The story still resonates when
black Americans are routinely
punished for seeking or attaining
For most of their time in this
country, Black Americans have
learned to hide their true and inner
feelings from white people. This is
a necessary survival skill for life in
a racist society. The “mask” also
extended to public spaces as well.
Barbershops, hair salons, churches,
fraternal organizations, homes,
bars and private clubs, were places
where black folks could engage in
“private talk” with a diminished
fear of the white gaze and the harm
that its many agents could cause us.
The new movie “12 Years a Slave”
is a quintessentially American
story. White supremacy remains
central to American political life
because it is one of the foundations
upon which the United States was
founded. The struggle against it
remains in the year 2013.
“12 Years a Slave” is also a
nightmare vision. While graphic,
its violence is rather routine
relative to the expansive (and in
many ways “creative”) cruelties
that were visited upon black slaves
by white people.
“12 Years a Slave” is also a
representation of the private
thoughts, fears, and collective
anxieties felt by African-
Americans. There is a deep tension
between wanting to see the
brutality of chattel slavery
presented for public consumption
in such a way that it corrects what
remains a very “white washed” and
fictionalized public memory about
“the peculiar institution,” and the
intensely personal and intimate
exercise that is being a member of
the Black Diaspora and watching
“12 Years a Slave” in a theater.
This experience becomes even
more intense and intimate when it
is the black body being torn apart,
raped, and abused by white people
on screen, and white and black
moviegoers, as both a society and a
community, have not collectively
confronted the meaning of that
historic crime, or its echoes in the
present.
In all, “12 Years a Slave”
challenges viewers because it
offers no easy out or solution either
for the viewers or its protagonist
Solomon Northup.
Ultimately, “12 Years a Slave” is a
horror movie for Black America,
one that is especially visceral for
the upwardly mobile black
Americans of the post-civil rights
era.
Solomon Northup was a free black
man, immensely talented and
intelligent, and who had carved out
a place for himself among the
white elites in his native New
York. America was a slave society:
most blacks were the human
property of whites. Thus, Solomon
Northup was a true outlier. He was
the very definition of an
“exceptional” black man. Yet, in
one moment all of his freedoms
and accomplishments were stolen
away. They counted for nothing
because several white men decided
that he would be kidnapped and
sold away for their profit.

Of course, in the 21st century black
Americans are no longer slaves.
But a sense that human rights for
Black Americans (and other people
of color) are still contingent and at
risk is very real and alive in the
post-civil rights era.
When black Americans driving a
nice car, one which “people like
them” ought not to own as judged
by the police, are racially profiled
and harassed, it is a reminder of
their Otherness. When black
Americans are followed around
department stores, asked for
identification when making routine
purchases, or otherwise harassed
for wanting to participate as full
citizens in “the consumer’s
republic,” it is a reminder that they
are perennial outsiders. Even black
celebrity millionaires and
billionaires are not free of such
policing by those who are acting in
the name of White authority. Black
graduates of elite universities are
less likely to receive job interviews
than white applicants. Black
men without criminal records
who apply for jobs are just as
likely to receive an interview as
white men that are felons . Black
Americans who are middle and
upper class live in neighborhoods
that in terms of public services and
net worth more closely resemble
those of poor and lower-class white
communities.
Solomon Northup lived in a state
of existential threat to his freedom.
Black Americans today remain
subjected to efforts by a society
steeped in white racism and white
privilege to put them “in their
place” when they are perceived as
“getting out of line.” Formal white
supremacy is illegal in America.
However, many of its informal
conventions remain.
Barack Obama is central to this
dilemma and puzzle. He is
arguably the most powerful person
in the world. He is the exemplar of
the multicultural elite class which
has come to prominence in the
United States after the Civil Rights
Movement.
In addition, Obama’s racial politics
are very conservative. He actively
avoids discussions of race-specific
solutions to the problems facing
the African-American community.
And when he does discuss the
latter, Barack Obama revels in his
chosen role as the “Scold-in-Chief”
of Black America.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama is
subjected to vicious and bizarre
assaults on his legitimacy by white
conservatives who cannot reconcile
his “blackness” and role as the
symbolic embodiment of the
United States of America. The
White Right is so disdainful of
Obama’s personhood and
humanity, that they will risk
destroying the United States
economy in order to protest the
legitimacy of the country’s first
black president.
What are the outrages directed
against Barack Obama by a
Republican Party, one that which
channels both the language and
imagery of the Confederacy and
the Southern Slaveocracy, if not an
effort, on a national scale, to beat
back and humiliate an “uppity”
black man?
African-Americans identify with
Barack Obama both out of a sense
of well-deserved racial pride and
because he is a champion of sorts
for black strivers and the politics of
black respectability. We hurt for
him too, and feel the needles of
white racism and disrespect when
they are thrown at him, because
when the White Right assaults
Obama’s legitimacy and
“Americanness” they are also
spitting in the metaphorical face of
Black Americans’ full citizenship
and belonging.
Solomon Northup’s experience in
the film “12 Years a Slave” is a
Dante-like ordeal in which black
humanity was under siege by
predatory whiteness and white
supremacy. That world was
hobbled by the Black Freedom
Struggle and a Civil War.
However, its legacy remains in the
way the accomplishments and
successes of upwardly-mobile
black Americans remain imperiled,
insecure, and undermined by a
system of white privilege which
still threatens, and in many ways,
actively assaults them.
Culled from the blog "We Are
Respectable Negroes"

Space booked

let me eat in order to read all this.
nice post