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Blacks in the Military

adaptation of the play which portrays a young Jewish soldier who is subjected to anti-Semitism from the members of his own platoon. Stanley Kramer, who broke through racial boundaries with Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, changed the lead character to an African-American. James Edwards plays Peter “Mossie” Moss who suffers from physical paralysis. It is discovered through flashbacks that this was engendered in him from conflict between Mossie and four other men in his platoon who subjected him to racist treatment. The psychologist who attends to Mossie helps him realize the paralysis stems from his guilt over the death of his best friend in the platoon, a guy who called him a “yellow-bellied nigger” during the course of battle. Mossie had a subconscious wish to see his friend dead according to the analyst, and is suffering guilt over his actual death. Ralph Ellison felt this was an evasion of the racial issues brought to light in the film because it served to erase them, “The psychiatrist ends up telling Moss that his guilt is no different from the combat-related traumas faced by other soldiers. Thus, Ellison wrote, the doctor, ‘ignores the racial factor and becomes a sleight-of-hand artist who makes it vanish by repeating again that the Negro is not like everybody else” (Seymour 2). Still, as we see in the film, the black man in the military is not treated like everyone else, even within his own platoon. For its era, the film brought to light some powerful emotions regarding racial issues in the American military and society.

The 1950s also saw portrayals of black men in the military, but of a limited variety and scope, mu

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Blacks in the Military. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:46, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1685115.html