White Privilege and Film Together Again: Did You Know That "12 Years a Slave" Makes Scarlett O'Hara's Struggles in "Gone With the Wind" Seem Petty by Comparison?

Like many of you, I am eagerly awaiting the new movie 12 Years a Slave. The early reviews suggest that the movie is going to win several Oscars. I have spoken with someone that has seen the movie and he described it as The Schindler's List of African-American history on film.

12 Years a Slave is powerful. And if director Steven McQueen's past movies are any indication, he will hold nothing back in his raw depiction of how power is not an abstraction--it is enacted by and through its relationships with the human body and psyche.

In surveying the early reviews of 12 Years a Slave, I came upon the following quote from the Hollywood industry magazine Variety:

This epic account of an unbreakable soul makes even Scarlett O'Hara's struggles seem petty by comparison.

Upon reading the above "blurb" on the website Rotten Tomatoes, and then the full review, I was less shocked than I was disgusted.

One of the themes I have returned to in my essays on We Are Respectable Negroes, Alternet, and Salon is how the colorline, and day-to-day white privilege and White Supremacy, are systems which are sustained in the post civil rights era by social and political institutions, an empathy gap towards people of color, and historical myopia by otherwise well-meaning white folks.

As the lede to an otherwise spot on and sharp endorsement of 12 Years a Slave, Peter Debruge's suggestion that the pain and loss experienced by a white woman who profited from White Supremacy, and owning black people as human property, is in the same moral or ethical universe as the suffering experienced by black bondspeople, remains bizarre. Yet, it is a near-perfect example of colorblind racism and White Supremacy in practice.

I am also disappointed by how a film reviewer for a major publication could read the film Gone With the Wind without a critical eye, and thus continue to further the myth of the Confederacy as a type of noble "Lost Cause"--and its white elites as "victims"--instead of identifying white slave owners as racial terrorists who deserve(d) no pity, empathy, sympathy, or human compassion.

Gone With the Wind is White Supremacist propaganda. Unfortunately, even in 2013, there are large numbers of people who fail to recognize how their fantasies of big plantations, fancy dresses, and "Southern hospitality" were based upon murderous cruelty towards black Americans. The white racial frame and Whiteness together facilitate many lies: one of the most prominent of those lies is a self-delusion that Whiteness is benign and exists as something neutral, good, and outside of history.

Peter Debruge's effort to create some equivalence between the real life events depicted in 12 Years a Slave and the "struggles" of Scarlett O'Hara are akin to a person taking pity on how Nazis came upon "hard times" when their stolen Jewish labor was taken from them at the end of World War 2. 

Any person in the public square making the latter suggestion would be run out of town, mocked, and derided.

By comparison, and as we have recently seen with deranged suggestions by Tea Party Republicans that extending reasonably affordable health care to the American people is a crime like slavery, black folks' history can be played around with, misrepresented, and lied about at will and with few consequences.

Peter Debruge's comments about 12 Years a Slave is just one aspect of a multifaceted and complex colorblind white racism in the post civil rights era and the Age of Obama. 

Of course, overt White Supremacy is real and remains dangerous. Thankfully, it has been reduced to an outlier and near-caricature by the Black and Brown Freedom Struggle. 

The new White Supremacy is far more difficult to counter because it works through taken for granted assumptions and spurious "commonsense" notions about unequal racial outcomes being based on "culture" as opposed to genetics and biology. Here, racist outcomes that reinforce White power are naturalized and made to seem normal. In all, colorblind white racism is based on unthinking assumptions.

Moreover, the new White Supremacy, especially as practiced by good white liberals and others, is enabled by both a lack of critical reflection and a willing surrender to seeing the world through White eyes and White Privilege. Such a bias does not encourage its owners to question basic priors about social relationships and power.

I do not know Peter Debruge. I will assume he is a good and smart person. But, there is something very wrong when he is able to equate--without thinking (is this not the core basis of implicit racial bias?)--the cruelty experienced by a person owned as human property, and the sense of loss when their owner is deprived of said human being's labor and owned personhood.

12 Years a Slave is a reminder of how there remains much work to be done in educating the American people about the crime against humanity that was the enslavement of millions of Africans in the "New World".

By comparison, in the post World War 2 era West Germans did a far better job of owning up to the Holocaust. White Americans lag far behind them in owning and making reparations for the centuries of crimes committed against African-Americans. So much for American Exceptionalism. But then again, like Santa Claus, American Exceptionalism was always a useful lie that could not withstand much critical scrutiny.

Hopefully, the movie 12 Years a Slave will inspire viewers to do some research, buy and read some some essential historical texts, and then grapple with the centrality of chattel slavery (and the genocide of our First Nations Brothers and Sisters) to the rise of America as a global power.