black and white

Last night I was watching tv and flipping through channels when I came across this performance of South Pacific. I first saw South Pacific in first or second grade; in my elementry school the sixth grade put on a musical every year. I liked South Pacific and so I watched the movie and I liked that as well. It's been a long time since I saw South Pacific and last night I found myself understanding much more than I did as a kid. One of the important themes of South Pacific is about racism and how wrong it is. The musical came out when segregation was a part of life in the United States, the setting was World War II when segregation was a part of life and when hundreds of Japanese Americans were put into internment camps to make sure that they wouldn't join forces with the Japanese. When I was little I couldn't understand why Nellie the Nurse couldn't marry Emile and why Joe Cable couldn't marry Liat, I didn't really know or understand about segregation and racial prejudice; as I grew older I learned about these things, I'm very glad for the ways the world has changed since the musical was made. I wonder how much South Pacific might have influenced that change. I don't know much about Rodgers and Hammerstein but it can't have been easy to get such a musical made in that time period. One song in the musical more than any other brings home the message of how wrong racial prejudice and segregation were and are. You've Got to be Taught. This isn't the whole song but I think it gives enough of the message.