Rhetoric Race and Religion
I keep reading these blogs about Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave claiming that black people are “tired” of seeing yet another slavery movie. Message board comments tell me that some non-black people are tired too, but these people are those who don’t understand why a majority of African Americans are inexplicably still a little troubled by slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing inequality in labor, housing, education, and the criminal justice system. Go figure.
Maybe I know what they mean. After all, we have all those movies about well-known leaders who were slaves like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, David Walker, Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, Denmark Vesey… hmmmm. Not so much? Then I guess they are just tired of all the stories about slavery that show the variety of experiences that took place over 250 years in the United States. I mean, there are at least as many films about slavery as there are about World War II, cowboys in the nineteenth century, or white people during the Civil War, right? What? You mean there’s not?
Thus the claim that people are “tired” of seeing slavery is fairly indefensible in relationship to the number of other historical genres that have many notable films. I would think that an institution that was immeasurably important in shaping our national history, demonstrating the greatest evils, tragedies, and resilience that we could possibly imagine, would garner a few more notable films than Mandingo, Beloved, Django Unchained, and McQueen’s recent entry into the slave film “genre.” Sure, there are a few more (and while it was on television, we must include Roots in this discussion), but given the number of people who were enslaved and the number of stories that nobody knows about, we have hardly cracked the surface of tales that could be told.
This argument is thus a bit baffling. Except it’s not. And it isn’t baffling because we have issues in this country with telling stories of suffering that don’t result in uplift.
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