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Recently I attended a preview of Twelve Years a Slave, a film graphically showcasing bondage in Dixie. In one scene I watched a white man in a sadomasochistic frenzy rape a young black woman -blood and semen seemed to drip in equal measure. I left the theater shocked and angry. This was the ultimate form of human degradation. I trembled. We seem to be under a continuing curse of psychotic racism spurred by a bloodlust so strong that even God Himself cannot cure it. Slavery is our own “Original Sin.”
It took some days to erase the searing images from the movie. As a historian I began to reflect. The actor who played the central character, Solomon Northrup, is Anglo-African Chiwetel Eijofor. When he mentioned that he is of Igbo descent and had heard of slavery in the West Indies, my antennae went up. Slavery in Igboland was a central fact of its nineteenth’s century economy. It seems that Eijofor wished to isolate a particular variety of slavery, one far removed from African realities.Americans do talk a lot about race and history, but are bound up in a highly stylized version of it —-The Dixie Narrative. By the last quarter of the twentieth century, the paternalistic image of U.S. slavery summoned up in Gone with the Wind and other works on the “Gallant South” had been consigned to the junk heap of history for most of us. The turbulence and violence of the 1950s and 1960s meant that the nation would, thank God, never again embrace any benevolent view of slavery. In the late 1950s, the historian Stanley Elkins compared plantations to Nazi camps, both producing an infantilized and dependent type of human being. In 1965 Daniel Patrick Moynihan created a stir when he followed up by saying that the supposed pathology of the black family stemmed from slavery. The pop cultural phenomenon of Roots, The Saga of an American Family swept the country in the late 1970s both as a book and a TV series. At the level of high art we have Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison’s terminally bleak Beloved dedicated to the “sixty million” gone in the Atlantic slave trade (the number is a deliberate multiple of the Jewish Holocaust’s six million). The image of the kindly master has been replaced by the master as sociopathic sexual predator. From the pulp-fiction of Mandingo to the glossily produced Roots, the planter is not primarily the owner of an economic unit. Rather, he is condemned for running a concentration camp cum brothel. In 1997, Steven Spielberg created a black Schindler’s List with his homiletic Amistad, a Cuban tale told as an American courtroom drama. A more recent example is Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained, nominated for various awards in 2013. Copiously using the word ‘nigger,” it careens from violent episode to violent episode in which buckets of blood, sweat and semen are expended. Django Unchained is no more or less historically inaccurate or accurate than Roots. It was followed by the current offering, Twelve Years a Slave. Even the widely acclaimed The Butler, a story taking place during the twentieth-century, anachronistically begins with a casual yet traumatic morning rape on the Old Plantation.
We need to examine our Narrative. In reality, far more deadly slaveries stretched in a bloody arc from Havana to Rio (only four and a half percent of enslaved persons were transported to what is now the United States). We must remember that slavery in desperately poor Puerto Rico ended ten years after Lincoln Emancipation Proclamation. Jazz and cultural critic Stanley Crouch notes if as much sexing went on in Dixie as occurs in abolitionist literature, African Americans would indeed look like Puerto Ricans. American racial thinkers did congratulate themselves that in the post-bellum period, the U.S. never “descended” into the “Coffee Colored Compromise” of Latin America. What is peculiar about the U.S. is the definition and maintenance of a white/black binary. We need not argue that the American South was the ultimate in human degradation. More apropos is the chant I once heard in a demonstration – “We built this here place!” African Americans produced more than seventy-five percent of the world’s cotton in the 1850s. It should not be forgotten that in 1860 the worth of all of those held in bondage was more than all the railroads and factories here. It is accurate to say that the vast majority of Europeans who arrived on these shores were allowed to step ahead of (and sometimes on the backs of) blacks and partake of white privilege.
After seeing Twelve Years a Slave, I strongly urged everybody within my hearing to see the film. Many have. But one neighbor proved resistant. He is a Catholic activist who seems perpetually on the go — from “Occupy” to protests against the use of drones. He was polite, but firm. The crises of times are in our times. Also, I know that there are more people enslaved in the world today than there were at the time of the sanguinary costume dramas at our local cineplexes. What is frightening is that many of those jarred by images of Dixie are ignorant of inured to sex trafficking in the Ukraine, sugarcane bondage in Haiti, the recrudesce of slavery for making charcoal in the wilds of Brazil and child-bondage in carpet workshops in India. The problem with a fixation on Dixie is that it leads to a perverse sacralization. The Dixie Narrative takes on the quality of the crucifix on the Inquisitor’s wall; the greatest crime has already been committed. Memory cannot serve as a goad to search out similar events. There can be no similar events; indeed, to search for them would be to “disrespect” the past. We must avoid this tendency; if we give into it, we run the risk of becoming passive facilitators of the very crimes we condemn.
