Historical depictions of slavery and civil rights in 21st century American film: global circulation of post-racial ideology in the Age of Obama

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Content Historical Depictions of Slavery and Civil Rights in 21st Century
American Film: Global Circulation of Post-racial Ideology in the Age
of Obama

By

Leah Aldridge

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION: CRITICAL STUDIES)

December 2017

Copyright 2017 Leah Aldridge

ii

iii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I will forever be thanking and appreciative to so many who shaped my life before and during this
journey: those that bought me coffee, provided spaces in and around Los Angeles for writing,
dialogue, and stimulation; and those that rescued me from myself, fed me, shook me, supported
me, and told me that everything would be ok. This includes family, friends, students, therapist,
and to the filmmakers who provide insights and reflections of ourselves for critical examination.
Special thanks and appreciation for my dissertation committee – Drs. Ellen Seiter, Michael
Renov, and Robeson Taj Frazier – for their guidance, time, and seemingly unlimited patience.

But to special acknowledgement goes to my grandmother, Lynette Montgomery Murray, who in
mantra like fashion told me that in order to achieve, I had to get my education. It was to her that
the promise was made.

LA

iv
ABSTRACT

This project analyzes the cycle of black cinematic product generated by Hollywood during the
two presidential terms of America’s first black commander in chief. While Hollywood has
practiced racial and gender discrimination for decades and continues to do so, ‘quality’
productions of cinematic blackness coinciding with President Barack Obama’s presidency
narratively centered America’s racist past at key moments in US History. These films broke with
the long practice of producers rejecting black actors and stories because of a pervasive industry
lore that “black doesn’t do well in foreign,” or, that ‘race’ is a barrier to financing and
international sales and therefore too risky for A-list production with international distribution.
“The Obama Effect,” suggests that Obama’s presidency elevated the visibility of American
blackness and his impact across socio-cultural milieu including education, crime rates, political
punditry, artistic expression, monuments and museums, and television and streaming shows to
name a few. Hollywood capitalized on this trend of increased white curiosity of blackness with
its black film production cycle narratively concerned and formally positioned to look backwards
causing many political and pop cultural commentators to wonder “why all of these slavery and
Jim Crow era movies now.”
Three particular films – The Help (Taylor, 2011), Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012) and 12
Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013) – are examined as representative of this investigation. While
there were more films made during this period that are reflect this trend, these three were chosen
because they 1) span both of President Obama’s terms, 2) are considered ‘quality’ pedigreed
“Hollywood” productions, and 3) broke from the lack of black profitability in international
markets lore, and thus consciously exported contemporaneous American racial ideologies. And it
bears repeating that unlike previous Hollywood black production cycles, this cycle coinciding
with Obama’s presidency was overwhelmingly interested in directing us to “look at blackness”
and “look back at blackness” but with ideological frames that make commentary on current post-
racial analyses: as nostalgia (The Help), as spectacle (Django Unchained), and as witness and
testifier to America’s racism (12 Years a Slave).
While President Obama’s election was heralded globally as a victory for racial progress, the
films made during his presidency problematizes the very notion of ‘progress.’ In examining how
these films “look at blackness” at this moment, we see race as an enduring force that continues to
structure US society. In doing so, I counteract the pronouncements of pundits and popular critics
(and widely accepted by the general public) that define our “post-racial” moment as one where
race no longer functions as a barrier in pursuit of the American Dream. I argue instead that the
election of the nation’s first black president marks a post-racial condition were the heightened
visibility of blackness reveals a mainstream racism that is consciously present and paradoxical.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract iv
INTRODUCTION 1
We Shall Overcome…Historical Constructions of Blackness 10
Hollywood’s ‘Age of Obama’ Black Film Cycle Heightens Black Visibility 17
Characterizing the ‘post-racial’ 23
Looking Back: As Resistance to Neoliberalism 28
CHAPTER 1: 34
Looking Backwards: History as a Strategy Forward 37
The Help: an “international film” 48
Looking Backwards: History Matters? 55
Looking Backwards: White Authored Nostalgia 70
Looking Backwards: Stockett’s White Ventriloquism 76
Looking Backwards: Black Legacy Womanhood 81
CHAPTER 2: 89
Looking Back: Black Visibility, Heightened Surveillance 89
President Obama: Too Black/Not Black Enough Double Bind 100
Looking Back: Django Unchained a Black Global Cinematic Hero 116
Looking Back: Fantasy Black Hero is Nothing But a Man 124
Looking Back: Post Racial Cultural Miscegenation 131
CHAPTER 3: 135
Looking Back: 12 Years a Slave Narrative Testimony 144
Looking Back: Black Sociality 157
Looking Back: From Watching to Witnessing 162

CONCLUSION 180
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189

vi

(BLANK PAGE)

1
INTRODUCTION

I came to academia from the creative side: I was an actress and a dancer, but recognized I
did not have the chops for the performance end of the business. A key frustration was the dearth
of roles for black women in the 1980s, so I naively thought that I would just create more roles for
black women and transitioned into screenwriting. As my work circulated around town, a constant
refrain from the industry was “great script, but you gotta put some white people in it.” This was
the beginning of my personal understanding of how commoditization and race worked in film
and television, providing insight into the industry lore that “black doesn’t do well in foreign.”
While international box office has always been part of Hollywood’s business calculus, after
industry reorganization in the 1980s, the idea of bankable black stars revealed further challenges
to equitable racial representation in the business overall.
The association of black bodies with cash value is a fraught concept considering the
lingering specter of American slavery: auction blocks, post-bellum institutionalized exploitation
(e.g., prisons labor), unequal wages for equal work, ghettoization to service employment, racial
ceilings, etc., was part of daily life for black Americans. But Hollywood as a creative industry
was believed to work as a meritocracy: just write a good story and your movie will be made. To
understand this aspect of Hollywood’s political economy, one had to have access to those
conference rooms, board rooms, and casting rooms where decisions were made regarding the
relationship between black bodies and capitalism. In these rooms, those with “greenlight” power
spoke openly and freely about how black bodies in front of the camera meant lower box office
returns. Through my experience, readings, and public discourse, Hollywood revealed itself to me
as just one of many systems fueling the dynamics of racism and capitalism. While most would
agree that this undercurrent is more visible at the level of representation, the business side was

2
uncritically perfunctory in its work; this was not about race but about money, which in
Hollywood translates to power.
Conversely, in those moments when the industry did think ‘black,’ determinants other
than social justice and equity were powerful motivators: the end of WWII saw increased black
faces and black-themed stories in Hollywood-produced films; but this is just as attributable to
Cold War anti-propaganda strategies as it was growing social consciousness and activism
domestically. The need to stave off bankruptcy in the late 1960s and early 1970s saw studios turn
to blackness for cash infusions and Blaxploitation became its own phenomenon. Fox
Television’s turn to blackness in the early 1990s allowed the upstart channel to distinguish itself
from the televisual pack, and stacked its primetime programming with a mix of hip-hop and
African American entertainment. In these instances (and plenty more) once the crisis had abated,
the industry would return to business as usual, but not without having been altered in some way:
at a minimum, Hollywood could not say that there was no audience for the centrality of
blackness in its storytelling.
Scholarship regarding race and representation was foundational, and insightful: the works
of Thomas Cripps, Manthia Diawara, Ed Guerrero, Jane Gaines, Cedric Robinson, and James
Snead were influential in thinking historically about cinematic representations of blackness.
Their work would aid my ability to make the claim that Hollywood was instrumental in creating
that international anti-black bias. Finding research that discussed blackness, Hollywood, and
international audiences was more difficult to obtain. Thankfully, Dr. Ellen Seiter pointed me to
the work of Timothy Havens, whose media industries work was instructive in thinking about
film sales and distribution practices: he generously shared monographs that eventually became
Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe. The pervasiveness of this

3
particular lore is potentially triggered every time a black actor, writer, or story is proposed for
television or film production in Hollywood. In Black Television Travels, Timothy Havens
discusses what happens when the belief that “black doesn’t do well in foreign” circulates and is
corroborated among producers, financiers, and distributors: the phrase moves from individual
beliefs into institutional practice and becomes pervasive “industry lore.” Havens situates this lore
within the “carrier discourse[s]” that transmits certain beliefs, values, and practices among those
tasked to produce, distribute, and exhibit televisual (and by extension, filmic) cultural product:
Industry lore provides the conduit through which the economic demands and the cultural
industries get transcoded into concrete representational practices. Despite its real power
to produce markets, representations, and subjectivity, however, rarely does industry lore
become visible to the general public.
1

Havens’ work validates the carrier function of the anonymous producer whose reinforcement of
the lore likely yields representations of blackness that are considered safe and reliable or, in an
attempt to appease an international audience’s bigotry, cultivate audiences whose familiarity
with blackness leans toward stereotypical representations. Via interviews with industry
executives and international buyers who repeat this sentiment and pass it on to new executives
entering the field, Havens has identified an important mechanism that shapes Hollywood’s black
cultural production.
2

As to the “why” this lore persists, Havens identifies a lack of transnational/transcultural
appeal in content or genre as the barrier to black cinematic consumption, more so than a racist
international marketplace. For greater international film and television consumption across racial

1
Timothy Havens, “Introduction,” Black Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe (New York:
New York University Press, 2013), 4
2
Havens, Black Television Travels.

4
difference, the product needs to have “crossover” appeal to as broad an audience as possible. In
doing so, Hollywood films and television shows foreground elements of ‘cultural proximity,’ or
preference for themes, values, and languages around which audience formations coalesce, and
can theoretically ‘relate’.
3
When deemed too niche or culturally specific to the United States,
stories about the black American experience are thought to lack ‘universality’ in their appeal.
This same niche-ness/universality impacts other Hollywood product, as certain genres
(comedies, sports films, historical, Americana, etc.) also struggle to translate transculturally.
Black films and television shows, especially those connected to the black historical condition or
steeped in a cultural vernacular, operate within a niche-ness that diminishes their perceived
‘universality’ (i.e., differentiated audiences’ ability to connect across difference with players,
stories, themes, values, traditions, histories, style, etc.). Theoretically, if differentiated global
audiences are not able to identify cultural proximity or commonalities beyond racial difference,
audience consumption is down, and profitability is reduced.
Hollywood dominates a significant portion of the cinematic global market share, yet must
still compete with other ‘national’ cinemas and local domestic productions vying for the same
screens. If producers are attentive and responsive to the dictates of international film markets to
generate profits, and international buyers and exhibitors, who function at the pleasure and tastes
of their consumers, believe they cannot sell certain forms of black representation, then the
confluence of race(ism), commoditized culture, market economics and globalization exposes the
limits associated with the supply-and-demand of black film/television. While considerably

3
Timothy Havens,, “Black Television From Elsewhere: The Globalization of Non-US Black Television,” Black
Television Travels: African American Media Around the Globe (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 153

5
oversimplified,
4
this is mainstream Hollywood’s racialized political economy that views film,
television, and talent as products that operate within an economic logic in order to generate
revenue or, “as commodities produced and distributed within a capitalist industrial structure.”
5

And while Havens addresses how audiences may not be aware of how their black cultural
product arrives to the screen, it is also likely that industry players are not consciously aware of
how their perpetuation of the lore shapes not just content, but other factors such as volume of
production, and where/when exhibition occurs. What is at stake here can be observed materially
and symbolically: this systemic belief frequently determines the authors (i.e., writers, directors,
actors, producers, executives), the types of stories (i.e., genres), and the means and thereby
quality of production afforded black films and television (i.e., access to financing, marketing,
and promotions). Additionally, acting upon such lore functions as a determinant for which black
images and representations are manufactured and exhibited, along with where they can be
consumed by domestic and global audiences (i.e. distributors, exhibitors, marketing, critics).
In addition to defining audiences and shaping their tastes for certain representations of
blackness globally, the impact is felt among below the line labor and contributes a form of
‘symbolic annihilation:’ where “representation in the fictional world signifies social existence,”
and the systematic absence of a particular group from the visual landscape in effect renders that
population invisible in the real world.
6
It should be noted that blacks are not the only ethnic or
affinity group impacted by this type of industry [mis]understanding of how to commodify types

4
Additional factors that influence this cycle of foreign sales include: how well shows/films perform in US domestic
markets, marketing assistance that distributors pump into foreign exhibition, merchandising tie-ins, etc.
5
Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 9-10
6
Gerbner quoted in Robin R. Means Coleman & Yochim E. Chivers, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Race: A Review of
the “Blackness” Literature,” African American Research Perspectives 12 (Spring 2008): 1-10.

6
of culture: various ethnic populations, women, LGBTQ, and persons with disabilities, for
example, remarkably remain at the margins of mainstream Hollywood productions. To some
degree, greater ethnic representation on the screen means greater diversity behind the camera and
below the line. Beyond profitability, this industry lore impacts not only what is produced and
end-user consumption, but other sectors of entertainment production such as labor and criticism.
Further, representational practices not only impact what is produced but also what is absent from
production. For example, the NBC sitcom Julia (1968-1971) starring African American actress
Diahann Carroll necessitated the hiring of crew skilled in make-up and hair styling of black
women; this show resulted in the hiring of hair stylist Ann Wadlington who then became the first
African American to join the Makeup Artists & Hair Stylists Guild, IATSE-Local 706, as a result
of her hire on a union show.
7
Wadlington’s achievement is an example in the inverse of how
symbolic annihilation can have real world impact in this case among labor of color. But
Wadlington’s hire also exemplifies a key crisis among the dispossessed majority; white stylists
who enjoyed a seventy-year head start in the business and protections of IATSE, suddenly
discover that they lack a certain skillset necessary to work on a new television show that happens
to have a black star, their ability to earn a living becomes threatened by diversity.
Each of the major networks, industry guilds and unions, and numerous community-based
organizations with industry affiliations have expressed commitments to increase ethnic and
gender diversity within its ranks and products. The push for diversity in the industry covers a
range of efforts: from the creative end to industry-affiliated businesses such as minority and
women owned procurement companies (i.e. vendors, suppliers, etc.). Real investments in

7
“Ann Wadlington,” Death Announcement, Variety, June 17, 1993, http://variety.com/1993/scene/people-
news/ann-wadlington-107921/.

7
diversifying the media landscape are made such as Comcast Cable’s requirement to create ten
new minority-owned and focused channels as part of its 2011 deal to purchase majority
ownership of NBCUniversal from General Electric for nearly $14billion dollars.
8
But
meaningful, sustainable change is questionable, as many efforts do not necessarily result in
increased representation either in front of or behind the camera, on small or large screens.
Instead, what is more typical is a bottleneck effect – broad diversity efforts pushing upwards
with very few avenues for output – that becomes one of the many contradictory aspects of
Hollywood’s modes of production that generate [minority] human capital/labor power that have
little to no access to the means or social relations of production. Thus, with what appears to be an
undeniable level of commitment and intention to diversify the industry across multiple levels and
sectors of the business, including diversity in content, how does Hollywood reconcile the
demands of its international consumers with is ‘progressive’ efforts? Hollywood has been in
tough spots before; but its resiliency rests in its ability to go with the flow, follow trends, tap into
what is in the air, including a trend that popularizes blackness.
Hollywood as an industry cannot dispute the over representation of white labor and
decision-making power throughout various facets of the business. A recent Directors Guild of
America (DGA) reports that only six (6) out of 598 films released in 2011 were directed by black
directors (only two were studio supported; and two were directed by Tyler Perry). Among half-
hour television comedies, Caucasian males are reported to have directed 73% of all television
episodes; Caucasian females directed 11% of all episodes; minority males (i.e. non-whites
collectively) directed 13% of all episodes, and minority females (i.e. non-whites collectively)

8
Todd Shields and Jeff Bliss, “Comcast Wins U.S. Approval to Buy NBC Universal From GE for $13.8 Billion”,
Bloomberg News, January 18, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-18/comcast-nbc-universal-deal-
said-to-be-near-u-s-fcc-approval.html

8
directed 4% of all episodes. Among one-hour television series, Caucasian males directed 76% of
all episodes, and in half-hour series, Caucasian males directed 69% of all episodes. Similarly, the
Writers Guild of America West’s (WGAw) reports stagnation in employment and wage earnings
among minorities and women. And finally, a 2012 Los Angeles Times study reveals that the
Oscars organizing body, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science (AMPAS), to be 96%
white, 77% male. This whiteout of the industry reached peak controversy when at the 2016
Academy Awards – dubbed #OscarsSoWhite – filmmaker Spike Lee and actress Jada Pinkett-
Smith declared that she and husband Will Smith would be boycotting that year’s ceremony due
to the lack of diversity in the Academy’s nominations. It is clear that Hollywood has by and large
established a dominant culture of whiteness that actually speaks volumes about the culture of the
industry, while simultaneously establishing a rationale for the perceived lack of desirability
associated with black film and television. As evidenced above, when a belief is consistently acted
upon as fact or truth, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was tempted at the beginning of this project to conduct international research that
confirmed or dispelled this lore. Thankfully, researchers in other disciplines such as business,
management, and employment law have taken up this concern, situating the issue of
Hollywood’s racial minority casting problems within the discipline of employment
discrimination. Researchers Venkat Kuppuswamy and Peter Younkin at University of North
Carolina and McGill University respectively, have found in their study of over seven hundred
Hollywood films released between 2011 and 2015, that not only does black casting in
Hollywood films increase domestic box office revenue, but that “international audiences do not

9
exhibit evidence of bias against diverse casts.”
9
To that end, several questions emerged: Are
black players and black films held to a different standard than those starring white actors? Does
this lore apply to genre films? Where does craftsmanship and casting fall into this analysis? To
what degree is Hollywood’s pervasive circulation of this industry lore at the core of a self-
fulfilling prophecy? When Hollywood has invested in black films, it was not unusual for black
films to receive smaller production and marketing budgets in order to mitigate against risk. This
practice sometimes referred to as “ghettoized,” increases probability of poor production values,
and poor theatrical attendance because the general public is unaware that the film exists. Second,
what is meant by “foreign?” Is this in reference to tried and true markets with similar colonial
histories, with dominant white cultures, and where English is the primary language, or wealthier
developed markets? Or, is this in reference to markets where Hollywood seeks greater expansion
such as China and India? Lastly, the corollary to this last point: is there an assumption that black
people in the diaspora are the target populations for black films from Hollywood? And, if
blackness lacks profitability due to racism or an inability to connect transculturally, how did
‘American’ whiteness emerge as code for ‘universality,’ and thus embody an elevated cash value
(e.g., real world ethnic non-whites cast with white actors, etc.)? Given global circulation and
awareness of black images long before the daguerreotype, when did this lore become an actual
thing? Why have industry analysts not developed a more nuanced or complex understanding of
this lore? Doing so would yield ways to more equitably represent the racial plurality of the global
audience, while allowing for a more fully exploited international box office. While an
anonymous producer’s email revealed after the hacking of Sony Studio in December 2014

9
Venkat Kuppuswamy and Peter Younkin, “Testing the Theory of Consumer Discrimination as an Explanation for
the Lack of Minority Hiring in Hollywood Films,” Social Science Research Network (SSRN),
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2738728.

10
exposed Hollywood’s facile comprehension of – and acquiescence to – international racism’s
influence on Hollywood productions, the email content also revealed that producers will
intentionally overlook an international bias (real or perceived) and go for the “double” when
there is an “inherent upside,” or, benefits beyond immediate box office receipts, rendering the
production worth the risk. In addition to the aforementioned questions, my central investigation
led to the following inquiry: what are the circumstances in which blackness does do well in
foreign? What motivates those moments when Hollywood will embrace the inherent upside of
black cinematic production belying the lore that “black doesn’t do well in foreign?”
We Shall Overcome…Historical Constructions of Blackness
While contemplating these assumptions and others, the United States was on the cusp of
electing its first black president and while not obviously apparent, the Presidency of Barack
Obama would influence my area of research. What was easily observable was how blackness
suddenly became trendy and visible. Coined ‘The Obama Effect,’ people were not only seeing
blackness in new ways and with more frequency, but wanted to mark the early effects of this
historical moment as comprehensively as possible. Research in 2009 and 2010 examined
whether his presidency would provide a “beneficial effect on Black-Americans’ [educational]
exam performance,”
10
if his status as a “counter-stereotypical exemplar led to reduced racial
prejudice and stereotyping,”
11
and whether “exposure to Obama can decrease implicit racial bias
levels,”
12
which all showed favorable results toward reductions in prejudice, bias, and
stereotype-threat performances. A 2009 New Yorker piece noted how the President’s comparison

10
David M. Marx, Sel Jin Ko, et al, “The ‘Obama Effect’: How a salient role model reduces race-based performance
differences,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, April 9, 2009.
11
E. Ashby Plant, Patricia G. Devine, et al, “Obama effect: Decreasing implicit prejudice and stereotyping,” Journal
of Experimental Social Psychology, May 3, 2009.
12
Corey Columb, E. Ashby Plant, “Revisiting the Obama Effect: Exposure to Obama reduces implicit prejudice,”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, December 2, 2010.

11
between the plight of Palestinians and that of African Americans subtly impacted Arab world
politics.
13
A 2009 Pew survey revealed that globally, the most recent election resulted in
viewing the US in a more favorable light and that they had high expectations for the new
president, believing that he would have a multilateral approach to foreign policy, with slightly
negative perceptions toward the US during this time from Arab Muslim countries.
14
And
criminology researchers began looking at a correlation between African American confidence
and a steady decline in black crime rates post-election, despite the great recession of 2008, when
“[b]lacks in the US are like the canary in the mine…crime rates go up faster during recessions,
and go down faster during good times.”
15
It was clear that the 2008 election would have dramatic
global geopolitical impacts and time would reveal those highs and lows. And filmmakers were
not immune to The Obama Effect given the volume of black films released during his
presidencies, with one South African reporter observing “[t]here is no easy explanation as to why
Hollywood has upped its treatment of race in film and it’s too early to say that black film is
thriving…[but] The visibility of the nation’s first African American president has made the issue
of race visible throughout the culture and one of the places we are seeing that is in Hollywood.”
16

The global circulation of a black cinematic presence, which based on this project’s
reading, is not just about representation, but inclusive of accompanying themes and histories that
enunciate black subjectivities, rather than historical modes that speak to global audiences in

13
Hendrik Hertzberg, “The Obama Effect,” The New Yorker, June 22, 2009,
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/06/22/the-obama-effect.
14
“Confidence in Obama Lifts U.S. Image Around the World,” The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Pew Research
Center, July 23, 2009, file:///Users/leahaldridge/Downloads/Pew-Global-Attitudes-Spring-2009-Report-1-July-23-
11am.pdf.
15
James Verini, “Is there an ‘Obama Effect’ on Crime?”, Slate.com, October 5, 2011,
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2011/10/the_obama_effect_a_surprising_new_theory_f
or_the_continuing_crim.html.
16
Mary Milliken, “Tinseltown Weighs in on the Colour Debate – Hollywood reflects on race in a year of African
American, civil rights films,” Pretoria News, South Africa, (also carried in the Tai News Service (Bangkok, Thailand)
8/29/2013.

12
stereotypical, caricatured, and the degraded ways in which they may have come to know
blackness. Thinking along these lines allowed for a differentiation and complexity in blackness
that Hollywood did not consider in its broad generalization and marginalization of black film
production and profitability. But the industry’s logic was not formed from myth, but is instead
residuum of a global colonial capitalist past: America’s history of racism would become
institutionalized in censorship practices during the co-occurring Jim Crow and
classical eras both by the Production Code Administration and among local
censorship boards across the country; similarly, English-speaking “white men’s
countries” around the globe would also make import procurement decisions based on
whether Hollywood films adhered to their own local censorship and raced based
laws born out of colonialism. For example, the all black musical The Green Pastures
(Connelly, 1936) depicting various Old Testament bible stories, was banned from
South Africa because it presented God as black; in addition to being banned in the
US because it violated anti-miscegenation laws,
Tamango (Berry, 1958), a French-Italian co-production adapted from
a novella by French writer Prosper Mérimée (author of Carmen on
which Bizet’s opera was based), about a ship-board slave revolt
starring Dorothy Dandridge, was banned in French colonies, despite
having changed the slave ship and captain from French to Portuguese
and Dutch, respectively.
17
While institutional and systemic barriers
worked to slow cinematic representation of black progress, other
cultural images and ephemera worked to reinforce black subjugate status via stereotypes:

17
Susan Hayward, “ Representing History: Epics, Courtesans and Master Narratives, 1796-1888,” French Costume
Drama of the 1950s: Fashioning Politics in Film (Bristol: Intellect Books, Ltd., 2010), 209-17.
Figure 1: Darkie
Packaging

13
Shanghai’s “Darkie Toothpaste,” first appearing in the early 1930s, used a blackface minstrel for
its packaging which circulated throughout Asian countries until the mid-1980s; the “golliwogg,”
a blackface minstrel rag doll character from children’s books written by Florence Kate Upton in
the 1890s, circulated as a cultural icon throughout the United Kingdom and Australia up until the
mid-1970s; and the East German billboard campaign for Beverly Hills Cop (Brest, 1984)
featured a graphic rendering of a black man with exaggerated features (lips, nose, kinky hair)
with a banana extended from his mouth. These examples and countless others have been part of
the larger visual and intellectual landscape which Henry Giroux suggests produces “narratives,
metaphors, and images that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think of
themselves and their relationship to others.”
18
Thus, it is critical to our understanding that if
black does not do well in foreign, that there are historical, cultural, oppression based, and
capitalist determinants contributing to what is less phenomenological (as Hollywood would
believe) and more conditioning.
In a 2007 Entertainment Weekly article, tabloid-esque industry watcher James Ulmer of
the Ulmer Scale (a ranking system of movie star bankability) flat out states that “the international
marketplace is still fairly racist.”
19
In a New York Times article of that same year, House Party
(1990) filmmaker and former BET President Reginald Hudlin states “I always call international
[markets] the new South.”
20
Hudlin likens the international marketplace to a period in American
history during the first half of the twentieth century, when local censorship boards could deny
theatrical bookings/request reedits of films, and advertisers shied

18
Henry A. Giroux, “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” Communication and
Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2004): 62.
19
Joshua Rich, “Why Aren’t African-American movie stars as popular abroad?” Entertainment Weekly, March 1,
2007, http://www.ew.com/article/2007/03/01/why_arent_afric.
20
Michael Cieply, “Films with Black Stars Seek to Break International Barriers,” The New York Times, February 28,
2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/movies/28color.html.
Figure 2 Florence Kate Upton's
"Golliwogg"

14
away from depictions of black life, perceived to run counter to that of Jim Crow, thus limiting
their domestic popularity and potential profitability. Years later, the characterization of the
international market as racist persists and was made publicly known in the now infamous Sony
hacking incident. In a private email sent to Sony Pictures Entertainment President Michael
Lynton, an anonymous Hollywood producer cites The Equalizer (2014) as an example of why
black actors should be excluded from films intended for wide international circulation because of
anti-black bigotry abroad:
“I am not saying The Equalizer should not have been made or that African American
actors should not have been used (I personally think Denzel Washington is the best actor
of his generation) … Casting him [Washington] is saying we’re ok with a double
[baseball term] if the picture works. He’s reliable at the domestic [box office], safe, but
has not had a huge success in years. I believe whenever possible the non event pictures,
extra ‘bets’ should have large inherent upside and be made for the right price. Here
[Washington in The Equalizer] there isn’t a large inherent upside….I believe that the
international motion picture audience is racist – in general pictures with an African
American lead don’t play well overseas.”
21,22,23

The email’s author reveals a typical decision-making calculus routinely negotiated for all
Hollywood films, in this instance, when casting is ‘racialized’: a star’s bankability (“reliable”

21
Chris Spargo, “Producer says Denzel Washington won’t make money for Sony because he is black and the rest of
the world is ‘racist’, leaked emails reveal,” The Daily Mail, December 18, 2014,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2878621/Producer-says-Denzel-Washington-won-t-make-money-Sony-
black-leaked-emails-claims-rest-world-racist.html.
22
Jess Denham, “Sony leak: Denzel Washington should not star in lead roles overseas because the world is ‘racist’,”
The Independent, December 18, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/sony-leak-
denzel-washington-should-not-star-in-lead-roles-overseas-because-the-world-is-racist-9932507.html.
23
“Sony email hack shows ‘racist’ international market don’t like Denzel Washington,” The Times of India,
December 19, 2014, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/english/hollywood/news/Sony-email-
hack-shows-racist-international-market-dont-like-Denzel-Washington/articleshow/45575368.cms.

15
and “safe”) is assessed against their perceived liabilities (African American) resulting in the
anonymous producer’s recommendation that “Sony should avoid casting black actors to appeal
to an international market.”
24
By nature, all commercial films – including those with blackness at
their narrative centers – are overdetermined, and thus any number of elements (i.e., marketing,
positioning, release dates, competition for screens, indigenous film industries, financing,
production values, or storytelling), when inadequately conceptualized, poorly executed, or
unfortunately timed, can result in poor box office performance. Sony’s big screen adaptation of
The Equalizer is in many ways nothing like the hit CBS that aired 1985-1989 starring white
British thespian Edward Woodward: by any standard, an expectation that a television show
cancelled nearly thirty years ago would find an international blockbuster audience (inclusive of
millennials) is a tough sell. Nevertheless, the unnamed producer offers no empiricism on which
to base his plea. For him the lore is real and should be acted upon: not only does he explicitly
state “I believe that the international foreign picture market is racist,” [emphasis mine] but in
circulating this belief, he contributes to an industry culture that routinely rationalizes racism and
encourages other industry decision makers – in this case, a studio president – to adopt the same
belief and act upon it.
Clearly there have been moments over the last century where black films were produced,
distributed, and generated profits for their producers. With Hollywood risk-averse and prone to
copycat practices, proof of concept rather than a debunking of the lore became this project’s
focus. Also embedded in the logic of Hollywood’s lore had been the assumption that a failed
film with black talent failed because of its blackness, an assertion never applied to films with

24
Ewen Hosie, “A Sony Producer Claimed Denzel Washington Lacks Box Office Appeal Because International
Audiences Are Racist,” Complex.com, http://uk.complex.com/pop-culture/2014/12/producer-sony-claimed-denzel-
washington-lacks-box-office-appeal-international-audience-racist.

16
majority white talent. For example, romantic comedies with similar age demographics, Think
Like a Man (Story, 2012) and The Five-Year Engagement (Stoller, 2012) were both released in
April 2012, at the cusp of summer blockbuster season. A non-scientific, cursory glance at their
numbers, courtesy of boxofficemojo.com, would support the claim that white movies make more
in the foreign markets than black films, with Engagement yielding just over $25 million and
Think/Man earning just $4.5 million. But a closer examination of their numbers by territory
yields a more interesting picture:
Think Like a Man
Combined BO: $96,070,507 (US: $91,547,205)
Production Budget: $12million
The Five-Year Engagement
Combined BO: $53, 909,751 (US: $28,835,528)
Production Budget: $30million
Country Receipts % of foreign Country Receipts % of foreign
Australia [no release] 0 Australia $6,353,823 .25
Egypt $40,907 .008 Egypt $58,086 .0023
Germany $165,257 .04 Germany $4,777.603 .19
Lebanon $179,232 .04 Lebanon $53,434 .002
South Africa $1,273,221 .26 South Africa $246,165 .0098
United Arab Emirates $425,650 .10 United Arab Emirates $350,666 .014
United Kingdom $1,027,944 .22 United Kingdom $7,743,125 .31
Table 1 Box Office Mojo Totals
First, a couple of caveats: it should be noted that The Five Year Engagement did not earn back its
production budget at the box office, compared to Think Like a Man which made seven times its
investment at the domestic box office. Second, reported budgets are usually production costs and
do not include marketing expense which can be equal to the amount of the production budget on
some films. Third, these totals should also take into account the number of screens and length of
time in theaters (Engagement was on nine hundred more screens in the US; Think/Man was in
theaters four weeks longer than Engagement). And, US produced films also compete with films

17
from other countries with film producing industries as well as a country’s own domestic
productions: consider whether the low numbers in Germany are really the result of an all-black
cast, or were internal domestic films opening simultaneously, whether it had ghettoized
marketing, or could all of these possibly been at play? When considering these numbers, in
looking at box office grosses in relation to budgets, Think Like a Man performed competitively
with The Five Year Engagement in the UK. Finally, given projected population changes
anticipated between now and the year 2050 when sub-Saharan and other subaltern populations
are expected to hit a boom, Hollywood would do well to pay attention to the performance of
Think Like a Man on the African continent/Middle Eastern region of the world.

