This guy is imminently more qualified to describe the pre-war South than Margaret Mithchell whose parents actually lived in it.
I was born in California but lived in the South three years during the 1970's.I was amazed at the polar opposite way whites and blacks saw the region and its history.You would have thought they were talking about two different universes.
From Mitchell's perspective she was telling the truth about her land of birth.GWTW was her work of art and the book and the film should stay intact.Yet a similiar film made by a black film maker should also be recognized as a legitimate point of view from his or her experiences.
Exactly. Who is the more trusted authority on life in the antebellum South: a native Southerner or some editorial writer in California?
Note, on the other hand, that liberals tell us that we cannot pass judgment on 21st century Islamic jihadists (since we don't understand their culture).
Why do we celebrate Thanksgiving in November, thinking of Massachusetts pilgrims rather than those Jamestown VA settler who held the first American thanksgiving feast a decade earlier? Because -- the winners write the history books. Ms. Mitchell was attempting to get around that sad fact of life by encoding her history into the form of a novel.
During the "The Wind Done Gone" dust up, Flo King had an article in National Review's "Misanthrope Corner" about GWTW. She maintains that GWTW was meticulously researched, including attention to the actual accents and variations. (Not that any of this made it into the movie.) Margret Mitchell had been a reported, when she was disabled by arthritis, she became an historical novelist, but with a report's eye for detail (and in that benighted time) accuracy.