Sudie and Simpson

Sudie and Simpson (1990) is a movie which promotes interracial friendship amid a backdrop of anti-Black prejudice, misogyny, and general ignorance. Set in a WW II Georgia small town, the movie focuses on the friendship between Sudie, a 10-year-old girl who had never seen a "nigger" in real life, and Simpson (Louis Gossett, Jr.), a black man living surreptitiously in an abandoned shack in the woods. Sudie who finds to her surprise and pleasure that Negroes are not all 9 feet tall, that they know what they do, and that their skin color doesn't rub off. Moreover, the gentle, harmless and moral character of Simpson is contrasted with the town child molester (a white man).

The themes of racism and morality are compared and contrasted, dramatically. If the whites, who "don't allow no niggers" in town, discover the presence of Simpson, they will likely expel him or string him up. If the victims of the white child molester complain to their mothers, they fear getting "a whipping".

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