Hollywood’s ‘Age of Obama’ Black Film Cycle Heightens Black Visibility
We were launched into the Obama era with no notion of what to expect….There was no
preparation, because it would have meant preparing for the impossible.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates
25

If the world had posed the question, “why is the presidency of Barack Obama cause for
so much attention,” Hollywood’s response was “you need to see histories of blackness and
whiteness, real and imagined, in order to understand.” During President Obama’s two terms,
Hollywood invested in looking backwards in time at blackness, but also looking at blackness in
various modes (nostalgically, reflexively, actively). This project presupposes that the increased
volume of black cast/themed films within a concentrated period of time indicates a black film
production cycle co-occurring with President Obama’s two presidential terms. A subset of films
within this production cycle were narratively concerned with slavery, the American Civil War,

25
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black: A History of the First African-American White House and of What
Came Next,” The Atlantic, January/February 2017 Issue,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/.

18
and/or Civil Rights emerged; I loosely mark the start of the trend with The Help (Taylor, 2011)
and sunsetting with two films with scripting and pre-production commencing in 2015, Hidden
Figures (Melfi, 2016) and 2017’s Marshall, directed by Reginald Hudlin, one of the producers
on Django Unchained. I mark the “Age of Obama” with then Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s
speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention where he famously stated “There’s not a
black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United
States of America”
26
and its closure with his departure from the White House in January 2017.
Notably, this extended look backwards during a moment of perceived racial progress revealed to
two key observations: that the election of Barack Obama elevated black visibility domestically
and abroad; and, that the election of the first black president of the United States signals that this
nation has become ‘post-racial.’ The relationship between these two observations – heightened
black visibility and a post-racial state of being – is the focus of this project. Specifically, by
looking at representations of blackness from the past produced during the Age of Obama, certain
ideologies regarding this notion of a ‘post-racial’ America have been articulated and rendered
visible for global consumption.
Presidential aspirations from previous black contenders Reverend Jesse Jackson,
Reverend Sharpton, and Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm planted the seed of possibility, but the
electrifying Illinois Senator from the south side of Chicago inspired Americans to imagine one
version of a post-racial nation. Cinematic and televisual manifestations had certainly offered
visions of what such a country could possibly look like: the Fox television show 24 had
presented in 2001 a very presidential black head-of-state in the form of Dennis Haysbert. Before
that, the authoritative Morgan Freeman when he said, in his calm, voice-of-God intonation that

26
Barack Obama, “Illinois Senate Candidate Barack Obama,” WashingtonPost.com, July 27, 2004,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.

19
only half of humanity would survive in Deep Impact (Leder, 1998). Given that a feature film’s
typical gestation period of many years, it makes sense that Hollywood producers and writers,
having seen Obama’s DNC speech caught the black cool zeitgeist and would begin incorporating
versions of Obama-era blackness into their movies.
The trope of shared humanity between black and white characters, popular since the end
of WWII, would continue in this period: despite no well-known international white star, The
Secret Life of Bees (Prince-Bythewood, 2008) starring Dakota Fanning and Queen Latifah made
respectable box office returns domestically but had negligible international success. On the other
hand, The Blind Side (Hancock, 2009) earned $256 million domestic (another $53 million
abroad), and an Academy Award for Sandra Bullock. Both films targeted female audiences, both
were set in the south – one period, one contemporary – and, both were adaptations of popular
books. When producers compared these two films in successive years they only reinforced
Hollywood’s prejudice against the choice of black actors’ and stories due to their presumed lack
of profitability – thus the overwhelming tendency in Hollywood to construct stories with white
centrality and blackness hovering in the wings to offer wisdom, solace, or some form of
embodied experience that could cure the white main characters of their malaise.
As we shift into the Age of Obama, however, blackness begins to move toward narrative
center, and our temporality shifts backwards. From December 2012 to December 2016, over a
dozen feature films were released narratively concerned with the legacy of the African slave
trade.
27
Based on summarized descriptions and/or reviews, some of the feature length period
pieces (set in the 1700s or 1800s) remind audiences of the transatlantic slave trade’s global

27
Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012), Lincoln (Spielberg, 2012) 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), Belle (Asante,
2014), The North Star (Phillips, 2014 TBD), Savannah (Haywood-Carter, 2013), Freedom aka Something Whispered
(Cousens, 2014), The Retrieval (Esku, 2013), Tula: The Revolt (Leinders, 2013), The Keeping Room (Barber, 2014),
Free State of Jones (Ross, 2016), The Legend of Tarzan (Ross, 2016), The Birth of a Nation (Parker, 2016).

20
expanse with stories like Belle (Asante, 2014) and Tula: The Revolt (Leinders, 2014) set in the
UK and the Dutch colony Curacao, respectively. Some of the films such as Lincoln (Spielberg,
2012) and The Keeping Room (Barber, 2014) focused on the American Civil War, while others
foregrounded slavery proper with a focus on black male heroism such as in Django Unchained
(Tarantino, 2012) or black male subjectivity, as was the case for Solomon Northrup in 12 Years a
Slave (McQueen, 2013). Television took advantage of the black visibility trend as well: Hell on
Wheels (AMC, 2011) The Book of Negroes (BET, 2015), a Roots re-boot (2016) with three
channels – History, Lifetime, A&E – simultaneously broadcasting, and Underground (WGN,
2016). Film exhibition varied from wide global distribution (e.g., Django Unchained), to limited
as in festival screenings such as that of The Retrieval (Eska, 2013), or in a single region like
Freedom (Cousens, 2014) starring Cuba Gooding, Jr. released in Australia, New Zealand, and
South Korea as well as US cable channels. Not released outside of France, Case Depart
(Steketee/Ebue/N’Gijol, 2011) takes a comedic turn toward slavery with its heroes transported
from the present back in time. By way of comparison, a brief look at Wikipedia shows that
between 1969 and 2012, African slave trade films, television productions, documentaries were
released on average one per year.
This most recent period of increased black visibility in Hollywood should not be viewed
as an anomaly, something new, or in isolation, but intertextually in conversation with co-
occurring moments of heightened black visibility: the Washington, DC monument to Martin
Luther King opens in 2011; 2015 saw two historical commemorations, the sesquicentennial of
the end of the Civil War which sparked memorials and events for several years leading up to that
anniversary; that year was also the fiftieth anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” the Selma to
Montgomery Civil Rights march; and the National African American Museum of History and

21
Culture opens in 2016. Further, as the latest installment in the Hollywood cyclical pattern of
black film production, where films with common themes and characteristics appear within a
definable period of time, Hollywood’s historical blackness cycle should also be read in relation
to previous blackness film cycles.
Film scholars such as Rick Altman, Lawrence Alloway, Peter Hutchings, and Mark
Jancovich summarize the need to study film types in cycles within the context of production
trends inclusive of a studio’s “economic planning” and “cultural repertoire;” as cycles related to
certain personnel (i.e. available or hot talent); or industry practices such as marketing and
distribution that are able to capitalize on heightened audience awareness and familiarity.
28
Rick
Altman offers that the orchestration of film cycles and genres is an ongoing process of constant
change and reinvention “closely tied to the capitalist need for product differentiation.”
29
Leger
Grindon characterizes a film cycle as “a series of genre films produced during a limited period of
time and linked by a dominant trend […] sparked by a benchmark hit” that “present a variable –
often fresh – treatment of a genre’s fundamental conflicts under the influence of a particular
time, place and circumstance.”
30
With “period of time” believed to have discernable beginning
and end points, this would suggest that film cycles are socio-culturally determined and reflect a
particular zeitgeist of a moment, which alternately reveals how both genres and society change
over time. With films culturally and historically determined, seminal events also spark a film
cycle as such was the case with the spate of films and television shows post 9/11.
31
In American

28
Mark Jancovich, “’A Real Shocker’: authenticity, genre and the struggle for distinction,” Continuum: Journal of
Media & cultural Studies 14, no. 1 (2000): 31.
29
Rick Altman, “Are Genres Stable?,” Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 64.
30
Leger Grindon, “Cycles and Clusters: The Shape of Film Genre History” in Film Genre Reader IV, ed. Barry K. Grant
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 44.
31
Wikipedia lists forty-seven projects produced between 2002-2011 that either have the event central to the plot,
address the discrimination experienced by Muslims or South East Asians in the events aftermath (regardless of
where they live in the world), or have the event as back story.

22
Film Cycles: Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures, Amanda
Ann Klein argues how the “periodic marketability of black cultural production” reveals the
contours of Hollywood’s trend of situating black images and black life as something outside of
the realm of whiteness. In so doing, Hollywood is able to produce and market blackness as
“images not represented in mainstream Hollywood film,” that offer audiences “a glimpse of
previously absent images.”
32
Examining cinematic blackness in cycles exposes Hollywood’s
ideological tendencies toward symbolic annihilation and how doing so periodically lifts sagging
bottom lines for the industry. In this view, cinematic blackness is a commodifiable trend that is
forgotten each time the bust goes out of each boom. Despite this purview, on a deeper, political
level, cycles of cinematic blackness point to a lineage of black Hollywood historicity and profit-
making; cycles link the stories and images to a larger, heartier, robust real world existence.
For some, the spate of slavery-themed films in the 2010s, which included Django
Unchained and 12 Years a Slave signaled a new cycle of black cinema. Historically, Hollywood
has ‘discovered’ black audiences and produced films believed to cater to black tastes and
sociality, that like slave narrative publishing, simultaneously appealed to white audiences:
musicals and social problem films from the 1940s-1950s; blaxploitation in the 1970s; and urban
hip-hop and/or what S. Craig Watkin’s called the “ghetto action” films from the 1990s. Not
coincidentally, each cycle was preceded by an increased global awareness of American and
global black sociality/human condition: WWII ‘new world order’ spotlighted US domestic race
issues for global scrutiny; civil rights movements and counter-cultural rebellions against the
status quo; and drug, gang, and police brutality swept up in a hip-hop vernacular and globally

32
Amanda Ann Klein, “Not Only Screen But the Projector as Well: the relationship between race and film cycles,”
American Film Cycles Reframing Genres, Screening Social Problems, and Defining Subcultures (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2011), 143.

23
exported as examples. The late 2000s to mid 2010s saw another generic cycle of cinematic
blackness, this time that of America’s slavery and civil war past. Unlike what Mark Reid
characterized as the ‘new wave’ of black cinema of the 1990s, largely executed with black talent
and labor and aimed at black audiences, the historical blackness cycle differs in at least three key
ways: the volume of films produced within a concentrated period of time, the centrality of
blackness to their narratives, and for a certain few, their Hollywood production affiliation.
Characterizing the ‘post-racial’
The U. S. Negro and the way his fellow citizens treat him are now visible to the whole world. No
longer does he need a Harriet Beecher Stowe to speak for him; he speaks for himself, and
everywhere on the globe people speak for him. Europe and the Russians hear his complaints and
judge us; Asia and the immense Ear [sic] East—whose millions are “colored” too— hear him,
and with deep suspicion, observe our reluctance to grant him those equal rights on which we
base our pride.
33

The Reporter, December 6, 1949

World War II made Jim Crow treatment of black Americans “visible to the whole world”
as the above quotation notes, and with a growing racial reflexivity, there is a shift in
Hollywood’s representation and position within the cinematic landscape. When viewed as
reflective of contemporaneous geo-political and cultural changes globally, the move of blackness
from the margins (albeit minimal) to the center of Hollywood storytelling, despite its continued
narration via white lenses, whether set in the south or not, becomes part of America’s larger
public relations campaign to characterize the country as one that walks its talk of liberty and
freedom for all men. In short, characterizations of “happy slaves” were no longer a tenable
representation. Thus, while many intellectuals, abolitionists, and activists in the 19
th
century
implored the international community to pressure America to deal with its racism, WWII became
a powerful game changer: with an elevated international profile, America’s ability to ‘expand’

33
“Introduction – Table of Contents,” The Reporter: A Fortnightly of Facts and Ideas 1, no. 17, December 6, 1949.

24
democratic ideals was impeded by its Jim Crow racist practices, laws, and attitude at home.
Charles Mills notes that “global decolonization and U.S. desegregation essentially [became a]
postwar phenomena,”
34
and Jodi Melamed argues that “…anticolonial and antiracist movements
gained political power and visibility during World War II…expos[ing] racial contradictions on a
global scale” the country’s “postwar liberal racial formation sutures an ‘official’ antiracism to
US nationalism.”
35
Mary Dudziak elaborates on how these forces would eventually converge in
the post-war period as “civil rights reform came to be seen as crucial to US foreign relations.”
36

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva notes that the effect of this post-war pivot is shaped by escalating Cold
War antagonisms that “made it a necessity to eliminate overt discrimination at home in order to
sell the United States as the champion of democracy.”
37
America, liberator to the free world, was
viewed through jaundiced lenses, the most obvious contradiction at that time: an institutionalized
policy and practice of racial segregation and discrimination within the same military sent to fight
racism and fascism abroad. One can see how the world community perhaps considered this
ironic at best and hypocritical at worse. Overtly racist Jim Crow policies and practices were
contradictory to American ideals and values that were essential to the nation’s postcolonial
expansionist, and transnational capitalist goals: racism was both bad for business and for
boosting the nation’s hegemonic influence.

34
Charles W. Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies,” Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1997), 101.
35
Jodi Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text
89, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 2-4.
36
Mary Dudziak, “Introduction,” Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy, (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 6.
37
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, , “The New Racism: The U.S. Racial Structure Since the 1960s,” Racism Without Racists:
Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers,
Inc., 2014), 29

25
While it may seem that America went from three hundred years of a white regime that
officially subjugated other races institutionally, systemically, and socially, to non-racist in the
span of one generation, anti-racism formations had always been operating in the best interest of
the nation’s ideals from its beginnings. But one week after an Alabama mob beat Freedom
Riders in 1961, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy revealed glimpses into brother President
John F. Kennedy’s desire to improve racial issues in the United States: via Voice of America he
states “that we have tried to make progress and we are making progress….[w]e are not going to
accept the status quo.” Kennedy’s “we” was an assertion to the more than sixty nations listening
around the world that “we” will get our racial act together. Kennedy’s notion of “progress” can
be read in close proximity to President John Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 issued two
months earlier which demanded that the US government “…take affirmative action” against
discrimination in employment, and later in housing and education for blacks and other minorities
historically denied unfettered access and opportunities to achieve the American Dream. When
read this way, Robert Kennedy’s speculation in 1961 that “a Negro can achieve the same
position that my brother has”
38
characterizes these policies as generative of the social conditions
that ushered Barack Obama in as the first black US president. And, for over four decades, these
conditions have changed attitudes, assumptions, experiences, values, traditions, in effect the
culture of the status quo (which the junior Kennedy said America would not tolerate) for
generations. Forty-seven years after Robert Kennedy’s prediction, the US indeed elects its first
black president. Like millions of Americans during this period of time, Barack Obama would
attend college earning advance degrees, and in 1990 be elected the first black president of the
Harvard Law Review. However, Obama was acutely aware that this accomplishment did not

38
Stanley Meisler, “Negro Can Be U.S. President, Atty.-Gen. Says: Negro Can Be President Government Disturbed,”
The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973); May 27, 1961; The Washington Post (1877-1997) pg. A4.

26
mean the end of racism in America: in an interview with The New York Times’ Fox Butterfield
Obama cautions that “[i]t’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is
O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands
of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance.…”
39

Writing in 2003, Henry Giroux articulates what has now become the widely discernable
impact of America’s neoliberalism on race: with its empowerment of the individualized subject,
it has shifted agents of racism away from systems and institutions of power which structure
inequality for racialized populations in daily life, toward ideological assumptions and practices
that reframe racial barriers as irrelevant, or inherent to individual agency, biases, and/or
inadequacies, which legitimizes dismantling the nation-state’s role in militating against social
forces which inherently create inequality and injustice such as corporate deregulation, voter
protections, and ‘welfare state’ policies.
40
With this particular rise of the individualized subject
we are able to witness in action an “utterly privatized discourse that erases any trace of racial
injustice by denying the very notion of the social and operations of power through which racial
politics are organized and legitimated.”
41
But when juxtaposed against numerous quality of life
indicators demonstrating entrenched racialized inequality, if not outright oppression (the “war on
drugs” and the prison industrial complex as one example), it becomes apparent how in the Age
of Obama, we arrive at a mischaracterization of the ‘post-racial’ as the end of racism, when
instead, it is “born again racism” as David Theo Goldberg has called it. While popular and
critical discourses have characterized the “post-racial” as a temporal moment where race no

39
Fox Butterfield, “First Black Elected to Head Harvard’s Law Review,” The New York Times, February 6, 1990,
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/06/us/first-black-elected-to-head-harvard-s-law-
review.html?pagewanted=print.
40
Henry A. Giroux, “Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti-Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of
Neoliberalism,” Communication Education, 52:3-4 (2003): 191-211.
41
Giroux, “Spectacles of Race.”

27
longer functions as a determinant in structuring, shaping, and perpetuating social inequity and
injustice; simply put, race is no longer a barrier to black success as exemplified by black
celebrities and athletes, sporadic increases in the presence of blacks televisually and
cinematically, or more pointedly, by Obama’s ascendency. However, with political, socio-
cultural, and economic disparities among black communities demonstrating otherwise across the
nation, many reject the concept of post-racialism outright. I seek to advance an understanding of
post-racialism as our engagement with race, racism, and white supremacy during and after the
Age of Obama. I suggest in this project, that the post-racial is the height of awareness of racism’s
continued existence in structuring American society characterized as the behavior of individuals
not systems and institutions, because now that anti-racism is official government policy,
privatized racism leaves individuals shrugging at claims of racism.
Herein lies one of the central paradoxes of the post-racial: the simultaneous embrace and
rejection of race and not really knowing at this in our history, post-Obama, what to do with it.
We struggle currently with the desires to be both racially conscientious and aware and colorblind
at the same time. Cornel West says race matters. Martin Luther King Jr. prayed for the day that
we are judged by the quality of character not the color of our skin. Paul Gilroy argues that there
is no longer any place for race in a multicultural world, that there must be a deliberate
renunciation of race that will be difficult for people to give up. Old blackness has been replaced
with globalized blackness. In examining post-racial, by and large, it has a negative connotation
to it and is discredited or dismissed by scholars and anti-racism activists. Yet the term persists. In
examining the rift that exists, one clear element emerged: generationally, it is Gen Xers – older
populations that have lived through and been the beneficiaries of affirmative action and civil
rights legislation, that hold on so steadfastly to race mattering, while the millennial generation –

28
who have grown up the descendants of affirmative action – dismisses it. With the preponderance
of public discourse working to discredit the concept, it does have some value; post-racial films’
primary function is to reintroduce race discursively socially, culturally, economically, and
politically, which has been missing since the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Looking Back: As Resistance to Neoliberalism
That a crucible of second wave industrialization, the emergence of Jim Crow, rising
“national” awareness, waves of immigration, and the birth of Hollywood would yield nine
cinematic productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin between 1903-1927 demonstrates America’s
ongoing attempt to deal with the moral, material, and political consequences of slavery in the
face of an evolving nationalism, which was then exported globally, not only as part of
Hollywood’s industrial popularity, but also as a mechanism for disseminating America’s racial
ideologies. Thematically, the periodic depiction of slavery-related melodramas such as Uncle
Tom’s Cabin and the slavery/plantation subgenres becomes a way to locate America’s “moral
legibility” within distinct historical moments, where “the sign of virtue will begin to overcome
its repression,” assuring the world that that which is right will triumph over that which is
wrong.
42
It is interesting to note how the positionality of whiteness and blackness change in the
genre over time. These periodic cinematic ‘pulse checks’ on the nation’s ability to adhere to its
constitutional and ideological tenets (i.e., virtues) extend beyond pure entertainment value when
situated historically and, once internationally distributed, function hegemonically for America’s
international relations and status as leader of the free world. Civil rights and slave film
melodramas foreground the moral legibility for audiences via excessive emotionality and/or

42
Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 43.

29
affective stimuli. Thus, in this instance, the melodramatic mode of excess becomes a key literary
and cinematic cultural strategy for the “gaining of rights through the recognition of injury,” by
“playing the race card” as Linda Williams theorizes,
43
in the post-racial moment.
Much of scholar Robert Rosenstone’s work has centered on the ways in which historical
films problematize notions of history as dry, sober discourse, a “Dragnet” just-the-dates-and-
facts version of the past. While validating cinema’s right to be among those who contribute to
historical discourse, as historical writing is on some level, a narration of, or storytelling of the
past, Rosenstone does point to film’s inability to be all encompassing, how it may elide certain
elements for the sake of narrative convention, or veers into unconventional trajectories when
articulating significant moments from the past. The historical film’s imagistic reductivism is
concerned more with the telling of the story than what is told, and often re-visions history via the
post-modern historical film, which self-consciously exposes is constructedness as part of its
political project. (Rosenstone, 1995) Michael Martin and David Wall expand on Rosenstone’s
work, in their discussion on the importance of memory, its relationship to history, and how
cinematic memorial signification creates understanding of the present. Accordingly, “cine-
memory” as defined Martin and Wall compels audiences to not focus so much on “the
relationship between veracity and verisimilitude” but to see “memory as a political project
parsed through the history film as a form of political critique.”
44
As such, memory functions as a
pathway, an avenue that allows us to access history, reasserting Rosenstone’s notion that film as

43
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson, (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).
44
Michael T. Martin. and David C. Wall, "The Politics of Cine-Memory: Signifying Slavery in the History Film," in A
Companion to the Historical Film ed. Robert A. Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu (Blackwell Publishing, 2013),
October 03, 2015,
http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode.html?id=g9781444337242_chunk_g978144433724224.
44
Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/utc/impact.shtml.

30
a form of (historical) documentation is not a window into the past but a canvas on which
contemporary understandings of the past are articulated. I will explore Hollywood’s looking at
blackness, and looking backwards in time at blackness in an effort to discover insights into the
logics of Hollywood, and its articulation of blackness, as viewed from a contemporary
perspective.
In the following chapter, I consider Katherine Stockett’s 2009 novel The Help, adapted
for the big screen and released in 2011. Both the novel and the film were immensely popular and
the film was a box office success domestically and internationally. Set in Jackson, Mississippi
during the early years of the 1960s, The Help tells the story of “an aspiring author during the
civil rights movement of the 1960s [who] writes a book detailing the African American maids’
point of view of the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a
daily basis.” (IMDb.com) Full of affect and nostalgia, the film is a feel-good melodrama where
Jim Crow segregation is no match for cross-cultural sisterhood. At a time when America’s first
family consists of three highly visible black females – First Lady Michelle, and daughters Malia
and Sasha Obama – what does it mean to return to a period of time that normalizes black
subjugation with images of black female domestics that are alternately longsuffering, sassy,
thieving, or painstakingly devoted to their white employers? What commentary does such
international popularity make about diasporic black womanhood? Do the modes of “looking
back” deployed in The Help render history irrelevant? Did the familiar and comforting position
of the liberal white female narrator facilitate the films’ global box office success?
In this chapter, I contrast Michelle Obama’s heightened visibility as a paragon of black
womanhood, with that of the black women characterized in The Help as a way of problematizing
the deeply rooted historical images and comprehension of black women as subjugate and

31
subordinate, the Mammies and Sapphires that persist to this day in a global cultural imaginary.
Then I examine how the relationship between black and white women is rendered nostalgically.
In so doing, The Help conjures a Jim Crow world that “levels the playing field” between black
and white women and reinforces neoliberalism’s denial of systemic and structural asymmetrical
power. Finally, I address the roles of history, and white women’s authorship of black female
subjectivity. Analyses along these lines reveal a post-racial paradox that black womanhood and
respectability have been and continue to be intrinsically bound up with whiteness.
Chapter Three frames the film Django Unchained in the context of Obama’s reaction to
the highly circulated images of black teens and men brutalized by police and the rise of the Black
Lives Matter movement, as well as the problematizing of black masculinity in the historical
context of lynchings, beatings, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Quentin Tarantino’s
2012 film Django Unchained follows the trajectory of a black slave on a mission to rescue his
wife from the plantation owner to whom she was sold. To do so, Django partners with Dr. King
Shultz (Christoph Waltz), a white German bounty hunter who needs Django to accompany him
on his search for a notorious band of brothers; in exchange for identifying the bounty, Shultz
agrees to teach Django the bounty-hunting business and to help him reclaim his wife. But what
does it mean that Tarantino’s desire to create a filmic black hero who can exact blood for blood
revenge upon racist America, is best constructed as a generic mashup of pastiche, and the
fantastical? Under neoliberalism, does the spectacle of a gun wielding black male aimed at white
men exacerbate troubling concepts of reverse racism claims from the dispossessed majority, in
the same way some claim Obama’s victory to herald racial equity? Finally, does an
overrepresentation of mediated acts of deadly force against black bodies become part of the
cinematic pleasure in a film such as Django Unchained?

32
While the entirety of this project presupposes a cinematic obsession with a backwards
look at blackness during Obama’s presidency, in Quentin Tarantino’s 2012 Django Unchained
we see how the spectacularized black male form reasserts certain American truths for global
audiences. In this chapter, I explore how black male visibility in Django Unchained resonates
with President Obama’s political mobility: despite black progress, blackness continues to be
scrutinized, policed, and contained. Like much of President Obama’s ability to move and shake
within the American political system, Tarantino’s Django signifies a black masculinity
formulated within the European/American systems of colonial imperial capitalism and violence
that only allows for limited success within its confines.
Finally, Chapter Four meditates on McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. Though contemporary
audiences are more aghast by earlier depiction of “happy slaves” found in 1938’s Jezebel, or
1939’s Gone with the Wind, films such as 12 Years a Slave compel us to witness slavery’s
atrocities. More importantly, Northrup is rendered helpless to take action to defend or protect any
of the slaves or himself. Northrup’s chief role in both the film and in the real world as evidenced
by his slave narrative, was that of witness to the inhumanity of the Atlantic Slave Trade for those
who would not believe, minimize, deny, or as was the case in Jezebel, portray black sociality
under slavery as a benign existence filled with “happy slaves.”
As a slave narrative rendered cinematically, 12 Years a Slave compels audiences to “look
back at blackness as witness” to slavery’s horrors: since we can do nothing about the past (except
be truthful to it), our contemporary actions become that of testimony of a particular truth that
would otherwise be misrepresented by neoliberal interests. By examining 12 Years a Slave’s
mode of “looking back,” modern audiences not only witness representations of the horrors of
that peculiar institution, but are indicted by certain truths: that the seeding of transhistoric

33
structures of disenfranchisement and disparity which plague black Americans today can be
directly traced to the institution of slavery. In so doing, 12 Years a Slave exposes post-racial
characteristics whose seeds continue to bear: white complicity, black social death, and the
twoness of black subjectivity.
The conclusion will summarize insights from the previous chapters: how looking at
blackness in The Age of Obama makes certain commentary on the contemporary moment,
yielding a post-racialism that reveals a reconfiguring of racism that underscores contemporary
racism’s paradoxical inclinations. Then I look to how contemporary cinematic representations of
blackness reveal a complexity that is marked significantly by black sophistication, an overt
double consciousness, and a consciousness regarding class and sexuality, with brief discussions
of films such as Moonlight, Get Out; and televisual productions such as Lemonade, Vice
Principals, Atlanta, and Blackish. With another black production cycle nearing its end, its impact
can be verified and measured by systemic and institutional changes within the industry: in front
of the cameras, behind the camera, and behind those executives’ desks where decisions of black
cinematic are made.

34
CHAPTER 1

Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her
prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment
they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.
-- Ta-nehisi Coates
45

I don’t feel like [The Help] was from our perspective, that’s the problem I had with it.…nobody
wants to stain the memory of that black woman who loved them probably more than their
mothers loved them…They want to preserve that memory of them being loving and the women
who wanted to be with them all the time, you know, so they want to keep them pure.
-- Viola Davis, on The Help’s depiction of black domestics
46

First Lady of the United States Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is arguably one of
the most important symbolic and representational manifestations of black womanhood to flourish
during the Obama Era. At a time when global discussions of black women’s experiences are
propelled by health, economic, labor and quality of life crises, as the first black First Lady of the
United States (fbFLOTUS), Mrs. Obama is tasked not only with traditional responsibilities as
White House hostess and advocate for children, the Princeton and Harvard graduate, and mother
of two daughters, but also bears the added expectation that she positively impacts the plight, if
not visibility of black women everywhere. WhiteHouse.Gov describes Mrs. Obama as “a role
model for women and an advocate for healthy families, services members and their families,
higher education, and international adolescent girls [sic] education.”
47

45
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black: A History of the First African-American White House and of What
Came Next,” The Atlantic, January/February 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-
president-was-black/508793.
46
Tilly Pearce, “BAFTA nominee Viola Davis slams 2011 film ‘The Help’ for its ‘unrealistic representation of life as a
maid in 1960s Mississippi,” The Sun, January 17, 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/2631095/bafta-
nominee-viola-davis-slams-2011-film-the-help-for-its-unrealistic-representation-of-life-as-a-maid-in-1960s-
mississippi/.
47
“First Lady Michelle Obama,” The White House, https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/first-lady-
michelle-obama.

35
As President and Mrs. Obama perform black respectability and uplift through a political
career contested with a sustained, emboldened strain of racism reminiscent of post-Civil Rights
era backlash on issues such as integration and affirmative action, the female melodrama The
Help (Taylor, 2011) about black-white sisterhood in Jim Crow Mississippi arrives in theaters and
becomes arguably one of the most popular, internationally circulated representations of black
female respectability and negro uplift of another sort. Within the film, black female domestics
from 1963 Jackson, Mississippi , briefly find their collective voice and commit a liberatory act of
truth-telling, albeit via an ambitious young white woman in pursuit of her own career path.
A general allowance of this overall project is the heightened curiosity about blackness
within popular culture as a result of the election of America’s first black president. Placing these
two highly visible and widely circulated representations of black womanhood in conversation
will reveal protean regard for historical records in the post-racial era. A linear historical timeline
would suggest that black women’s social conditions have progressed from dependency (The
Help) to self-agency (Michelle Obama). However, the actual timeline of events would suggest
that heightened curiosity about blackness created opportunities for culture industries (i.e.
publishing, filmmaking) to exploit black popularity in the wake of Barack Obama’s campaigning
and eventual victory. At play here is the production and international distribution of a sanitized
sentimental flashback of subjugate black womanhood after the arrival of the first black first lady
of the United States (fbFLOTUS). What then does it mean to return to a period of time that
normalizes black subjugation with images of black female domestics that are alternately
longsuffering, sassy, thieving, or painstakingly devoted to their white employers in this moment?
What commentary does the international popularity of The Help make about diasporic black
womanhood? Do the modes of “looking back” deployed in The Help render history irrelevant?

