While I was writing my earlier post for today, I recalled a church-related public service announcement from my youth. My memory involved an animated clip of someone being mugged, of a judge walking past and humph-ing “Drunk!”, and a “Mexican” on a burro spotting the victim and saying “¡Ay, que lastima!” I thought it would make an apt, historic, multimedia addition to my argument about the meaning of the Good Samaritan parable.
That PSA seems, however, to have vanished almost without a trace. By determined, persistent Googling, I found a single mention of the theo-biblical advert, with a context that had, at the time, escaped my attention:
RIGHTS GROUP CHALLENGE
Chicano Says Samaritan Not Good
… A nationwide effort to portray the parable of the Good Samaritan in “Bonanza” terms is being challenged by Chicano civil-rights groups. Nick Reyes, executive director of the National Mexican-American anti- defamation committee Wednesday accused the United Presbyterian Church of trying to perpetuate the image of the Mexican as “a man on a donkey.” “The Good Samaritan,” a 60-second television spot prepared and distributed by the church’s division of mass media in New York is racist in tone, Reyes charged. But Charles Brackbill, who developed the short film, was puzzled by the accusation. “The Mexican is shown as the good guy of the parable,” he said. “He shows mercy and compassion. How can anybody object to that?”
I can’t find a copy of the clip now to check, but Reyes’s complaint rings true to me. “But Reyes said Brackbill said it never occurred to him that… no Chicanos were ever consulted about the strip.”
This reminds me of the grand premiere of the American Bible Society’s “Out of the Tombs,” a “multimedia translation” (or “transmediatization”) of Mark’s story of the Gerasene Demoniac. The producers and sponsors of the nine-minute film were there, the video was shown, the invited scholars responded — and the critics were harsh, to say the least. The demon spoke with a woman’s voice; why a woman? The white demoniac was depicted as reintegrated into society by depicting him in a charming contemporary suburban neighbourhood; did they mean to suggest that suburban life represented an ideal Jesus espoused? And so on, and so on. The producers might have said, along with Brackbill, “How can anybody object to that?”
History, unlearned, repeats — and so we hear of Ridley Scott’s biblical epic in which Blackness correlates to “being against Moses.” Possibly it never occurred to Scott to consult anyone with a smidgen of racial awareness about what that might signify.
The topics to which my search led me extend in a myriad of directions. If you know of a place I can see that original advert again, though, please let me know.