So you all know, in my other life I'm a music historian. And I work on race, gender, sexuality, etc in popular music. A lot of what I do is based on a concept I'm going to put in the book I'm working on I'm calling "contextual empathy." It is more than just contextualizing.

I mean, it is also about contextualizing, because I notice a lot of people are not contextualizing at all when they launch into their critiques. (My book is a book transgender musicians and race from the 1950s--or maybe the 1930s if I can get a lot of writing done--by the way).

I have seen way too many people critiquing people from, say, the 1960s for using the term transvestite because that is transphobic, saying they should use transgender instead...but...transgender wasn't a term in the 1960s, and transvestite was understood differently than now.

And queer in 1990 doesn't mean the same thing as queer in 2020. And what positive representation looked like then may not look the same now (this is similar to how people sometimes look at an old film and call it cliché not realizing that it wasn't a cliché yet back then).

Sometimes the opposite happens. We might hold up something from the past as super progressive and queer and cool...and in its context...it wasn't. Sometimes we miss important critiques one could have of a thing from the past because we don't understand the context.

However! One of the other things about what I'm calling "contextual empathy" as a methodology is about using the skills I learned as an actor when it came to preparing a role. When preparing a role, I always dove into it, trying to see them as a human being and understand them.

Really trying to think about what it would be like to live their life, their material realities, in both a micro and meta level. I can still critique, but the critique, I try to place within the reality of that person.
So why am I talking about all this?

I just finished watching a PSA sort of film from 1960 about race. The film is called "The New Girl In the Office" and it was produced by the President's Committee on Government Projects. It is about a company hiring its first black secretary and how some people are not happy.

The film is here:
It is from the Prelinger collection (which you can find on http://archive.com ) but this is hosted on YouTube by ReelBlack which has collected a BUNCH of historical black film stuff--check them out!
But back on topic...

Watching this film I'm thinking about it in a few different ways. I'm thinking about analyzing the film...like how is it put together, how is the camera used, what they choose to show or not. What is the ideology? The lighting...blah blah. Standard sort of media analysis.

I also put myself into the world of the characters. The New Girl in his film...what are her feelings? The New Girl's mother? Who is she? What were experiences? Where is her brother coming from? You know, all that inside the world of the film analysis.

But at this moment I'm also thinking about the actors in the film. Who they were. I think about Gail Fisher, who played The New Girl. This is one of Gail Fisher's first roles. So who was Gail Fisher? She trained under Lee Strasberg at the American Academy of Dramatic Art.

She then became the first African-American accepted into the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center, working with Elia Kazan. She is the first black person to land a role in a national TV ad with spoken lines. She worked on Broadway, but then started work on TV.

Roles for black people were not great in this era. First off...there were rarely any, especially in dramas. There was the half hour comedy Amos'n'Andy which started off as a blackface radio show done by white dudes. When they put in on TV they put black people in the roles.

But the foundation of that show was still blackface caricature. Anyhow, Gail Fisher was the second black woman to be a regular on an hour long drama after Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek...that was for her role as a secretary on the crime show Mannix.

For her role in Mannix she was the first black woman to win an Emmy, and the first black woman to win a Golden Globe. She was on Mannix between 1968 and 1975. While she was on the show she was all that. But after that show got cancelled? There wasn't that much work for her.

She ended struggling with drug addiction and unlike Robert Downey Jr. her career never really recovered after she got publically busted and went to rehab. When she died, no one in Hollywood even noticed until 4 months after she died. She was important but forgotten after Mannix.

And before Mannix? She made this film in 1960, one of her first things. Between this film (produced by the government) and Mannix in 1968, she had only a few handful of spots on TV. Usually just one or two episode spots as a singer or a secretary. Now I go back to New Girl.

This is the beginning of her career. She has a very serious pedigree in terms of her training. She went to school with Robert Redford, Judd Hirsch, and Eileen Brennan. She studied with Strassberg! The Father of the American version of The Method! The guy who trained so many!

Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, Jane Fonda, James Dean, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Paul Newman. She had the training that could have made her big. But in this moment she starred in this short film...it wasn't great for black people who wanted to be actors.

In 1934, the actor Charles Muse wrote a small pamphet called "The Dilemma of the Negro Actor." In it he said that black performers were caught in a trap. "There are two audiences in America to confront, the white audience with a definite desire for buffoonery and song..."

"...and the Negro audience with a desire to see the real elements of Negro life portrayed." Was it better, he asked, for black actors to achieve success in mainstream roles as Maids and Uncle Toms, or risk not working at all if they insist on better parts and representation?

That dilemma Muse talked about in 1934 was still very present in 1960 (and in many ways it is still lingering today...though there are more black produced media so that helps). So here is Gail Fisher...with her amazing training...wanting good parts. And what is her big break?

Her big break is a government film about how the difficulty and importance of hiring black people in the work place. It is a film about being subject to racism. It a role where she gets to be someone talented and with a family. It is a film where she gets to do some acting.

But it is not really a Hollywood film and it is one were racism is solved pretty easily...and it is really, really aimed at a white audience telling them to stop being racist in the workplace if they want to get government contracts. And then...not much for 8 years.

I think about how her character overcame prejudice in this film...but in real life she struggled to make it as a black woman in Hollywood, and with the exception of Mannix, where she got those Emmys and Golden Globes by playing secretary who'd sometimes go under cover...

Hollywood didn't really have much for her to do. Nor Nichelle Nichols to be honest. Nor Dihanne Caroll. And the way that toll impacted her and negatively mentally and physically. And she remains today basically unknown and unspoken of. Forgotten. Died of renal failure in 2000.

She was born two years before Jane Fonda, who had an amazing career...weathering some major backlash for her politics and now currently staring in the TV show Grace and Frankie which has had 6 seasons so far. She was in two successful films in 2017 and 2018.

Our Souls at Night a romantic drama with Robert Redford who is another contemporary of Gail Fisher who has done well for himself, and the romantic comedy Book Club with some more luminaries of that generation: Diane Keaton, Mary Steenburgen, and Candice Bergen.

Have any of you seen Jane Fonda in the film "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" She is amazing. And I think about how Gail Fisher never got to be in films like that. She never got to show off her range and her training. She got to be the secretary in Mannix--which was a big deal.

And she got to be the New Girl in this government educational film in 1960 about how workplace discrimination is not okay. I wondered what her hopes and dreams were when she filmed this at the age of 25. I wonder what she thought about this film that she was in.

I think about Gail Fisher. I think about the lessons she could teach us if we listened to her and thought about her as a bright, talented human being who had to deal with the intersectional oppression of being a black woman in an society that always has a reason not to be fair.

Anyway, Gail Fisher, I remember you. You are not forgotten. And I watched all 30 minutes of that odd artifact of race relations of 1960. And saw you in there. I imagine your struggle and I honor what you've done to make my life just a few notches better. Now I have to find Mannix