by Dexter Gabriel

The recent release of “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” has sparked renewed dialogue on American slavery, as all such films inevitably do. A full 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery remains a touchy subject for public discussion. When then-candidate Barack Obama dared mention it in his famous 2008 “race speech,” the rarity of the moment sent commentators into spasms of awe. As a nation, we seem unable to negotiate a working language for slavery into our popular discourse. So, naturally, we’ve outsourced the job to Hollywood.

But Hollywood’s depictions of slavery have never been solely grounded in the past; they are just as much about the present. They reveal each era’s memories of slavery, shaped by popular folklore, myths and contemporary constructions around race and national identity. “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” present us with slaves that are, with few exceptions, voiceless spectators, or caricatures out of old plantation epics—byproducts more of the history of slave films, than of slavery itself.

Early Hollywood depicted an American past filled with loyal, contented slaves, a trend that would continue for decades.

In the silent films “Confederate Spy” (1910) and “For Massa’s Sake” (1911), faithful Uncles spy for the Confederacy, sell themselves back into slavery and sacrifice their lives, literally, “for massa’s sake.” No movie would capture these popular American mythologies like D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation.” In the film, slaves work, dance and sing happily for their masters—until emancipation. Spoiled with freedom, they turn haughty, violent and, worse still, oversexed. Only Mammy and Uncle remain loyal, fighting in defense of their former masters. In the film’s climax, the gallant Ku Klux Klan rides in to put the unruly blacks back in their place.

These early movies had little to do with slavery as it actually existed. Rather they depicted the slavery of Old South nostalgia, the slavery memorialized in minstrel shows and “Lost Cause” folklore that by the early 20th century had become a part of popular Americana. Hollywood helped promote this mythologized past, creating plantation epics filled with doting Mammies, loyal Uncles and happy, docile slaves.

These depictions of slavery were directly related to the times—a reaction to a new generation of African Americans, whose aspirations and assertive attitudes both frightened and enraged whites, leading to black codes, Jim Crow and repressive violence. The content slaves of the screen served as substitutes to the so-called Negro problem, rewriting both history and reality through movie magic.

In films like “The Little Colonel” (1935) and “The Littlest Rebel” (1935), child-star Shirley Temple danced through slavery with Uncle Billy (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson), while Willie Best shuffled his best Sleep ‘n’ Eat. The zenith of the plantation epics, “Gone with the Wind” (1939), promoted all the slave stereotypes of American folklore: the doting Mammy (Hattie McDaniel); the dutiful Uncle Peter (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson); the child-like Prissy (Butterfly McQueen). Black actors managed to humanize these roles (earlier depictions often featured whites in blackface), but could not transcend their limitations.

Hollywood’s turning point came with the social upheavals of the 1960s. As early as 1946, African Americans launched protests against Disney’s “Song of the South,” objecting to its caricature Uncle Remus, fashioned as the kindly Tom. Inspired in part by radical black playwrights, Hollywood created a new slave to meet the times. Movies like “Slaves” (1969), the Blaxploitation epic “The Legend of Nigger Charley” (1972) and “Mandingo” (1975), turned the old plantation epics on their heads, depicting slavery as brutal, the whites as functionally deranged and their chattel property simmering with all the militant (nearly always masculine) anger that set Watts and Detroit to flames. Slavery now mimicked Hollywood caricatures of Black Power, projecting new stereotypes of black manhood into the past. Slave women escaped their Mammy roles only to become sexual props, decorating celluloid plantations in lurid and salacious imagery.

When Blaxploitation died (or more accurately, devoured itself) slavery mostly disappeared from Hollywood. Television took up the slack, with groundbreaking miniseries like “Roots” (1977).

Far removed from the Old South epics and more sophisticated than Blaxploitation, “Roots” managed to humanize slavery more than any previous cinematic portrayal. The world the slaves made, separate and apart from their masters, was in full display. No one mistook Fiddler (Louis Gosset, Jr.) for a Tom, even if he wore that mask from time to time. Mammy disappeared, replaced with more complex roles like Belle (Madge Sinclair) and Kizzy (Leslie Uggams). Kunte Kinte (LeVar Burton and James Amos) became a symbol of black defiance, risking life and limb (literally) to reach freedom. Billed as “An American Saga,” Roots mirrored the attitudes of an emergent black middle class, providing a vision of African Americans as strong, moral, hard working and grounded in traditional family values. Sanitized and homogenized for mass consumption, slavery was no longer America’s original sin—it was just another immigrant story.

Hollywood did not return to slavery in a major feature until “Glory” (1989) and then “Amistad” (1999). In both films, slavery this time is revised to extol American patriotism and memorialize great white men. “Glory” recreates the all-black 54th Massachusetts as slaves (most were actually free black men from the North, even Canada and the West Indies) who are taken from bondage to manhood by their white commanding officer (Matthew Broderick). “Amistad,” ostensibly about a slave mutiny, turns into a courtroom drama where John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) delivers a fictionalized prelude to the Gettysburg Address. Hollywood was again willing to talk about slavery only as long as our perceptions of national pride remained intact.

