I see that English nurses are protesting against the movie The Snake Pit, because it represents nurses as hard and unsympathetic. The curse of today is the Pressure Group, especially in America. You can’t take a step without getting picketed by someone. One odd aspect of it is that you can no longer put a negro on the stage unless you make him very dignified. Owing to the activities of the negro pressure group, comic negro characters are absolutely taboo. The result is that all the negro actors are out of work, because the playwrights won’t write parts for them.”

Thus, P. G. Wodehouse writing to Bill Townend, on March 30, 1949 and foreshadowing by almost half-a-century the recent revival of Show Boat (a work in which he had a hand, or anyway a finger), a production picketed during its Toronto try-out by black community groups who denounced it as racist. They were right: the black characters were the only ones treated with dignity and respect; the whites were reduced to musical comedy cut-outs.

That’s one reason why I’m relatively relaxed about any forthcoming Federal hate crimes legislation. To anyone who’s dropped by the theater on a semi-regular basis in the last twenty years, Washington is merely a belated convert to the formal codification that already prevails in much of our cultural life. The dignity categories have expanded a tad since 1949—not just blacks, but also women, gays, immigrants, the disabled, the transgendered … On the other