written by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

In 1981, I was five years old and wanted to be Indiana Jones.  I understood who Harrison Ford was, connected immediately to the power of the actor, but found myself discovering myself in both Ford's landmark screen personas: Han Solo and Indiana Jones.

By age 9, entering the third grade -- my parents had bought me a bullwhip.  Yes. We went to Six Flags Great Adventure in St. Louis and in the early 80's you could still purchase bullwhips and all sorts of "adventurer" paraphernalia at a family-oriented amusement park. My parents thought nothing of it at the time, and barely a decade old, it was the most natural thing to me:  a bullwhip. 

I could follow in Indiana Jones' footsteps. 

What I did not realize, much to the chagrin of my white friends who of course were bothered that I somehow could inhabit and emulate Ford's swashbuckler better than they could -- was that Indiana Jones was a white American nationalist avatar.  Yes, he fought bad people and Nazis, but often he too looted ancient artifacts and was only doing for America what the imperial Europeans did for their nations:  steal art and priceless cultural icons and works and "protect" them in their own Western museums.

This understanding came much later as did my awareness that, essentially, Indiana Jones was a benevolent racist.

Now, that's a heavy load for a young boy who could relate to Sidney Poitier's Walter Lee Younger as much as he could, amazingly, related to Harrison Ford's roguish adventurers.  Like the baby boomers before me -- we grew up idolizing the John Waynes of cinema who killed the Indians.

This all became disastrously apparent when, on what must have been my hundredth viewing of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, sometime in *1986 -- the year I put away childish things in favor of baseball and comics -- that decolonization set in.  And it was traumatic.

The scene is the one everyone knows.  It’s the one all my stepfather's family and friends howled at, the one that brilliantly distilled an attitude and political view of Steven Spielberg's out into the universe:  when Indiana Jones, in the streets of Cairo, and tired of battling and dueling buffoonish Arabs stands across a Middle Eastern minstrel who snarls and chortles with his fancy swordsmanship, threatening Jones to make a move -- and instead Jones simply shoots him.  The onlookers cheer (without that device Spielberg would have outed himself, but he demands you know that "it's ok to shoot a sand-nigger without giving a second thought because look! - that's what his own people permit) -- and in a few brilliant seconds, Spielberg encapsulates an entire racist political viewpoint about Arabs, via fey "Zionist" (racist) thinking. 

There is no way around this.  The scene is brilliantly executed, eloquent and cannot be interpreted in any other way. Spielberg would go on to push the envelope of his racist and xenophobic views and high school locker room jokes with his derogations on Southeast Asians in “Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom,” which unfortunately demonized the Indians more than the Indiana Jones franchise lambasted the Nazis.  The Nazis were buffoons…but intelligent ones. He always attributed them a nefariousness that could be equated to “cool” villainy as opposed to his racist depictions of Indians, Indigenous natives, or Arabs.

(Somehow here one can easily be forced to review what Baldwin wrote about Camus’ “The Stranger.”)

Think about it.  Could a Black or Arab man do this to a white Jew or a member of any white tribe in the middle of a marketplace and get cheers?  Not even Will Smith or Denzel could get away with that.  Not even Samuel "Capital One" Jackson himself, the white man's favorite Black buffoon, could get away with that. Splitting the room like the Red Sea to make room for a bullet to fly into a white Jewish person or a WASP from Connecticut?    No way. Impossible. And why we would want to do this is even more disturbing. 

But it is this classic and beloved seduction and dangerous racist view that cinema so majestically proffers to its audience.

The laconic, exhausted and simple act of just taking out a pistol, firing one bullet, and then acting as if you can finally move on with your life is exactly what Israel is doing to the Palestinians:  they're just playing this scene over and over again and amping it up. 

Spielberg will be remembered for what may the greatest children's love story (“E.T.”) and the classic Hollywood historical tear jerker (“Schindler's List”) but mark my words:  this one scene from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” will get new attention and spark even newer debates about the power, morality and political impulse of Hollywood movies, in particular, over the next several decades. 

This scene will only lose power when Palestinians are freed from the clutches of white supremacy and the USA and Britain's money -- and when Black and brown satirists ferociously chew this scene and spit it back out. 

Until then, our own silence will continue to perpetuate the violence. On screen. And in life.

Just look at the damage we condone in pop music.

* For clarity, from the years 1980-1984 I lived in Westchester where my parents had jobs that were far out of NYC’s bounds.  When we moved back in 1985, I was already moving onto more “sophisticated” things, and books, in particular, were my passion – replacing my boyish reveries of spaceships or bullwhips.  What I find amusing is that obviously there is no way I could have walked around Queens or Manhattan with a bullwhip in tow the way I did in Mamaroneck.  We used to run into Matt Dillon at the local A&P there.  I wonder if he noticed the little Black kid with a bullwhip.  Of course, all my teachers did…and now I realize what they must have been thinking: he stole his parent’s sex toy!  This understanding only came when I remembered that one of the teachers – before informing the principal – asked if she could have that bullwhip for herself!  HA!