HOW NICK CANNON MADE ME WRITE ABOUT SLAVE MOVIES AGAIN

            I really, really wanted to move on from talking about slave movies, but, like Al Pacino, whenever I try to get out, they pull me back in.  Actor and comedian, Nick Cannon, like so many others, wants a richer expression of black life in film, something with which I agree 1000%. Most of the objections to slave movies have been based on not wanting to endure the pain our ancestors bore, or not wanting to feel like victims.  Nick Cannon’s rationale hit me like a brick upside my head.  He tweeted:

“If I see another d@mn slave movie…AARRRGGHHHH!!!!!  I think they keep making them because they want to keep Black folks on edge!  They don’t want us to get to comfortable!  Yeah we know about Obama…But don’t forget about Toby!”

                         

I’m trying really hard to get this straight.  The incarceration rate for black males is six times that of white males; The Supreme Court recently gutted the Voting Rights Act resulting in more than a dozen states moving to disenfranchise black voters.  Innocent black children are  being slaughtered daily by mindless, black gang members, who have no idea as to who they are, or what their place in the world should be.  An entire prison industry has grown up based on the incarceration of black males. White folks have taken up shooting black folks for sport (a la George Zimmerman).  Black folks are constantly demonized by the media.  And while all this is going on, it’s next to impossible to get black folks who aren’t on a specifically political site to read anything that relates to the black struggle, and Nick Cannon worries that “They don’t want us to be to comfortable.”  Mr. Cannon, it is not the white establishment that doesn’t want black folks too comfortable.  It’s conscious black elders like me who don’t want black folks to be too comfortable.

The same war that was going on when Africans were first kidnapped and brought to this country is still going on right now. It is no longer the same physical war that divided this country in the mid-1800’s.  It is never-the-less a real and important war of ideas and power.     It is a war to determine who will define reality.  Who will define Black people.  Who is truly entitled to all of the rights and privileges associated with citizenship in the United States.  Right wing propaganda machines (television and talk radio, as well as some mainstream columnists) pump out racist bile every single day, while black folks are far too busy keeping up with the sports scores or the Kardasians to notice.  History is being re-written everyday in a thousand different ways to eliminate Black contributions.  This past summer I took a visiting relative on an architectural boat ride in Chicago.  The tour guide stated that the best way to understand the city was to start with the history.  I beamed with racial pride as I anticipated the obligatory acknowledgement of Chicago founder, Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable.  Instead I was treated to stories about the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, neither of whom actually set foot on what was to become Chicago.  More than ten minutes in, Du Sable was mentioned, almost in passing, with the notation that he is “regarded by some as the founder of Chicago.”    

The racists who trivialize slavery are the same racists who point to Obama and declare this a “post racist America.” They are also the same folks who refuse to recognize Obama as the legitimate POTUS.  The Jews rubbed their noses in the Holocaust until they got a whole country!  We couldn’t even get forty acres and a mule.   We are the ones who should be pointing to Toby, NOT the power establishment. Rather than keep beating my head against the wall, I’ll let Washington Post columnist, Richard Cohen make the rest of this argument for me.  He is far more eloquent on this subject than I could ever be!

I sometimes think I have spent years unlearning what I learned earlier in my life. For instance, it was not George A. Custer who was attacked at the Little Bighorn. It was Custer — in a bad career move — who attacked the Indians. Much more important, slavery was not a benign institution in which mostly benevolent whites owned innocent and grateful blacks. Slavery was a lifetime’s condemnation to an often violent hell in which people were deprived of life, liberty and, too often, their own children. Happiness could not be pursued after that.

Steve McQueen’s stunning movie “12 Years a Slave” is one of those unlearning experiences. I had to wonder why I could not recall another time when I was so shockingly confronted by the sheer barbarity of American slavery. Instead, beginning with school, I got a gauzy version. I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people — fellow Americans, after all — and the sadistic Simon Legree was the concoction of that demented propagandist, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a lie and she never — and this I remember clearly being told — had ventured south to see slavery for herself. I felt some relief at that because it meant that Tom had not been flogged to death.