This time, we’ve been given two films about slavery. The first, “Lincoln,” like its immediate predecessors, manages to make itself almost completely about great white men. Slavery here is a thing, both debated and settled by important white men while blacks await deliverance. Who comes out on top by the film’s end? America, of course.

The second film, “Django Unchained,” tells the story of a freed slave who embarks on a vengeful killing spree to save his wife. A kitschy farce steeped in violence and bravado, it is slavery in the era of the action hero, where black masculinity and swagger alone can overcome any obstacle. While Django (Jamie Foxx) takes his cues from Blaxploitation, his fellow slaves seem throwbacks to the old plantation epics. Dazed and voiceless, they stand around as backdrops to Django’s heroics. The one standout role, the sinister Stephen (Samuel Jackson), recycles “Lost Cause” caricatures of the faithful Tom stitched together with contemporary African-American folklore on so-called house versus field slaves. In this post-racial revision of American history, mythical Uncle Toms and sadistic whites collude to maintain slavery—a clever moral escape-hatch to negate white guilt and guarantee crossover appeal.

None of this should come as a surprise. In surrendering our public discourse on slavery to Hollywood, we’ve rendered it a marketable commodity (“Django Unchained” even comes with action figures) rather than an honest historical exploration.

In each instance, Hollywood alters the past to fit the present, feeding our myths and expectations back to us. Slavery becomes both tool and metaphor, revised and rewritten to fit contemporary perceptions of our national past. If “Birth of a Nation” tells us more about 1915 than Reconstruction, “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” are mirrors for our times, rather than reflections of the slave experience.

Dexter Gabriel is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University. His areas of focus include slavery, emancipation and popular culture in the Black Atlantic.

Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily. Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.

1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. It was key to London’s emergence as a global capital of commerce, and spurred New York’s rise as a center of finance. The industry to construct, fund, staff, and administer the thousands of ships which made close to 50,000 individual voyages was alone a herculean task. The international financial and distribution networks required to coordinate, maintain and profit from slavery set the framework for the modern global economy.

2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement.
Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.

3) African know-how transformed slave economies into some of the wealthiest on the planet.
The fruits of the slave trade funded the growth of global empires. The greatest source of wealth for imperial France was the “white gold” of sugar produced by Africans in Haiti. More riches flowed to Britain from the slave economy of Jamaica than all of the original American 13 colonies combined. Those resources underwrote the Industrial Revolution and vast improvements in Western Europe’s economic infrastructure.

4) Until it was destroyed by the Civil War, slavery made the American South the richest and most powerful region in America.
Slavery was a national enterprise, but the economic and political center of gravity during the U.S.’s first incarnation as a slave republic was the South. This was true even during the colonial era. Virginia was its richest colony and George Washington was one of its wealthiest people because of his slaves. The majority of the new country’s presidents and Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

However, the invention of the cotton gin took the South’s national economic dominance and transformed it into a global phenomenon. British demand for American cotton, as I have written before, made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era. The single largest concentration of America’s millionaires was gathered in plantations along the Mississippi’s banks. The first and only president of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis—was a Mississippi, millionaire slave holder.

5) Defense of slavery, more than taxes, was pivotal to America’s declaration of independence.
The South had long resisted Northern calls to leave the British Empire. That’s because the South sold most of its slave-produced products to Britain and relied on the British Navy to protect the slave trade. But a court case in England changed all of that. In 1775, a British court ruled that slaves could not be held in the United Kingdom against their will. Fearing that the ruling would apply to the American colonies, the Southern planters swung behind the Northern push for greater autonomy. In 1776, one year later, America left its former colonial master. The issue of slavery was so powerful that it changed the course of history.

6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.
Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.

7) The economic success of former slaves during Reconstruction led to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.
In less than 10 years after the end of slavery, blacks created thriving communities and had gained political power—including governorships and Senate seats—across the South. Former slaves, such Atlanta’s Alonzo Herndon, had even become millionaires in the post-war period. But the move towards black economic empowerment had upset the old economic order. Former planters organized themselves into White Citizens Councils and created an armed wing—the Ku Klux Klan—to undermine black economic institutions and to force blacks into sharecropping on unfair terms. Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, details the targeting of black individuals, as well as entire black communities, for acts of terror whose purpose was to enforce economic apartheid.

