It has not appeared. I never know why my comments don’t pop up. There are many possible explanations. Certainly, it seems unlikely this site has me blocked, but who knows? In any event, if I’m going to write something, it may as well appear somewhere.
And I will add editorially, that dwelling in the past is bad for both individual and groups. Yes, it helps to know where you come from, to know who you are, to better marshall your personal resources to move into the future. But the goal is always moving into the future. Making movie after movie after movie of how bad being a slave was does not help kids born in ghettos to crack-addicted or alcoholic mothers. It does not give them hope. It does not give them a path forward, or a role model for anything but undirected and almost entirely self destructive rage.
It is precisely the failures–the long term, expensive, and obvious failures–of policies designed to remedy inequalities which make movies like this so easy. Stirring up anger is a child’s task. Calming it down, and directing it soberly in productive ways is the hard work.
Those same atrocities are being inflicted on Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria TODAY, as the direct result of Obama’s policy of arming and then not seriously fighting Islamist sadists. At what point do people start living in the 21st century and acting like their moral compasses still operate?
And in point of fact 650,000 people died fighting a Civil War whose cause was the institution of slavery, almost all of them white. Are the mutilations of cannon grape shot, bayonets, and bullets any the less atrocious?
I feel less than zero guilt. I feel movies like this actually HURT the cause of black equality by working to build resentment about things that happened long ago, while ignoring the fact that the policies meant to help blacks have destroyed the nuclear family, eradicated their thirst for education and knowledge, taught them that they are helpless, and encouraged them to seek remedies for their poverty everywhere but hard work and long term plans.
All Frederick Douglas asked for was an equal shot. All Martin Luther King, Jr. asked for was to be judged on the content of his character. Movies like this have as their clear subtext the idea that blacks are owed something because of things that happened long before the lives of any living human beings.