1915

Birth of a Nation was released. It was the most profitable American film of all time until Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarves (1937). In this critical darling, director D.W. Griffith dramatically depicts a mid-19th century south plagued by mulattos and abolitionists who scheme to keep the white man down and raise up the black man in what is, to its intended audience, an obviously grotesque perversion of natural order. In government sessions, the reconstruction-empowered black politicians (played buffoonishly by white actors) take off their shoes and feast on fried chicken. Luckily, the chivalric Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.

This version of history was angrily disputed (famously by W.E.B. Du Bois among others) but remained pretty much the accepted version of history until well after World War II. The NAACP, founded just five years earlier, organized nationwide protests. There were riots in Philadelphia and Boston. Cities in Illinois, Minnesota Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania refused to show the film. In Indiana, a white man murdered a black stranger and blamed it on having seen Birth of a Nation. However, the film received a special screening at the White House where president Woodrow Wilson supposedly remarked, "It [the film] is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The quote was later argued to be from someone else but the film was still marketed as "Federally-endorsed."

It is still widely praised for decades for it's pioneering technical achievements which arguably, are exaggerated to excuse its bafflingly continuing popularity. Nearly all of these achievements have since been discovered in earlier films and yet even mainstream critic Roger Ebert considers it a great film, stating, "'The Birth of a Nation' is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl’s 'Triumph Of the Will,' it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil." This from a guy who doesn't like Blue Velvet or A Clockwork Orange because of the subject matter. I guess racism is OK when it's old. You know, they just didn't know any better back then.

    Hispanic Heritage Month began in 1968 as Hispanic Heritage Week. We never learned about it in my schools which prided themselves on being among the most progressive in the country. Every year we celebrated Black History month which began, amazingly, in 1926 as Negro History Week back when the Ku Klux Klan enjoyed its peak membership of 4 to 5 million people (or a whopping 15% of the nation's eligible men). Anyway, we students always raised the same questions. Is it in February because it's the shortest month? Where's Asian or Latino History Month? Where's White History Month?
I don't recall my teachers having the answers except that we learned plenty of white history year-round and Black History Month was a time to recognize the contributions of a people to American culture who'd been systematically ignored.
     So, this year I found out about Asian Pacific American Heritage month which began in 1978 and which I had NEVER heard mentioned. Some Asians I knew had. They said it was marked by more documentaries about Japanese Internment Camps being shown on PBS. At the same time I found out about Hispanic Heritage Month which I mentioned started in 1968 and which I'd also never heard about. 
     When I first moved to Los Angeles, I thought (educated mostly by Los Angeles' films and TV and music videos) that it was going to be 50% plastic people living in palatial homes, 25% Crips and 25% Bloods. I don't know any of those people except  O.G. Crip Greg "Batman" Davis who's one of the patron saints of Amoeba's Black Cinema section.
But that's pretty much what we were fed. And I thought, given it's famous palm trees, it would be steamy and sub-tropical like my former home in Florida.
     I got to Chino (which I figured was pretty close to the ocean) and drove to Pollo Loco in Chino Hills because I'd seen an ad in Spanish for it with a chihuahua that said a lot more than "Yo quiero Taco Bell" which piqued my interest.
     My friends in Chino and Pomona whom I'd met in Iowa showed me around. I flipped the radio stations and heard bandas, Vietnamese talk, ranchera (on the am), Korean music, norteñas and freestyle. The people I saw everywhere didn't look like the people I'd been led to believe I'd see. And it was dry and cold at night. I still get annoyed when (invariably white) people characterize Los Angeles as a soulless botox world of corporate chains and cultureless (and invariably white) people. It's almost as if you're not black or white, then you're invisible. The truth is that Los Angeles is probably the most ethnically (and culturally) diverse spot on the planet and possibly the universe. 46.5% of the population is Hispanic and/or Latino. Los Angeles was founded by the Spanish and then became part of Mexico with its independence. Following the rebellion of illegal American immigrants in Mexican Texas and it's subsequent secession, they tried the same thing in Mexican California. Maybe that's why some people are afraid of immigrants from the south. Maybe we/they have this cultural memory about when white people moved illegally to the area, refused to assimilate or even learn the language and then revolted with guns because the creator of the Universe always had this plan for white people to settle on the Pacific which he communicated to Andrew Jackson in a vision, I suppose.