Randall, author of "The Wind Done Gone," has succeeded in getting people to believe that "Gone With the Wind" somehow caused everything wrong that happened in her life or to her family, which makes it nearly impossible for those who do stories on Randall to see her as anything but a victim. Luckily, reviewers don't care who she is, they just want decent literature. Which is why nearly every review rips "The Wind Done Gone" as a crummy piece of work.
Star-crossed interviewers don't even realize they've been snookered. Entering the fray with an anti-Southern bias already entrenched and a liberal view of racial politics, it doesn't take much to get them to believe what Randall says, that somehow her "own mother was damaged by ('Gone With the Wind') and has all kinds of problems with racial identity."
Using her mother is a coy play. For us to be led to believe that her mom's life was ruined by a piece of fiction is ridiculous. Randall's a Harvard elitist, someone who talks about country music as having a "Metaphysical quality." Anyone who talks that way about country music is not going to be affected by Mitchell's book, and it's clear to anyone but the agreeable interviewers that Randall's only out to make a buck on the back of Mitchell's masterpiece (the second-best selling book in the world, next to the Bible).
I'm not going to debate the legal wrangling; what I'm interested in is motivation. What makes a woman stir the pot of racial controversy? Dollar signs.
When Randall, 42, visited Atlanta recently on the invitation of the Margaret Mitchell House, she revealed herself to be bullheaded and rude. No matter what, she would not listen to anyone who disagreed with her assumption that "GWTW" caused millions of blacks to lead substandard lives. When a female employee of the Mitchell House got up to challenge Randall on her claim that Mitchell was a racist, Randall interrupted the woman - a black woman, mind you - and shouted that the questioner had been brainwashed, saying: "If you don't think that it was racist, it's because you read 'Gone With the Wind,' internalized it, and loved it when you were young!. . . You are my example of another generation of black women damaged by 'Gone With the Wind'!"
When the woman, Mitchell House employee Kelsey Aguirre, continued trying to press her point that Mitchell had paid for numerous African-American men to attend medical school, Randall wasn't listening.
Instead of thanking the Mitchell House for inviting her to speak (when they could have easily have never spoken to Randall due to her pirating of their copyrighted story and the subsequent ongoing lawsuit), instead she declared she wasn't "here to debate employees of this place. I'm not being paid to be here."
(See how the money issue arises again? Later, when signing her book she advised kids that undedicated volumes have a higher value.)
When challenged to allow the employee to speak, a cornered Randall pointed to another black questioner and hysterically raised the victimization defense, claiming Mitchell House personnel were "trying to silence another black woman!" of course, she just silenced a black woman, but that's the kind of double-speak liberals engage in when confronted face-to-face.
"I want to give her my copy of her book back, so I can be an ignorant black woman who didn't go to Harvard," said Aguirre, referencing the several times Randall had mentioned her own undergraduate degree from the Ivy League school. "She didn't want to hear about what I wanted to tell her. She came to talk about what she wanted to." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
As is typical with the Left, anyone who disagrees with Randall is automatically branded a racist, a sexist, a troglodyte, etc. There is no such thing as a meaningful exchange of ideas. There is no dialogue; merely accusations that are as subtle as a hammer to the skull.
She can't even run from other blacks, though. In late April, africana.com columnist Amy Alexander wrote an insightful piece in which she called Randall's bluff: "To say that 'The Wind Done Gone' will somehow make black people feel better about how blacks are portrayed in 'Gone With the Wind' is wildly presumptuous. From the beginning, the whole gambit smelled of raw commercialism.
"Randall is merely canny enough to recognize a story subject that is sure to elicit controversy. . . Just how many black people, I wondered, actually harbor bad feelings or suffer from identity crises because of 'GWTW'? Who, I wondered, actually takes Mitchell's book as anything more than what it is - a snappily written love story about a strong-willed white Southern gal whose personal development coincided with the War Between the States?"
Instead of being graceful in the face of controversy, Randall gives back in spades the disrespect she claims to be a victim of, in order to sell a book panned by critics. Is "Gone With The Wind" a romanticized vision of the ante-bellum South? Somewhat so, absolutely. It's a remarkable love story set in a time of extreme hardship and duress, not a historical documentary. For Randall to trash Mitchell as a racist, and her vision as possessing the capability to set back generations of black Americans, is absurd and a worse offense than what Randall claims was done to her own fragile ego.
I love Gone With the Wind, the movie. Never read Margaret Mitchell's book, but I doubt Alice Randall had, either, until she saw a golden opportunity to skewer it for profit.