Spike Lee is complaining that Clint Eastwood, in his Iwo Jima movie Flags of Our Fathers, doesn’t feature enough “Negro soldiers.” (Lee’s phrase)

“Many veterans, African-Americans, who survived that war are upset at Clint Eastwood. In his vision of Iwo Jima, Negro soldiers did not exist. Simple as that. I have a different version.”[Iwo Jima films slammed for overlooking blacks The Associated Press May 23, 2008 ]

I would have guessed that this was because there weren’t any, or hardly any, because the brunt of the Iwo Jima effort came from the Naval Service, both Navy and Marines, neither of which had much in the way of integration at the time.

Former intelligence officer “George Smiley” at the In From The Cold Blog has the actual figures, which say that there were 700 African-Americans on Iwo, total, out of 80,000 troops, and most of them were in support roles, loading and unloading ammunition, for example. (Not that that’s any picnic under combat conditions.)They only engaged in actual combat when the Japanese succeeded in penetrating to a rear area.

As for “Negro soldiers,” the term “soldiers” is not used to refer to Marines, and the Army didn’t take over Iwo Jima until after it was declared secure, when the 147th Infantry Regiment relieved the Marines.

The main ethnic groups engaged in frontline combat on Iwo Jima were white Americans and Japanese, (the least multicultural people on Earth) with some valued contributions from American Indians–including  Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian, who was one of the men who raised the flag on Mount Suribach, and the Navajo Code Talkers.

If you are a recent graduate of a public school, your teachers may have given you the impression that the fighting was done by a coalition of the Tuskegee Airmen, the Navajo Code Talkers,  black Navy stewards, and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, while white troops sat at home guarding Manzanar, but this is not the case. Partly because America was 90 percent white, and partly because of segregation, World War II was fought almost entirely by white troops.

Eastwood knows this, of course,and told the Guardian

As for Flags of Our Fathers, he says, yes, there was a small detachment of black troops on Iwo Jima as a part of a munitions company, “but they didn’t raise the flag. The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people’d go, ‘This guy’s lost his mind.’ I mean, it’s not accurate.”

Of course, there’s been a lot of mind-losing going on in Hollywood over the past twenty years. Jonah Goldberg, who is reliable on the subject of bad movies, described the phenomenon of the

Anachronistic Black Man. This is the African-American character who is wildly out of place in the time the film depicts. Slaves who talk like Harvard grads and black cowboys whose ethnicity seems trivial can be found in a host of films. Perhaps the best recent example was in the film U-571, in which a black galley cook on a (segregated) World War II submarine not only bellows orders to the white crewmen and hobnobs with the officers, but is also an expert submariner himself. He even knows how to drive a German U-boat without instruction.

See Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves, with Morgan Freeman as “Azeem”, or Wild Wild West, with Will Smith in the role played by  Robert Conrad in the Sixties television show. Spike Lee could claim that there’s now a tradition of inserting black characters in historical contexts where they don’t fit, but he can’t claim that he’s serving historical truth.

From my review last spring in The American Conservative:

“Under the Same Moon”

The once-lively Mexican film industry stagnated after it was nationalized in the late 1950s, but revived in 1990s with the loosening of the government’s velvet stranglehold on the arts. By last year, three art house films by Mexican directors, “Babel,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and “Children of Men,” garnered a total of 16 Oscar nominations.

Meanwhile, the number of Mexicans in the United States continues to soar, eliciting the interest of movie moguls hoping somehow to woo the enormous, but opaque illegal immigrant market away from the Univision television network. (Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was a huge hit among undocumented filmgoers, but Hollywood would rather not remember that missed opportunity.)

Expecting synergy, the Weinstein Company and Fox Searchlight paid $5 million at the 2007 Sundance film festival for “Under the Same Moon,” a sentimental family film made by Patricia Riggen, daughter of a Guadalajara surgeon. (Part of its $2 million budget was provided by the Mexican government.)

