It's Blacks who should protest `Rising Sun,' not Japanese

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

Thousands of Japanese- Americans protested outside theaters across America a few weeks ago when "Rising Sun" debuted as a movie. Having read the book, they no doubt expected the movie to portray the Japanese as author Michael Crichton had - as conniving, manipulative entrepreneurs buying up American property and American businesses as fast as they could.

But the movie is not a political polemic. It's a second rate thriller full of loud music, dumb dialogue, gratuitous violence and nothing else.

I would not even be mentioning it, but for the fact that the real people slandered in it haven't breathed a word of protest, demonstrated, or even yelled unfair, and I do not understand why.

Here's the bare plot: A beautiful, young, Caucasian woman is found dead the night of a lavish and important Japanese business party. Two of the men assigned to find out who killed her are Sean Connery, schooled in Japanese culture, and Wesley Snipes, new at his Special Services Officer job. Connery, therefore, acts as Snipes' mentor and also as a kind of a narrator for the audience, another glitch in the film.

But back to the main effrontery. Wesley Snipes is black. The character he plays, in the book, was white. But so what? A man's color doesn't have anything to do with how he does his job. You trade a black man for a white man and no one should notice.

But notice is all you do in this movie. For some reason, Hollywood writers turned the Wesley Snipes character into a black man in much the same way they would have turned him into a gay man - with all the predictable, exaggerated, ridiculously demeaning mannerisms.

Snipes has a black temper and is full of black mean-assed retorts and, of course, when he and Connery need help he takes his mentor to meet his good buddies in the hood, where they shake up the plot a little with stereotypical bad gang action and banter.

And what is reinforced yet again is that black men are dangerous, black men are to be feared, because, my God, look how out of control they all are. Look at this intelligent, important guy's friends. Look at who he hangs out with.

"Graham has no real knowledge, no first hand experience. He just has a collection of prejudices and media fantasies," Michael Crichton wrote about one of the detectives in his thought-provoking book.

These words more than apply to the American public. Most of the American public has no real knowledge, no first hand experience. Most of the American public has just a collection of prejudices and media fantasies.

And the media keeps building on them.

Wesley Snipes has just finished another movie. This one takes place in 2020. In it he plays a mass murderer frozen instead of executed. By some horrific misfortune, Snipes is accidentally unfrozen and immediately wreaks havoc on a peaceful, non-violent world. To stop the carnage, authorities defrost another convicted murderer, Sylvester Stallone, who gets to play the good guy by going after Snipes.

And here it is again, in predictable black and white, the same, old message: wake up the black guy and look what happens.

It would be nice to think that Meteor Man, the new black super hero movie could make up for all this bad karma that Hollywood keeps spewing forth. But one movie, especially a kid's movie, however positive cannot compensate for dozens of negative ones. What's most noteworthy about Meteor Man is that it's 1993, and this is the first black super hero movie out of Tinseltown. Does this not speak volumes?

What also speaks volumes is that while Japanese-Americans are protesting the movie's plot, African-Americans are not protesting its stereotypes. They should be. People who don't know black men, who don't know even one black man, know only what they see on the screen. Hollywood shows them punks, pimps and buffoons. African-Americans should be enraged.