36
And, with regard to comments at the top of this discussion from The Help star Viola Davis, did
the familiar and comforting position of the liberal white female narrator facilitate the films’
global box office success?
A key tenet of post-racial ideology is the simultaneous acknowledgement and
dismissal/disavowing of race as a determinant in pursuing and achieving the American Dream.
This act of both seeing and not seeing has been one of neoliberalism’s chief functions in the
post-civil rights and post-affirmative action periods: in the aftermath of Brown vs. the Board of
Education of Topeka (1954), which effectively ended state sponsored segregation, the push for
racial progress and the pull to maintain white supremacy has delivered an historical period where
blackness is culturally trendy and racial disparity resides in the rhetoric of universal liberalism
and colorblindness. Post-racial ideology bears down on history, revealing tensions between those
that would expand historical records and offer counternarratives, and those that would seek to
minimize or erase the historical significance of blackness and its subsequent benefits to
whiteness. While Mrs. Obama’s invokes the past in an effort to move into the future, The Help,
characteristically postmodern, effaces historical contexts, and drives a wedge between signifiers
and their historical referents.
In this chapter, I contrast Michelle Obama’s heightened visibility as a paragon of black
womanhood, with that of the black women characterized in The Help as a way of problematizing
the deeply rooted historical images and comprehension of black women as subjugate and
subordinate, the Mammies and Sapphires that persist to this day in a global cultural imaginary.
Then I examine how the relationship between black and white women is rendered nostalgically.
In so doing, The Help conjures a Jim Crow world that “levels the playing field” between black
and white women and reinforces neoliberalism’s denial of systemic and structural asymmetrical

37
power. Finally, a discussion of white women’s authorship of black female subjectivity reveals a
post-racial paradox that black womanhood and respectability have been and continue to be
intrinsically bound up with whiteness.
Looking Backwards: History as a Strategy Forward
Without an official job description or official authority, the traditional responsibilities of
the first lady of the United States (FLOTUS) have included host of dignitaries and White House
events, activist, policy advocate, campaigner and “pillow talk” influencer of their presidential
husbands. In the twentieth century, the position of the FLOTUS can appear to be a thankless one:
either she is too active and can eclipse the work of her husband and in some cases the vice
president (e.g., Eleanor Roosevelt, Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson, Hillary Clinton), or
traditionalist in their roles as supportive spouses (e.g., Pat Nixon, Rosalynn Carter, Nancy
Reagan, Laura Bush). With the first forty-three US presidents having been white males, it is not
difficult to see how this position has become the presumptive and normative domain reserved for
white patriarchal power, with their white female partners, daughters, or daughters-in-law
codifying the typical performance and duties of the head hostess of State. It was not until the
arrival of Barack and Michelle Obama that the nation saw different forms of leadership and
performance of State. As a result, some criticisms suffered by Mrs. Obama would reveal public
prejudices and stereotypes regarding black femininity, or complaints that she was not performing
like her white female predecessors.
Michelle Obama’s eight year tenure as the first black First Lady of the United States
(fbFLOTUS) can arguably be characterized as treacherous: too much evidence of her strong
black woman persona ensconced in Ivy League regalia and she risks overshadowing her husband
or being out of touch with the common folk; advocating for race based progress and she is

38
labeled an “angry black woman;” eschewing issues of an overt political nature and focusing on
family (dubbing herself “mom-in-chief”), health and wellbeing draws criticism for squandering
her platform as potentially the nation’s most influential feminist, dubbed a “feminist nightmare”
by a move in favor of June Cleaver status.
48
Indeed, Mrs. Obama spearheaded the global learning
initiative LetGirlsLearn.gov, launched in March of 2015, in response to what has been framed as
a “global girls education crisis.”
49
Arguably Mrs. Obama was influenced by high-profile global
incidents such as the April 14, 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian girls from school by militant
organization Boko Haram, an attempted assassination on then fifteen-year-old Pakistani activist
Malala Yousafzai for advocating for the educational rights of girls – which Mrs. Obama says is
when girls’ right to education “got really personal for me,”
50
– and a February 2015 United
Nations Council on Human Rights report entitled “Attacks Against Girls Accessing Education,”
that documents increased global aggression against girls’ academic achievement and reinforces
other evidence that gender equity in education leads to healthier nations with less extremism.
Clearly President and Mrs. Obama understand the role education plays in positively
impacting social conditions and quality of life; Mrs. Obama makes it clear that she understands
that educational parity for girls and women cannot happen “until we address the broader cultural
beliefs and practices that can help cause and perpetuate this crisis” as fostered by “unjust laws
and harmful practices and beliefs”
51
such as female genital mutilation and honor crimes
committed after a female has experienced a sexual assault in order to restore ‘honor’ to her

48
Michelle Cottle, “Leaning Out: How Michelle Obama Became a Feminist Nightmare,” Politico Magazine,
November 21, 2013, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/leaning-out-michelle-obama-100244?o=1.
49
Michelle Obama, “Let Girls Learn,” The Atlantic, November 2, 2015,
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/girls-education-michelle-obama/413554.
50
Michelle Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at the United Nations General Assembly Spousal Program,”
WhiteHouse.gov, September 19, 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/19/remarks-first-
lady-united-nations-general-assembly-spousal-program.
51
Obama, “Let Girls Learn.”

39
family. But Mrs. Obama uses passive, ‘agentless’ language, skirting the edges of sexism and
patently avoids overt references to patriarchy, misogyny, and the role men play in women’s
subjugation as root causes of oppression and violence against girls and women. For some
feminists, Mrs. Obama as the “First Feminist, takes on ‘women’s issues’—carefully.”
52

Nevertheless, as the above summary demonstrates, much of the popular criticism of Mrs.
Obama fails to 1) acknowledge how she is held to a standard of performance unlike all other
First Ladies before her; 2) take into account imbrications of race, class, and gender; and 3) how
those overlapping intrasubject positions inform her role as the fbFLOTUS specifically and as a
black American woman in general. Borrowing from Julien and Mercer’s discussion on the
multiplicity of blackness (and Stuart Hall before them), in the contemporary moment when
American Dream upward mobility generates a diversity of blackness, Mrs. Obama represents a
complex version of black womanhood that is acutely aware of both her humble beginnings and
her trajectory of upward mobility. In her 2009 work, Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill
Collins discusses historical underpinnings of black women’s activism shaped by three main
systems of subjugation: labor exploitation, denial of rights or access to opportunities, and an
inability to control their own image. As such, a commitment to justice, an understanding of how
multiple and intersecting modes of oppression impact global women, and an appreciation of the
role history plays in the mutually constitutive nature of identity and subjectivity broadly
influence black women’s intellectual (and activist) work. Commensurately, readings of Mrs.
Obama’s speeches at local, national, and international gatherings reveal black female
womanhood as dynamic and self-determining where, as Hill Collins states “Black women’s

52
Sharon Lerner, “Michelle Obama, First Feminist, Takes on ‘Women’s Issues’—Carefully,” The Nation, June 10,
2011, [https://www.thenation.com/article/michelle-obama-first-feminist-takes-womens-issues-carefully.

40
participation in crafting a constantly changing African-American culture fostered distinctively
Black and women-centered worldviews.”
53
To wit, in the Obama era, other high-profile
representations of black womanhood dominate the media and have elevated the visibility and
respectability of black women. Despite an over representation of black womanhood in reality
television, others have seen fit to nuance and complicate black womanhood in this period: Chris
Rock’s 2009 Good Hair and Bill Duke’s 2011 Dark Girls, both documentaries that call out some
of the long-lasting damage caused by a dominant European standard of beauty to women of color
globally; the work of writer-producer Shonda Rhimes, which has black women narratively
centered in primetime network television shows such as Scandal and How to Get Away With
Murder; Beyoncé’s defiant black womanness with 2016 witnessing Formation at the Super Bowl
and her concept album/video Lemonade referencing both the Black Live Matter and the Black
Panthers, and Oprah Winfrey’s rebranding of OWN, her namesake cable venture, in an effort to
“salvage [the] struggling network,” after her audience of twenty-five seasons on “mainstream”
network ABC failed to follow her; her solution was found in “catering to more of an African
American audience.”
54
This potpourri of mediated black womanhood is in no way exhaustive;
instead points to the complexity and diversity of black womanhood with none of them
reminiscent of stereotypical trope of the “Sapphire” or the “mammy.”
A team player, Mrs. Obama stumped for Democratic congressional, gubernatorial, and
mayoral candidates in Philadelphia, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Colorado, Rhode Island,
Connecticut, Illinois, and Maryland in a two-week period in 2012, and endlessly for Democratic

53
Patricia Hill Collins, “Chapter 1: The Politics of Black Feminist Thought,” Black Feminist Thought (New York:
Routledge, 2009), 13.
54
DM Levine, “OWN Shifting Attention to Its African American Viewers,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 8,
2011, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/own-shifting-attention-to-african-american-viewers-271469.

41
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016. She has delivered numerous commencement
speeches for high schools and higher education, which are always inspirational and stress that
success comes from hard work and determination. Mrs. Obama’s speeches are frequently
inflected with personalized narratives that provide a contextual lens as well as a point from
which to pivot into her more sagacious moments: a member of a loving, alternately blue- or
working-class family in a tiny apartment on Chicago’s South Side; daughter to Marion and
Frazier Robinson, a stay at home mom and father who was a pump operator for the city of
Chicago, who would develop multiple sclerosis; sister to older brother Craig, a basketball coach
and sports broadcaster; a product of the Chicago Public School System, Princeton, and Harvard.
This rhetorical approach amiably allows her to connect with the audience as if to say, “I am like
you, I come from where you come – I was able to achieve; so can you.” They are expectedly
inspirational, colloquial, and made vivid with details that enliven her content. After scanning
several speeches from First Ladies Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Nancy Reagan, there
appears to be a formula to their speeches: greetings and gratitude to the organizers and audience,
introduction of their general themes, background on their family histories, recounting of the
President’s priorities or track record of accomplishments, American values, etc., and always a
focus on and concern for the children.
Generally drafted by Mrs. Obama’s speech writer for the last eight years, Sarah Hurwitz,
after lengthy consultation with Mrs. Obama about content, fbFLOTUS then edits and refines
them herself. Even with the aid of a speechwriter, there can be no mistaking that the sentiments
in Mrs. Obama’s speeches are all her own as they differ from her predecessors with their coded
blackness. The coding can be as subtle as her frequent recalling of the south side of Chicago, a
city founded in the 1780s by Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black trader and farmer, known for

42
its large black communities because of the Great Migration, or, for its blatantly racist
institutional policies such as restrictive covenants and redlining, that resulted in the housing,
mobility, and economic segregation and containment of black Americans. Alternately, the black
coding can be explicit as was the case with her 2016 City College of New York Commencement
speech where in discussing the nation’s diversity she corrects the popular “nation of immigrants”
myth favored by those that would elide the course of black American citizenship: “Maybe your
family has been in this city for generations, or maybe, like my family, they came to this country
centuries ago in chains.”
55

Similarly, but with significantly more gravitas, the work of Mrs. Obama goes unmatched
for its seriousness and potential for long-term transformation. Countless speeches – particularly
those delivered abroad in places such as Cuba, South Africa, Japan, Spain, Liberia, Qatar,
England, Pakistan, Morocco, Cambodia, Peking, China, India, and at the UN – focused on the
education and economic empowerment of girls and women, while pointing to the underlying
misogyny and gender bias of female devaluation as the barrier to overcome. It is in these ways –
the focus on education for girls as a strategy toward economic empowerment, as education was
for her – that Mrs. Obama’s legacy addresses and confronts the three systems of oppression not
just for Black American women but for women and girls globally.
At the 2016 Democratic National Convention for the US Presidential election, Mrs.
Obama gave what has been lauded as possibly the best speech of the convention: conservatives
called it a “grand slam,” and President Obama tweeted a very public display of affection “…our

55
Michelle Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at City College of New York Commencement Address,”
WhiteHouse.gov, June 3, 2016, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/03/remarks-first-lady-city-
college-new-york-commencement.

43
country has been blessed to have her as FLOTUS. I love you, Michelle.”
56
International coverage
of Mrs. Obama’s speech from Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and Arab outlets were consistent in their
complementary review of her speech, many pointing to her dismissal of Donald Trump without
saying his name, or her thematic focus on family and children and how that needs to be a key
focus of the US President. Throughout her speech, Mrs. Obama referenced her husband’s
decency and grace in the face of immense challenges, how she assured her daughters that the
vitriol of bullies in the media did not represent the true essence of America, and impressed upon
them to prevail with the family motto “when others go low, we go high.” Mrs. Obama delivered
a poignant speech thematically focused on the importance of children, family, and legacy, a key
tenet to this presidential contest as “this election and every election is about who will have the
power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.”
57

As previously mentioned, concern for children has been a typical area of interests and
accomplishment for many past FLOTUS, including that of the current, history-making 2016
Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spent much of her professional
career advocating for the rights of marginalized children. However, Mrs. Obama’s focus on
children fosters atypical imagery of black motherhood that counters many domestic
characterizations ranging from mammies to welfare queens to those mourning the loss of their
children’s untimely death as the result of police brutality or urban street violence; and
international representations of women unable to care for malnourished offspring. When
discussing America’s resiliency and its ability to overcome divisions because as a nation we are

56
Barack Obama, @POTUS, Twitter, July 25, 2016, https://twitter.com/POTUS.
57
Michelle Obama, 2016 DNC Speech, delivered July 25, 2016, “Transcript: Read Michelle Obama’s full speech
from the 2016 DNC,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2016 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-
politics/wp/2016/07/26/transcript-read-michelle-obamas-full-speech-from-the-2016-dnc.

44
“stronger together,” Mrs. Obama shared a striking observation that speaks to ‘positive’ change
for all races in America but particularly the material and social progress of black females:
“That is the story of this country, the story that has brought me to this stage
tonight, the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame
of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and
doing what needed to be done so that I wake up every morning in a house that
was built by slaves. And I watch my daughters, two beautiful, intelligent, black
young women playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”
58

In 2016, there were at least three other instances (Santa Fe Indian School Commencement, the
World Innovation Summit in Qatar, and the Oberlin College Commencement) placing a frame
around an image of her daughters on the White House lawn. For those who follow her public
appearances and speeches, this invocation has become a familiar reference for her. However, the
effect is much more than a referential comment about black progress in the United States. She
links three temporal nodes along a historical timeline in the progress narrative of black
womanhood: during White House construction, commissioned in 1792 along with the entirety of
the nation’s new seat of federal government, on land ceded for this purpose from Maryland and
Virginia, two slave states
59
; the eight year span of time Mrs. Obama will have occupied the
White House; and an allusion to the future of young black women by referencing her own
daughters, themselves having matured at the presidential residence. Layered and composited, this
bit of mise-en-scene that Mrs. Obama reconstructs from her daily life is an ellipsis across two
centuries history, linked by crossfades, that emphasis history’s importance in the present
moment.

58
Obama, 2016 DNC Speech.
59
William, C. Allen, History of Slave Laborers in the Construction of the United States Capitol, June, 1, 2005,
http://artandhistory.house.gov/art_artifacts/slave_labor_reportl.pdf.

45
Black political thought has emphasized the need to document black participation in the
histoire of the United States for centuries. The struggle for historical respect has been derisively
labeled revisionist, as black participation in society functions as correctives, counternarratives,
“subjugated knowledges,” and/or alternatives to dominant narratives regarding America. Further,
as blackness fights for inclusion in the various ‘official’ records, backlash fights for continued
marginalization, if not erasure, of black historical significance, and minimization of white
supremacy’s impact both then and now. Importantly, emphasis is placed on the need to use
codified blackness in American history as a way up from slavery, to uplift the race, toward black
respectability, and self-determination. George Washington Williams, a military veteran, Baptist
minister, lawyer, newspaper founder, the first black American elected to Ohio’s state legislature,
and author writes in the introduction of his 1882 two-volume tome, History of the American
Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: as Negros, as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens, “I
modestly strive to lift the Negro race to its pedestal in American History. I raise this post to
indicate the progress of humanity; to instruct the present, to inform the future.” Historian and
founder of The Journal of African American History (formerly The Journal of Negro History)
and of Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson writes in the preface of 1922’s The Negro in
Our History that it was his desire to “present to the average reader in succinct form the history of
the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro in this country.”
60
In his
1925 essay, The Negro Digs Up His Past, Arthur Schomburg posits from his opening that “The
American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future.” Born in Puerto Rico,
Schomburg amassed one of the most well-known collections of Africana, which would become
the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture at the New York Public Library in Harlem.

60
Carter G. Woodson, “Preface,” The Negro in Our History (Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, 1922),
https://archive.org/details/negrohistory00woodrich.

46
A lay historian and bibliophile of Africana whose contemporaries and critics included James
Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Schomburg’s own writings and work
emphasized the documentation, collectivization, and curation of black contributions to the
western world – allegedly spurred on by an elementary school teacher in Puerto Rico who told
him as a child that “black people had no history, no heroes, no great moments.”
61

Remembering the past as a pathway to future progress seems to just make good sense.
Case in point: Mrs. Obama’s cinching together multiple temporalities is not one of fond
remembrance, longing, or reflection. Instead, Mrs. Obama’s gesture is reflective of sankofa or
“to go back and get it,” an adage among the Akan and Ashanti peoples, that encourages drawing
from the past as a way of growing future generations.
62
This is consistent with others who
caution us to remember the past as a way toward forward progress, such as philosopher George
Santayana’s quote “Those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” which is
inscribed on a memorial plaque at former Auschwitz concentration camp, or more colloquially as
“we must always remember; we must never forget.” While those prompts to remember the Nazi
Holocaust are generally taken as cautions against the reemergence of fascist and nationalist
beliefs that turn genocidal, Mrs. Obama’s sankofa works to ensure that no erasure of the past
occurs lest broad contemporary black social conditions be singularly attributed to essentialist or
exceptionalist notions. In other words, acknowledging slavery’s legacy allows for black disparity
and/or black achievement to be attributed to something other than innate underachievement or
phenomenological uniqueness. Thus, sankofa calls out historical injury, not as a strategy for

61
National Park Service, “Draft Historic Landmark Nomination: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture,”
by Amanda Casper, Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, March 1,
2016, 23, https://www.nps.gov/nhl/news/LC/spring2016/SchomburgCtrBlackCulture.pdf.
62
“African Traditions, Proverbs, and Sankofa,” Internet Archive Wayback Machine,
https://web.archive.org/web/20110420131901/http://ctl.du.edu/spirituals/literature/sankofa.cfm.

47
claiming victim status and reparations in the contemporary moment (although that is a viable and
much contemplated issue for discussion), but to mark colonialism and the TransAtlantic Slave
Trade as an “originary” point of trauma to blackness. It is in this way that looking backwards
establishes a benchmark and asks us to recognize the space and time between that originary point
and the current moment as ‘progress.’ The space in between the two points – where the work to
struggle and overcome occur – becomes the evidence against essentialism and exceptionalism
(the Obamas have been discussed in this context which, in effect, sets them apart from other
blacks, suggesting that this ‘black president’ is a one-time occurrence). Beyond its ability to
prevent erasure, Mrs. Obama routinely calls attention to the act of “reaching back” as way of
promoting forward progress as she did in her 2016 speeches at the World Bank and CCNY’s
Commencement. Rather than insert a fiction into the past, Mrs. Obama has recalled the past –
namely black contribution to nation building – as illumination of a pathway forward.
What can be said about the Obamas is that they are exemplars of the American Dream:
from humble beginnings, both lived relatively scandal and criminal free lives, earned law
degrees from prestigious American universities; achieved steady upward mobility while
maintaining street credibility among the salt of the earth; won two presidential elections, and as
an ideal nuclear family, have virtually ensured that their daughters will carry on their parents’
legacy for future generations. In addition to the normal, expected amounts of public bashing that
any US presidential family may receive, the Obamas had the added challenge of overcoming
routine racist and sometimes virulent sentiments. They were scrutinized for signs of hidden race-
based agendas, and denied meaningful, sustained participation in public racial discourse lest Mrs.
Obama be labeled an ‘angry black woman,’ Mr. Obama accused of exhibiting ‘black male rage,’
or an inability to represent “all” of America. However, in order to underscore the historical

48
significance of this particular presidential tenure, it was necessary to remind the public that the
starter’s block for black pursuit of the American Dream began with slavery. In so doing, Mrs.
Obama’s leap from lashed black slaves to that of the first black First Family strongly points to
notions of racial progress and societal change, changes that are typically fraught with instability,
backlash, and contention.
The Help: an “international film”
Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help appeared several years after America first came to
believe in the possibility of its first black president in the form of Barack Obama. While the
book’s idea was seeded in the wake of 9/11, Stockett shares in Time Magazine that after five
years of rejection, it may have only been weeks from agent to publishing to its April 2009
release,
63
just months after President Obama took office. A foray into America’s racial past, The
Help narrativizes the relationships between black domestic workers and their white (female)
employers in vestigial Jim Crow Mississippi in the early 1960s. Consistent with other white
southern novelists, Stockett continues the tradition of Margaret Mitchell’s Mammy and Scarlet,
Fanny Hurst’s Delilah and Beatrice, and Alfred Uhry’s Hoke and Daisy with the dramatization
of black-and-white interdependence. Central to the novel are three main characters: Aibileen
Clark and Minny Jackson, both black domestics, routinely beset by ‘normal’ and ‘typical’
indignities and injustices African Americans might experience at this time in the south (the most
prominent example being the prohibition of using their employers’ indoor toilets); and Eugenia
“Skeeter” Phelan, young white college-educated protofeminist. Because each of novel’s three
main characters narrate alternating chapters in the first person, Stockett bears the responsibility

63
Claire Suddath, “Q&A: Kathryn Stockett, Author of The Help,” Time.com, November 11, 2009,
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1937562,00.html.

49
of creating reliable narrators, and generating multiple, racialized subjectivities, a point that will
be revisited herein.
Stockett’s was a wildly successful best-selling debut novel: it sold more than five million
copies in thirty-five countries and forty different languages, joined the Kindle “million sellers
club,” stayed in the top ten on The New York Times best seller list for eighty-one weeks, and was
lauded by the Oprah Book Club. Other Stockett contemporaries working in similar terrain have
had less widespread acclaim, such as Ellen Douglas’ Can’t Quit You Baby (1989), Susan
Tucker’s 2002 non-fiction text, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers
and Their Employers in the Segregated South, and Norma Watkins’ The Last Resort: Taking the
Mississippi Cure (2011); only Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2003) has had similar
success with more than six million copies sold globally and a film adaptation in 2008, which did
not fair nearly as well at the box office.
The 2011 screen adaptation of The Help, rendered by close Stockett friend and first time
director, Tate Taylor, counts among its many producers DreamWorks Pictures, Participant
Media, 1492 Productions, and Harbinger Films; with co-production financing from Reliance
Entertainment (subsidiary to Indian media conglomerate Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani
Group) and Image Nation Abu Dhabi (formally Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ). As new players in
the entertainment game, Image Nation International, in partnership with Participant Media,
banked on the success of The Help and its other 2011 Hollywood co-production, Contagion, to
propel itself into the international film production and distribution industries, while
simultaneously building its domestic Arab filmmaking talent. According to The Nation online
(also owned by the Abu Dhabi Media Company), Image Nation’s chairman Mohammed Al
Mubarak states in reference to The Help’s Oscar win that they are “extremely proud for Abu

50
Dhabi to be associated with such a successful and recognized film.”
64
The Nation further reports
that Image Nation’s chief executive Michael Garin, a veteran of Hollywood’s Lorimar-
Telepictures and Time-Life Television, considers The Help’s success part of Image Nation’s
strategy to build a middle eastern film industry with international reach.
65

The international marketplace’s engagement with The Help contextually occupies the
periphery of this discussion: as such, this is not an attempt to draw a causal relationship between
a single Hollywood film, and attitudes regarding black American women in the global market
place. Instead, it is an attempt to make some keen observations regarding the types of black
American female imagery that systematically circulates globally, in order to problematize the
industry lore that black films lack profitability in the international market. One such observation
that immediately comes to mind is the designation “international film” which is taken to connote
films that intentionally privilege the tastes, cultural considerations, and risks associated with the
global marketplace during its development, production, distribution and exhibition, over those of
the domestic audience of a given ‘national’ cinema. Otherwise stated, in this context, the
“international” film or television programs are not only aesthetic spectacles, commercially
viable, and frequently high-concept, but also possess ‘universal’ themes that transcend socio-
cultural specificity associated with the nation-state.
Foreign distribution has been a mainstay of Hollywood production from its beginnings.
Since World War II, however, a number of determinants – the dismantling of Old Hollywood’s
studio system which drove the industry to forge more financing and distribution relationships
from abroad, conglomeratization, and the emergence of the blockbuster –led the industry to

64
Gregor Stuart Hunter, “Oscars joy for Abu Dhabi with The Help,” The National, February 28, 2012,
http://www.thenational.ae/business/industry-insights/media/oscars-joy-for-abu-dhabi-with-the-help.
65
Hunter, “Oscars joy for Abu Dhabi.”

51
adopt new business models and strategies to exploit the needs and interests of foreign markets.
However, while Hollywood studios have international distribution and marketing divisions, it is
not known if any major Hollywood studio or production company houses an internal division
charged with developing and producing content explicitly for a diverse global audience, or
“international films.”
Image Nation Abu Dhabi characterizes itself as a producer of “international films” and
counts The Help as one such film in its catalogue. Its website’s “What We Do” page
impressively asserts it position as “one of the leading media and entertainment companies in the
Arabic-speaking world, producing local and international films, documentaries & television
content, and is a pan-Arabic broadcaster following the 2015 launch of Quest Arabiya.”
66
The site
hosts a glossy, professionally produced three minute promotional reel in English of quick clips
from their various projects, underscored with energetic rock music reminiscent of early U2. We
read intertitle graphics that assert that they are “the region’s leading content creator. We bring
the world television, documentaries, cinema, international productions [emphasis added] …A
new Arabic factual entertainment channel...We are building an industry: by developing
homegrown talent; by working with international partners; by investing in our people…” The
last line is followed by a lifted yet unidentified line of dialogue spliced into the audio track:
“…they can change the world.” A partnership with Participant Media whose states a
“commitment to producing entertainment with socially relevant themes….dedicated to
entertainment that inspires and compels social change…”
67
along with their desire to provide

66
“About: What We Do,” Image Nation Abu Dhabi website, http://imagenationabudhabi.com/en.
67
“About Participant Media,” Participant Media website, http://www.participantmedia.com/about-participant-
media.

52
“factual Arabic entertainment” suggests liberal, progressive, or social justice leanings in their
productions.
In addition to The Help, other films co-produced by Image Nation Abu Dhabi with
Participant Media include: He Named Me Malala, A Most Violence Year, Furry Vengeance, The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (and its sequel), Cesar Chavez, Contagion, and Snitch. Other films,
some of which are clearly more commercial, include My Name is Khan, Ghost Rider: Spirit of
Vengeance, Men in Black 3, the Adam Sandler vehicle That’s My Boy, Zero Dark Thirty, Flight,
the Valerie Plame-CIA story Fair Game, Deepwater Horizon, and the 2017 release of Barbie, a
live action production based on the lives of Mattel’s ubiquitous dolls. By being part of Image
Nation Abu Dhabi’s roster of international films – not “Hollywood” or “American” but an
international film – The Help and its contents are positioned as concerned with themes or issues
with whom differentiated audiences around the world can identify. Indeed, the film’s major
production companies – Dream Works, Image Nation Abu Dhabi, Reliance, and Participant
Media – all use similar (if not identical) language in their descriptions of the film: “1960s,”
“Mississippi,” “extraordinary women,” “courage,” “alliance,” “friendship,” “bond,”
“sisterhood,” “transcend,” and “changing times.” The emphasis here is on forging bonds between
women who are different, where society dictates that there be none. Once universalized, these
themes become about justice, subversion, even revolution which global masses can connect with
on their own populist, localized level rather than the cultural specifics to the US such as “white
supremacy,” “black subjugation,” and “Jim Crow” in America. From their promotional materials
and their slate of films, it is clear that Image Nation Abu Dhabi’s strategy for building a domestic
film industry is to produce and distribute “international” product.

53
The Help opened domestically August 10-14, 2011 grossing $169 million domestically
and $49 million globally, distributed in over 45 countries. The box office performance of The
Help was impressive – to comprehend just how impressive, a little comparative context is
helpful. The Help, released at the tail end of peak of summer tent pole season (August 10), was
the thirteenth top grossing film of 2011 but it should be noted that eleven of the films out-
performing The Help were sequels; of all of the higher performing films, sixty to seventy percent
of their total box office gross came from foreign receipts (vs. The Help with only 30% of its total
box office from abroad, which makes sense given its ‘niche’ content); eight of those films were
fantasy/superhero based, the higher grossing films were on 500-1360 more screens than The
Help, and, the little film about domestic workers in the Jim Crow south remained in theaters for
thirty weeks (the next longest running booking was twenty-three weeks by Cars 2). In other
words, The Help was the top grossing non-action-driven drama of the year, outperforming
notable films with stronger Hollywood pedigrees such as Bridesmaids, The Girl with the Dragon
Tattoo, The Descendants, War Horse, Moneyball, The Iron Lady, numerous animated family
films, and that year’s Academy Award-winning Best Picture, The Artist.
The Help’s reception as an international film is of primary interest particularly in the age
of Obama, given Hollywood’s industrial belief that international audiences are biased against
blackness. Overall, reviews in the popular press were favorable for the film with many around
the globe summing the film up as “feel good,” and “life-affirming,” and characterization of the
period as Civil Rights-era on the brink of “social change.” Other than one Australian journalist’s
wondering if the film’s success could “be due to it pricking the conscience of a US that, even
with a black president, struggles with issues of race?”
68
very few notices made connections

68
Jim Schembri, “These maids of honour,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 2, 2011,
http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/these-maids-of-honour-20110831-1jmk8.html.

54
between the film and contemporary black-white US relations. For the most part, concerns that
The Help’s depiction of black womanhood in the film would encourage contemporary global
audiences to continue to see black American women as subjugate appears to be unfounded.
Instead, there was a general acceptance among international film reviewers that the film was a
“truthful” depiction of 1963 Jim Crow Mississippi relations between white employers and their
black domestic workers.
Notably, regions with similar histories of race-, class- or caste-based oppressions make
connections to their own societies. For example, Tymon Smith of Johannesburg, South Africa,
writing in a piece titled “Darkly Lightweight,” scathingly likens the context to that of the post-
Apartheid country: “while it has a thin veneer of conscience about the social failings of its time
and place and some strong performances, the whole thing feels like a slice of milk tart served on
a lacy doily of political consciousness at a dinner party thrown by a liberal-minded madam in a
white suburb under apartheid.”
69
Trisha Gupta with the Indian Express cautions domestic
audiences against feeling too politically aware or evolved to not be able to locate themselves in
such a story:
“Stocketts [sic] Skeeter gives the privileged viewer a comfortable position from which to
safely empathise with the disadvantaged other: were [sic] only too happy to identify with
Skeeter, cause [sic] she [sic] the kind that speak to the help. It makes it easier to distance
ourselves from the truly evil white people the ones who make their maids work punishing
hours, enforce domestic segregation, refuse loans in the interest of self-help and are quick
to levy accusations of theft. But as we watch the pasty-faced Hilly Holbrook satisfyingly
given her cinematic comeuppance, we might do well to think how close we really are to
her.”
70

69
Tymon Smith, “Darkly Lightweight,” The Times, Johannesburg, South Africa, October, 7, 2011.
70
Trisha Gupta, “The Maid’s Tale,” Indian Express, December 2, 2011,
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-maids-tale.

