is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger… [If] you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that." James Baldwin threw down that challenge to his country in a 1963 interview. Fifty years later, America marked the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington by basking in the soaring rhetoric of his cherished universal dream, but Baldwin's painful question continues to sting. Why did white people need to invent the "nigger"? A pressing, urgent, ugly, difficult, necessary question, and one that America has been avoiding since its inception. At least we can now say that the question is beginning to be asked, on our screens if not in our hearts. In 2013, the nature of white racism became the biggest question at the movies.
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| Leonardo DiCaprio, on filming Django Unchained: "I've gotta say, the first day on set was incredibly difficult for me…. The language is hard for us as actors to say." What Samuel L. Jackson said to DiCaprio that day, according to costar Jamie Foxx: "Hey, motherfucker, get over that. It's just another Tuesday for us. And let's get going." |
The sheer bulk of films about the history of race in recent years has been astonishing. They used to be pure buzzkill. Last year, Tarantino, Spielberg, and Lucas all released films based on the theme of black oppression. The odds-on favorite for Best Picture at this year's Oscars is
12 Years a Slave, but the competition will almost certainly include the summer's surprise megahit,
The Butler, as well as
Mandela and probably
42. And there are more to come next year, too. The director of
The Help is slated to direct a James Brown biopic. You did not read that incorrectly: The life of Mr. "I'm black and I'm proud" will be told by a white director; the screenplay is being written by two Brits.
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| Brian Helgeland, left, writer and director of 42, and Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave. |
We are in the middle of a new era of racially conscious films, all of which take a radically different, far more open approach than their predecessors. Race has always been one of the great subjects of film, of course. The beginning of movies as we have come to know them was 1915's
The Birth of a Nation, a sentimental celebration of the origin of the Ku Klux Klan. The white perspective on the history of slavery, in classics like
Gone with the Wind, focused exclusively on the gallantry, the idealism, and the romance supported by brute slave labor. It took the civil-rights movement to provide an African-American counter-narrative — most famously
Roots, which revealed the barbaric cruelty underlying all that charm. The division was stark: white people making movies about the struggles of white people, black people making movies about the struggles of black people. And this division continued, even in movies about encounters across the color line. Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing and
Jungle Fever both concerned an inability to reconcile white and black narratives. People are thrown together and then torn apart — often ending up more deeply confused about one another than they were at the beginning.
The fusion of both sides of the story is the key to the new era of movies. Both
42 and
Mandela have a white director,
12 Years a Slave and
The Butler a black one, but this fact seems more or less irrelevant when you look at the finished products. What is so remarkable about this year's movies is how they show both the virtues of white people and the barbarism of slavery together. And that fusion of perspectives is illuminating in an entirely fresh way:
The Butler focuses on the life of a single character, but the film's arc is really a journey through a succession of white people that takes us from all-out sadomasochism to the craven racial tokenism of Ronald Reagan to the election of Obama.
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| "In the black film community, the consensus is that we're entering a new era of 'Al Jolson movies….' Some of the films made today seem like they're sifted of soul. It's as if the studios are saying, 'We want it black, just not that black.' " —John Singleton in an essay in The Hollywood Reporter in September |
In all of these dramas, the black people's stories are simple, almost banal. As the kidnapping victim in
12 Years a Slave says, "I don't want to survive. I want to live." He simply endures, with all the courage and dignity he can muster. His situation, the heroism of his situation, is easy to understand. The slave owner, played by Michael Fassbender, is a far more mysterious, more fascinating type: What kind of man wants to flog nearly to death the mother of the child he adores? What kind of man rests against people as if they were furniture? It is a testament to the power of American denial that Fassbender's portrayal of a slave owner is the finest ever put down on film. It took a white European actor and a black British director to do it.
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This month brings two Hurricane Katrina projects: the final season of "Treme," featuring a largely African-American cast and depicting the aftermath of Katrina, and "Hours," concerning a white man, played by Paul Walker, who saves his newborn daughter during the storm. Both projects were created by white men. |
Only the fusion of perspectives can approach Baldwin's thorny question, and the answer it provides is both complicated and horrifying. The slave master in
12 Years a Slave is so cruel because he believes his cruelty to be righteous. In his book
Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains exactly how this contradiction informs the modern history of racism: "When you do something that harms someone else, you must be able to justify it." The sense of justification is what generates the ferocity of the hatred — the racist believes his hatred to be earned and that beauty and nobility and even love flower from it. The tragedy is that precisely the best parts of European culture, its highest ideals and most cherished values, led to the unique viciousness that Walt Whitman described as "the foulest crime in history known in any land or age." In
12 Years a Slave, the master brandishes the Bible while he holds the whip.
As we approach the end of Obama's term as president — a term that was supposed to be the achievement of a kind of redemption of American racism's history — it is becoming clear that the transformation he wrought is subtler and much less tangible than what everybody had hoped for. The world of America at work and in church and in virtually every other public domain remains starkly divided by race. But in an environment that perhaps can best be described as post-hope, we can at least say that we're post–
The Help, too. All distinctive American culture is a fusion of European and African modes — American music and art have derived most of their strength from that often brilliant, often insane cultural economy of gift and theft. Mixing things up is always dangerous. It's also the only possibility of salvation.
