Word: schickele
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Feeling as I do that art in both its creation and criticism is largely an individual matter, I still find Richard Schickel's television review of Roots [Jan. 24] unacceptable...
...Schickel can complain about the dialogue. The most monstrous dialogue is the American vernacular of Washington, Jefferson, and those we call the founding fathers, living off the labor of slaves while debating the God-given liberty of mankind...
...suggest that Mr. Schickel take a look at Middle America's history and social studies books. He will find they are oversimplified...
Black Americans can always tell when a book, play or movie about black people is an accurate or realistic one: it is good when it gets a bad review. Richard Schickel, in reviewing Roots [Jan. 24], finds it incomprehensible that a black American would view all whites as equally responsible for the institution of slavery. But even when New England abolitionists mouthed cliches about the evil of slavery, they would wear cotton clothing, while sitting on furniture handcrafted by slave artisans, eating food cooked by black women. Slavery was an all-pervading fact of American life. All Americans benefited from...
...artistic merit. Leading TV critics had, at best, serious reservations about the series, and many panned it outright. The Chicago Sun-Times' William Granger, complaining of "puerile" writing and "caricatures," described Roots as "so transparently bad at times that I was filled with embarrassment." TIME'S own critic, Richard Schickel, labeled the TV production as "Mandingo for middlebrows." He wrote that Roots offered "almost no new insights, factual or emotional," about slavery; instead, there was "a handy compendium of stale melodramatic conventions...