55
With India’s four centuries of European economic incursion and colonial rule, Gupta’s
admonishment suggests that domestic audiences can relate to racialized, gendered, and economic
power dynamics exhibited in The Help. Otherwise stated, analogous concerns are both
recognized and critiqued because of their proximity to home – issues of asymmetrical social
relations articulated in The Help are not exclusive to the United States; for Gupta, the “they” is
“us.” Similarly, Kaori Shoji, writing for The Japan Times critiques the film’s failings in its
toothless rendering of asymmetrical social relations through the lens of classism: “[The Help]
ultimately fails to address the politics of domestic labor, and how in the developed world it still
symbolizes servitude and degradation, especially among the white-collar class. In one scene,
Aibileen [played by Academy Award nominated actress Viola Davis], croons that her young
charge is ‘important and special,’ which you could interpret: ‘You will never have to scrub
toilets or wash dishes.’”
71
Despite their discontent with the final products, what these reviews
reveal is the possibility of transnational cinema that is definitively considered “international
film,” not Hollywood-produced, or internationally co-produced, but one that allows global
viewers to connect with plot, story, and subtextual themes, as well as their own historical
experience with systematic and institutional instances of in/justice, protest, and liberation. The
Help, designated an international film by Image Nation Abu Dhabi, has the makings of a
possible transnational cinema.
Looking Backwards: History Matters?
One of the loudest critiques of The Help has been its elision of historical truth in representing
both the Civil Rights era and the working conditions of black southern domestics. Director

71
Kaori Shoji, “The Help - Oscar Winner Paints Disparity in Black and White,” The Japan Times, March 30, 2012,
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2012/03/30/films/film-reviews/the-help/#.V_MTIpMrJAY.

56
Taylor recounts in an interview with TheGriot.com that he had no interest in showing “these
ladies scrubbing toilets” or blacks beaten with crowbars because “we’ve seen that done before.”
Instead, Taylor wanted to “tell this personal story on our homeland and tell it in a way that we
felt was accurate…not about victims….[but] victims of circumstances.”
72
The desire to forge
relationships with lasting bonds of genuine affection between structurally unequal parties (e.g.,
master/slave, colonizer/colonized, oppressor/oppressed, employer/employee) that are the product
of “circumstances” is a noble one. How then, does one ascertain what is “accurate” and the
condition of certain “circumstances” of a historical moment when filmmakers allow their own
desires and subjectivities to occlude that which is verifiably otherwise? What happens to our
national narrative when dramatic license positions nostalgia over and above historicity? And,
what does the global embrace of black subjugation in the form of The Help signal for the future
of diasporic black progress during the Age of Obama?
One way to tell “accurate” stories situated within accurate socio-political “circumstances”
is from first person accounts. However, judging from Stockett’s public discussions about her
process, as well as the final product, research did not appear to factor significantly into her or
Taylor’s process. In a Time Magazine online interview, Stockett discussed only one instance of
having interviewed a black domestic and her white female employer, where Stockett thought “it
was so interesting to compare their perspectives.”
73
The white woman tended to remember the
relationship fondly; however, to Stockett’s surprise, the black woman really just saw the
experience as a job.
74
Despite the realization that it was possible that black domestics did not

72
Chris Witherspoon, “Director: People are Too Critical of The Help,” The Griot, August 11, 2011,
http://thegrio.com/2011/08/15/the-help-director-people-are-too-critical-of-this-film.
73
Claire Suddath, “Q&A: Kathryn Stockett, Author of The Help,” Time.com, November 11, 2009,
http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1937562,00.html.
74
Suddath, “Q&A: Kathryn Stockett.”

57
share similar sentiments about their jobs as did their employers, Stockett nevertheless proceeded
to tell a tale of remembrance that never happened. Even having full knowledge of the ways in
which race and gender posed a continual threat to the corpus of black womanhood, the author
minimizes the racial sexual terror experienced by black southern domestics:
“…I did hear plenty of interesting stories. One black woman from Birmingham
told me she and her friends used to hide down in a ditch, waiting for the bus to
take them to work. They were afraid to stand on a street corner because white men
would harass them.”
75

In doing so, Stockett crafts an entire world where black women’s subjectivity operates to assuage
the fears of female whiteness and provide material content for the advancement of female
whiteness. In short, the story has been constructed through a white racial frame that would
ensure its consumption among audiences accustomed to the narrative centrality of whiteness.
One of the black maids interviewed was Stockett’s brother’s housekeeper, Abileen
Cooper, who sued Stockett for unauthorized use of her likeness in The Help after granting the
author numerous talks revealing personal details that are echoed by the fictional Abileen in the
novel and film. The suit was dismissed due to an expired statute of limitations, but the accusation
of plagiarism became part of Stockett’s mythology as an overnight sensation. However, in May,
2011, at a lecture for aspiring writers at the Dallas Museum of Art, one blogger captured
Stockett’s admission to the falsity of her entire narrative and perhaps to her own writing ability:
“Reading a lot makes for a good writer,” she said. “You learn the turn of a phrase and, if
you read it enough you can rip it off.” She good-naturedly continued to downplay her
success, assuring us that everyone can learn the craft as she has. “There are those who are
truly gifted—Hemingway, Steinbeck—but really, I’m just makin’ shit up.”
76

75
“A Conversation with Kathryn Stockett,” Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, A Division of Penguin Group (USA),
http://www.penguin.com/static/packages/us/thehelp/author_conversation.php.
76
Pamela Hammonds, “Lessons on Writing from Kathryn Stockett,” What Women Write Blog, May 9, 2011,
http://whatwomenwritetx.blogspot.com/2011/05/lessons-on-writing-from-kathryn.html.

58
In August, 2011, Stockett appeared on a different panel, this time with the film’s stars, Viola
Davis and Octavia Spencer, in a post-screening discussion with the audience at the National
Association of Black Journalists Convention in Philadelphia. As reported online in the Urban
Urbanite, Spencer deflected criticism of Stockett for lacing actual historical events in her
fictional novel and film by placing the responsibility for teaching history on parents, not creative
artists. Perhaps in an attempt to keep things light, Stockett then punctuates Spencer’s comments
with her previous assertion that “I just made this shit up!” Given her record– no actual instances
of these relationships, questionable research, and claims to have conjured it all out of the air
(perhaps to counter accusations of plagiarism) – one is left questioning what testimonial and
memory serve as historical evidence to support “accuracy” in The Help.
The Help paints a plausible picture of social relationships between black and white
women in a sentimental world insulated from everyday eruptions of racial and gender political
strife that mark this period in US history. Despite being set in 1963, an explosive year for civil
rights activity, The Help is less interested in history and more interested in the evocation of
charged feelings and sentiments. When asked specifically as to whether he considers The Help a
civil rights movie, Taylor is emphatic that the film is not:
“Civil rights is just the backdrop. I'm not qualified to make a film about civil rights.
People say to me: 'Why wasn't there a lynching? Why aren't there houses burning down?'
But that's not what this story is. For me, the most horrific moment in the film is the scene
where the maid is sitting with her panties round her ankles in a three-by-three plywood
bathroom, like a cat in a litter-box, while an impatient white woman is tapping her
foot outside. If people need to see blood and gore and can't see how horrific that is – well,
I don't have answer to that.”
77

The danger here is that for Taylor (and by association, Stockett), the institutionally racist Jim

77
Xan Brooks, “Is The Help Helping? Domestic Servants on Film in Today’s Hollywood,” The Guardian, October 20,
2011, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/oct/20/the-help-domestic-servants-on-film.

59
Crow south can be visually reduced to watching a black woman using an outhouse. This thinking
reflects the lingering effects of Lost Cause ideology which minimized the pivotal role of slavery
in the war between secessionists and union preservers as well as its horrors; in effect,
perpetuating the idea that “life wasn’t so bad under slavery.”
Indeed, by foregrounding a narrative of black/white female melodrama one can be sure
that Stockett and Taylor saw something other than racial justice as the political project of their
film. There is an ambivalence towards history operating in Stockett’s historical fiction, a genre
which situates fictional characters, who may (e.g. Forrest Gump), or may not (e.g. Gone with the
Wind) engage with actual historical people, within a recognizable historical moment at least
twenty-five to sixty years past. Another constitutive element in the genre is its conscious
engagement and narrative entwinement with its historical referent. For example, the war with
Viêt Nam and US Civil War figure prominently in Forrest Gump and Gone with the Wind (in
both novel and film forms) respectively, shaping and impacting the decisions and ultimately the
lives of Forrest and Scarlett. These turbulent historical moments advance their respective plots as
narrative cause and effect, and as part of the socio-cultural condition for the characters. Not to be
outdone, 1963 America was replete with memorable historical events indelibly inscribed in our
national cultural knowledge, from which filmmakers of The Help could imbue their story,
characters, tone, or mood with narrative gravitas. A cursory glance at a Wikipedia page for
“1963 in the United States” returns us to a year when: Alabama’s new governor George Wallace
famously proclaims at his inauguration “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation
forever;” Betty Friedan publishes The Feminine Mystique; Dr. Martin Luther King delivers his “I
Have a Dream Speech” at the Lincoln Memorial as a culmination of the March on Washington
for Jobs and Freedom, only to be followed a few short months later by the bombing of a black

60
Birmingham church where four children perished; and, the death of educator, activist, and writer
W. E. B. Du Bois at the age of ninety-five.
78
Along with several southern lunch counter sit-ins,
voter registration drives, protest marches and riots, that year also saw Sidney Poitier’s Academy
Award-winning performance for Best Actor in Lilies in the Field. Stockett makes what amount
to little more than passing references to the assassinations of civil rights organizer Medgar Evans
and President John F. Kennedy, ostensibly to signal to audiences where we are in time and space.
Now, it is conceivable that the shortcomings of The Help were the result of Stockett’s and
Taylor’s neophyte status as respective novelist and filmmaker. Or, it is possible that their
effacement of history is the result of our post-modern and post-truth condition where ‘history’
and ‘research’ no longer matter, only affect matters, and history is here to be plundered for
personal gain. For example, in the span of six minutes, the assassination of Medgar Evers is
introduced – without explicitly stating his name – via a televised press conference in the Phelan
living room. Skeeter, in center frame, sits on the sofa with the family’s black domestic help
standing behind the sofa flanking Skeeter’s shoulders. Charlotte (Allison Janney), Skeeter’s
mother, descends the stairs in the far background, enters the living room, and, annoyed that
Skeeter and the domestic staff are watching the announcement of Evers’ death together, moves
to the television snaps it off, dismissing the staff and admonishing Skeeter for “encouraging
them,” [emphasis added, referencing their black domestic staff]. From there, we cut to Aibileen
on a city bus, where we learn along with Aibileen that “some nigger got shot,” and she is put off
the bus. Tensions rise as black folks hurriedly mill about the streets; in grand pratfall tradition,
Aibileen trips and falls on the lawn, legs splayed, then collects herself and enters Minny’s house
to find Minny and her children listening to news coverage of Evers’ murder. After Minny sends

78
“1963 in the United States,”Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_in_the_United_States.

61
her children to bed, Aibileen and Minny huddle together in Minny’s kitchen, visibly shaken, and
in strained whispers question whether working with Skeeter is safe:
Minny: “What they gonna do if they catch us with Miss Skeeter?”
Aibileen: “We’re gonna be careful.”
Minny: “Hitch us to a pickup? Drag us behind? Shoot me in front of my children?”
Aibileen: “We ain’t doing civil rights. We’re just telling stories like they really
happened.”
Minny: [chuckling] “You’re a fool, old woman. A fool.”
From Davis’ delivery, we are to take that Aibileen lacks conviction and she knows it: it appears
that she and Minny may believe on some level that their “telling stories” is a subversive act of
resistance to racial injustice. In the span of six minutes, however, it becomes clear that the
historical significance of Evers’ assassination serves two functions: as a (feeble) attempt at
consciousness raising for Skeeter, and to heighten the sense of risk for Aibileen and Minny. The
film never returns to this moment, it is not integrated into the story, and fails to function as cause
and effect in an Aristotelian sense. As a matter of fact, once the sequence ends with Skeeter
scanning a collage of articles including that of the Freedom Riders bus bombing (1961), the
brutal murder of Emmit Till (1955), and Life Magazine’s coverage of the Evers assassination, the
film cuts to Minny vacuuming a giant taxidermied grizzly bear in the living room of her new
employer, Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain) from Sugar Ditch, Mississippi, a social pariah among
the mean girl clique due to her lower class status (i.e., “white trash”). When Minny hears a thud
from above, she goes to Cecilia who is locked in her bathroom. After Minny bursts through the
locked door, she finds Cecilia on the floor in a pool of blood. Minny aids Cecilia through what
we discover is one of numerous miscarriages. With this sequence, history is eclipsed and the
audience is quickly redirected towards the film’s actual emotional and narrative agenda: white
women’s comfort in the arms of black women.
Stockett’s ambivalence toward history takes an even more perplexing turn as she

62
continues to present forms of white benevolence in a south that has had to grapple “new”
meanings of blackness and whiteness in the post-Reconstruction, Jim Crow south. When black
domestic Yule Mae (Aunjanue Ellis) is publicly arrested and manhandled after she attempts to
pawn a stolen ring from the film’s chief antagonist, Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard),
other domestics are catalyzed into action: those previously hesitant to participate in Skeeter’s
book project now want their voices heard as a mild retribution against Hilly. Included in this
story-sharing session is one woman’s tale of white benevolence. One of the older domestics
recounts with reverence:
“I used to take a shortcut every day when I went to work at Dr. Dixon’s house, cut
through that farmer’s lower 40 to get there. One day this farmer was waiting for me with
a gun. Said he’d shoot me dead if I walked on his land again. Dr. Dixon went and paid
that farmer double for two of those acres. Told him he was gonna start farming, too. But
he bought that just for me, so I could get to work easy. He did.”
Now, it must be emphasized that the employer bought a plot of land from a farmer so that the
maid could have a shotgun-free walk to work, not to give to her. The melos cues the audience to
read this moment with all sincerity, as it is presented without contemporary critique – the
filmmakers play it straight. History is replete with examples of how white housewives drove
their domestics to and from work during the nearly year-long Montgomery bus boycott
(December 1955 to December 1956). The ambivalent amiability allows the audience to rejoice in
the maid’s positive recollection of her white employer going to bat for her. However, are global
audiences supposed to read this moment as a glass half full, and not half empty? The employer
does nothing to disrupt the social order of Jim Crow racial attitudes by challenging the actions of
the gun-toting farmer; instead, the doctor removes impediments to his own quality of life, by
making it slightly less dangerous for his domestic worker to come to work. This uncritical
presentation of such actions reveals the dangers of a white liberal sensibility that lives in

63
accordance to the tenets of racism, yet sympathizes with those for whom those same tenets are
oppressive. Stockett unconsciously acknowledges:
“That was just a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl,
seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing
fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now.”
79

Stockett (and Skeeter) reassert white supremacy’s ability to construct white racial framing that
‘naturalizes’ black difference and deference to white normalcy. Rather than an active response
that demands justice, this frame fosters a passive reaction of pity, despite how well-attired the
blacks bodies may be.
This practice of historical-plunder-and-narrative-peppering allows filmmakers of The
Help to generate a narrative where the cultural production of white entitlement and privilege is
masked, but the cultural manifestation of black disparity is underscored. In so doing, it allows
whiteness to ‘not see’ the connections between normative white supremacy and its production of
black subjugation. For example, early in the film, Skeeter drives into town for a job interview at
the local paper and makes no notice of what we the audience sees as the camera draws our
attention to local blacks ascending stairs to enter a building through the clearly marked
segregated entrance. Why doesn’t this mean anything to Skeeter who, having just graduated from
the University of Mississippi in Oxford, would have certainly been aware of the integration-
segregation battle in 1962 (just one year before film’s diegetic setting) where African American
student James Meredith attempted to enroll at Ole’ Miss, only to be confronted by National
Guards aided by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett? Wouldn’t Skeeter have known that the real
world newspaper, the Clarion-Ledger, established in 1837, for which she is hired to write the

79
Katherine Stockett, “Too Little, Too Late,” Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, A Division of Penguin Group (USA),
http://www.penguin.com/static/packages/us/thehelp/author_letter.php.

64
“Miss Myrna” tips for housewives column – a job which she has no professional or life
experience to qualify her for – was “pro-segregationist,” and reflected a “Confederate
mindset?”
80
These instances and others, such as passing references to the White Citizen’s
Council, and the minor inclusion of a state-produced information pamphlet entitled “Mississippi
– The Laws Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and other Minorities” (likely borrowed from
Stetson Kennedy’s Jim Crow Guide to USA: Laws, Customs and Etiquette Governing the
Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities as Second-Class Citizens, which is critique, not
promulgator, of Jim Crow laws across the south), allow the film to establish its presence in,and
proximity to the historical moment. Skeeter does not see these elements as part of a larger system
of a normalized white dominant culture in which she actively participates yet does not recognize,
however, and her burgeoning liberalism seeks to empower the black masses through a form of
entrepreneurialism (exposés of their white employers) which they themselves cannot exploit. In
effect, history in The Help becomes atmospheric, as racism is depoliticized and made affective.
Even the contributions of socially stratified yet politically aware white women are
marginally presented in The Help, yet complicated by the need to narratively distinguish white
protagonist from white antagonist. As film fodder, white activism occupies the periphery in the
form of real world organizations: the Daughters of America, a white nativist organization
founded in the mid nineteenth century, dedicated to the inclusion of Christian values and bible-
reading in public school education, of which Skeeter’s mother Charlotte Phelan (Allison Janney)
is a member and from which she will need redemption, and the White Citizens’ Council, a
staunch segregationist organization founded in Mississippi in the 1950s, which endorses

80
“Jackson Clarion-Ledger,” Credo Database, 2009,
http://search.credoreference.com.libproxy3.usc.edu/content/entry/vipfff/jackson_clarion_ledger/0.

65
antagonist Hilly Holbrook’s “Home Health Sanitation Initiative,” which would require white
home owners to provide separate outdoor toilets for the black help because, as Hilly states, “they
[blacks] carry different diseases than we [whites] do.” Including such organizations has the effect
of distinguishing Skeeter’s whiteness – visibly uncomfortable with her relational proximity to
such organizations – from that of her mother’s generation or Hilly. In fact, the film eschews real
world examples of white women’s involvement in civil rights organizing. Northern white males
and females traveled to the south as civil rights activists, and some lost their lives, such as
Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner (along with James Chaney) in 1964, and Viola
Liuzzo in 1965. Closer to home, Juliette Hampton Morgan, an Alabama socialite, also stands out
as an example of a southern white female who had protested against Jim Crow treatment of
blacks in public transportation since the 1930s, but amped up her civil rights activism with the
Montgomery bus boycott. White backlash to her activism lead her to depression and, eventually,
suicide in 1957.
81
Other efforts deemed less “radical” appealed to southern women using class as
their point of connection. The “Wednesdays in Mississippi Society” (WIMS) social justice
project, founded in 1964, implemented by an interracial/interfaith group of black and white
Jewish female professionals from northern states, stands out as a contemporary demonstration
and precursor to second wave feminist solidarity and early 1960s black/white female unity that
the film could have emulated. WIMS’ history, archived at the University of Houston as
Wednesdays in Mississippi: Civil Rights as Women’s Work, describes itself as:
“the only civil rights organization by women for women as part of a national women’s
organization, [the group] brought interracial, interfaith teams of northern middle-aged,
middle- and upper-class women to Jackson, Mississippi, in the summer of 1964 to meet
with their southern counterparts…. operated under the principle that the team members’
gender, age, and class would serve as an entrée to southern women who had criticized
and dismissed other civil rights activities as radicals. The WIMS team members’

81
Mary Stanton, “Juliette Hampton Morgan: From Socialite to Social Activist,” Alabama Heritage, Summer 2004,
24-29.

66
respectable appearance and quite approach enabled them to open a line of communication
between black and white Mississippi women and build bridges of understanding across
region, race, and religion.”
82

To be clear, WIMS was an interracial group of women from the north, banded together on behalf
of racial justice issues, not feminist concerns, even though their work arguably presaged the
second wave feminist activism catalyzed by the growing civil rights movement.
Global audiences and millennials are invited to experience a fiction that aspires to be
truth, but exists primarily as wish fulfillment in the minds of Stockett, Taylor, and others. They
offer a historical lens, but their view is blocked by cataracts: they are incapable of seeing around
the blind spots formed by white privilege. If we “erase” racial bias built into infrastructure, bias
that presents barriers to access and opportunity for people of color, yet demonstrate bias in favor
of whiteness, and make “equal opportunity” institutional practice and policy, then there can be
no racism. The “that’s the way those people are” or residuum of racism ascribed as black
pathology becomes the primary (and sometimes only) explanation for the disenfranchised: we
are the cause of our own oppression. This thinking is demonstrated by the arrest of Yule Mae,
who is seen in the third act joyously reading Skeeter’s now published novel while in prison with
a host of other black women. What are global audiences, unfamiliar with US race-based social
relations/history, to make of such? Allowing for a certain percentage of antisocial behavior
within the general population, do domestic and global audiences understand the degree to which
racialized social conditions create the desperation that leads to criminality? To their credit,
Stockett and Taylor’s terse plot linearity demonstrates this cause and effect trajectory, but
melodrama demands clearly marked individuals who function as victims and villains, not

82
“Wednesdays in Mississippi: Civil Rights as Women’s Work,” The University of Houston,
http://classweb.uh.edu/wims.

67
systems and institutions. The Hilly/Yule Mae conflict can be read as an individual’s failure to
pull herself up by her own bootstraps (because none of the other maids seem to have these types
of money woes) which leads to retaliation against her insensitive boss, and once caught, must be
redeemed and rehabilitated for her transgression via prison. Perhaps Yule Mae was successful in
pawning the ring, and her son went to college – but this is beyond the purview of Stockett’s
narrative.
The Help attempts to articulate an understanding of historical social relations between
black and white women, and between classes of white women who police each other’s
commitment to white supremacy. However, as we advance in time, and history becomes
increasingly distant from the present, the danger here is in believing that Stockett’s and Taylor’s
representations of representations represent the real. The film’s melodramatic mode of emotional
excess and gloss produces a “sticky” affect
83
proximally yoking the experiential to actual
historical events, generating an ontological truth: the ‘I feel, therefore it’s real’ impulse allows
films like The Help to insert themselves into a version of the past that then becomes the
normative narrative. As Anne Friedberg notes:
“[o]ne of the essential properties of cinema spectatorship is its temporal displacement:
The time of a film’s production, the time of its fiction, and the time of its projection are
all conflated into the same moment in viewing. The reality effect, created by cinematic
conventions of narrative and by illusionistic construction, works to conceal that
conflation and to produce representations that are taken for perceptions, or—as Metz
would have it—a discours that is taken for histoire.”
84

Friedberg reminds us of the ways in which classic Hollywood aesthetic strategies mask their
constructedness; in so doing, we see how The Help as both a novel and film carry the valence of

83
Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, November 12, 2010), 29-51.
84
Anne Friedberg, “Cinema and the Postmodern Condition,” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda
Williams, (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University 1995, 1997), 72-73.

68
truth. Commenting on Lukacs’ discussion of the ‘historical novel,’ Frederic Jameson writes, “as
that [bourgeois] class sought to project its own vision of its past and its future and to articulate its
social and collective project in a temporal narrative distinct in form from those of earlier
‘subjects of history’ …”
85
Stockett’s cathartic form of narrative pleasure performs a sort of time
travel that allows us to go back and impose a post-racial present ideology, that rewrites history,
but also allows for white liberalism to feel good about the contemporary moment, where racism
has been reduced to individualized behavior, or simultaneously affirmed and denied. With
specific regard to The Help, the film is able to insert itself into a historical moment in time, graft
itself onto and take credit for a black womanhood progress narrative – a progress narrative that
one can imagine would have led to the likes of a Michelle Obama. Jameson points out that this
kind of representation of the past is “built” or a fabrication that provides “…the narrative means
to a very different end, namely the brutal transformation of a realistic representation of the
present…”
86

Such misrepresentation of the past not only mollifies the historical reality of black
domestics in a violent turbulent Jim Crow south, it can potentially shape perceptions for
millennials and generations to come. Despite its factual inaccuracies (such as the cause of
Medgar Evers’ death), schools across the United States include The Help on their English and
Social Studies summer reading for high school students alongside classics such as To Kill a
Mockingbird and Native Son. One online resource for teachers suggests that The Help be utilized
to make students “aware of how racism and classism distort human relationships and of the

85
Jameson, Postmodernism, 283.
86
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press,
1991), 285.

69
segregated society that existed in America as late as the 1960s.”
87
Other schools list the book for
honors or advanced placement reading along other historical writers such as Eric Larson (Isaac’s
Storm, Devil in the White City), and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals: The Political
Genius of Abraham Lincoln).
In the contemporary moment, the unmoored floating signifiers, once disconnected from
systemic and institutional oppression which give them meaning, are atomized, floating as
particles in the air. Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern University Barnor
Hesse argues in “Im/plausible deniability: racism’s conceptual double bind” that the
irreconcilability of western ideological conceptualization of race verses western practices and
social relations of racism creates a double bind that both conceals and reveals racism. Because
anti-racism has been official US policy since the end of WWII, racism’s:
“…sociality is overwhelmingly conceived as a problem that has been largely overcome.
What remains is seen as residuum, consigned to pathology, a profound moral deviation
from the western liberal and democratic ethos and ethnos. Racism has been declared an
unacceptable form of western social behavior, committed by groups voluntarily on the
political fringes of society or desperately by classes economically jettisoned to its
decaying edges.”
88

Decades of weakened government institutions, increased containment and surveillance, and
increased health and wealth disparity reasserts the black experience of disenfranchisement as
‘intrinsic’ or the natural order of things. Old characterizations, stereotypes and tropes (childlike,
subhuman, lazy, inclined toward violence and sexual promiscuity, etc.) are not viewed as
historical narrative that legitimized both the colonial capitalist project and white supremacy, but
returns us to the colonialist narrative that grafts such characterizations on to blackness as

87
“Learning Guide to The Help,” TeachWithMovies.org, http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/help.html
88
Barnor Hesse, “Im/plausibile deniability: racism’s conceptual double bind,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study
of Race, Nation and Culture 10, no. 1 ( Routledge, 2004): 9-29, DOI: 10.1080/1350463042000190976.

70
normative, constitutive, and “just the way those people are.”
To be clear, The Help is not a documentary nor does it claim to be. However, since
neither Taylor or Stockett lived through the period in which they have created, it is curious as to
why this historical moment was chosen, particularly with their deliberate elision of historical
actuality. Based on the contemporaneous cultural inscription, values, and reading practices that
pervade every film, The Help demonstrates post-racial logics, not only that of simultaneous
acknowledgment and dismissal of racism, but also suggests that American racial history is not
necessarily that which is verifiable but that which is felt. It is through that lens that The Help
asks global audiences to recall the nation’s racialized terror and disenfranchisement: as an
imagined, romanticized white fantasy of interracial maternal longing from a childhood that never
occurred.
Looking Backwards: White Authored Nostalgia
Neither the novel or the film lay claim to being “based on a true story” or of depicting
any actual white employer/black domestic relationship then or now. The oft-reported legend of
Stockett’s debut novel begins with September 11, 2001. A resident of New York City but
homesick for Jackson, Mississippi, Stockett ached for comfort in the wake of the attacks on the
World Trade Center. In need of comfort after such a tragedy, Stockett’s thoughts turned to the
black family maid/nanny who raised her, Demitrie, who passed away when Stockett was sixteen.
Frederic Jameson, writing about a Phillip K. Dick novel, suggests that such motivations are the
result of “infantile regression” where one has “unconsciously chosen his own delusion and fled”
contemporary fears. In this light, The Help (both novel and film) can be understood in Jameson’s
formulation as “collective wish-fulfillment, and the expression of a deep, unconscious yearning
for a simpler and more human social system and a small-town Utopia very much in the North

71
American frontier tradition.”
89
Understandably, when threatened with annihilation (i.e. 9/11), we
desire to retreat to an uncomplicated protected existence: Stockett’s contemporary wonderment
about Demitrie’s life turned into a distorted historical love letter to an African American woman
for whom Stockett cared deeply.
Complex relationships forged between southern blacks and whites with genuine bonds of
love and affection notwithstanding, The Help is not concerned with depicting these relationships
or their overdetermined social conditions. Neither remembrance, nor reimagining of the past, the
temporal displacement operating in The Help (novel and film) functions as a contemporary
imagining of past social relations; an imagined piece of nostalgia or “longing for a prior state,
often perceived to be innocent, which will always remain unfulfilled because this state is
irretrievable—indeed it never existed.”
90
Stockett shared the same desire as many of her white
female interviewees who all “wished they could tell [the help], one last time, thank you for
everything.”
91
In so doing, Stockett turns wish-fulfillment into pseudo-apologia to Demitrie,
cathartically rendered with Constantine (Cicely Tyson). In flashback, Skeeter’s black
nanny/maid is dismissed, moves to Chicago, and later dies while Skeeter is away at college.
The Help allows Stockett, Taylor, and other white children raised by black help in the Jim
Crow and Civil Rights south to not only feel good in the present moment about the past, but to
establish a connection with a white liberal sensibility operating in those contemporaneous
moments. This practice did not originate with Stockett, as numerous other white authors imagine
a past that fashions a white hero to embody contemporary liberal politics. Published in 1960 and

89
Jameson, Postmodernism, 283.
90
Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “Chapter 6: Consumer Culture and the Manufacturing of Desire,” Practices of
Looking: an introduction to visual culture (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 217.
91
“An Interview With Katherine Stockett,” The Help, A Novel, Penguin.com, [online],
http://www.penguin.com/static/packages/us/thehelp/author_conversation.php.