“Under the Same Moon” tells the dual stories of a nine-year-old boy who stays with his grandmother in Sonora and his illegal immigrant mother, who has lived in a garage in East L.A. for four years so she can send him $300 per month she earns cleaning expensive homes. Neither one has a telephone (perhaps due to the high phone charges imposed by Mexico’s private landline monopoly, which has made its owner, Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world), so mother and son communicate only via a Sunday morning call from payphone to payphone. When the lad’s grandmother dies, he pluckily sets off for LA. Meanwhile, not knowing he’s on his way, she vacillates over whether to marry a handsome security guard with a Green Card, or return to Mexico to be with her son.

Theorizing that “Under the Same Moon” could be, in the words of the old Saturday Night Live parody ad, both a floor wax and a dessert topping, the studios released it simultaneously in both downscale theatres in Latino neighborhoods and in upscale cinemas for Anglos who like socially conscious foreign films with subtitles.

Through inept planning, I managed to check out both prongs of its novel marketing strategy. By the time I arrived at The Plant in heavily Latino Van Nuys (the curious title of this power mall built on the site of an old Chevy factory commemorates the days when cars and planes, not just movies, were manufactured in the San Fernando Valley), the 9:40 pm Saturday night show had sold out.

So, I drove south to the cinephiles’ latest venue, the Arclight on tony Ventura Blvd. for the 10:30 show, which turned out to be almost empty. Apparently, if the residents of the Hollywood Hills were really all that interested in hearing about the lives of illegal aliens, they wouldn’t pay $12.75 to see “Under the Same Moon,” they’d just strike up a conversation with their servants. Judging from the film’s maid’s-eye view of Los Angeles’s Anglo elite as stuck-up and cold-blooded, however, they aren’t.

Not surprisingly, “Under the Same Moon” works better as a floor wax than as a dessert topping. Its cast of telenovela stars delivers melodramatic telenovela-quality performances, and the screenplay is unsophisticated.

One important point that “Under the Same Moon” drives home to Americans who assume that everybody must long to live in America is that millions of Mexican immigrants dream constantly about going home.

It’s not just that Mexico isn’t really that poor anymore (life expectancy there is now 75.6 years, compared to 78.0 here). To Latin Americans from small colonial towns, where social life centers organically around the plaza, California cities, with no focal points but endless stripmalls, seem dishearteningly featureless. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland: “There is no there there.”

Thus, when the child finally arrives in East L.A. knowing only that his mother will try to call him the next morning from a street corner that has a laundromat, pizza parlor, and mural, he begins searching, only to discover, nightmarishly, that every corner looks like that.

In contrast, I once had to arrange to meet a friend in a week’s time in the fount of Latin culture, Rome, a city neither of us had ever visited before. We eventually agreed that we would get together at the Egyptian obelisk in Bernini’s great piazza in front of St. Peter’s. Now, there is most definitely a there there.

Rated PG-13 for some mature thematic elements.

During a conference with bloggers, Quin Hillyer of the Washington Examiner asked McCain to explain why “during the immigration debate, you referred to [amnesty] opponents to nativists and compared them to supporters of Jim Crow?”

McCain responded, “I’ve never said that. Please don’t allege that. I’m proud of the way I’ve conducted myself and treated opponents with respect, whatever their views. I have to stop you there. I’ve never used those two words before that I can recall.”

Well he didn’t specifically say “Jim Crow, ” but on the Senate floor he sarcastically asked amnesty opponents, “what next, are we going to say that work-authorized immigrants are going to have to ride in the back of the bus?”

According to the New York Observer, in a 2006 in front of a group of donors “[McCain] criticized elements in his own party as “nativist” before lambasting the punditry of Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and Michael Savage for helping to “fuel the problem,”

If we can give McCain credit for something, it’s that he has yet to accuse Dobbs and Limbaugh of causing hate crimes like Barack Obama who told a group of donors a few weeks ago, “There’s a reason why hate crimes against Hispanic people doubled last year. If you have people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh ginning things up, it’s not surprising that would happen.”