Happy birthday, Hattie McDaniel!!!

She was always the maid.

Or the scrub woman.

Or the cook.

Or the mammy.

Many refuse to even entertain the thought of watching her, even if she had a bit part in the film.

Black power... or more like Black pantload.

Because of the 'blackout' by sanctimonous young Black people, they will never see that Tyler Perry and the Wayans continue to recycle these so-called objectionable stereotypes, despite having significant resources, experiences, and latitude to elevate their art. And they will continue to blame Black actors like Hattie for trying to survive within a studio system that willingly caved into Jim Crow segregationist bullshit. These finger pointers will continue to watch Warner Brothers' Looney Toons without knowing that even the Bugs Bunny creators cowtowed to Jim Crow and created racist bullshit alongside universally embraced classics (seriously, check out Looney Toons Golden Collection Volume 3 - several shorts are all kinds of racist fcukery). The same with Tom and Jerry - if you watch it on Cartoon Network, you'll notice that they've (?) dubbed in a less offensive vocal performance for the recurrent housekeeper character.

At any rate, Hattie McDaniel tried to make lemons out of lemonade, and she did an admirable job. Paired with the likes of Jean Harlow, she was, naturally, there to offer a physical counterpoint to Harlow's platinum blonde sleekness; however, she did verbalize the soundtrack that was likely running through Harlow characters' heads. She did the same thing in Gone With the Wind, but was allowed to have a heart.

Hattie McDaniel suffered from the same ailment as many Black stars of today: typecasting. As Chris Rock once said 'The limit is the sky'. Actually, Hattie can and should transcend further if santimonious Black youth and overly empathetic PC folks would accept the constraints heaped on her and her peers and examine whether they made meals out of scraps.

Here's a brief clip from Gone With The Wind:



She made meals.