72
adapted for the screen in 1962, Harper Lee’s semi-autobiographical novel To Kill a Mockingbird
demonstrates its own form of southern white liberalism emanating from the period in American
history that The Help depicts. There are clear differences in their retrospective looks backward
(Mockingbird recreates the Depression era from 1962’s hindsight; The Help looks back at 1963
from the mid 2000s), geographic locations, and the Scout’s hero-worshiping perspective on her
father. What these two films have in common is that they both look at past race relations through
their respective contemporaneous white lenses. What are we to make of Lee’s 1960 construction
of Calpurnia living in 1930s Alabama, compared to Stockett’s mid 2000s construction of
Aibileen et al, in 1960s Mississippi? Black agency and subjectivity aside, both films evidence a
white liberal consciousness.
The melodramatic mode reminds us that above all else, emotionality in excess is what
drives our connection to the narrative: to be sure, audiences feel sympathy when bad things
happen to characters we care about, and feel anger, fear, or disgust when in the presence of evil.
What is problematic about The Help in this regard is its willingness to make all pain analogous:
for each black woman audiences connect with emotionally because of some societal wrong, there
is a white female with an equally dire, if not more compelling, set of circumstances. Minny
becomes paired with Celia: Minny is just a battered woman who happens to be black; Celia is
white trash and unable to carry a baby to full term. We see Celia curled up on the cold tile of her
bathroom floor, blood stains everywhere which prompts her to ask, “Why is there so much
blood?” Minny is ‘feisty’ and a fighter; Celia is delicate, unable to cook, and shunned by her
peers. Aibileen is a bit forlorn having survived the death of her adult son. Nevertheless, she has a
quaint and comfortable home, a church community, and can be good humored; on the surface,
she appears to live an event free life. Her white counterpart is Mae Mobley, the potty-training

73
toddler child of her employer, Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna O’Reilly), who is alternately neglectful
and physically abusive to Mae Mobley. Aibileen, filled with compassion for the child, routinely
tells her that “you is kind, you is smart, you is important” as a way of counteracting the esteem-
damaging effects of her mother. This is so touching that Mae Mobley tells Aibileen “you my real
mommy” within earshot of Elizabeth. The above is accomplished only by a:
“…violent formal and narrative dislocation could a narrative apparatus come into being
capable of resorting life and feeling to this only intermittently functioning organ that is
our capacity to organize and live time historically.”
92

The generalizability of the US black-white race narrative for broader domestic and
international audiences requires a subtext that can be represented as ‘universal.’ Typically, this
means narratively moving the nation’s historical racial and social formations to the background,
while foregrounding American and human ideals which are distilled into plot conflicts for goal
oriented protagonists (i.e. sisterhood struggles against racism OR sexism). For The Help,
Stockett’s stated goal was to write about a very special relationship between two women who
happen to be white and black, not racism in the US south. As such racism, class, and the larger
civil rights movement become the backdrop and fodder by which the women forge their bond.
On some level, racism in this construct could be replaced by many forms of socio-cultural and/or
systematic oppression between haves and have-nots, such as socio-economic status (Sirk’s All
That Heaven Allows), immigration (McCarthy’s The Visitor), and transvestitism (Schumacher’s
Flawless), to name a few. Imbuing characters with principles and ideals that emerge as plot
conflict and action is unavoidable when Hollywood attempts to dramatize a slice of history; for

92
Jameson, Postmodernism, 284.

74
screenwriters, it becomes a strategy for creating crises and establishing what is at stake for the
film’s central characters.
But does the universalized subtext via the melodramatic mode, which animates emotional
ties/common qualities among global audiences unfamiliar with US racial history, aid us in
locating ourselves within these narratives? Because we feel, does this mean that we identify? In
the case of The Help, evocations of remorse and sympathy provide catharsis for audiences and
are less progressive than anesthetizing: it produces sentimentality (pity, even) in the place of
enlightened consciousness – affect, not action. One could argue that universality is what gets
diverse audiences into the theater, the benefit of which is increased global understanding of US
racial history. One such example is the Visions and Venus: Art, Fashion, Humanitarian Events
and Discovering the Unusual in Life blog by Trish Brown Vernazza who attended the film’s
premiere in Atlanta, GA. In her blog, an effusive Vernazza states that she and her sister
identified with the characters Skeeter and Cecilia (Jessica Chastain).
93
It makes sense that this
woman and her sister identify with the heroine and the plucky-cum-renegade outsider. This begs
the question, though: in what instance would whites in the audience identify with the film’s chief
mean girl Hilly Holbrook? While Trisha Gupta’s quote (previously cited herein from The Indian
Express) reminds us of how the audience is “too happy to identify with Skeeter” and to “distance
ourselves from the truly evil white people,” under what circumstances will audiences want to
identify with Aibileen and Minny, or any of the maids? Is The Help how those people from that
period remember themselves? From this exploration, we see that there is a tension between
reality and its forms of representation, and how representations are informed from their own

93
Trish Brown Vernazza, “Aprons, Movie: The Help & Friendship that cross all Boundaries,” Visions of Venus,
September 15, 2001, https://avisionofvenus.wordpress.com/2011/09/15/aprons-movie-the-help-friendships-that-
cross-all-boundries.

75
representations. Jameson reminds us that “…the sense people have of themselves and their own
moment in history may ultimately have nothing whatsoever to do with its reality…” delivering
unto us a “false consciousness” from the “structural and social significance of a collective
phenomenon,” such as America’s colonial capitalist racist past that “may be wildly at odds from
their own inner experiences and their own interior daily life.”
94

Stockett sanitizes the past and with it, her participation and that of countless other whites
who were raised by black domestics but did nothing to change the social relations or conditions
that made that upbringing possible. They need to feel good about having been the beneficiaries
of a society in which whites controlled the economic, social, and cultural relations such that
Stockett, Taylor, and others benefited simply because they were white. To have represented the
lived experience of black domestics during this period would have meant the inclusion of
numerous race-based indignities and abuses including poverty-line living conditions, lynchings,
and sexual violence.
Stockett’s novel, published by Amy Einhorn/Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Books at the
time, employed a domestic marketing strategy that eliminated the human form. Instead, the
publishers borrowed a piece by artist Ellen Granter entitled “Two and One:” three little birds sit
on a telephone line, two huddled close and one off to the side. Instead of the cool blues and
greens used in the original painting, the publishers used high contrast, pop color splashes of
ocher and lavender which the artist embraced, giving the new book cover a “warm southern
heat.” Internationally, the book had numerous jacket covers but they all depicted two black
female maids, standing watch over a small white female child:

94
Jameson, Postmodernism, 281-82.

76
“[T]he books by Stockett and Kidd [The Secret Life of Bees], both white writers, were
promoted to readers of all races, McFadden [an African American writer] says her novel
was marketed solely to African Americans…[starting with] the book covers. The Help
and The Secret Life of Bees had covers that did not reveal the race of the main characters.
White publishers have taken it upon themselves to be arbiters of black stories for white
readers…”
95

Audiences experience a catharsis as whiteness trumps whiteness. The book delivers a feel good
yarn that sidesteps racism, glosses over the violence of segregation, and reifies what bonds us
together in a universal sisterhood across the racial divide. The Help demonstrates that by
revisiting the past, we can make some commentary on contemporary US racial progress. Further,
it is universality that allows global audiences to locate themselves emotionally (if not racially,
generationally, geographically, etc.) in a culturally niche book that sold over five million copies
globally and generated nearly $50 million in foreign film receipts. Finally, The Helps aids
audiences in remembering the past nostalgically, which can make them feel good about the
present.
Looking Backwards: Stockett’s White Ventriloquism
As with numerous other Hollywood films depicting black sociality, The Help garnered its
own controversies around authenticity and veracity. After being sued by her brother’s African
American domestic worker for the “unpermitted appropriation of her name and image”
96
by
allegedly turning aspects of the maid’s life into a novel, Stockett defended herself: “The Help is
purely fictional and the character [Aibileen] was loosely inspired by my relationship with

95
Annette John-Hall, "50 Years after Publication, Harper Lee's 'Mockingbird' Still Sings," Philadelphia Inquirer,
September 8, 2010, http://articles.philly.com/2010-08-29/entertainment/24974285_1_atticus-finch-mockingbird-
harper-lee/3.
96
Campbell Robertson, “A maid sees herself in a Novel, and Objects,” The New York Times online, February 18,
2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/books/18help.html?_r=0.

77
Demetrie,”
97
the black maid in Stockett’s grandmother’s home who was instrumental in her
upbringing after her parents’ divorce. Stockett, like many novelists, wove a fictional tale that
included threads from her own life: in addition to her memories of Demetrie, the story is set in
Stockett’s hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, and the novel’s lead is a young white woman who
moves to New York in her early twenties to work in publishing – mirroring Stockett’s own pre-
novelist career. Coupled with aspects of the black maid’s own life, such as the death of an only
son, it is easy to see how a real life domestic worker named Aiblene Cooper (same first name,
different spelling) could come to the conclusion of appropriation of life rights without
permission or remuneration.
While not uncommon, Stockett’s smudging of the real into a fictive narrative bears
underscoring here as much of historical fiction’s cultural which as previously mentioned, are
criteria that have loomed large over literary historical blackness since the appearance of mid-17
th

century slave narratives. Skepticism about the veracity of slave narrative stems from white
minimization and disbelief in the dehumanizing aspects of slavery as well as skepticism of the
abolition-sympathizing white publishers who ‘shaped’ many a slave narrative for white
American and European consumption. In many instances, since many runaway or freed slaves
could not read or write, their experiences were dictated to publishers’ amanuenses endowed with
the power to put words into the mouths of blacks and to interpret black sentiment. Indeed, the
veracity of the interviews of former slaves documented during the New Deal’s Federal Writers
Project (1936-1938) revealed many southern blacks nostalgia for the comfort of slave era: Lost
Cause historians used these slave narratives as evidence that the Ol’ South was not as horrific as

97
Sharon Churcher, “Her family hired me as a maid for 12 years but then she stole my life and made it a Disney
movie,” Dailymail.com, September 4, 2011, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2033369/Her-family-hired-
maid-12-years-stole-life-Disney-movie.html.

78
had been characterized, and black historians interpreted such content as black folks deploying a
long practiced survival strategy of telling whites what they want to hear – as most of the Federal
Writers Project interviewers were white Americans. Akin to the skeptical lens with which slave
narratives and literature were viewed, the screen adaptation of Stockett’s novel endured similar
scrutiny due in part to: 1) the diegetic film world’s ability to corroborate the lived experience and
of Jim Crow black life and specifically that of black domestics; and 2) Stockett’s ventriloquism
as thinker, speaker, and puppeteer of black women’s experience. On this last point, Stockett
acknowledges her positionality and transgression of certain socially structured prohibitions:
… I was very worried about what I'd written and the line I'd crossed. And the truth is, I'm
still nervous. I'll never know what it really felt like to be in the shoes of those black
women who worked in the white homes of the South during the 1960's and I hope no one
thinks I presume to know that. But I had to try. I wanted the story to be told. I hope I got
some of it right. […] Skeeter was the hardest to write because she was constantly
stepping across that line I was taught not to cross. Growing up, there was a hard and firm
rule that you did not discuss issues of color.
98

A device of character development, Stockett presents Skeeter as a victim of traditional southern
chivalry instead of as a member of the power elite, by having her ally with Aibileen, Minny, and
the other black domestic workers. Tara McPherson notes how these southern belles, cultural
descendants of “plantation mistresses” fail to address their own participation in oppressive
ideologies, noting that “historical agency in the South supported other racial and racist power
structures, even as it worked to amend those systems vis-à-vis gender.”
99
By privileging
Skeeter’s need to stand out among other white writers in New York, southern black struggle
becomes background plot provocation, and black domestic workers function as heuristic through

98
“A Conversation with Kathryn Stockett,” Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, A Division of Penguin Group (USA),
http://www.penguin.com/static/packages/us/thehelp/author_conversation.php.
99
Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2003), 81.

79
which good whites are differentiated from bad whites. Furthermore, Stockett narratively
articulates what I characterize as “the exchange” which is a more typical convention of the
“buddy film:” key characters who are not obvious allies (plot conflict) team up, and through a
series of plot complications and conventions, overcome their divisions; in so doing each becomes
more enlightened for having had the experience with the other. An early model of this cinematic
illusion of black-white sameness can be traced back to one of the post-war eras earliest versions
of the black-white buddy film, The Defiant Ones (Kramer, 1958). In this case, two escaped
prisoners, one black (Sidney Poitier) and one white (Tony Curtis) symbolically and literally
shackled together, must cooperate with each other to outrun the long arm of the law. Initially the
two men treat one another with antipathy indicative of a racialized 1950s southern America.
Despite incarceration practices of racial segregation in many southern states (which speaks to
plausibility), director Stanley Kramer fashioned an aspirational vision of white and black male
alliance, as the two escaped prisoners cooperate with one another in order to maintain their
freedom. This “exchange” reduces institutional racism to a case of individual beliefs in racial
stereotypes that are overcome, allowing mutual admiration and respect to take root: even after
they have broken their prison shackle, they stick together to the end, no longer bound together by
iron, but by brotherhood.
In The Help, Skeeter’s analogous struggle is one of sexism and it is through the courage
of black domestics that the film’s white heroine develops the chops to resist conforming to
traditional patriarchal gender roles. In the end, both Skeeter and Aibileen (and Minny and
Cecilia) realize that they each have struggle in their lives and achieve an illusion of “equity” and
“sameness.” On the publicity website for the novel, Stockett boils the story’s essence down to
such a fantasy by quoting a line from her own novel: “Wasn’t that the point…for women to

80
realize, We [sic] are just two people. Not that much separates us. Not nearly as much as I’d
thought.”
100
But The Help as “pastiche” or “blank parody” is symptomatic of postmodernism’s
tendency toward commodification of the past at a surface level while effacing historical
referents’ context and meaning. In so doing, the film’s teleological argument legitimizes
sentimental reflections of the past which are pervasive in today’s contemporary white liberalism:
it is as if the filmmakers for The Help constructed a preferred version of the past in order to
satisfy the neoliberal trend towards memorial erasure and denial in post-racial era. Instead of
looking into the past as a strategy for moving forward, The Help’s contribution to heightened
black female womanhood during the age of Obama is one that reasserts black female subjugation
in the white imaginary. Recalling Viola Davis’ epigraph at the start of this discussion is better
late than never: after vociferously defending The Help in 2011 in the wake of criticisms about
both the depiction of black/white Jim Crow era Mississippi, as well as the frequency with which
Hollywood produces such representations, Davis relents that the film was not actually about
blacks or steeped in a black subjectivity. In the same interview, Davis shares that, “the hatred
[these domestics] would have towards these white women if they were asked, if they were put in
a situation where they were isolated, would have been vocalized. You didn’t see none of that [in
the film]!”
101

Tate Taylor defends Stockett’s right to recount this moment in US history, justifiably so,
not that her right to do so was ever in question. But what Taylor and Stockett fail to realize is the
degree to which white subjectivity and affect do not equate to “truth:”

100
“A Letter from Kathryn Stockett,” Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, A Division of Penguin Group (USA),
http://www.penguin.com/static/packages/us/thehelp/author_letterkathyrn.php.
101
Tilly Pearce, “BAFTA nominee Viola Davis slams 2011 film ‘The Help’ for its ‘unrealistic representation of life as a
maid in 1960s Mississippi,” The Sun, January 17, 2017, https://www.thesun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/2631095/bafta-
nominee-viola-davis-slams-2011-film-the-help-for-its-unrealistic-representation-of-life-as-a-maid-in-1960s-
mississippi.

81
The Help is about people having the right to tell a story and it's just a really scary place in
the artistic world where people are [wanting to determine] who can tell what story based
on their colour. … Kathryn Stockett had every bit of a right to tell this story because she
was speaking about her experience with her maid….The idea that Kathryn is to be
silenced because part of that story of who she was as a child involves an African-
American woman is really frightening to me.
102

Stockett’s and Skeeter’s “right to tell a story” is not what is in dispute; what is troubling is white
ventriloquism which fashions black/white reality into white fantasy, perpetuating representations
of a distortedpast intended to allow audiences to feel good about their current racial subject
positions. As part of Stockett’s present, the help function as they did for Skeeter: as chisel and
hammer to fragile white womanhood, which ultimately fashions her into a heroine.
Looking Backwards: Black Legacy Womanhood
“To the foreseeable future when the history of black servitude will no longer be the expected and
most valued lens through which to see and achieve black American progress.”
Vershawn Ashanti Young, From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Help: Critical
Perspectives on White-Authored Narratives of Black Life, 2014, v.
In 2012, the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), a professional
networking organization for female scholars of the African diaspora, published online an “Open
Statement to the Fans of The Help.” The film’s gestures toward historicity would lead many fans
of the successful novel and film to believe in its facticity. The ABWH (and many others across
cultural and academic landscapes) attempted to mollify the film’s persuasive sway over the
public with injections of sobriety:
During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic
inequalities limited black women’s employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent [sic] of
working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The
Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a
mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or
segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers
of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream Americans to ignore the

102
Tate Taylor, quoted in “These maids of honor,” by Jim Schembri, The Sydney Morning Herald, September 2,
2011.

82
systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where
employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is
troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman
could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.
103

The excerpt points to the ways in which a white racial frame overlooks black subjectivity and
lived experience, and instead adheres to a legacy of black womanhood perpetually linked to
slavery as constitutive to her subject positioning. Mrs. Obama called out this boomeranging
legacy in a 2015 commencement speech at Tuskegee University as she urged persistence and
diligence in the face of “the realization that no matter how far you rise in life, how hard you
work to be a good person, a good parent, a good citizen – for some folks, it will never be
enough.”
104
Richard Pryor put it much more colloquially with: “I got plenty of money but I’m
still a nigger.”
105
This is not to say that blackness cannot ever be conceptualized as something
other than slavery’s descendant (would European whites not also be inheritors of this same
institution and its social formations?). However, in contrast to Mrs. Obama’s sankofa glance
toward the past as a strategy forward, a white racial frame returns to the past to reassert a level of
black subjugation in the present, The Help included. Here is where the global popularity of The
Help as an international film: based on this success, will foreign investors be encouraged to
produce more of the same? Can the popularity of The Help (and others like it) be traced to the
retention and recollection of black female subjugation in the cultural imaginary of international
audiences? Case in point: First Lady Michelle Obama was featured on the August 10, 2012 cover
of Spanish magazine Fuera de Serie [translation: “one of a kind” or “out of the ordinary” or “out

103
Ida E. Jones and Daina Ramey Berry, et. al., “An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help,” Association of Black
Women Historians, January 15, 2012, http://www.abwh.org/images/pdf/TheHelp-Statement.pdf.
104
Obama, Michelle, “Remarks by the First Lady at Tuskegee University Commencement Address,” The White
House, May 9, 2015, https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/05/09/remarks-first-lady-tuskegee-
university-commencement-address.
105
Hilton Als, “A Pryor Love: The life and times of America’s comic prophet of race,” The New Yorker Magazine,
September 13, 1999, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/13/a-pryor-love.

83
of series”] swathed in muslin-appearing fabric, her right breast exposed, a wrap in her hair,
sitting on a chair draped with the US flag. The image was borrowed from the collection of
famous nudes created by UK artist, Karine Percheron-Daniels, who recreates established painted
nudes with faces of famous others superimposed over the bodies. Other superimposed faces on
established nudes featured on her website include pregnant versions of the “Mona Lisa” and
“Girl with the Pearl Earring,” Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, and of course President Barack
Obama.
106

Percheron-Daniels superimposed Mrs. Obama’s
visage onto Portait d’une negresse by French artist
Marie-Guilhelmine-Benoist, a painting that became
symbolic of liberatory, changing attitudes toward gender
and race in post-revolution 1800 France, into a mash-up
christened First Lady. The painting was conceived as an
“homage to Michelle Obama […] I was inspired to
create this as such when president Obama, the first black
president of the USA was elected.”
107
That the election
of America’s first black president prompts many to reflect on the nation’s history of slavery and
calculate “how far we have come” is an essential marker of this post-racial moment. However,
First Lady exemplifies the problematics of post-
modernism’s pastiche that revels in its ahistorical and
decontextualized repurposing: the artist, like Stockett, practices an erasure of historical

106
Percheron-Daniels, Karine, “About,” Fine Art America, http://fineartamerica.com/profiles/karine-
percherondaniels.html.
107
Percheron-Daniels, Karine, “First Lady,” Fine Art America, [online] http://fineartamerica.com/featured/first-
lady-karine-percheron-daniels.html.
Figure 2 First Lady portrait as Magazine Cover

84
signification in favor of her aspirational liberalism, which in the piece’s accompanying
description, necessitates divorcing the west from its slavery legacy:
This picture is only racist if you wish it to be. I see it for what it means to me. Look again
at the flag. It is not crumpled up in the small of her back. It is draped over the chair and
around her. I see it as a symbol of a nation that once deemed the black people as nothing
more than livestock, to now protecting, comforting, shielding and elevating them to the
point of equality where a black man or woman can hold the highest office of power in our
nation. It should be a symbol of how far we have come. But if all you see is racism, then
maybe we haven’t come as far as I think.
108

This artist’s statement is attributed to Percheron-Daniels, accompanying her work on the art
distribution website, Fine Art America, that houses her work. Percheron-Daniels’ rhetorical
switch from the “I” at the point of rebuke functions as an attempt to preempt criticism by
diffusing it across an unknown “we” that reveals her lack of understanding of problems that
materialize from the ethnocentric reading of appropriated racialized texts. Further, it is yet
another example of challenges that diasporic blacks confront globally when confronted with the
decontextualized sonic or imagistic sign that, once unmoored from its historical referent, is
commodified, packaged, and circulated without regard to the differential readings of said texts.
Other examples abound: from the black face Golliwog children’s literary character cherished
throughout England since the late nineteenth century; “Darkie” Toothpaste created in and sold
throughout Asia since the 1920s whose logo was a graphic of a man in blackface patterned after
Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer; the beloved Dutch Christmas character of Zwarte Piet (“Black
Pete”) that has circulated as a holiday tradition since the mid nineteenth century; a December
2011 laudatory article in Dutch magazine Jackie that compliments the style of pop star Rihanna
by calling her “de niggabitch” (“ultimate niggabitch”); and Sweden’s twin scandals with
children’s pickaninny literary character, the Lilla Hjartat, appearing in books and film aimed at

108
Percheron-Daniels, “First Lady.”

85
shaping young minds, and then, in 2012, artist Makode Linde’s “cakegate” art installation, of a
‘native’ looking African woman with exaggerated features performed by the artist, who would
scream and cry out in pain with each slice.

Figure 3 Artist Makode Linde's African Woman as Dessert 2012
Like Stockett, Percheron-Daniels assumes a universalized western white gaze at black bodies
that paradoxically links blackness to ‘originary’ roots steeped in slavery and thus will forever
carry its trace, yet dismisses the weight of that history as significant in the decoding of said texts.
The accompanying subtitle to Michelle Obama’s cover on Fuera de Serie narrative supports this
claim with the magazine’s headline “Michelle Tataranieta De Esclava, Duena De America”
(“Michelle, Granddaughter of a slave, Lady of America”) is followed a ‘positive’ Editor’s Note

86
that describes the First Lady as one who has “managed to seduce the American people.”
109
Can
this likeness of Michelle Obama, who would “seduce” the public with an exposed breast escape
what Hortense Spillers calls the “pornotroping” of black women, always understood in a
prostituting way? Presumably, it is her first lady status that sparked the interest in having her
image grace the cover. It can appear that no matter how exceptional the accomplishment,
members of the black diaspora can at anytime, anywhere on the globe, conjure up connections to
the Atlantic Slave Trade and its legacies, as blackness is always already marked. This is the
iconography that cinematic blackness is challenged to overcome as it attempts to travel and
circulate globally: hundreds of years of black subordination indelibly etched in the minds of
global consumers of visual culture, sometimes in an endearing childhood pleasure, which should
be noted as Fanon argues that “we cannot attach enough importance to the way white children
come into contact with the black man’s reality.”
110
Does history demand that the dominant
representation of blackness – that of slavery, subjugation and subordination – be the one
continually associated with black diasporic subjects? Nevertheless, the work pushes the post-
racial envelope, to be elaborated upon later, by insisting that we both acknowledge race and
racism, and simultaneously shrug our collective shoulders in its wake.
The Help, along with other films that look back historically, mark the Age of Obama as
one of racial progress; the constant juxtaposition of racialized past with the election of the first
black president repeatedly points us to this notion of “look how far blacks have come.” With the
Obama Effect, comes a congratulatory back slap for white liberals who feel good about their real
or imagined contributions to black progress: as Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes

109
“Michelle se come a Obama,” Fuera de Serie, August 8, 2012,
http://fueradeserie.expansion.com/2012/08/10/personajes/1344591523.html.
110
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 2008), 15.

87
nothing without a demand,” which would include white power. As with the black production
cycles destined for international distribution, white imaginar(ies) in the Age of Obama must
somehow locate themselves in contemporary renderings of America’s racial past. Thus, in the
Obama Age, with palpable, heightened visibility of black femaleness in popular and political
spheres, Stockett’s The Help masquerades as a narrative of black liberation, suggestions of
female racial parity, and cross-racial solidarity in 1963 Mississippi.
The film’s postmodern relationship with historical actuality is one of allusion and
evocation: the filmmakers reel in real world people, places, and things for narrative bona fides,
without creating any real stakes for their characters in relationship to those real world actualities.
The real world references are so inconsequential, that the entire film could be told without any of
the references as they are not tied to the fates of any of the characters, in effect, as blank parody
of this type of storytelling. In so doing, The Help leverages these allusions to bolster its own
cultural legitimacy as stylistic imitation of southern female melodramas such as in Imitation of
Life and reinforces a legacy of subjugation of black womanhood.
To be clear, there are no real or imagined victories in The Help, there is no overcoming,
no struggle against injustice; it is about a young white woman and the disenfranchised black
female labor that she exploits to advance her own career, under the guise of liberation which
results in the termination of Aibileen’s employment and an unsure future in 1963 Jackson,
Mississippi. However, the film’s melodramatic mode facilitates a representation of the past that
is primarily affective; because we feel and are emotionally moved by a fiction that is heavily
invested in imitating or approximating the real, it becomes clear how The Help achieved such
tremendous popularity and financial success. The film’s highly glossed and saturated color
palette evokes a bucolic atmosphere and encourages audiences to feel the kind of cultural and

88
intellectual satisfaction that comes from looking backwards at parochial bigots such as Hilly
Holbrook. As sociologist Mike Featherstone argues, there is an aspect of postmodern consumer
culture that fosters “the emotional pleasures of consumption, the dreams and desires which
become celebrated in consumer cultural imagery and particular sites of consumption which
variously generate direct bodily excitement and aesthetic pleasures.”
111
This desired cultural
imagery includes occluded forms of historicism.

111
Michael Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (SAGE Publications, Second Edition, 2007), 13.

89
CHAPTER 2
Looking Back: Black Visibility, Heightened Surveillance
Stereotyping blacks as criminals and predatory has “erroneously served as a subtle
rationale for the unofficial policy and practice of racial profiling”
112
by criminal justice
professionals. Racial profiling, or the illegal “discriminatory practice by law enforcement
officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity,
religion or national origin,”
113
is based on a set of beliefs, assumptions, and practices informed
and reinforced by larger society. One factor contributing to state authorized racial profiling as
well as general public surveillance of blackness is the widely held “impression that crime is a
problem disproportionally attributable” to blacks.
114
As demonstrated by a spate of killings of
unarmed blacks by law enforcement and civilians alike during both Obama Administrations, the
conflation of blackness and criminality can produce tragic outcomes. In 2012, George
Zimmerman, who is not black, shot and killed seventeen-year old African American male
Trayvon Martin, in an altercation that by all reports began with the self-appointed neighborhood
watchman’s racialized surveillance of Martin in a middle-class Florida gated community. The
frequency, pervasiveness, and national reach of excessive use of deadly force against largely
black males led to claims that it was open season on blackness – underscoring not black
criminality, but a unique risk for victimization as a result of the projection of criminality onto the
black form. It bears stating that this characterization and its deadly outcomes is not a naturally
occurring phenomenon, as neoliberalism would have it, but is one of the many legacies of the

112
Kelly, Welch, “Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling,” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 23, no.
3 (August 2007): 276-288, Sage Publications, https://doi.org/10.1177/1043986207306870
113
“Racial Profiling: Definition,” American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), https://www.aclu.org/other/racial-profiling-
definition.
114
Kelly Welch, “Black Criminal Stereotypes,” 276-88.

90
nation’s history of black subjection and white supremacy. Martin would symbolically represent
the crucible of racial profiling, black criminality, and excessive force resulting in literal black
death, demanding attention from the highest levels of political office.
President Obama’s previous attempts to talk race from the Oval Office scored low marks
for the President: BeerGate and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and the US Agriculture Department’s
handling of Shirley Sherrod’s dismissal for alleged racist statements at an NAACP event are two
such examples where the President’s attempt at fairness and impartiality left Americans
unimpressed. With 2012 an election year, President Obama’s return to racial scrimmaging would
have to allow him to control the discussion: inviting the audience to infer an indictment against
racial violence by pointing to himself. A Washington Post reporter observed how President
Obama “assertively insert[ed] himself into the [Martin-Zimmerman] controversy,”
115
during the
March 23, 2012 White House Rose Garden ceremony to introduce Dr. Jim Yong Kim as the new
World Bank president, an unidentified reporter calls out from the press core for the President’s
comments on the Zimmerman shooting, to which Obama appears to extemporaneously reply.
While cut together with typical speaker-at-a-podium coverage (i.e., wide establishing shot,
cutaway reaction shots, singles, mediums, etc.), both outlets captured and aired the seamlessly
edited yet continuous presentation which is consistent with the official ObamaWhiteHouse.gov
transcript.
Cable outlet C-SPAN picks up the presentation as President Obama, Dr. Kim, Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner enter the frame from a White
House garden exit, and make their way to a preset podium (the White House footage begins at

115
Krissah Thompson and Scott Wilson, “Obama on Trayvon Martin: ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon’,” The
Washington Post, March 23, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-if-i-had-a-son-hed-look-like-
trayvon/2012/03/23/gIQApKPpVS_story.html?utm_term=.e636a895c77f.

91
the podium). Scantly attended, camerapersons and reporters capture the presentation for their
respective outlets from in front of the podium behind a designated press area marked by red
stanchion. For approximately four and a half minutes, the President extolls Dr. Kim’s virtues,
then turns to welcome the new World Bank leader with a hand shake. Immediately afterwards,
the President resumes a forward-facing position, and with hands gently resting on the outer edges
of the podium, he offers a clipped “alright” which appears to signal the end of official prepared
remarks, and the beginning of the question-answer period from the press. The unidentified
reporter’s hailing of the President compels all of those at the podium to look in the off-camera
reporter’s direction, low and left of the frame. Although President Obama’s shoulders become
slightly deflated when the reporter mentions “…allegations of lingering racism within our
society…”
116
in framing his request for commentary on the Martin case, none of the government
officials in the frame appear the least bit surprised at this question, the only press question asked,
which had no obvious connection with World Bank leadership. With the caveat that he must be
careful commenting on open Department of Justice probes (in this case, possible violations of
Martin’s civil rights), and expressing appropriate concern for what he calls a tragedy and the
need for soul searching, President Obama pauses, collects his thoughts, then offers “…my main
message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he’d look like
Trayvon….” New York Times reporters observed that “Mr. Obama, who typically leaves such
events ignoring the shouted questions of reporters, seemed prepared.”
117
Dogged by critics for

116
Matt Compton, “President Obama Nominates Dartmouth College President to Lead World Bank,”
ObamaWhiteHouse.archives.org, March 23, 2012,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2012/03/23/president-obama-nominates-dartmouth-college-
president-lead-world-bank.
117
Jackie Calmes and Helen Cooper, “A Personal Note as Obama Speaks on Death of Boy,” New York Times, March
23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/us/politics/obama-talks-of-tragedy-not-race-in-florida-
killing.html.

92
his silence on the matter, The Huffington Post noted that “He took only one question before
heading into the West Wing – signaling that both he and his press handlers were feeling pressure,
coming from black activists and others, to make a public comment on the Martin case.”
118

Footage of the World Bank announcement on C-Span
119
reveals two separate objectives: to
introduce Dr. Kim, and to provide President Obama safe passage into the racial fray. Here we
note a correlation with President Obama’s deployment of reflexivity in relationship to violence.
By personalizing his comments, President Obama exposed the elephant in the room: his
own blackness and therefore his connection to black inheritors of slavery’s legacy. From the
capture of Africa, to the journey across the Atlantic, to colonial subjugation into repressive
systems that dehumanize and exploit, violence has steadily stalked blackness every step of the
way. In its most simplistic and pliable comprehension, violence encompasses acts, energies, or
forces, that injure, harm, or destroy. Resulting trauma, in the form of breaks or ruptures, can
cause a range of impacts, from destabilization to physical and/or spiritual death. President
Obama’s reflexivity is commonly deployed when discussing acts of violence including the 2012
Sandy Hook elementary school shooting massacre, and a CNN Town Hall on gun control where
he again tells a young African American male who lost his brother to gun violence that, “when I
see you I think about my own youth.”
120
With the inscription of violence leading to an
overdetermined interpretation of blackness as criminal, President Obama’s reflexivity invites us
to see how blackness has been victimized by violence. Unfortunately, the yoking of blackness to

118
Sam Stein, “Obama on Trayvon Martin Case: ‘If I Had a Son, He’d Look Like Trayvon,’” Huffington Post, March
23, 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/23/obama-trayvon-martin_n_1375083.html.
119
“Remarks from the President on the Nomination of Dr. Jim Kim for World Bank President,” Obama White House
Archives, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2012/03/23/remarks-president-nomination-dr-
jim-kim-world-bank-president.
120
Barack Obama, “Obama’s advice to teen who lost brother to gun violence,” Interview, CNN.com, January 7,
2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2SN19jamzk.