I’m not sure. This ‘slavery thing’ Americans are dealing with- levity–lack of seriousness, jokes and avoidance. I know we are trying to get over it–the way Americans talk. ‘Get over it’- not this my dear people. This one hangs on your neck–it will choke you to death. So interesting to me enough, it does it like a frog in a boiling water. I’m amazed to watch many Black Americans brought here-their forefathers/mothers now–try to hard to make jokes out of it. But, they keep suffering–they cry in open and in secret places. Noone knows what to do and we turn it into jokes. We write about like a play. No–this is an issue of humanity. You can’t play with it. You would not dance your way out of this one. It is not funny. You decimate humanity. You destroy humanity.
I work at it myself as i watch how America continues to disgrace Black people. America would not change their behavior-making a ragic even worse. The pain continues.
Don’t ask me what we do. We’re dealing with humanity. I knw something abut that-humanity. Human beings–yes-I know something about me. So-I know what it means–a human being–I know what it means.
I’m not sure. You must change America. Stop the abuse of humanity.
I’m happy to see the *most difficult* set of issues being tackled here & discussed on Tikkun.
One thing was critical in the article written here–and trust me, I’ve lived all over the US, coast to coast from small town Texas to NY to Silicon Valley to my original home on the rivers of Louisiana–so I know firsthand, how hate &
bigotry play their game.
Here is the quote I find meaningful in this article :
>”The problem with a fixation on Dixie is that it leads to a perverse
sacralization.
The Dixie Narrative takes on the quality of the crucifix on the Inquisitor’s
wall; the greatest crime has already been committed..”
–The reason we need to come to grips with
this—
and get kids & teens to relate to this—is that we have 2-battles-in-one :
1—We have the need to focus on the slavery & hate–and all the problems—happening NOW,
yet,
2—we need to be honest about the fact that *everyone* who’s family or culture has been butchered, needs to talk about it, to tell their story, to blog it, to make a movie, a song or whatever.
Free expression… it’s what these long-dead slaves & martyrs fought-for anyway, eh?
If anyone thinks progress toward ending slavery, war, sex-trafficking or poverty is going to happen by ignoring past stories, they’re dreaming in a very
naive way;
If anyone thinks we can make progress for humanity while ONLY re-telling these stories, well they’re *also missing the mark.*
Why else has pop-culture, music, games, movies & drama *all* swept the world like no force in history—?– Because story-telling makes history come ALIVE, no matter if that sounds corny or
not.
Slogan for a documentary perhaps, but it’s reality in the digital generation more
than ever.
Yet it DIES QUICKLY if you don’t wake-up to the fact that the old haters, murderers,
bullies & conmen are part of bad-behavior that is still booming right now;
if we don’t see the patterns of hate & injustice repeating right now, we’ll be making these movies & telling these sad stories ad nauseum.
We need to communicate by telling the facts, by revealing the honest stories while BLENDING these
movies & songs & lessons with
tactics & ideas to deal with these repeating-problems in the old (and new) here & NOW.
Watch the most well intentioned kids who see these movies or study the sad history in
their classrooms, & ask :
do kids tune-out or turn-away from these things because they can’t handle it—is it that the
problems are too tough–?–No. Every generation of kids hits the ground–hard–stumbles–and tries to keep running.
One universal truth is growing up. Every thing that lives & breathes does it & finds some tough
roads sooner or later.
The reason kids grow up to tune “big struggles” out of their world of games & shows IS because we do not teach them how to recognize the same bad-patterns while using understanding & tools to
deal with those patterns–rather than that most pathetic
of lines “oh you can’t change this or that—it’s human nature”..
Nice comedy in a sense—if that old line doesn’t make you laugh sarcastically, or otherwise, you need
a checkup.
All we have to do is connect lessons of the past to today’s reality. Show kids-and adults–that building healthy systems of justice, success or happiness is also a pattern, and how to recognize the
good in the system from the bad, or the sick or…whatever, you get my point.
Either extreme won’t work: stuck on past sorrows, or overwhelmed by current
battles; it won’t change the fact that we
want–and have a right–to healthy lives & freedom, connected to the ecosystem of a real world.
The dynamics of the game—or the biosphere—or the business world–or sports or music– won’t stop because we imagine some “mega solution” to it all.
It’s the fairness & mutual respect of our past & present–all of us–not just those who own the biggest storytelling studios or the smallest poems, but equal share in facts & the roads from
a tough past to a tough present, that gets us “to” a process just like it gets
us “to” a future.
This re-building, healing or re-tooling our attitudes & systems is simply about interaction of
past stories without the fear that everyone’s “stories in the making” are too much to handle. “You can’t change the world” is the best line–it reminds us that we DON’T need to change
the world.
What we need are honest stories from the past with honest perspectives on the present, it’s not rocket science and it’s not war, it’s just simple interaction in a mutual quest for some decent freedom and
health without being fooled that “you can’t do it” or “you don’t deserve it.”
A friend came into our shop the day after seeing this film and urged us to see it. Painful, yes. Horrible, yes. We must learn from the past to deal with the now and the future. Thanks for sharing your response to the film and inviting us to think.