Back in the peak of her popularity, actress Farrah Fawcett was interviewed by   Jet   magazine.   It was a short article, so short that I re-read it and practically memorized it. It went something like this.   "Black men who are fantasizing about actress and   Charlie's Angels  star Farrah Fawcett are wasting their time.  Fawcett said recently  'I'm trying to get rid of my prejudices, but Daddy was stabbed by a Negro once and hasn't liked them ever since.' "
    It was not surprising that a woman born in 1947 (or 1987, '97, for that matter) had absorbed some racial attitudes growing up that she later found inconvenient. What was surprinsing was that she was candid enough to say so openly. After reading that article, I could not help but wonder if Ms. Fawcett had successfully "gotten rid of her prejudices" of her Texas upbringing, so over the years I watched her public work  with African Americans with this in mind.
    Not long afterword,   Jet  magazine ran a photo of her receiving a tennis lesson from Bill Cosby.    She seemed as relaxed as anybody else might be in that photo. Perhaps she had been successful. Ms. Fawcett later co-starred with Alfre Woodard in a theatrical release about a rape victim who fights back.  She starred in  Small Sacrifices  ,a TV movie produced by Suzanne De Passe, former head of Motown's TV and movie productions. Still later, she portrayed the wife of Danny Glover who lives in a snooty gated community in  the African American comedy,   The Cookout.    Whatever burden her father's prejudices had been for her, she seemed to have over come them for her professional career. 
    By far the most interesting role she played was in 1995's    Children of the Dust,  a TV miniseries set in Oklahoma/Indian Territory in the late 1800s. Ms. Fawcett's role was that of a middle-class white New Yorker transplanted reluctantly to the frontier by her new husband.  Her character has  a pathological fear of Indians, fueled no doubt by popular accounts of Indians scalping or "violating" white women.  She is driven further into madness and physical illness, played with marvelous nuance, when her husband accepts an orphaned Plains Indian boy into her home to be raised.  
    Ironically enough, Ms. Fawcett's character has no problem with the Black Cherokee protagonist, played by Sidney Poitier, and trusts him around herself and her children, but the Indian boy she just never warms up to. She dies early in the story, leaving her son to grow up into a white supremacist politician, and her daughter to fall in love with the Indian boy and produce a grandchild.  It all ends unhappily in realistic racial violence, including the castration of Sidney Poitier's character by a white mob and the hanging of two pre-teen black boys on baseless allegations of "rape."
    I liked this role for Ms. Fawcett, because it showed a person struggling with strong racial feelings. She could go either way. Usually, racist charcters are portrayed as cartoonish buffoons or monsters, and not as real people who actually negotiate their own feelings with the environment in which they find themselves. Her role in    Children of the Dust,   really demonstrated her props as an actress. (Recently, I learned that Ms. Fawcett's mother, Pauline was born in Oklahoma and was partly of Choctaw descent.)
    Farrah Fawcett's  skills as an actress were overshadowed by her brief time spent as a 1970s pinup icon.  Likewise, her actress props were overshadowed by a personal life that seemed undeservedly harsh.  When she died on June 25, 2009, all the media tributes already planned for her (no surprise, as her slow publicized death from cancer gave the networks plenty of time to prepare) were pre-empted by the sudden death of the King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
    I wonder still if  Ms. Fawcett's  father, James Fawcett,  ever gave up his own dislike of "Negroes," or if they ever discussed the change in her attitudes (or her role as wife of Danny Glover) or how he felt  about his daughter's  death being upstaged by the death of an African American icon. Perhaps he was relieved just to have the private funeral under the radar while all media attention was on the Jackson family. 
    James William  Fawcett lived to see his wife and both of his daughters die of cancer before him. I would not wish such a thing on anybody. 
    May the Good Lord have mercy on him and the whole Fawcett family.