93
violent criminality is difficult to recognize as anything other than that as some see the act of
differentiating black US families from others as an act of racial divisiveness. George
Zimmerman, who was tried on second degree murder charges of Martin in Sanford, Florida and
acquitted (and therefore not a disinterested party), accused President Obama of “dereliction of
duty [by] pitting Americans against each other solely based on race…”
121
a sentiment held by
many political bloggers, commentators, and eventual Trump-for-president supporters. For
Zimmerman and the like, discussions of race and racial inequities trigger an ire held by the
dispossessed majority’s intolerance for racism claims post-civil rights/affirmative action.
Commenting on racism ruins the illusion that race no longer restricts or provides undue benefits
to differentiated racialized populations, which provides some insight into the public’s
bewilderment in seeing racial victimization, but not racial criminalization. The Trayvon Martin
case would become symbolic of injustice suffered by African Americans, largely males,
confronted by a society that reads blackness and criminal as one in the same.
Fast-forward to 2013: a year after the Martin killing, and six days after George
Zimmerman’s acquittal of second degree murder, President Barack Obama took to the Brady
Press Briefing Room at the White House and delivered a seventeen-minute speech. The President
established early on that this would not be the usual question-answer session with the White
House Press core. In it, he doubles down on blackness and seizes the opportunity to “expand on
my [previous] thoughts a little bit,” regarding African Americans’ reactions to the verdict:
“You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.
Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago. […]
There are very few African American men in this country who haven’t had the
experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That
includes me. There are very few African American men who haven’t had the experience
of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens

121
“An Interview With George Zimmerman,” Ayo & Iken, Attorneys and Advocates,
https://www.18884mydivorce.com/georgezimmerman2015/.

94
to me – at least before I was a senator. […] I don’t want to exaggerate this, but those sets
of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened
one night in Florida.”
122

With these comments, President Obama purposefully articulates common scenarios of black
male vulnerability and situates himself within that mise-en-scene. For many black Americans,
President Obama’s comments resonated with a truth and understanding about the black
American experience of and relationship to violence that had never previously been
acknowledged in this way by any other American president, but it also revealed the different
ways in which blackness is animated for democratic political gains and white reactionary
practices toward black democratic authority. Lingering high-profile references to black males
made during presidential politics in recent history include George H.W. Bush’s invocation of
Willie Horton, and Hillary Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill reference to black “super-predators,”
which reinforced long-standing beliefs in black criminality, a propensity toward violence, and
the legitimacy of racial profiling. However, Barack Obama’s highlighting blackness became not
about an ‘other;’ instead, blackness became self-referential which exposed how neoliberal
contours of whiteness and violence continually work to limit black political presence.
With self-reference considered typical and characteristic of past US presidents, its
hegemonic effect centered a universalized white male understanding of the world, which the
differently raced and gendered were to understand as normative and universal. The Washington
Post’s Carlos Lozado acknowledges how common it is for presidents to reference themselves
typically in the form of biography where it “plays a central role in all political campaigns, with
candidates deploying their life stories to buttress their arguments.” Lozado also astutely notes
how doing so can impede a president’s ability to get things done if self-reference carries any

122
Obama, Barack, H., “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” ObamaWhiteHourse.archives.gov, July 19,
2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/19/remarks-president-trayvon-martin

95
whiff of arrogance. Lozado both commends and critiques how President Obama has since 2004
deployed his own personal narrative, “turn[ing] to his life and symbolism as a default reference
and all-purpose governing tool” pointing to himself on everything from public and foreign policy
to electoral politics.
123
However, Michael Eric Dyson nuances the racial implications associated
with the President’s tendency to “substitute his body for our black bodies, his life for ours, and
[…] his story of advancement [to stand in as] ours,” as the end of black disenfranchisement in
communities across the nation.
124
The danger here is taken to mean that President Obama’s self-
referencing reinforces notions of a paradoxical black exceptionalism, where his success is looked
to as the rule, not the exception.
Aside from unsettling a long held presumption that ‘US President = white male’ (and in
general, American leadership and authority), President Obama’s movement ‘from the particular
to the general’ elevated the visibility of blackness and masculinity in ways that could not be
anticipated prior to the election of a black US President. Was it even possible for the first black
president to address the presumption of criminality experienced daily by black Americans
without linking himself to that particular formation of black masculinity discussed in press
accounts as everything from ‘suspicious’ to drug and criminal justice affiliated? President
Obama’s brand of masculinity resisted established tropes of black men as brutes, bucks, coons,
simple-minded, docile, or criminal. This left one obvious stereotype used to disparage blacks
whose comportment, accomplishments, and sometimes very presence in historically all white
domains was considered a challenge to natural white superiority: the uppity nigger. Deemed

123
Carlos Lozado, “The Self-Referential Presidency of Barack Obama,” The Washington Post, December 15, 2016,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/12/15/the-self-referential-presidency-of-barack-
obama/?utm_term=.dffe5b63040e.
124
Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America, (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016): 196.

96
“coolly arrogant” by Karl Rove, President Obama’s brand of black masculinity became a sort of
symbolic example of what nearly a half century of affirmative action and government
“entitlement” programs could produce: a growing class of black respectability and sociality that
was educated and prepared for professional careers in positions of authority. Formulated as a
political dog-whistle, this kind of black threat made sense to white Americans who have heard
stories of “diversity” hires, or perceived that more qualified white males are passed over for
employment and/or promotion, in favor of less qualified ethnic or gender minorities. Activist
scholar Jackson Katz notes how this framing of President Obama was used as a strategy in both
the 2008 and 2012 elections “attract working class white voters—especially men—in part by
using class coded language to impugn the manhood of Democrats and liberals, and even
moderate Republicans. The idea was that ‘real men’ work with their hands (and vote
Republican)….”
125

In his 2016 book, The Long Game: A Memoir, Senator Mitch McConnell, who in 2010
stated that “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a
one-term president,”
126
appears to be in agreement with Rove’s characterization of the confident,
educated, charismatic former senator from Illinois with a bold progressive agenda:
“He’s like the kid in your class who exerts a hell of a lot of effort making sure everyone
thinks he’s the smartest one in the room. He talks down to people, whether in a meeting
among colleagues in the White House or addressing the nation. And he’s simply a very
liberal guy who is determined to move the country toward the kind of progressive ideal
that Western European societies embraced decades ago.”
127

125
Jackson Katz, “2008: McCain vs. Obama,” in Man Enough?: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the Politics of
Presidential Masculinity (Northhampton: Interlink Publishing Group, 2016): 200.
126
Glenn Kessler, “When Did Mitch McConnell Say He Wanted to Make Obama a One-Term President,” The
Washington Post, September 25, 2012, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/when-did-
mcconnell-say-he-wanted-to-make-obama-a-one-term-president/2012/09/24/79fd5cd8-0696-11e2-afff-
d6c7f20a83bf_blog.html?utm_term=.2c516db15353.
127
Mitch McConnell, “Professor Obama,” in The Long Game: A Memoir, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2016):
185.

97
Interestingly, in “Chapter 16: Professor Obama,” McConnell’s chief complaints are that the
President talks too much, does not listen enough, is unrelenting when making his case, and
“simply a very liberal guy who is determined to move the country toward the kind of progressive
ideal that Western European societies [i.e. social democracy or socialism] embraced decades
ago.”
128
Without pointing to any real or evidentiary instances of malfeasance, incompetence, or
mismanagement, leaves McConnell’s criticism toward President Obama personal. While no
claim of racism is directed at McConnell and Rove, their attitudes and behavior toward Mr.
Obama exemplify the incredulity exhibited by those unaccustomed to witnessing blackness in
roles of authority and power traditionally held by whites. Furthermore, referencing President
Obama as “coolly arrogant” and reaction to his tendency toward condescension suggests the
commander-in-chief relied on reason to win the day, not aggression or violence, behaviors
stereotypically conflated with black masculinity. Is it possible that the absence of black male
rage in President Obama’s demeanor disappointed those who would believe this is one of the
dominate modes of being black, despite the numerous events that could have sent the first black
president through the proverbial roof? Even though white men can display anger and aggression,
black male aggression is taken as proof of the lie that blackness must be contained. As a highly
visible black male then, here is an instance where President Obama cannot exhibit normal
behaviors particularly in times of crisis not have it become a blight upon the black community.
Double-bind theory, advanced by Gregory Bateson in the mid-1950s as a way to
understand and treat schizophrenia, is premised on contradictory communication injunctions,
followed by countervailing directions, resulting in what is referred to colloquially as “mixed
messages” or being “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” If we assume that much of the

128
Mitch McConnell, “Professor Obama,” 185.

98
country’s governmental power is dominated, controlled, and coded by what sociologist Joe
Feagin calls the “white racial frame,” then, when challenged, the entitlements of white privilege
are threatened and exposed as unearned benefits normalized throughout mainstream culture.
Blacks who engage mainstream systems have their allegiance to black solidarity, justice, and
liberation tested by those suspicious of strategies that attempt to use the “master’s tools” to
“dismantle the master’s house” as Audre Lorde has cautioned. It is seen by many as black
mimicry of white constructions of power. This is a power which Frederick Douglass asserted
“concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.”
129
Resultantly, for blacks
compelled to participate in representative democracy, can find themselves experiencing their
personal/professional power mollified by whiteness as it is perceived as a threat to the
established racial hierarchy. Viewed within the context of a racialized America, an example of
this mixed messaging sounds like the American ethos “you can be anything you want to be when
you grow up,” but once mission accomplished, shifts to the barrage of vitriolic, anti-black spume
and indignation such as that endured by President Obama over his two terms of national service.
What I am interested in here is what happens to reflexive blackness that moves into
positions historically defined and dominated by whiteness: how is power redefined, limited, or
articulated in those instances? Are those black bodies compelled to do things in accordance with
the status quo and mainstream, or can it look and sound different and be “powerful” (however
that is measured)? And, does the American racialized double-bind – expectations from blacks
and limitations from whites – produce a syncretic blackness that symbolically and affectively re-

129
Frederick Douglass, “Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass; one of West India Emancipation, delivered at
Canandaigua, Aug. 4
th
, and the other on the Dred Scott Decision, delivered in New York, on the occasion of the
Anniversary of the American Abolition Society, May, 1857” (Rochester: C.P. Dewey, Printer, American Office,): 22.
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mfd.21039/?sp=1&st=slideshow#slide-1

99
centers national discourses on race and power? The film Django Unchained (Tarantino, 2012)
subtextually posits similar questions which in turn impact the political economy of black film
stars and heroes’ ability to generate global box office dollars. Django (Jamie Foxx), in addition
to being enslaved, finds himself with a domestic crisis: his wife has been sold, which in itself is
an act of violence to personhood and community. Django embarks on a rescue mission to reclaim
his wife from plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). To do so, however, Django
must assimilate the ways of white patriarchal masculinity, including that of seeing/not seeing
black exploitation, and the use of excessive violence. Django as a goal-oriented hero, cannot be
distracted by efforts to liberate the few he meets along the way; by remaining focused on his goal
– that of rescuing his wife – where he must wage war (which liberates many more than if he had
stopped to fight those roadside battles) that eventually explodes the master’s house, and restores
a new order of sorts; in spite of the fact that new masters will undoubtedly emerge. Similarly,
President Obama emerged at a time of domestic crisis, and intent upon rescuing the nation,
internalizes the processes, rules, and ideals of American democracy, born from colonialism and
empire with oppression built into its very fabric.
Along the way, President Obama – like Django – had his intermittent victories, the
Affordable Care Act, the death of Osama Bin Laden, and a stabilized economy counted among
them. Both Django and President Obama owe much to white frames and their attendant gazes, in
shaping how and where they move (overtly and subversively), how and where they are powerful,
and how and where limits are placed upon their power. As was the case with Django, despite
President Obama’s presence and heightened visibility igniting old conversations for a new
generation, the master’s house still stands. But is it still the same house or is it forever changed
as a result of his having occupied that heretofore white male dominated space? In the case of the

100
United States, how does having a black president impact the racial consciousness of America as
an imagined community? It is helpful to consider President Obama’s double bind in relationship
to thinker/writers Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon and others, who articulate
tensions between blackness in relationship to whiteness, and national belonging in the colonized
world. Constructions of a black American identity emanating from a dominant white gaze that
speaks its messaging (buttressed by laws, institutions, and uses of force) at blackness, which
black subjectivity cannot escape, give rise to “twoness” or “double consciousness,” resulting in a
fragmented sense of self, producing an alterity where one consistently performs ‘self’ through
the lens of the other. For black Americans, this generally means having a constant awareness of
how white Americans ‘see’ blacks, and how that awareness then shaped the actions of blacks. I
am interested in how violence is used to speak at blackness, and as it does, how it continues to
mark, inform, and transform blackness. By placing these two highly visible and widely circulated
representations of black masculinity in conversation, President Obama and Quentin Tarantino’s
Django reveal post-racial understandings of black masculinity that is symbolically powerful,
exhibits tensions between containment and resistance, whose very presence is marked as
threatening, but nonetheless embodies vulnerability.

President Obama: Too Black/Not Black Enough Double Bind
For some in white America, “Barry O,” a moniker adopted by the President during his
college days, was too black (despite having a white mother); for others, Barack Obama was not
black enough. Obama’s response to American racism disappointed: scholar Cornel West referred
to the president on CNN in 2015 as “niggerized,” his term for black people who avoid calling out

101
white supremacy due to fear or intimidation.
130
West’s perspective implies that because Obama
did not identify more strongly as black, he was an “Uncle Tom,” –a black person whose actions
make them complicit in the perpetuation of white supremacy. Other black male social
commentators agreed. While recognizing the obstructionist Congress and the racism confronted
by Obama, political commentator Tavis Smiley nevertheless observed that under President
Obama “black Americans have lost ground.”
131
President Obama’s anemic record of generating
policy combatting structural and institutional disenfranchisement and inequality, and his “rising
tide lifts all boats” philosophy did nothing to close the disparity in access to wealth or education
between blacks and whites. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan complained that President
Obama did more to defend Israel and the rights of gays than he did for Blacks. Thus, Hillary
Clinton was just a continuation of Obama era policies. He castigated Obama “…don’t worry
about your legacy…’cause the white people that you serve so well…they’ll preserve your
legacy—the hell they will…You didn’t earn your legacy with Black people. You fought for the
rights of gay people…you fight for Israel…Your people are suffering and dying in the
streets.”
132
Farrakhan’s comments accuse President Obama of prioritizing his role of politician
over the needs of black people. Similarly, Eric Dyson notes Obama’s unwillingness to advance
legislative remedies targeting police brutality, Dyson argues how:
In one rhetorical swoop, Obama leveraged the authority of the state against black
youth, played to stereotypes of their criminality, offered responsibility lectures in place of
public policy, maintained an emotional distance from the desperation of a group of

130
Ian Schwartz, “Cornel West on Obama: ‘The First Black President Has Become The First Niggerized Black
President,’” Real Clear Politics, June 22, 2015,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/06/22/cornel_west_on_obama_the_first_black_president_has_bec
ome_the_first_niggerized_black_president.html.
131
Rachel Gebreyes, “Tavis Smiley: Black Americans Have ‘Lost Ground’ Under Obama,” The Huffpost Live, January
15, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/tavis-smiley-obama-black-
wealth_us_569820dbe4b0ce496423f053.
132
“Farrakhan Says Obama ‘didn’t do anything for black people,’” The Griot.com, September 23, 2016,
http://thegrio.com/2016/09/23/farrakhan-obama-didnt-do-anything-blacks.

102
Americans who happen to be his people, and offered them moral lessons instead of
official action.
133

The rhetorical commentary to which Dyson refers was President Obama’s response to post-
Ferguson, MO police reform where the President “pivoted to the personal” by introducing his
uplift program My Brother’s Keeper, a Justice Department community relations endeavor.
Dyson’s criticism points to the neoliberal rationale behind President Obama’s program,
suggesting “If I can become a success by being a responsible young black man, so can you.”
President Obama’s invitation to see blackness increased critical consciousness regarding
the complexities and vulnerabilities associated with black masculinity. In the case of Trayvon
Martin, President Obama’s familial linkage was validating to many; instead of reinforcing the
specter of the black male super-predator, it militated against that trope, disallowing the tendency
to dismiss this and other instances as “just another dead nigger,” and illuminated the ways that
the widespread presumption of black criminality increases risk of injury and death for black
people. As long as Obama could wax abstractly about race, he could skillfully avoid the
appearance of racially privileging any particular group – but by situating himself within the
racial discourse, President Obama, as an exemplar of black respectable masculinity, would
challenge the notion of an intrinsic black criminality and instead compel all citizens to meditate
on the costly legacy of black male victimization. In so doing, President Obama’s reflexivity
would contribute to an already elevated black visibility, resultant from his position as ‘leader of
the free world.’ President Obama’s now famous “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon”
became one of the President’s more notable self-referential moments, a tactic that would become
a signature move for him when compelled to speak publically about race. More significantly, the
correlation between his own blackness and maleness and that of Martin’s made visible two

133
Dyson, The Black Presidency: 194-200.

103
things: that the proverbially most powerful man in America was black; and, that his power – like
Trayvon Martin’s – would be contained, restricted, and limited not by the Constitution but by
racism.
Critiques such as those made by West, Smiley, and Dyson provoke discussions of what
black public figures necessarily carry for a black politic? Is there an expectation that black
politicians utilize public policy as a historical corrective to centuries of oppression because of
their ethnic/racial affiliation with blackness? Figures such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, and former Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice were seen as disconnected from a black politic due to their
conservativism and Republican party affiliation. Is the President’s racial wrangling one that is
more politicized than “niggerized” – or are they one and the same? Can President Obama, in an
attempt to connect with diverse masses as an everyman by “pivoting to the personal,” avoid
pointing to blackness, at least directly? In other words, can the President point to himself without
the public seeing that he is black and all that is coded therein? In writing about the President’s
unusual silence toward another “looking back at black” film production cycle, 12 Years a Slave
(McQueen, 2013), Erin Aubry Kaplan comments on the inescapability of Obama’s always
implied blackness as signifier of America’s storied racial legacy:
…he is a black man who was elected to the presidency partly because he made a tacit
agreement with the white electorate that he would not invoke slavery or any other overtly
racists issues that taint the grand old flag which he now represents…Obama cannot out
himself as black, even though plenty of people have in pretty savage fashion -- just this
week, Ted Nugent called the sitting American president a ‘sub-human mongrel’ and a
‘chimpanzee.’
134

134
Erin Aubry Kaplan, KCET, February 28, 2014,
http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/cakewalk/awards-but-no-audience-what-12-years-a-slave-
tells-us-about-america-today.html.

104
President Obama has, in typical liberal fashion, displayed ample and appropriate empathy toward
the racially victimized, making only oblique references to America’s legacy of white supremacy.
While there are limits to what any US President can say (except perhaps Donald Trump), these
limits appear much narrower for the first black president when there is a real or perceived racial
context, as evidenced by his 2009 off-the-cuff remark regarding the arrest of African American
Harvard Professor and historian Henry Louis Gates by a white police officer for climbing
through the window of his own home after he locked himself out. When asked for comment,
Obama offered the caveat of not having all of the information but judged that the arresting white
officer acted “stupidly.” In what may be the boldest statement about race and militarized
domestic law enforcement President Obama would offer over the next eight years, he went on to
comment that “what we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history
in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement
disproportionately. That’s just a fact.”
135
The backlash against the Obama was swift:
Republicans and police unions demanded an apology from President Obama for his “disgraceful”
comments. And Obama relented, saying in a later statement that his comments were
“regrettable.”
For Dyson, this was the precise moment when Obama’s “tacit agreement with the white
electorate” was revealed: he was to limit his talk about race from the Oval Office. “One of
[Obama’s] three fateful conclusions,” Dyson writes, included “…never [to] speak of race in a
way that holds whites even partially responsible for black suffering. The subject of white guilt of
any sort—even in circumstances of clear white culpability—is to be avoided at all costs.”
136

135
Katharine Q. Seelye, “Obama Wades Into a Volatile Racial Issue,” New York Times, July 23, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/us/23race.html.
136
Dyson, The Black Presidency: 13.

105
Over the course of the next eight years, the truth of Dyson’s observation would be repeatedly
tested by the vastly increased reporting of black deaths at the hands of police officers and white
citizens, the increased legitimacy and overt racism of Fox and Breitbart News, the rise of Black
Lives Matter, the circulation of a persistent global narrative of “radical Islamic terrorism,” and
the waves of panic over political refugees, and ‘illegal’ immigration. All of these the black
president would be expected to comment upon, and often he remained silent.
Nothing, however, could have prepared President Obama or the nation for the need to
address racism and white supremacy after the June 17
th
, 2015 massacre of nine black worshipers
at Emanuel First African Methodist Episcopalian (AME) church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Dylann Roof, a twenty-one-year old, self-declared white supremacist, sat through an hour of
bible study with “Mother” Emanuel church members before methodically shooting nine of them
to death: with breaks to repeatedly reloaded his gun, Roof completed his goal – to kill blacks – in
under six minutes. The “Charleston Nine” ranged in age from twenty-six to eighty-seven years of
age, and they died of multiple gunshot wounds on (what is assuredly coincidence) the
anniversary of Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 slave revolt.
137
The fact that the close-range
shooting of nine black Christians during bible study at Mother Emanuel was a calculated act of
white supremacist domestic terrorism, only one of countless acts perpetrated over three centuries
of aggression aimed at black churches intended to police and control blackness, should be lost on
no one. As one black former South Carolina state politician commented the morning after the
2015 shooting “If we can’t be black in church, where can we be black in America?”
138
Pleas for

137
Vesey was himself an esteemed member of Emanuel First AME church. White mobs and secret trials ensued
resulting in hundreds of arrests, more than thirty executions, including that of Vesey’s, and the outlawing,
shuttering, and/or burning down of scores of black churches including that of Emanuel First AME, which like many
black houses of worship was a locus of anti-slavery activism and organizing throughout America’s history.
138
Tyrone Dudley, “My Feelings on My Town,” Cheddar and Biscuits and A Genius: It’s My Opinion in Blog
Form,]http://cheddarbiscuitsandagenius.blogspot.com/2015/06/.

106
calm from family members of the church massacre staved off a repeat of Ferguson, Missouri’s
three waves of community unrest from August 2014 to August 2015 after the fatal shooting of
Michael Brown yielded no indictment of the white officer who killed Brown. The Charleston
massacre was not viewed by black America as an anomaly or the outcome from exigent
circumstances as some might argue was the case with the killing of Michael Brown. Unlike the
Brown case, the Charleston massacre was an emphatically clear declaration of white supremacist
terrorism, and experienced as part of an escalating and proliferating barrage of assaults against
blackness co-occurring with the first black president’s tenure. The irony of the “leader of the free
world” who happens to be black, witnessing escalating racial violence on his watch is
undeniable. Amplifying this irony is international media coverage of racially-related black
homicides and open bigotry from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Russian President Putin
that is reinforced by members of US congress. What then is the first black president, whose
burden of representation is like no other US President, to say to a nation traumatized by this
church shooting? How much punch can this conversation about white supremacy and racism
pack? And, is now a moment where black masculinity can cry out, be enraged at such terror?
It makes sense that President Obama would look to historical precedent for guidance.
For example, the September 15
th
, 1963 bombing of the 16
th
Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Alabama was remembered for the violent deaths of four adolescent black girls –
Carol Denise McNair, 11, Carol Robertson, 14, Cynthia Wesley, 14, and Addie Mae Collins, 14
– and is marked as having “sparked ‘The Movement that Changed the World’… [with a] surge of
momentum that helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and later the Voting

NOTE: I saw the same news report/broadcast the morning of June 18
th
, 2015 and actually heard/witnessed the
former state politician make this same statement; however, I was too upset, overcome with shock and grief to
have noted his name at that time. LA

107
Rights Act of 1965….”
139
FBI investigators surmised that at least fifteen sticks of dynamite had
been planted underneath the church, enough to shake the entire building. Two thousand black
residents poured into the streets in its aftermath, followed by hundreds of local/state law
enforcement officers and National Guard troops to keep the peace. In addition to the countless
injuries suffered by others attending Sunday church services, and the deaths of the four girls, two
black male teens were also killed in the burgeoning unrest: 13-year old Virgil Ware, by white
classmates returning home from a segregation rally; and Johnny Robinson, 16-year old, shot by
Birmingham police.
After the 1963 killings, President John F. Kennedy, a civil rights supporter, delivered a
brief (216 words) statement appropriately recognizing the public’s grief and outrage. He then
characterized the bombing as what happens when “public disparagement of law and order has
encouraged violence upon the innocent.” The first Roman Catholic US President then hoped that
these “cruel and tragic events” would move the nation “to a realization of the folly of racial
injustice and hatred and violence” in an effort to move America “toward peaceful progress.”
140

President Kennedy’s vague, roundabout (avoidant) language, while stylistically typical of
politicians, minimizes the significance of the occurrence, and reframes the state as the victim:
bombing a church of black parishioners becomes ridiculing the law; “racial injustice” in the form
of institutional incivility.

139
“To Award Posthumously a Congressional Gold Medal to Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson,
and Cynthia Wesley to Commemorate the Lives They Lost 50 Years Ago in the Bombing of the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church, Where These 4 Little Black Girls’ Ultimate Sacrifice served as a Catalyst for the Civil Rights
Movement,” H.R. 360, 113 Congress Public Law 113-11, (US Government Printing Office, May 24, 2013): 127 STAT.
446, https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-113publ11/html/PLAW-113publ11.htm.
140
John F. Kennedy, President, “Statement by the President on the Sunday Bombing in Birmingham,” The American
Presidency Project, (Santa Barbara: University of California, Santa Barbara, September 16, 1963),
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9410.

108
By not explicitly calling out the white supremacist culture as culprit, the public is left to
interpret these events as the isolated actions of a few crazed individual anarchists, not the
sustained campaign of domestic terrorism in support of an apartheid society. Further, it fosters a
racial distanciation among the “white moderate” from white extremists. Martin Luther King Jr.
warned that white moderates “…will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic
words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
141
Still,
other political leaders reflected the early neoliberal trend of sympathetic whites who empathize
with the pain of the suffering of black American victims, yet forgo any indictment of the racism
and white supremacy that brought the violence and victimization to bear. For example, New
York Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent this missive to Dr. King Monday morning, September
16, 1963:
“I share your grief and that of men of goodwill everywhere who deplore the utterly
barbaric bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, resulting
in the tragic deaths of four innocent children. Your appeal to the negro community of
Birmingham – and its response to that appeal – for forbearance and restraint in the face
of so horrendous an act of violence was magnificent. May I extend through you my
most heartfelt sympathies to the families of these children murdered while at worship
in the house of the Lord.”
142

When whiteness must confront whiteness’ guilt and complicity in the endemic deployment of
terroristic violence – in this instance, as a means of racial social control – many take a path of

141
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education
Institute, (Stanford: Stanford University, April 16, 1963), 11a,
http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undecided/630416-019.pdf.
142
Nelson A. Rockefeller, Western Union Telegram, The King Center, September 16, 1963,
http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/telegram-nelson-rockefeller-church-bombing-0#.

109
least resistance by focusing on the injured. Birmingham Mayor Albert Boutwell, reportedly in
tears, called it “sickening that a few individuals could commit such a horrible atrocity” and, in an
effort to contain distraught and angry black residents, requested three hundred National Guards
from Alabama Governor George Wallace who promised the “entire forces of the state to
maintain law and order in Birmingham and throughout Alabama.”
143
Public officials and
congressional leaders across the United States spoke out against the atrocity, with little to no
naming and public calling out of the white supremacist culture of terrorism and violence that
allowed the promulgation of Birmingham bombings for over a fifteen years. And, to characterize
this type of violence as “evil” and “hate” instead of one tactic in a larger strategy of white
supremacy and social control (reinforced institutionally, systematically, financially, etc.), these
actions will continue to be attributed to a few extremists. Thus, the culture of white supremacy
remains safely ensconced within society as normative racial subject positioning: for optimal
effect, it is not only the dominated who “believe, participate, and process their standing as
normative,”
144
as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva points out, but members of the dominant classes also
invested maintaining their location in it as normative. There are countless explanations for why
President Kennedy would strike such a position, two lessons are clear for politicians: tread
lightly on politicizing tragedies, and, in times of great emotional trauma and violence, the leader
of the free world must lead the public away from despair.

143
William O. Bryant, “Church Dynamiting, Street Violence Claim Six Lives; Call Out Troops in Alabama,” The Daily
Courier, Connellsville, Pennsylvania, September 16, 1963, 1, https://access-newspaperarchive-
com.libproxy1.usc.edu/us/pennsylvania/connellsville/connellsville-daily-courier/1963/09-16/page-
3?tag=Albert+Boutwell+birmingham+church+bombing&rtserp=tags/birmingham?ndt=by&py=1963&pey=1964&pe
p=church-bombing&pf=albert&pl=boutwell&psb=relavance.
144
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Preface,” Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Inequality,
(Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 4
th
Edition, July 29, 2013): xiv.

110
Alternately, Charles B. Morgan, a young white Birmingham resident who later in his
career would become a prominent civil liberties attorney, later defending Julian Bond and
Muhammad Ali, was scheduled to speak the next day before the Birmingham Young Men’s
Business Club, which represented the city’s leading white establishment. As a private citizen on
a smaller platform before a smaller audience, Morgan could take greater risks and speak more
freely than any president, but perhaps even more so than the first black President, despite more
than five decades of racial ‘progress.’ Morgan points to the everyday (in)actions of average
white folks as causal to the 16
th
Street Baptist Church bombing. For Morgan, white complacency
and complicity manifested itself in the “individual who talks about the ‘niggers’ and spreads the
seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock
the party with laughter.” Morgan gets closer to snatching back the hegemonic veil of white
supremacy, as the agents of the bombing and its resultant deaths. In one instance, Morgan calls
out institutional police collusion as culpable:
“Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was
attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into
action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a
day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force
which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry….”
145

Morgan pointed to everyday in/actions of good men and women who may not have carried the
dynamite or lit the fuse, but created the conditions of tolerance and acceptance that allow
domestic terrorism to become routine. In the mid-twentieth century, Birmingham became known
as “Bombingham” with over fifty church bombings from 1947-1963: this period of sustained

145
Charles B. Morgan, “Speech After Birmingham Bombing,” Genius.com, September 16, 1963,
https://genius.com/Charles-b-morgan-speech-after-birmingham-bombing-annotated.

