I bought and watched 12 Years a Slave. I did not want to see it in the theaters. I knew it was 'based on a true story', but I have also seen what Hollywood has done with that phrase, wholesale altering reality to make pretty pictures, or movies 'with a message'. I thought TYAS would be the latter, and I really did not want to be preached to. I felt prejudice was over. Any racial disparities are on the basis of effort, or choices, or genetic differences, or schools. But not prejudice. But the movie didn't preach.It was very upsetting. A husband and father is drugged, kidnapped and sold into slavery. He is literate, articulate, a part of his community. And he is reduced to slavery.
I don't think about slavery much. To me, it has always been a part of the past, long over and therefore irrelevant. Mostly I have thought of those making ongoing claims about slavery to be whining apologists for personal failure. History papers over slavery. Some slaves were house servants, some were literate. Christmas entertainment was provided. Slaves did not live in conditions significantly worse than Northern factory workers. All this makes slavery an abstract issue, a human rights issue, a term that allows emotional retreat into the intellectualisms of the UN. It allows the forgetting of physical suffering and emotional abuse. The effect is similar to the over-arching story of the Holocaust, where talking about 6 million deaths prevents thinking about individuals, families and communities hideously destroyed and dehumanized.
'Schindler's List' made the Holocaust sickeningly real on a human, individual level. TYAS did this for me with regard to slavery.
I watched this man wake up trapped in a room, in shackles. he was degraded, called names, then beaten severely. That upset me on a very personal and visceral level. He stands naked while being sold. He receives kind treatment at the hands of his first owner, but there is no escaping the fact that he is owned. That his kind treatment is not a right, but a privilege, a condescension of a man who owns property. This point is made crushingly later in the film, when his second owner says 'a man can do as he likes with his own property'.
The human implications of that get glossed over. That means that he can beat his property mercilessly, starve him, feed him anything he likes, have sex with him or her, work them to death. All with the same ethos as might apply to driving a car until it breaks down. And all of those behaviors, outrageous and illegal between people, are perfectly acceptable between people and property. And the movie shows all that.
The slaves are called niggers routinely, with a distinction made between field niggers and house niggers. They stand with eyes cast down, not allowed to meet the eyes of their owners, afraid of beatings if they simply look a man in the eye. Their 'entertainment' is being forced to dance in the big house on Christmas Eve, and being beaten when their dancing is insufficiently enthusiastic. They have the Bible read to them by the same people that beat them. Their work output is measured in pounds of cotton picked, with rewards to the biggest pickers. Their families are split up, and if the mourning is expressed too openly they are killed. Not only are the slaves degraded but there is no escape. This is their life, a life of degradation and exploitation.
And suddenly many things looked different to me. The difference between many black and white men in talking about important issues became clear. Typically a young black man looks down when speaking about important topics. A young white man looks in the face. That looks like a residual of slavery to me.
If I were judged like a car or a horse, by my 'horsepower', by my ability to tote and fetch and pull, I would never be so judged again. In our society, where opportunity for so many blacks is bad, I would not see working hard or being eager as a virtue. It would be buying into the system of oppression. I would never be eager except for my own. I would form my own society, my own world. Blacks get criticized for not integrating into the world of whites. We talk of the racism of blacks. I would be racist too, and with real reason rather than simply a belief that one color was less than another.
If my families were split up, I would learn that creating a child does not require two parents. And if I were spat on, beaten, called names and driven like cattle, I would be sullenly silent, the only alternative to rage to the point of murder. Greeks think Turks are animals two hundred years after independence. Sicilians will not speak to strangers at all. I would do no differently. And if I were told that my advancement meant integrating myself into the society of my oppressors I would never do it. I would rather have what is mine than anything that meant I identified with so horrific an aggressor.
I don't think we as a society can pretend that such things are not the residuum of slavery. 140 years is nothing compared to a legacy of a whole group of people being brought to a country as disposable labor. The last people who lived in slavery died in the early 1900s (not counting babies born as slaves but raised free). Their children died in the 1920s and '30s. Their children in the '50s and '60s. And their children are alive right now. And the South treated black men and women like slaves until 1964. We are truly only a generation or two removed from a culture that overtly denied civil rights to blacks, sneered at them, put them in different schools, and taught that they stank, were lazy, were stupid, good for nothing.
I watched that movie and was horrified. I realized how much my own assumptions were cultural, how innate the beliefs are, how unchallenged, despite all good intention and all law. All the quiet assumptions and mutterings of so many whites are just false, an ongoing labeling of people who are singled out as the descendants of an abusable class merely by the color of their skin. The movie affected me like Todd Browning's 'Freaks'. That film set up an emotional dissonance by making the physically normal evil and the horribly deformed good. TYAS made people who look like me, who are financially well off, like me, disgusting exploiters, rapists, murderers. And the muttered about, the black, the niggers, are truly horribly mistreated. And they are, within the severe limits of their situation, kind, helpful to others, polite, dignified.
And I was ashamed for what I saw. Not because I did it, but because I realized that in so many ways I continue to buy into the values and assumptions that made it possible to treat one man differently than another just on the color of their skin. I wasn't ashamed historically, or culturally. I was ashamed of myself.
