Dr. Hannah Tericium Robbins

speaker

404 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 20 Feb

Dr. Hannah Tericium Robbins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

You're Dead to Me · Lena Horne: racism and resilience in the Golden Age of Hollywood · 20 Feb 2026 podcast

But she is split between a portrayal of just a singer in a cafe and also performs a new song written specifically for the film called The Sping.

And The Sping is this bizarre, exotic song

splurge of references to Cuba to the Caribbean more broadly to southern America to Latin culture they deliberately immediately start to lean on the idea of her being slightly ethnically ambiguous and this then feeds into sort of her wider

marketing across film in general but i think it's also really important to say that this is also a time where black actors were sometimes listed as props and not as cast people in the paperwork at the studios so the complexity of the ways in which they are conceptualizing race cannot be overstated can you

give me an example of how they were listed as props it's like starring you know ted as the broom like how does so they would produce these documents outlining the contents of the films this would include the list of scenes the number of songs who the cast were and then they would have a prop list where they would have table kettle six chairs and in one and louis armstrong yeah

Oh, my gosh.

It's a bleak fact, but it is a really important nuance to understanding what it might have been like to be making a film for her at that time.

Yeah, absolutely.

think when we talk about her race identity and weaponizing her race identity we also have to recognize that they started doing it right away and whether we want to perceive that as mobilizing light-skinned privilege or whatever it is being set against

this really bleak, dehumanising context for all black performers.

Yeah, absolutely.

I think she gets caught in the middle of a lot of different political priorities during her sort of decade at MGM.

The NAACP and a couple of other black unions were particularly invested in addressing representation in Hollywood at this point.

And they saw Lena Horne as a tool, as an opportunity.

They felt that she had an aesthetic advantage.

Her visual appearance, her vocal style would appeal to the white executives.

And they sort of saw her as a Trojan horse, if you like, to quote-unquote break the color line and to get an actor who was not white into multiracial films.

Yeah.

And if you look at her filmography, really those two films, Cabin in the Sky, which is an adaptation of a hit stage show, and Stormy Weather, which was an original film made by Fox, are really the highlights of her film career in the 40s.

Showing 221–240 of 404 · page 12 of 21