111
white supremacist domestic terrorism, which supports what George Lipsitz characterizes as “a
system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for
asset accumulation and upward mobility”
146
effectively contained black mobility, and maintained
racial housing and school segregation. The vast majority of these bombings were never solved.
The 16
th
Street Baptist Church bombing was the fourth in four weeks and did not find any justice
until a series of trials beginning in 1977, the last in 2002. Morgan’s 727-word indictment of the
white establishment made him a target in the town, earned him “nigger lover” status, and
eventually forced him to move for the safety of his family.
It is understandably difficult for leaders to speak out against aggressors when the identity
of perpetrator is not clear; but there are moments when we just know what we know, and in
instances such as the 16
th
Street Baptist Church bombing, the shooting of Trayvon Martin along
with a spate of high profile homicides against black men, and the Mother Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church, we know white supremacist terrorism when we see it. Midday June
18
th
, President Obama spoke briefly but eloquently about sorrow, heartache, sadness, anger, and
how particularly heartbreaking this event was because of its occurrence in a House of Worship.
The President was measured, as he briefly outlined the significance of Mother Emanuel church
and its historic and symbolic significance to black liberation. Gun violence became the policy
recommendation with the President chiding “…let’s be clear: at some point, we as a country will
have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced
countries…it is in our power to do something about it.” Some may argue that to mention white
supremacy during this statement to the nation or any others would somehow trigger criticisms of
partisan politicizing of Roof’s terrorism and the church members’ deaths. Not doing so, however,

146
George Lipsitz, “Introduction,” The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity
Politics,” (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006): 9.

112
signals a pre-Civil Rights gradualist stance to societal enfranchisement for black Americans
where “we shall overcome, someday” by trusting in God and the goodwill of good men and
women, or that President Obama too soft on American racism. Personalizing his remarks with
“Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME Church. We knew their pastor,
Reverend Clementa Pinckney…” credentials the President’s authority to speak as one who shares
many traits and concerns with his colleague Reverend Pinckney, who was also a black Christian
male politician; in effect, President Obama aligns himself with a yet another black man. Then the
pivot to targeting racism without identifying any racists:
“The fact that this took place in a black church obviously also raises questions about a
dark part of our history. This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked.
And we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy
and our ideals.”
147

Maintaining a leadership style similar to that of President Kennedy’s, President Obama avoided
politicizing this tragedy when he addressed the nation shortly after noon from the White House.
Unlike JFK, however, President Obama delivered heavily coded remarks intended to preserve his
standing with blacks, while addressing an audience of mixed races. He was presidential,
emotional, as he was during the Sandy Hook Massacre, another instance when, as others
exhibited rage, the black Chief Executive was remorseful and teary eyed. This is not to say that
verbal jousts with President Obama did not have bite; on the contrary, there are numerous
instances where we can see steam around his collar. But when it came to anger and aggression,
frequent precursors to violence, President Obama was controlled and tactical. With references to
a “dark part of our history” he hinted at the legacy of white supremacist terrorism, and with

147
Barack H. Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shooting in Charleston, South Carolina,”
ObamaWhiteHourse.archives.gov, June 18, 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
office/2015/06/18/statement-president-shooting-charleston-south-carolina.

113
quotes from Dr. King’s eulogy for the four little girls killed in 1963, President Obama forcefully
pointed to the invisibility of white supremacy culture, not individual shooters:
“[these deaths] say to us that we must be concerned not merely with [those] who
murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the
murderers.”
148

In generalizing his remarks with the comment “across races and faiths” he dissipated this
reference to white supremacy and violence against blacks, enlarging his discussion to include
anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic domestic terrorism. Further, like previous high-profile leaders, the
President would reinforce the notion that this particular type of violence is motivated by hatred,
rather than a need for power. This particular type of violence has been foundational to white
supremacist culture as Bonillia-Silva recalls “no system of domination can survive without
violence in the last instance”
149
and thus continues to maintain those systems through violence.
One does not have to hate other populations in order to participate in systems of dominance; one
simply has to be comfortable with the view.
As much as Barack Obama’s ideal that “there is not a Black America and a White
America and a Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America,”
150

the President (and it would seem, any African American candidate) remains black enough to
attract dehumanizing insults from white supremacists, such as the former rocker and
conservative political pundit Ted Nugent, along with countless others, and to know that lashing
out would inevitably blowback on him. For critics such as West, Smiley, and Dyson, however,
Obama’s style was more politic than activist, where the politician bows to the will of the status

148
Obama, “Statement by the President on the Shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.”
149
Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, xiv.
150
Senator Barack Obama, “Keynote Address,” 2004 Democratic National Convention,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19751-2004Jul27.html.

114
quo, where his consensus-building universal liberalism, and “a rising tide lifts all boats”
philosophy led many to claim that Obama was not black enough for black America. For purposes
herein, heightened black visibility began with the ascension of a legitimate black presidential
contender (Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention) and reached its apogee
with the termination of President Obama’s second presidential term in January 2017. Obama was
cast as both the hero and the villain of contemporary racial machinations: the quintessential
American success story, and the deceptive alien immigrant who falsified papers to achieve his
goals. From Senator John McCain’s off-the-cuff objectifying reference, “that one,” to the Birther
campaign championed by presidential successor Donald Trump, Barack Obama’s hurdles in the
race to the White House struck at the core of black access and opportunity: from not entitled and
undeserving to illegal. The Birther charge was particularly onerous as it peeled back scabs from
wounds received in the fight for black American citizenship, non-existent until the Fourteenth
Amendment, then consistently degraded henceforward. Historical narratives have occasionally
characterized US presidents as heroic resultant from their ability to advance national interests
despite personal and/or professional crises; Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt,
and Kennedy among them. I am less interested in remembering President Obama as a national
hero; what is of interest are the ways in which his performance of certain feats against
tremendous odds cast him as the hero in a decades long narrative of racial progress.
President Obama’s reflexivity, or invitation to look at his particular brand of black
masculinity, sparked several questions central to this discussion which will hopefully further
nuance US post-racial ideologies which are disseminated globally. Theoretically, President
Obama’s election can be viewed as one of affirmative action’s most visible and catalyzing
achievements, conjured by the Kennedy Brothers (i.e., President and Attorney General) in the

115
early 1960s as one possible outcome of their civil rights agenda. To blaze a path forward toward
the possibility of a black president, The Kennedys pursued civil rights policies intended to create
increased access and opportunities for disenfranchised ethnic minorities, proliferate and
normalize interracial sociality, and ameliorate to effects America’s oppressive racial past. What
the Kennedys and other civil rights era change agents had not anticipated was that with each
notion of racial progress, racialized white power would too adjust with the times. With President
Obama’s two elections, we see progress, but also manifestations and operationalization of a
“new racism” constructed within neoliberal rationalities with continued “discourses of denial”
about the potency and persistence of black subjugation.
151
With the heightened visibility black
men gain via achievement – the president, athletes, entertainers, and pundits notwithstanding –
comes a heightened consciousness regarding persistent racial inequality in sharp relief to those
believed to have advanced racial progress. With this awareness of inequality come claims to
rights, reparations, and redress against institutional abuses, which, regardless of intentionality,
challenge domains of white superiority and power. While the similarities between the historical
Obama and the fictional Django may appear to support a recognition of black progress, a closer
look at their texts and contexts reveals disturbing paradoxes regarding power and nation.
During the eight years of Obama’s tenure as chief executive of the nation, Americans
were routinely compelled to examine their own expectations and anxieties regarding race and
masculinity. Though nothing new to black Americans, this experience may have been exhausting
for white America, unaccustomed to the quotidian calisthenics people of color train for daily to
prepare for the casual racism that permeates US society. In moments of anti-black crisis,
President Obama reveals the conflicts and tensions of a uniquely American “double bind” that of

151
Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists, 266.

116
the politician who happens to be black vs. the black politician. What are the tensions between the
burden of racial representation and democratic functions of the state? What are the limits of
black self-interest for politicians who happen to be black? What were the socio-political impacts
or risks from an elevated black visibility? With regard to the President, are their limits to non-
white mimicry of white constructions of power such as American democracy? Otherwise stated,
can black people do the same things in the same ways as whites when performing roles that are
traditionally and historically held by white players and privilege hegemonic whiteness? Finally,
how do those moments of egregious, heinous violence impact President Obama, so that we can
see how violence continues to mark, shape, and inform black masculinity?
Looking Back: Django Unchained as a Black Global Cinematic Hero
I wanted to tell a western story and then…I wanted to deal with ‘America’ in the
antebellum south during slavery times and show you America at that time and give you
kind of an unblinking look at it. There hasn’t been that many slave narratives in the last
forty years of cinema…when there are they’re usually done on television… [historical
depictions] keep you at arm’s length dramatically because also there’s a kind of level of
good taste they’re trying to deal with about the history of the subject…I wanted to tell the
story as a genre movie as an exciting adventure in this case I wanted to do an exciting
western tale, an almost odyssey voyage that Django goes on, journey, to free his wife
from the clutches of an evil empire. But use antebellum south Slavery as the backdrop for
that adventure. … I like the idea of telling these stories and taking stories that often times
if played in out the way that they’re normally played out just end up becoming soul
deadening because you’re just watching victimization all of the time and now you get a
chance to put a spin on it and actually take a slave character and give him a heroic
journey, make him heroic… give him his payback and actually show this epic journey
and give it the kind of folkloric tale it deserves, a kind of grand opera stage it deserves.
152

– Quentin Tarantino
In the above 2013 interview with National Public Radio’s talk show host Terry Gross,
Quentin Tarantino’s enthusiastically explains why he made the 2012 stylistic and generic
mashup Django Unchained, assembled with fragmented filmic language and formal strategies to

152
Quentin Tarantino, “Quentin Tarantino, ‘Unchained' And Unruly” Interview, Fresh Air with Terry Gross, January
2, 2013 http://www.npr.org/2013/01/02/168200139/quentin-tarantino-unchained-and-unruly.

117
articulate one possible black-slave-to-freedman experience that is alternately fantastic, comedic,
and horrific. Paternalistic, patronizing, yet aspirational, Tarantino’s desire to do things
differently envisions a historical past where a subjugated black male occupies narrative centrality
as such. The film’s goal-oriented protagonist, Django, a black slave, problematizes notions of
traditional Hollywood cinematic heroism, as Hollywood heroes typically embody American
ideals overdetermined as white, heterosexual, and male. Compellingly, both the presidency of
Barack Obama and the film Django Unchained reveal ideological contradictions of heightened
black male visibility: despite heroic achievements, whether in the White House or the master’s
house, violence continues to shape, mark, and/or inform the black masculine, sometimes in
spectacularized fashion.
The film follows the trajectory of a black slave, Django (Jamie Foxx) on a mission to
rescue his wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the plantation owner to whom she was
sold. To do so, Django partners with Dr. King Shultz (Christoph Waltz), a white German bounty
hunter who needs Django to accompany him on his search for a notorious band of brothers; in
exchange for identifying the bounty, Shultz agrees to teach Django the business and to help him
reclaim his wife. The journey for the two men begins in “1858 – Two years before the civil war –
somewhere in Texas” and eventually travels to Tennessee and Mississippi.
Much of the corpus of criticism against Django Unchained alleges that the film overlooks
real historical slave revolts, demonstrates a complete lack of acknowledgement on Tarantino’s
part for the tradition of the black cowboy/western, its assertion of black exceptionalism, and to a
lesser degree, how the film’s generic properties fail to hold the black American slave experience
in proper reverence, and how these same genre conventions fail to provide adequate subjectivity
via which audiences may come to know these characters and their true circumstances. Of

118
particular criticism was Tarantino’s usage of the stylized Italian western, which only days before
the film’s release Spike Lee tweeted “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti
Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor
Them”
153
and made it clear that he would not be seeing the film. Lee’s antipathy toward
Tarantino, which extends back into the mid-1990s, reportedly has more to do with Tarantino’s
voluminous usage of the word “nigger,” invoking a critique of authorial entitlement, namely that
of white filmmakers telling “black” stories, or more specifically, their construction of black
characters through white frames for a white gaze accustomed to viewing blackness as inferior. In
response to these criticism, what should be remembered is that Django Unchained is not a slave
or plantation story, and thus, no need for it to be understood as a slave revolt in the vein of Nat
Turner, Denmark Vessey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, etc.; it is a fictional tale of a hero’s journey set
in a recognizable past era. It’s reliance upon historical reality – the slavery era, expanding
western frontier – is more for spatial-temporal setting, mood, and atmosphere, as well as the
establishment of a puzzle whose pieces are identified and dropped into place by the audience’s
ability read its multiple intertexts, generic codes, and pop cultural sensibility. On this last point,
Django Unchained demonstrates its interest in using the past as a critique upon the present
moment; its use of hip hop, formal aesthetics typically understood as emerging in a particular
moment, including its depiction of violence (1960s-1970s), and its modern acting style (vs. a
classical era mode of performance) all work to collapse time whereby the past visits us presently
as a critique upon the contemporary moment.

153
Spike Lee, on Twitter: “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust.My
Ancestors Are Slaves.Stolen From Africa.I Will Honor Them.” Twitter, December 22, 2012,
https://twitter.com/SpikeLee/status/282611091777941504.

119
Concern about white authors and their constructions of blackness have been constant
since the birth of cinema with early silent shorts such as Watermelon Contest (White, 1900), and
Nigger in the Woodpile (1904). Prior to cinema, white constructions of black representations
circulated in Europe and its global colonies in the form of colonial ephemera, literature, songs; in
the US, black face minstrelsy was a favorite form of entertainment among white audiences.
These constructions of black representation work together intertextually to code blackness in
particular ways, the least of which maintain racial hierarchies and contain blackness. Thus, when
examining racialized constructions of black representation, whiteness has controlled the means
of production, circulation, distribution, consumption and meanings of mainstream black
cinematic imagery. To wit, some question whether a film like Django Unchained could have
been made by a black filmmaker. This assumes that a black filmmaker, a cultural insider, would
have produced the “right” construction of blackness or that there even is a correct construct
given blackness’ diversity in the larger diaspora. Without question, Tarantino’s oeuvre, talent,
and track record aided in his ability to have the film made. Writing for Salon.com in 2012, David
Sirota opines that Tarantino’s whiteness was instrumental in getting the film done:
The best way to illustrate this form of White Privilege is to imagine Django Unchained
being released as a production from an African American writer and director. Under
those circumstances, in the media and among white audiences, the film most likely would
be perceived not merely as a mass-audience entertainment product with some underlying
social commentary by a single director, but as a niche political film allegedly from a
whole community with an axe to grind. That is, it would probably be met in the media
and among potential viewers not in the way it has been met, but instead as a divisive
“black movie” by, and allegedly only for, black people. Studio executives know all of
this.
154

154
David Sirota, “Could a black director have made ‘Django’?” Salon.com, December 28, 2012,
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/28/could_a_black_director_have_made_django/.

120
As a general sentiment Sirota’s assessment is probably accurate. But Sirota’s notion that, with all
things being equal, if Django Unchained had had a black writer-director, the film would have
had a completely different reception is more telling. Whether speculation or insight, the
perception that white authorship carries with it the force of authority as tastemaker and advancer
of particular truths is lost on no black person who has ever asked a white acquaintance to be their
“front” in an effort to avoid racial bias and discrimination (this author included). Nevertheless, in
Hollywood, whiteness does not always automatically mean acceptance or quality: take George
Lucas’ twenty-three-year effort to bring, Red Tails, about Tuskegee airmen during WWII to the
screen. Historical films can be expensive to make because the world has to be made over into a
moment past; this becomes one of Hollywood’s considerations when deciding whether to
produce a film or not (which makes the Obama Era black production cycle of historical films
more intriguing). The creator of the Star Wars universe could not get financing for his passion
project; it was not until 2012 in the Obama Era, that Lucas finally self-financed the $58 million-
dollar film, which had less than negligible foreign distribution. In the final analysis, Red Tails
was poorly received and retreated from theaters earning less than what the film cost to make. But
overall, there does seem to be a general consensus that there is some truth to Sirota’s claim.
Speaking in 1997, bell hooks defends the industrial disesteem aimed at Spike Lee because he is
black and critiques the industry. Referencing Tarantino’s self-parody in Lee’s 1996 sex-phone
operator film Girl 6 cultural critic and scholar bell hooks comments on white authored
constructions of cinematic blackness:
It doesn’t have anything to do with what color the person is, it’s a certain image of
blackness that Hollywood finally believes can be negotiated by any cultural

121
maker….Black people aren’t needed to produce black cinematic culture because white
people can produce that culture…
155

Perhaps because hooks first denies the relevance of race, then indicts race in the production of
black culture, as cultural consumers, we want to factor not just the cultural insider/outsiderness
of the producers (white actor Brad Pitt was a producer on 12 Years a Slave, black director
Reginald Hudlin was a producer on Django Unchained), but also the meanings made from said
cultural product, how those products operate intertextually within the larger constellation of
black cultural product in circulation, and the reading practices of audiences. With regard to
hooks’ point about cultural product that white people can produce, Hollywood’s ambivalent
relationship with blackness becomes more complicated as black stars take on more action hero
roles. Here is another instance where we have to question whether blackness can be dropped into
constructs and tropes constructed within a white racial frame and not trigger the ways in which
blackness has been historically constructed to embody certain negative stereotypes, provoking
the question, “is this what was meant by equality?”
For example, No Good Deed (Miller, 2014) and The Perfect Guy (Rosenthal, 2015), two
middling thrillers helmed with familiar black Hollywood actors (Taraji P. Henson and Idris Elba,
and Sanaa Lathan and Michael Ealy, respectively) performed respectably at the box office
despite less than stellar reviews. With nothing in their narratives to mark these stories or
characters as intrinsically black, these films could be cousins to other obsessed-stalker-turned-
murderous thrillers (Single White Female, Fatal Attraction, The Crush; The Fan, The Boy Next
Door, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, and classics such as Play

155
bell hooks, “Cultural Criticism & Transformation,” Interview, Media Education Foundation Challenging Media
Transcript, (Northhampton, Media Education Foundation, 1997), 14, http://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Bell-
Hooks-Transcript.pdf.

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Misty For Me or either Cape Fear). But watching Idris Elba whack a white woman to death with
a shovel in Deed, and Ealy in The Perfect Guy spontaneously erupt into violence, mercilessly
beating a white guy at a gas station with his bare hands, and fighting with an older white woman
causing her to fall down a flight of stairs and die, has the ability to trigger and reinforce the trope
of the black brute. The nighttime setting, kinetic editing, medium close shots, pulsating yet
ominous music, and low angle photography that situates the spectator on the ground with the
victim at the gas station in The Perfect Guy is frightening. bell hooks argues that black
masculinity (at least in the US) is a manifestation of white heterosexual capitalist patriarchy. As
the province of white males, dominance and violence as means of social control during slavery
begot more dominance and control: “the gender politics of slavery and white-supremacist
domination of free black men was the school where black men from different African tribes, with
different languages and value systems, learned in the ‘new world’ patriarchal masculinity.”
156
In
her analysis, we scratch the surface of our understanding of the relationship between blackness in
its multiplicity, and violence as, on many levels, attributable to slavery and its legacy. Ed
Guerrero notes that the brute as a trope emerged post-Reconstruction, noticeably in the works of
Thomas Dixon, author of The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman, which would be adapted for
the screen by DW Griffith as The Birth of a Nation. Guerrero reminds us that the effect of this
trope was to unify “both southern and northern whites to suppress the expansion of black civil
rights and political power,” and artificially prop up white manhood “by taking up the honorific
task of protecting White Womanhood against the newly constructed specter of the ‘brute’
Negro.”
157
The inscription of the always already brutish black male as always already a threat to

156
bell hooks, “ Plantation Patriarchy,” We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, (Brooklyn: South End Press,
1992): 3.
157
Ed Guererro, “From ‘Birth’ to Blaxploitation: Hollywood’s Inscription of Slavery,” Framing Blackness: The African
American Image in Film, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 12.

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white womanhood is part of the narrative that saw fourteen-year old Emmitt Till mutilated and
beaten to death in 1955, just as the always already criminal stereotype contributed to the death of
Trayvon Martin.
These inscriptions have real and material consequences. White actors consider whether
these types of roles will typecast them or become a star turn, they are not confronted with
whether or not a given role/performance will be perceived as a discredit to the white race, or
contribute to established harmful characterizations in the cultural imaginary. In today’s
Hollywood, A-list status is arrived at by garnering juicy roles in well-produced genre films that
travel abroad, including thrillers and action films. The paradox is that when black folks do what
white folks do, it has the ability of reinforcing racist connotations, thereby reducing the
perceived commercial value of black screen performers, feeding the vicious cycle that is
Hollywood’s lore regarding black commercial appeal that exists beyond the realm of farcical
comedies, sooth-saying magical Negros, or plucky sidekicks. Typically, for black male actors to
ascend to Hollywood royalty, they embody characters who are legibly black, but exist without
contextual, cultural, or social blackness, such is the case with the majority of Will Smith films.
So too in the real world, blackness finds itself performing a mimicry that is in accordance with
Bhabha, “almost the same but not quite” and “not quite/not white.”
158

This form of imitation is part of the colonial disciplining power and authority of the
subjugated, and makes visible its ability to surveil, or in this instance, assess the ‘genuineness’ of
the copy, but it is none the less a copy and thus will always reflect back to power its own
fallacies and mythmaking as myth. Theoretically, in order to achieve success in any domain that
has been constructed by whiteness and is largely controlled by whiteness, blackness will

158
Homi K. Bhabha, “Ch. 4: Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The Location of Culture,
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 121-131.

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conform, assimilate, or imitate the values, habits, and knowledge of that domain, and in effect
reinforce the rules of that domain, which may include black oppression. How then, does the
aspiring black actor avoid the double bind, particularly where there will be screen violence
thereby creating an impossible double bind – one that elevates his or her star power in the
industry, but reinforces stereotypes of black violence and criminality in the real world? Is an
imitation of white constructs what we meant by equality? Does black ‘equality’ in Hollywood
casting of lead roles mean that they should imitate or “act white?” Must black bodies take on the
‘American’ normative values and ideals that have been conflated with whiteness? When black
characters figure in a narrative about freedom and liberty and national security, they may subvert
the ideology of the hero, while pointing to a history of hypocrisy and struggle in the failed reality
of the ideals of equality in the US.
Looking back: Fantasy Black Hero is Nothing But a Man
Tarantino’s black hero begins not so much within the temporal setting of his diegetic
world, but with cinematic and extra-cinematic intertextuality. The filmmaker recalls Corbucci’s
1966 mononymous character who by film’s end has broken hands (Belgian-Romani jazz guitarist
Django Reinhardt is rumored to be the character’s namesake, who, because of a childhood
injury, only used three fingers on his left hand). Corbucci’s anti-hero Tarantino’s fascination
with Italian westerns notwithstanding, in this instance we see mimicry’s “slippage of difference:”
the mononymic white man with no past signals mystery and peaks our curiosity; a black
enslaved man has no past because he has been renamed by a white man as form of erasure, and
disconnection from familial roots, signaling ownership rather than belonging or kinship. This
extra-cinematic knowing greets the audience in advance of Luis Bacalov’s borrowed title track
from Corbucci’s original. Set in 1858, Django, is less than an everyman when confronted with

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extraordinary circumstances that transform him into a gifted, mission driven warrior, forsaking
his own safety in the defense of another. He is as much an action hero as The Searchers’ Ethan
Edwards or Die Hard’s John McClain, but Ethan and John presumably honed their warriorism
via their military and law enforcement careers.
Black exceptionalism is a frequent criticism of Django Unchained. As a slave, it is
unlikely Django had any opportunity to practice marksmanship or master the ways of frontier
horsemanship, but for the sake of narrative expediency, takes to both expertly and quickly via
montage. Other characters refer to Django as “special”, “a natural”, and “not like other niggers.”
As Django on horseback and Dr. Shultz on his dentistry wagon casually ride into the small
western town of Daughtrey, Texas, townsfolk stop mid-sentence and mid-action to stare. One
man stops midsentence – with mouth agape, he points at Django and remarks with astonishment
“a nigger on a horse.” As Ennio Morricone’s “The Braying Mule” underscores the scene,
Tarantino, at a lulling pace, and with ample coverage all angles, imbues a typical, western
laconic moment of strangers-riding-into-town with anticipation: wide shots and cutaways, high
and low angle shot/reverse shots are intercut with static and tracking shots as the now business
partners casually make their way to the hitching post. The moment is clearly about seeing
Django. We watch Django, who masks concern as he spies a noose hung over a beam; a white
woman, almost imperceptibly smiles as their eyes connect. Django’s visibility is literally
elevated with him astride a horse, something considered remarkable for a black man during this
period. Dr. Shultz doffs his hat at gentlemen as he passes them; they remain stone-faced in return
and Dr. Shultz seems genuinely befuddled:
Dr. Shultz: “What is everybody staring at?”
Django: “They ain’t never seen no nigger on no horse before.”

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Political scientist David O. Sears characterizes black exceptionalism as the idea that “African
Americans are fundamentally different from other non-European people of color” resulting from
a “long, and unique, and continuing history of discrimination and disadvantage;” that DuBois’
“color line” is largely impermeable for blacks in comparison to other ethnic minorities; and, that
the experience of being black in America is more “stigmatizing” than other racial minorities,
leading to an “aggrieved group consciousness,” isolation, and less social integration.
159
Michelle
Alexander argues that black exceptionalism represented by “[h]ighly visible examples of black
success are critical to the maintenance of a racial caste system in the era of colorblindness.”
160
It
would seem then that black exceptionalism marks black Americans as a distinct category that
signals the lingering effects of slavery in the form of disparity and discrimination, yet
simultaneously points to how black success is used to deny the conditions that shape that
distinction.
In her piece “Quentin Tarantino Creates an Exceptional Slave,” Salamishah Tillet
comments that Django’s “exceptionality comes at a price…[where] he seems to exist in a
vacuum. Most of the slave characters he meets are not his equals; they are flat, naïve, and as in
awe of him as the audience. And they barely dent racial stereotypes.”
161
Writing for
OpenDemocracy.net (tag line: “free thinking for the world”), Matthew Cole complicates the
black exceptionalism conversation by adding the concept of “bootstrapping:”
…a term from the phrase ‘to pull oneself over a fence by one’s bootstraps’ that emerged
in the early nineteenth century United States. It is derived from what is called the

159
David O. Sears, “The American Color Line and Black Exceptionalism,” White Paper Prepared for delivery at the
17
th
Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology: Social Psychology and Politics, March 17-20, 2014,
http://www.sydneysymposium.unsw.edu.au/2014/chapters/SearsSSSP2014.pdf.
160
Michelle Alexander, “The Racial Bribe—Let’s Give It Back,” The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2010, 2012), 248.
161
Salamishah Tillet, “Quentin Tarantino creates an exceptional slave,” CNN.com, December 25, 2012,
http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2012/12/25/opinion-quentin-tarantino-creates-an-exceptional-slave/.

127
“Horatio Alger Myth.” … a fundamentally flawed concept…. But why is ‘bootstrapping’
fundamental to the racism of Django Unchained? Because Tarantino’s narrative is
premised on black exceptionalism, which inserts the bootstrapping adynaton into the
logic of white supremacy, used by both conservatives to deny contemporary structures of
racism and liberals to applaud blacks for ‘transcending race’…. Django
Unchained actually works to perpetuate the racism of black exceptionalism with his
bootstrapping narrative of slavery and the [South]West. It transposes the violent imagery
of slavery onto the form of a western in order to enact some ahistorical vengeance,
perhaps confronting white racists with one of their great fears, but ultimately serving as
revenge porn for liberals plagued by white guilt.…A film by someone more familiar with
racism and American ideology that offers a truly radical account of slave revolts in the
South (most of which were actually way more violent than any Tarantino film, see
Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in
1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831) is due.
162

What is problematic about these critiques and others like them is that they fault the film for being
something that it is not: a film about slavery. If the film is read as constructed – a goal-oriented
protagonist who amidst disruption and chaos, embarks on a mission to fight evil and restore
domestic order – then claims of black exceptionalism and bootstrapping (neither of which are
substantiated with actual evidence from the film) collapse. What is dangerous about these types
of critiques is that they suggest that there is a right way for blackness to be represented
cinematically and reassert an oppressive burden of representation. Moreover, if critics want to
suggest that the institution of slavery is one that does not lend itself to any sort of fictive
narrative treatment that falls outside of the struggle between black and white which every other
slave movie has done since The Birth of a Nation, then that is, as they say, another story.
Some Hollywood creatives (of various ethnicities and genders) pay attention to thinkers
and writers and genuinely want to “get it right.” If we want black heroes, then audiences need to
be able to read the cinematic codes embedded in the filmic language, and discern certain

162
Matthew Cole, “Django in Chains: American Racism and the Bootstrapping Myth,” OpenDemocracy.net, January
9, 2013, http://www.opendemocracy.net/matthew-cole/django-in-chains-american-racism-and-bootstrapping-
myth.

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characters as such. The challenge is in noting what happens when black bodies are dropped into
spaces historically constructed within a white racial frame which have been traditionally
occupied by white male bodies; the presence of the black body changes the construct as is the
case with Django Unchained and risks reinforcing historically inscribed stereotypes as both
transgressive and regressive. The moment when the bounty hunters encounter the Brittle
Brothers is a clear example of this risk that can be read as both transgressive and regressive.
Inspired by British artist Thomas Gainsborough’s 1779 painting “The Blue Boy,” Django wears
a teal blue sateen suit with knee length pants and a ruffled shirt. The scene is played for comedic
effect until Django shoots and whips two of the three wanted men to death. One could argue that
this is a moment of exploitation, using the black body to corrupt Europeanness, or, an attempt to
turn a black man into a dandy/Zip Coon. What is clear is that this ostentatious outfit heightens
the former slave’s visibility, rendering it a transitional moment in Django’s transformation from
slave to free man to hero. Tarantino is very deliberate marking these moments of conversion
from slave to hero. Dr. Shultz’s telling of “Der Ring Des Nibelungen/Rings of the Nibelungs” to
Django is a narrative device wherein the story-within-the-story is a diegetically realized version
of the internal tale, foreshadowing what is to come. In the night wilderness air, lit by a glowing
crackling camp fire, Django sits low to the ground facing Dr. Shultz, who is seated but
positioned above Django as he shares the German/Nordic folktale of Siegfried’s brave rescue of
Broomhilda who is locked in a tower guarded by a fire-breathing dragon. If this were two white
men, then the audience could just sit back and wait for the rest of the film to unfold like the tale.
However, in providing the audience with a moment to relax as well as narrative exposition,
Django Unchained in this moment cannot escape perpetuation of black male infantilization and
white paternalism. Does this mean then that filmmakers should eliminate this aesthetic literary

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device? Keep the device and not cast black actors? Or do we keep both the device and the black
actors, remain critically conscious as to the historical trauma it triggers, and then subvert it in the
end? The black man’s double bind in the white construct continues.
In accordance to narrative conventions, there is nothing inherently special about Django
despite Tarantino’s craftsmanship working to make us feel as though there is; in the same way
that black Reggie Hammond (Eddie Murphy) is plucked from a jail cell by white police officer
Jack Cates (Nick Nolte) to catch some bad guys with whom Reggie is well acquainted in 48
Hours (Spottiswoode, 1983), Django is plucked from a traveling chain-gang of slaves by Dr.
Shultz (Christoph Waltz) to track down some bad guys with whom Django is well acquainted.
Django Unchained’s plot is not one of slave revolution but one man’s journey to seek retribution
on behalf of the damage done to his family, a plot tradition found across the generic landscape in
films such as The Big Heat, The Searchers, and Death Wish. Dr. Shultz, a western European,
instructs Django on the ways of the gun and killing. White patriarchal masculinity is routinely
commercialized in film. In the context of Django Unchained, it is my hope that the violence
endemic to dominance and power will be noticed. Los Angeles Times film critic AO Scott makes
note:
…in placing his story of righteous payback in the Old South rather than the Wild West,
and in making its agent a black former slave, Mr. Tarantino exposes and defies an ancient
taboo. With the brief and fascinating exception of the blaxploitation movies and a few
other works of radical or renegade art, vengeance in the American imagination has been
the virtually exclusive prerogative of white men. More than that, the sanctification and
romanticization of revenge have been central to the ideology of white supremacy…. but
the canonical captives of antebellum American literature were white women kidnapped
by Indians, who after the Civil War were often replaced by freed slaves as objects of
superstitious terror. The idea that regenerative violence could be visited by black against
white instead of the reverse — that a man like Django could fill out the contours of the
hunter — has been almost literally unthinkable. But think about that when the hand-
wringing starts about “Django Unchained” and ask yourself why the violence in this

130
movie will suddenly seem so much more problematic, so much more regrettable, than
what passes without comment in “Jack Reacher” or “Taken 2.”
163

Does the white man’s justice and use of violence translate to blackness, and if so, we must ask
ourselves, does it reflect upon blackness? What we see is not exceptionalism, but a
demonstration of how this type of black masculinity is constantly coming into being as
conditions around him change, including his acclamation to violence.
With the prominence of Tarantino’s Django, this diegetic world also brings whiteness
and its assumed supremacy into sharp relief. While some have criticized Tarantino’s white
characters as too simplistically “evil,” or as cartoonish “villains,” arguing in favor of more
nuanced characters, doing so would be incongruent with the hyperreal mosaic that is the entire
film. The white characters provide the actions to which Django reacts. In other words, white
characters function metaphorically as the social, political, and economic authorizing forces that
create the foundation and pretext for violent resistance. Tarantino demonstrates for contemporary
audiences how white liberalism (Shultz), racism (Big Daddy), capitalism (Calvin Candie), and
complicity (Miss Laura) work synergistically to uphold white supremacy. The bold display of
violence functions to shape a particular type of authority, but one of the subtler modes of
authorizing occurs with the narrative-within-the-narrative: the story of Broomhilda (this is
happening as part of the conventions of storytelling, but also, because Django is black, it
operates on a different level – the not-not black mode).

