerful moving picture—in one case, that of a white woman suffering at the hands of a black man, and in the other, a black man suffering at the hands of white male police. In American popular culture, these two antithetical moving pictures have been chasing each other around for a long time in a complex dialectic of feeling. To trace the mass culture genealogy of black and white racial melodrama over the last 150 years is to recognize that these raced and gendered movements to sympathy and antipathy are the very bedrock of American popular culture. I call this bedrock the American melodrama of black and white.1 Looking back at Uncle Tom from the vantage point of Rodney King and O.J. Simpson, it becomes clear that an emotionally charged “moral legibility” so crucial to the mode of melodrama is intrinsically linked to a “racial legibility” that habitually sees a Manichaean good or evil in the supposed visual “fact” of race itself—whether it is the dark male victim of white abuse or the blonde female victim of black sexual aggres-