This news item shocked some. Two unnamed Academy members said they picked 12 Years a Slave as their choice for best picture of the year. It subsequently got the award. The shock, though, was that the unnamed members candidly admitted that they did not see the film. They minced no words why. It was just too painful and disturbing to watch this kind of film. But this really shouldn't be much of a shock. Facing the horror of slavery is a tough nut to crack not simply because it entails facing an inconvenient truth about past racial dehumanization, but because it entails facing the real truth that slavery still corrodes in big and little ways American life. This starts with the truth of why and how slavery became a respected and legitimate part of American life in the first place.
The U.S. government encoded slavery in the
Constitution and protected and nourished it for a century. Traders,
insurance companies, bankers, shippers, and landowners made billions off of it.
Their ill-gotten profits fueled America's industrial and agricultural might.
For decades after slavery's end, white trade unions excluded blacks and
confined them to the dirtiest, poorest paying jobs.
While it's true that many whites and non-white immigrants came to America after
the Civil War they were not subjected to the decades of relentless racial
terror and legal segregation, as were blacks. Through the decades of slavery
and Jim Crow
segregation , African-Americans were transformed into the poster group for
racial deviancy. The image of blacks as lazy, crime- and violence-prone,
irresponsible, and sexual predators has stoked white fears and hostility and
served as the standard rationale for more than 4,000 documented lynchings
between 1890 and 1945, as well as the countless racial assaults and acts of
hate crime violence.
Blacks continue to have the highest rates of poverty, infant mortality, violence victimization rates, and health care disparities than any other group in America. They are still more likely to live in segregated neighborhoods and be refused business and home loans. Their children are more likely to attend failed public schools than any other group, and more likely to be racially profiled on America's urban streets.
The U.S. government admitted it
was legally liable in 1997 to pay the black survivors and family members of the
two-decade long syphilis experiment begun in the 1930's by the U.S. Public
Health Service that turned black patients into human guinea pigs. The survivors
got $10 million from the government and an apology from President Clinton. They
were the victims of a blatant medical atrocity conducted with the full
knowledge and approval of the U.S. government.
The state legislature in Florida in 1994 agreed to make payments to the
survivors and relatives of those who lost their lives and property when a white
mob destroyed the all-black town of Rosewood in
1923. This was a specific act of mob carnage that was tacitly condoned by
some public officials and law enforcement officers. Florida was liable for the
violence and was duty bound to apologize and pay. The Oklahoma state
legislature has agreed at least in principle that reparations and apology
should be made to the survivors of the dozens of blacks killed, and the
hundreds more that had their homes and businesses destroyed by white mobs with
the complicity of law enforcement in the Tulsa
massacre of 1921.
A bill by Michigan Congressman
John Conyers that has been kicked around Congress since 1989 to establish a
commission to study the impact of slavery and the feasibility of paying
reparations to blacks has gone nowhere in Congress. Reparations is simply too risky,
divisive, and distracting for Congress to seriously consider. President Obama,
however, has spoken at times about the need to spend more on education, job and
housing programs as the best way to deal with the ills of the black poor.
The brutal truth is that a mainstay of America's continuing racial divide is
its harsh and continuing mistreatment of poor blacks. This can be directly
traced to the persistent and pernicious legacy of slavery. But from the
comments and actions of at least some Academy members even watching a movie about
slavery that's set a century and a half ago is too much too take. Think what it
would take for them to connect the dots from then to now and that tells why
America still refuses to face its slave past.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network. Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