I am sorry for so much that happened, even though I didn't do it. More importantly, I am sorry for ways, overt but more importantly assumptive, in which I DID do it, in which I have participated in the negative assumptions and beliefs about people. The movie made me look at slavery, but more importantly at myself.
Ted
I don't think about slavery much. To me, it has always been a part of the past, long over and therefore irrelevant. Mostly I have thought of those making ongoing claims about slavery to be whining apologists for personal failure. History papers over slavery. Some slaves were house servants, some were literate. Christmas entertainment was provided. Slaves did not live in conditions significantly worse than Northern factory workers. All this makes slavery an abstract issue, a human rights issue, a term that allows emotional retreat into the intellectualisms of the UN. It allows the forgetting of physical suffering and emotional abuse. The effect is similar to the over-arching story of the Holocaust, where talking about 6 million deaths prevents thinking about individuals, families and communities hideously destroyed and dehumanized.
'Schindler's List' made the Holocaust sickeningly real on a human, individual level. TYAS did this for me with regard to slavery.
I watched this man wake up trapped in a room, in shackles. he was degraded, called names, then beaten severely. That upset me on a very personal and visceral level. He stands naked while being sold. He receives kind treatment at the hands of his first owner, but there is no escaping the fact that he is owned. That his kind treatment is not a right, but a privilege, a condescension of a man who owns property. This point is made crushingly later in the film, when his second owner says 'a man can do as he likes with his own property'.
The human implications of that get glossed over. That means that he can beat his property mercilessly, starve him, feed him anything he likes, have sex with him or her, work them to death. All with the same ethos as might apply to driving a car until it breaks down. And all of those behaviors, outrageous and illegal between people, are perfectly acceptable between people and property. And the movie shows all that.
The slaves are called niggers routinely, with a distinction made between field niggers and house niggers. They stand with eyes cast down, not allowed to meet the eyes of their owners, afraid of beatings if they simply look a man in the eye. Their 'entertainment' is being forced to dance in the big house on Christmas Eve, and being beaten when their dancing is insufficiently enthusiastic. They have the Bible read to them by the same people that beat them. Their work output is measured in pounds of cotton picked, with rewards to the biggest pickers. Their families are split up, and if the mourning is expressed too openly they are killed. Not only are the slaves degraded but there is no escape. This is their life, a life of degradation and exploitation.
And suddenly many things looked different to me. The difference between many black and white men in talking about important issues became clear. Typically a young black man looks down when speaking about important topics. A young white man looks in the face. That looks like a residual of slavery to me.
If I were judged like a car or a horse, by my 'horsepower', by my ability to tote and fetch and pull, I would never be so judged again. In our society, where opportunity for so many blacks is bad, I would not see working hard or being eager as a virtue. It would be buying into the system of oppression. I would never be eager except for my own. I would form my own society, my own world. Blacks get criticized for not integrating into the world of whites. We talk of the racism of blacks. I would be racist too, and with real reason rather than simply a belief that one color was less than another.
If my families were split up, I would learn that creating a child does not require two parents. And if I were spat on, beaten, called names and driven like cattle, I would be sullenly silent, the only alternative to rage to the point of murder. Greeks think Turks are animals two hundred years after independence. Sicilians will not speak to strangers at all. I would do no differently. And if I were told that my advancement meant integrating myself into the society of my oppressors I would never do it. I would rather have what is mine than anything that meant I identified with so horrific an aggressor.
I don't think we as a society can pretend that such things are not the residuum of slavery. 140 years is nothing compared to a legacy of a whole group of people being brought to a country as disposable labor. The last people who lived in slavery died in the early 1900s (not counting babies born as slaves but raised free). Their children died in the 1920s and '30s. Their children in the '50s and '60s. And their children are alive right now. And the South treated black men and women like slaves until 1964. We are truly only a generation or two removed from a culture that overtly denied civil rights to blacks, sneered at them, put them in different schools, and taught that they stank, were lazy, were stupid, good for nothing.
I watched that movie and was horrified. I realized how much my own assumptions were cultural, how innate the beliefs are, how unchallenged, despite all good intention and all law. All the quiet assumptions and mutterings of so many whites are just false, an ongoing labeling of people who are singled out as the descendants of an abusable class merely by the color of their skin. The movie affected me like Todd Browning's 'Freaks'. That film set up an emotional dissonance by making the physically normal evil and the horribly deformed good. TYAS made people who look like me, who are financially well off, like me, disgusting exploiters, rapists, murderers. And the muttered about, the black, the niggers, are truly horribly mistreated. And they are, within the severe limits of their situation, kind, helpful to others, polite, dignified.
And I was ashamed for what I saw. Not because I did it, but because I realized that in so many ways I continue to buy into the values and assumptions that made it possible to treat one man differently than another just on the color of their skin. I wasn't ashamed historically, or culturally. I was ashamed of myself.
I am sorry for so much that happened, even though I didn't do it. More importantly, I am sorry for ways, overt but more importantly assumptive, in which I DID do it, in which I have participated in the negative assumptions and beliefs about people. The movie made me look at slavery, but more importantly at myself.
Ted
What a beautifully phrased and well written item. I still need to watch this film.
ReplyDeleteThought-provoking. Thanks. I haven't seen the movie yet--not sure if I can take it emotionally.
ReplyDelete