8) The desire to maintain economic oppression is why the South was one of the most anti-tax regions of the nation.
Before the Civil War, the South routinely blocked national infrastructure protects. These plans, focused on Northern and Western states, would have moved non-slave goods to market quickly and cheaply. The South worried that such investments would increase the power of the free-labor economy and hurt their own, which was based on slavery. Moreover, the South was vehemently opposed to taxes even to improve the lives of non-slaveholding white citizens. The first public school in the North, Boston Latin, opened its doors in the mid-1600s. The first public school in the South opened 200 years later. Maintenance of slavery was the South’s top priority to the detriment of everything else.

9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.
Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquee names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

10) The wealth gap between whites and blacks, the result of slavery, has yet to be closed.
The total value of slaves, or “property” as they were then known, could exceed $12 million in today’s dollars on the largest plantations. With land, machinery, crops and buildings added in, the wealth of southern agricultural enterprises was truly astronomical. Yet when slavery ended, the people that generated the wealth received nothing.

The country has struggled with the implications of this inequity ever since. With policy changes in Washington since 1865, sometimes this economic gulf has narrowed and sometimes it’s widened, but the economic difference has never been erased. Today, the wealth gap between whites and blacks is the largest recorded since records began to be kept three decades ago.

I was hanging out with one of Leila Khaled’s sons last night in Amman. After meeting Leila in Gaza, I apparently just cannot get enough of this family.

Gazan Farmers at Work in Kuzaa

Planting wheat in Kuzaa

December 10th, 2012

Today, Gazan farmers from Kuzaa, a small village near Khan Younis, worked on their land in defiance of Israeli military harassment. Farmers ploughed approximately seven dunams and then sewed wheat in a plot that they had previously been denied access to before the November 21st, 2012 ceasefire. The farmers successfully worked up to 100 meters from the separation fence. The Israeli military arbitrarily designates this area as a restricted military buffer zone, otherwise known as the “kill zone.” According to the workers, they have not been able to farm on this specific plot of land for the past ten years. Formerly an orchard, Israeli forces bulldozed the field multiple times during military incursions and regularly shoots at farmers who attempt to work there.

At approximately 8:00 AM, the Palestinian farmers began their morning‘s activities when two Israeli tanks, one military jeep and five bulldozers lined up across from the farmers on the Israeli side of the fence, threatening to fire. Around 9:30 AM, the farmers were joined by a group of 14 solidarity activists from Gaza, Spain, Italy, France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Germany and the United States. The Israeli forces left after half an hour and were quickly replaced by two more military jeeps. The Palestinians and internationals stood their ground approximately 100 meters from the fence despite multiple Israeli warnings to leave the area. One of the international activists accompanied a Gazan driver aboard his tractor to act as a deterrent to Israeli fire. Other farmers sewed wheat by hand. The work concluded around 12:30 PM without any fire from Israeli forces.

This was a small, yet very important victory for the farmers, especially as Israel has frequently and unapologetically breached the ceasefire’s stipulations to “refrain from targeting residents in the border areas” and to “stop all hostilities in the Gaza Strip land, sea and air including incursions and targeting of individuals.”

Israeli tanks near the fence

Bulldozers

Standing between the army and the farmers

Tank shell fired at Kuzaa residents during Operation Cast Lead

I just got to see Leila Khaled for the FOURTH TIME this week! I wish I had video editing skills so I could do something nice with her speech from tonight, which I recorded. Where is that brother of mine when I need him??

Well, maybe I’ll have something by the end of the month, or maybe I will share someone else’s video sooner. :)

Today, about a dozen international activists accompanied farmers in the buffer area in Khoza’a (near Khan Younis, Gaza). We were threatened by the Israeli soldiers, who ordered us to go back, but they did not shoot when we refused. According to the soldiers, we were 80 meters from the border fence. If the farmers were there without the activists, they would likely have been shot immediately. Such is the racism of the Israeli army, which deems Palestinian lives (even civilians) as expendable. Palestinians have been shot at as far as 1500 meters from the fence, although the high risk zone extends to about 300-500 meters.

All in all, it was a successful day for the farmers, as they were able to work about 7.5 dunams of land in the buffer zone that they had been unable to reach for 12 years. Due to the high risk of being shot in this area, the farmers plant low-maintenance crops in the buffer zone, so they will not have to risk it again until harvest time. About 1/3 of the most fertile land in Gaza is located in the buffer zone, which makes it necessary for the farmers to work there.

At a gallery featuring students’ artwork in Gaza. Some incredibly moving pieces ranging from the recent attacks to the Right of Return to symbols of Palestinian heritage. And afterwards there was basbousa. Basbousa is always good.

Finished a meeting with some fishermen about an hour ago and was greeted outside by the sound of F-16s flying above. I’ve heard that this is because of Khaled Meshaal’s visit. I also heard that he is staying at a hotel down the street from my apartment. Regardless of whether any of these rumors are true or not, the sound is not exactly calming.

Security for Khaled Meshaal, leader of Hamas, in Gaza for the first time.

View outside my apartment - Security for Khaled Meshaal, leader of Hamas, in Gaza for the first time.