163
AO Scott, “The Black, the White and the Angry: Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ Stars Jamie Foxx,”
NYTimes.com, December 24, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/25/movies/quentin-tarantinos-django-
unchained-stars-jamie-foxx.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0].

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Looking Back: Post Racial Cultural Miscegenation

In no way is this discussion intended to defend Quentin Tarantino. Instead, it is an
attempt to acknowledge that in the Age of Obama, post-racial ideologies point to the mixed race
and mixed culture society of America. To be clear, President Obama undoubtedly has critical
consciousness about blackness in America. But as the leader of the nation that both exalts and
condemns the conditions that made his presidency possible, his path was one that had never been
traversed and as such, he spoke the language of the dominant culture and its concerns as Ta-
nehisi Coates states:
Obama’s DNC speech is the key. It does not belong to the literature of “the struggle”; it
belongs to the literature of prospective presidents—men (as it turns out) who speak not to
gravity and reality, but to aspirations and dreams. […] Obama’s [2004 DNC] keynote
address conflated the slave and the nation of immigrants who profited from him. To
reinforce the majoritarian dream, the nightmare endured by the minority is erased. That is
the tradition to which the “skinny kid with a funny name” who would be president
belonged. It is also the only tradition in existence that could have possibly put a black
person in the White House.
164

Blackness is conformed to the power construct; similarly, Tarantino wedges blackness into a
white hero construct, one that does not seek black liberation but one that reinforces
heteropatriarchy, romanticism, and idealized American notions of honor, chivalry, and violence.
The fact that the hero in Hollywood films is white, with few exceptions, is a product of a larger
system of white supremacy, capitalism and nation-building that was fully enacted in the very

164
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic, January 2017,
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/.

132
earliest films. The film industry was born into existing social, political, and economic relations
or what Henry Giroux calls nation-state racial pedagogy, or, how national discourse around race
shapes our attitudes, knowledge, and behavior. The fantasy elements of a black man with a gun
killing white and black men in explosive gunplay are not so fantastical when a quick scan of
history reminds us of the Nat Turners who did launch revolts and killed white plantation owners.
Django Unchained grounds its historicity in recognizable symbolic motifs – nooses, whips,
chains, depictions of the antebellum south, with black social strata. Postmodern pastiche in look
and sound, but in its collapse between the sacred and the profane, historical accuracy is found in
the film’s milieu, thankfully eschewing the temptation to wax nostalgic (as in The Help) or
function as didacticism (as in 12 Years a Slave).
Django Unchained’s political gravitas can be discerned not only textually but
genealogically. Corbucci’s Django (1966), follows an American Civil War veteran drifting
across what appears to be a post-Civil War American frontier dragging a coffin, still wearing his
Union army uniform. Django, (Franco Nero), defends Mexican peasants against a white
supremacist Confederate veteran named Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo) and his band of red-
hooded fellow white supremacists. Now turned pseudo-mercenary, Django collaborates with
Mexican revolutionaries against Mexican Federales in cahoots with Jackson. It is important to
note that Corbucci’s film was produced to capitalize on the popularity of Sergio Leone’s Fist
Full of Dollars (1964), itself an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), influenced by
the cinematic adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled detective novels. A
communist/leftist blacklisted writer of hardboiled detective novels, Hammett’s affinity for the
proletariat manifested as a frequent narrative convention where antiheroes, in their defiance of
political and institutional corruption, became criminalized or operated outside of the law to

133
restore order or mete out some form of justice. Perhaps not coincidentally, Corbucci’s Django
arrives at the height of the US Black Power Movement, and was narratively concerned with
challenging white supremacy.
Django Unchained asks audiences to contemplate several moments in American history
simultaneously: antebellum slavery and the wild west, Civil Rights era, and the present. In doing
so, the film’s intertextuality compels the audience to view the film with the politics of the several
eras of the multiple genres it represents. Rick Altman reminds us that genre films work not as a
single isolated text, but are instead in conversation with each other, within its transhistoric
collective body of work. Hollywood and Italian westerns, plantation/slavery, buddy/road picture,
southern gothic horror, action, and Blaxploitation come together via the melodramatic mode and
legitimize Django’s adventure story. In so doing, the film takes previously disparate cinematic
representations of nation and through genre hybridity, insists that audiences think about the
historical moments they depict: by studying traditional Hollywood westerns and plantation films
separately, it would be easy to overlook how their temporal settings are typically co-occurring ––
which covers key moments of defining national identity and nation building. One of several
interventions the film makes is disrupting classical comprehension of the western and the
plantation/slavery genres (in part by underscoring the fact that these genres are set in the same
time period – roughly the 1850s to 1910. Django Unchained refuses to allow us to find pleasure
in narratives (fictional and factual) that espouse frontier freedom, manifest destiny, and rugged
individualism without acknowledging that just a few states over, white supremacy constructed
and maintained a southern society antithetical to those very same ideals. Legal scholar, activist
and initiator of the #SayHerName movement Kimberlé Crenshaw would have us not be naïve
about this post-racial moment:

134
…a society once expressly organized around white supremacist principles does not cease
to be a white supremacist society simply by formally rejecting those principles. The
society remains white supremacist in its maintenance of the actual distribution of goods
and resources, status, and prestige.”
165166

In Tarantino’s fantasy mash-up of cinematic blackness, we see a key post-racial characteristic in
the Age of Obama, one that both encourages the assimilation of whiteness while simultaneously
constricting its mimicry to reveal its fallacies of superiority. Both President Obama and Django
Unchained locate highly visible black masculinity in spaces traditionally dominated by
whiteness. The fact that whiteness is constitutive of black violence, including victimization and
vulnerability, is lost on too many. The centering of race in Django Unchained reveals the
entrenchedness of white supremacy. But the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t position
that haunts black masculinity, as stated previously, has material consequences. The spate of
black homicides at the hands of law enforcement officers during President Obama’s two terms
serves as the height of irony for such racial progress.

166
Kimberlé Crenshaw, quoted in Charles V. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997), 101.

135
CHAPTER 3

“If you don’t introduce and edit, the audience does not have an escape and you are forced to
watch the images in front of you…”
167

Sean Bobbitt, cinematographer, 12 Years a Slave

In a continuous unedited take near the end of 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013), the
character Solomon Northrup,
168
looks. During this medium close up, the spectator interprets the
expressions silently conveyed by actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as woefulness, weariness, and
incredulity at his circumstance: a free-born black man from the state of New York who is
kidnapped, sold as chattel, and becomes first hand participant in and witness to American slavery
for twelve years. Without any perceptible motivation, he slowly lifts his head from its gaze
towards the ground to looking off camera left at the unspoiled lands surrounding the Louisiana
plantation where he would remain for ten of those twelve years in captivity. Preceded by
lingering shots of Spanish moss, sounds of nature suggest a Thoreau-like moment of spiritual
bucolic bliss in this continuous take. There is not reverse shot to his line of sight to confirm what
he is looking at. Instead, we are transfixed upon Solomon, brow furrowed, eyes fatigued, beads
of sweat on the whole of his visage; his expression works contrapuntally to the idyllic setting.
The length of the take makes the viewer anxious, eager for the filmmakers to cut away, show
some action, make something happen, something more than just looking into the space beyond
the camera. The meaning of that moment soon becomes clear: as Solomon surveys the
surroundings, his gaze turns directly into the camera lens and, for ten seconds stares at us, the
audience. Throughout the majority of the film, we are voyeurs watching as Solomon was victim
and witness to the horrors of antebellum American slavery. But in that moment – fifteen minutes

167
“Heart of Darkness: Sean Bobbitt, BSC, 12 Years a Slave,” British Cinematographer,
https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/sean-bobbitt-bsc-12-years-a-slave.
168
The author’s last name appears interchangeably in various documents as both Northrup and Northup.

136
before the film ends – the filmmakers break the fourth wall, and engage directly with the viewer.
In so doing, the act of looking – by Solomon and the audience – shifts Solomon into the role of
cinematic interlocutor, and as the audience, we become bystanders who witness.
As the audience, we are there on the plantations, watching not as passive spectators
through an illusionary realist window, but immersed in and moving through that time and space
intentionally placed as witnesses to both the brutality and beauty of the south.
169
We move
through the south with short and long takes of nature: expansive fields, verdant lands,
magnificent skies, aural stimulation from buzzing and breezes, and sleepy bodies of water.
Immersed in another time and space, the long takes provide us with a moment for exaltation, and
perhaps as abolitionist Thoreau would have it, to look to nature’s sublime as a pathway toward
transcendental spirituality. As indicated by the opening epigraph from the film’s
cinematographer Sean Bobbitt, a long-time collaborator with director Steve McQueen, this same
style of long continuous takes of action on a single, hand held camera, denies audiences the
ability to look away from the violence that was American slavery. Solomon dangles from a
noose on tip-toe for a full ninety seconds in a three-minute scene before there is a cut. We are up
close and personal with Master Epps for over seventy seconds before the first cut in the two-
minute rape scene of Patsey. An unblinking roving Steadicam captures Platt’s disgust and Epps’
guilt, shame, and elation for nearly five of the eight minutes that is Patsey’s lashing.
Simultaneously, other witnesses, such as overseers, plantation mistresses, and other slaves, play

169
In scene A168 of the screenplay, Solomon “sits on a secluded part of the road, fiddle in hand. He stares across
the expanse. His eyes transfixed on something that is a million miles away.” Arguably, we, the audience, could be
what is seen across the expanse, a million miles away in both time and space, but there is no explicit direction for
Solomon to look into the camera (unlike say, Wayne’s World which breaks the 4
th
wall as part of the narrative). In
both the screenplay and film, this moment takes place after the scene where Bass (Brad Pitt) tells Solomon that
there has been no response to letters dispatched on Solomon’s behalf. Hopeless, Solomon sits by the side of the
road, and proceeds to methodically destroy his fiddle.

137
their roles as bystanders who witness but are unable to alter the reality of everyday life under
American slavery.
The entirety of this project presupposes the act of not only looking at blackness, but also
looking back in time at blackness. This shift from spectator to witness poses several questions.
How is 12 Years a Slave instrumental to our understanding of the difference between watching
and witnessing? Why does McQueen (a British director) choose to revisit this cornerstone of
American nation-building, during the tenure of the first black president? How does 12 Years a
Slave Why is it important to see American slavery rendered as “uncompromisingly violent and
quietly meditative,”
170
with a centralized black subjectivity in this way (compared to television
depictions such as 1984’s Solomon Northrup’s Odyssey, or the 1977 version of Roots; the 1975
film Mandingo, or 1958’s Tamango)? What does 12 Years a Slave really want us to see about
our particular historical moment?
As heuristic, looking backwards in time at blackness, but also looking reflexively
at blackness, 12 Years a Slave renders visible the origins of contemporary black sociality in the
African American experience of slavery long ago. The film provides an imagistic starting point,
a way of understanding modern day black disparity as the yield of what Oscar Patterson
discusses as a “social death;” where, for the purposes of this discussion, slavery produces a
subjugated, racialized population that had “no socially recognized existence outside of his master
[becoming] a social non person.”
171
For Patterson, “natal alienation,” or, how the slave was
severed from any sense of rootedness, kinship, ancestry, and traditions, disabled an individual’s

170
“An Essentially American Narrative: A Discussion of Steve McQueen’s Film 12 Years a Slave,” New York Times,
October 13, 2013, https://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/movies/a-discussion-of-steve-mcqueens-film-12-
years-a-slave.html.
171
Oscar Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, M.A.: Harvard University Press,
1982), 5.

138
ability to draw from historical accomplishment and purpose. Violent treatment produced trauma
and the economics of slavery denied Blacks the ability to create and maintain families for
themselves. Thus their only viable and sustainable connection to society was that of the master-
slave relationship, which established power relations that white supremacy and black
subjugation.
Socio-economic and health disparities among black Americans and diasporic African
descendants of European colonialism are well documented. Neoliberal rationalities and
globalization, however, would have societies believe that these disparities are the results of
individuals who fail to socially self-enfranchise, or pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.
What does everyday life look like, then, for a stratified population of black Americans, whose
“history” begins, in accordance with Patterson’s formulation, with systems and institutions
culturally codified, psychologically coercive, and socially enforced to produce black social
death? Despite some folks’ incessant desire to sever the present from the past, others insisted
upon recalling the past as methodology for comprehending modern day social inequities. For
example, in October 2013, The New York Times hosted a discussion with McQueen, Ejiofor,
artist Kara Walker, and historian Eric Foner about 12 Years a Slave, facilitated by writer-
producer Nelson George. George starts with what he calls “contemporary analogues [such as]
stop and frisk,” the practice among New York City police of stopping and detaining blacks and
Latinos without cause. George then asks filmmaker McQueen if present day racism influenced
his film that is set in the past. McQueen states:
History has a funny thing of repeating itself. Also, it’s the whole idea of once you’ve left
the cinema, the story continues. Over a century and a half to the present day. I mean, you
see the evidence of slavery as you walk down the street.

139
George and McQueen, who are both black, share their assertion that the vestiges of
slavery remain today to continue to maintain white supremacy and black subjugation. Their
testimonial to these connections revealed ear-to-the-ground, folk or subjugated knowledge a
priori. Surprisingly, Eric Foner, author of numerous books on slavery, the quest for freedom, and
the Reconstruction period, offers a rejoinder that again aims to disassociate fruit from seed:
I believe this is a piece of history that everybody – black, white, Asian, everybody – has
to know. You cannot understand the United States without knowing about the history of
slavery. Having said that, I don’t think we should go too far in drawing parallels to the
present. Slavery was a horrific institution, and it is not the same thing as stop and frisk. In
a way, putting it back to slavery takes the burden off the present. The guys who are acting
in ways that lead to inequality today are not like the plantation owner. They’re guys in
three-piece suits. They’re bankers who are pushing African-Americans into subprime
mortgages.
172

With all due respect to Foner, without making these connections and linkages, blackness
is left with essentialist explanations for present day social disparities, systemic bias, and
institutional oppression. It is clear to the interviewer and the filmmaker that contemporary racism
is connected to past institutional and systemic strategies to control black people. For Foner to
deny that “stop and frisk,” the purpose of which is “to humiliate black and brown men […] in a
way that allows the police to dominate them,”
173
is a (not so distant) cousin of antebellum slave
patrols is to suggest that history be read as event-centric, discrete silos of fixed moments in time
that can exist outside of their real, material, cyclical, conceptual, or philosophical connections to

172
Eric Foner, “An Essentially American Narrative.”
173
Oliver Laughland, “I worked as a prosecutor. Then I was arrested. The experience made a man out of me. It
made a black man out of me,” The Guardian, August 11, 2017, https://amp.theguardian.com/us-
news/2017/aug/11/chokehold-book-paul-butler-us-police-african-americans.

140
other events. Alternatively, Braudel’s longue durée, the historical method that emphasizes
looking at significantly longer periods of time to ascertain the origins of contemporary states of
being-- aids contemporary understandings of the African Trans-Atlantic slave trade as deeply
extended before the antebellum period, diasporic, serialized conjunctures, that provide contexts
and conditions for events, allowing for the genealogical relationship between “stop and frisk”
and its antecedent – state-sanctioned modes of racialized surveillance, containment, and social
control, such as slave patrols, Fugitive Slave Acts, Black Codes, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim
Crow.
174

To his credit, Foner attempts to hold contemporary society accountable for contemporary
forms of oppression; but numerous articles written in the aftermath of the subprime mortgage
crisis point to both moral hazard (neoliberal economics) and the US legacy of racial redlining
and housing covenants. Why don’t twenty-first century bankers in three-piece suits engaged in
class-based and race-based structural inequality in the service of capitalism,carry the same
valence as Reconstruction era carpetbaggers and scalawags, or early twentieth century housing
covenants and redlining? Foner’s comments are representative of contemporary thinking that
individualizes sovereignty, rendering individuals the agents of their own disparity. Foner’s
sentiment was preceded by countless other white authority figures, found in the 1965 writings of
liberal Democratic Congressman Danial Patrick Moynihan, author and intellectual William F.
Buckley whose National Review writings from the 1950s supported white supremacy cloaked as
conservatism only to later offer support for civil rights, and influential historians such as Ulrich
Phillips and William Dunning before him, whose research agendas systemically and

174
Edward Blum, Forging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press 2005), Kindle.

141
institutionally advanced post-Reconstruction white victimization, and Lost Cause ideology. This
type of work severs the links of contemporary black social inequity and injustice to slave era’s
institutionalization of black social death. With heightened black visibility in the Age of Obama,
12 Years a Slave resists neoliberal governmentality and makes the case that the seeds for
contemporary black sociality (socio-economic, health, and political disparity; heterogeneous,
stratified, marked, mimetic/hybrid/assimilated, etc.) were sown during this epoch in the forging
of America. The film’s appearance during Obama’s tenure as president demands a certain
awareness of its moment of arrival, insisting that we witness its intrinsic linking of the present to
the past. In contrast to previously discussed characteristics of post-racialism’s paradoxical
tendency to both affirm and deny the endurance of white supremacy, 12 Years a Slave’s
contribution to the post-racial condition is that it testifies to the truth of American slavery and
thus the forging of the nation.
Why then is it so important to remember American slavery in this moment, the Age of
Obama? With each measure of significant black “progress” – which the election of the first black
American president can be called – comes a rolling, roiling, sometimes violent, yet sustained
backlash. Across the longue durée, progress in the form of racialized social relations becomes
visible and measurable, especially if blackness is measured generationally (e.g., African, slave,
free, enfranchised, integrated, assimilated, affirmed, presidential). Whiteness measured
generationally (explorer, colonial settler, immigrant, citizen, authority, dominant, privileged)
demonstrates an ongoing response to contestations of white supremacy. Arguably, not since
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, has a film so overtly centered white supremacy, racism, and black
subjugation in its narrative as 12 Years a Slave. Many of its late twentieth century generic
predecessors such as Zwick’s 1989 Glory (should a white Union officer lead black conscripts?)

142
and Spielberg’s 1997 Amistad (should slaves captured in open revolt on the high seas be allowed
to return to Africa?) utilize proxy struggles for dramatic conflict. Charles W. Mills in Black
Visibility, discusses what happens when white supremacy and racism are at the discursive center.
Mills states that “Global White Supremacy” or an essential outcome of whiteness, has “left us
with the racialized distributions of economic, political, and cultural power that we have today,
have the semantic virtues of clearly signaling reference to a system, a particular kind of polity, so
structured as to advantage whites” while simultaneously rendering life in the margins a
normalized space for non-whites. That racialized system is recognized as “a particular mode of
domination, with its special norms for allocating benefits and bur-dens, rights and duties; its own
ideology; and an internal, at least semi-autonomous logic that influences law, culture, and
consciousness.”
175
This semi-autonomous logic that has a grip on a particular kind of polity is
what is made visible with a film like 12 Years a Slave (and Django Unchained, and The Help),
particularly the difference between the systems and institutions that compel inequity and those
individuals who find themselves somewhere along a continuum of complicity in churning the
wheels when semi-autonomy becomes stymied. This distinction is indicative of a move to
separate the individual from circumstances or ideology with white supremacy. Not a totalizing
theory or completely autonomous but also not reducible to mere prejudice or bigotry, but “…a
complex of ideas, values, and attitudes and racism as an institutionalized politico-economic
structure for which the ideas are an ideological accompaniment.” It allows for “overlapping,
interlocking, and intersecting systems of domination” (such as capitalism) in which “white
supremacy focuses attention on the dimension of racial oppression in these systems…”
176
White

175
Charles W. Mills, “Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy,” Blackness Visible: Essays on
Philosophies and Race, Cornell University Press, 1997, pp 98.
176
Mills, pp 100.

143
supremacy evolves over time either because of those interlocking systems, because of political
resistance of non-whites, or both. Periodization would mark before and after as the period of
legal colonialism and slavery, and the aftermath (“de facto white supremacy”) – thus, individuals
can claim that they are not racist, but still engage in interlocking systems of white supremacy.
The backlash (i.e., white supremacy), represented and/or supported by a systematized and
institutionalized status quo attempts ‘course corrections’ intended to reset and reassert racial
hierarchies. Deterritorialization tactics to disconnect contemporary racism and white supremacy
from their historical meanings and valences range from the institutional (e.g., voter roll purges,
rollbacks, and gerrymandering) to the ideological, with what Melissa Weiner references as the
“social forgetting of slavery” and the “willful act of forgetting.”
177
This makes this generation –
the one that elected the first black president – witnesses, and thus keepers and propagators of
what is real and true (verisimilitude and violence being necessary to foreclose future attempts to
return representational practices to 1958’s Band of Angels or 1938’s Jezebel). To combat covert
white supremacy and neoliberal rationales that continue to erase racism as seeds of contemporary
black liberation struggles. Because as a slave narrative, it is based on a “true story,” and thus
testimonial of that which has been witnessed in reality. Because as those linkages are made, it
needs to come from a black subjectivity. That it is male portends other challenges to totalizing or
universalizing black representation (economic bias in the industry toward maleness, European
vs. American, etc.). Call to action – vigilance in assaults against truth: how white supremacy
created the conditions of black disparity that we attend to today as resistance to neoliberalism.
As a slave narrative rendered cinematically, 12 Years a Slave compels audiences to “look
back at blackness as witness” to slavery’s realities and recognize that since we can do nothing

177
Melissa F. Weiner, “(E)Racing Slavery: Racial Neoliberalism, Social Forgetting, and Scientific Colonialism in Dutch
Primary School History Books,” Du Bois Review” Social Science Research on Race, 2014, pp 5.

144
about the past (except be truthful to it), our contemporary actions become testimony of a
particular truth that would otherwise be misrepresented, if not erased, by neoliberal rationalities.
By examining 12 Years a Slave’s mode of “looking back,” audiences witness representations of
the horrors of what Frederick Douglass called “one of the peculiarities of American institutions”
– not just that of Africans sold upon reaching the new world, but of the “internal slave trade,”
where “millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic.”
178
Furthermore,
viewers are indicted by certain truths: that the seeding of transhistoric structures of
disenfranchisement and disparity which plague black American today can be directly traced to
the institution of slavery. In so doing, 12 Years a Slave’s contribution to post-racial ideology in
the Age of Obama evinces the social construction of black disparity that plagues contemporary
black society today (white complicity, black social death, and the twoness of black subjectivity).
Looking Back: 12 Years a Slave as Narrative Testimony

Solomon Northrup was a free black man living with his wife Anne, and three children
Alonzo, Margaret, and Elizabeth in Saratoga Springs, New York, when he was lured to
Washington, DC in 1841 under false pretenses, drugged, abducted, and sold into the “internal
slave trade” where he remained for twelve years. The film 12 Years a Slave is based on
Northrup’s first person account, testimony to the institution of American slavery. Once liberated
from enslavement, Northrup joined a distinguished group of survivors who lived to speak of
moments of violence, objectification, and dehumanization mixed with moments of “familiarity
and assurance in the household between master and slave” where there were “moments of
compassion.”
179
Within the abhorrence of slavery, 12 Years a Slave makes visible contours of a

178
Frederick Douglass, “The Internal Slave Trade,” My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Penguin Books, 2003),
345.
179
“Slaves of Andrew Johnson,” President Andrew Johnson, National Historic Site, National Park Service,
https://www.nps.gov/anjo/learn/historyculture/slaves.htm.

145
human condition where the proscribed constitution of the slave, the master, and the bystander is
drawn in sharp relief against a world that is relationally, emotionally complex and ambivalent.
As spectators, we typically are not aware of the poetics and aesthetic strategies that
collude to reveal storytelling as a confluence of point of view, narration/implied narrator, and
author. Literary point-of-view (POV) is a cornerstone of storytelling. POV informs our
comprehension of cause and effect, animates subjective and objective positions, and determines
degrees of reliability of characterizations, spaces, eras, and events as filtered through the
narrator’s consciousness. In Genette’s formulation, narration refers to the mood and voice of an
always-existent implied narrator, who may or may not appear as a character within the story. The
narrative voice and mood confer a certain quality upon the diegesis via ‘distancing’ (emotional,
perspective, temporal, physical); in other words, the implied narrator holds certain attitudinal and
regulatory power over those story elements. Then there is the author, who can both occupy the
role of the narrator, and provide the point of view through which audiences access the story, but
should not necessarily be assumed to be one in the same. The author theoretically determines
both narration and point of view in its artistic and ideological expressions that, once rendered
cinematically, function in accordance to Vivian Sobchack calls a “dialogical and dialectical
engagement of two viewing subjects” [emphasis original] between the film and the spectator
both of which have the capacity of ‘seeing.’
180
These distinctions seem overly simplistic given
the overdetermined nature of storytelling in both the literary and cinematic form. Nevertheless,
noting distinctions between how spectators access the story, the storyteller’s attitude toward
story elements, and the dynamic relationship between story and spectator factors into my

180
Vivian Carol Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: Phenomenology and Film Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, December 3, 1991), 23.

146
argument that 12 Years a Slave turns spectators into witnesses, so that those who see may testify
to this truth.
This discussion begins with the original text as testimonial. The book, Twelve Years a
Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in
1841, and Rescued in 1853 is narrated via first person POV, as Northup articulates his own
experience of subjectivization into slavery, through which his thoughts, emotions, motivations,
and reactions are filtered. Thus, Northup occupies the space of both author and narrator,
articulated through his subjective first person point of view. As shall be elaborated upon later,
antebellum-era slave narratives would be generically shaped into harrowing adventure tales of
the slave’s escape to freedom, or, persuasive oratories with great emotional, moral appeal in an
early form of human rights discourse. Northup’s story, is neither action-oriented nor melodramic,
but a testimonial of his experiences over the course of an extended odyssey. Much of Twelve
Years a Slave focuses on Northup’s observations of what happens to others, and life lessons
learned along the way. In situating Twelve Years as testimony, a brief examination into slave
narratives as autobiographic literature will be helpful.
Slave narratives emerged as a literary tradition first in England in the mid-18
th
century,
then in North America in the early to mid-19
th
century. In The Classic Slave Narratives, Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. writes a brief history of antebellum slave narratives, which in his estimation
formulates the foundation of the “black intellectual tradition.”
181
As a cadre of “very special
people” (as they represented the literate among the free), slave narrative authors expressed
experiential testimonials that interrogated notions of “race and reason.” Central to the political

181
Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Introduction,” in The Classic Slave Narratives: The Life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of
May Prince, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. by Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., (New York: Signet Classics, Penguin Group, 2012), xii.

147
project of slave narratives is a conjoining of literacy and freedom, where the articulation of the
experience of slavery is a key component to ‘uplift’ from slavery (Gates, 2012). Indeed, in the
preface to his book To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography,
1760-1865, literary scholar William L. Andrews writes that black “autobiographers demonstrate
through a variety of rhetorical means that they regard the writing of autobiography as in some
ways uniquely self-liberating, the final, climactic act in the drama of their lifelong quests for
freedom.”
182
Slave narratives encompass the wide variety of black slave experience over
historically differentiated periods (mid-1600s to 1938; antebellum, Reconstruction, early 20
th

century). They appeared in numerous formats which facilitated white access to this content:
lectures and oration, pamphlets, broadsheets, letters, periodicals and other formats circulating
across in North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. Articulated by former
slaves, infused with morality arguments, and the logic of secular humanism, slave narratives
helped to galvanize abolitionism domestically and abroad. Speeches by ex-slaves like Maria W.
Stewart, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Sarah Parker Redmond, Henry “Box” Brown,
Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass provided first-person testimonial, individual declarations
of brutality and dehumanization. Antebellum-era slave narratives revealed the importance of a
black subjectivity revelatory of self-possession, agency, and expression as part of the black
literary tradition. As an early form of human rights discourse, these true stories were generative
of what would become ‘black thought,’ and established the foundation for the comprehension of
black sociality, that is the “ontology of blackness and its relationship to life, death, and the
concept of the human.”
183

182
William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865,
(Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1986), xi.
183
Alessandra Raengo, “Dreams are Colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality,” Black Camera 8, no. 2
(Spring 2017): 120-140.

148
In his discussion of slave narratives as testimony, American slavery scholar John
Blassingame summarized the historical challenges of using slave narratives as testimonials, the
largest of which was the overwhelming presence of white amanuenses, many of whom were
motivated by the abolitionist movement, their Christian faith, an interest in history, or adventure
narratives, often operating with “integrity…[and] impressive credentials.”
184
While the essential
characteristic of editing is the shaping of a text, one cannot discount how in the case of slave
narratives, the editorial process influenced certain generic or thematic elements such as the use
of violence or paternalistic connections to slave masters. Furthermore, while the slave narratives
are articulated via a first-person perspective, it is unknowable the degree to which black agency,
subjectivity, and self-possession is singularly that of each narrative’s author. Crucial to
understanding production and circulation of blackness is an awareness of how slave narratives
were manipulated in form and content for the purpose of bringing these experiences to larger
audiences. John Sekora calls attention to the role whites have played in shaping black speech in
his piece, Black Message/White Envelope, where slave masters controlled not only the work and
bodies of slaves but also “…the words, the very language of their slaves. To masters, the words
of slaves appeared doubly significant….By seeking to control slave language, masters sought to
exact slave complicity in their own subjugation.”
185

The policing and surveillance of black speech found its way into the aesthetic shaping of
slave experiences. As such, the presence of the abolitionists and their growing movement,
antebellum slave narratives carried with them a shadow of propaganda. Sekora corroborates
Gates’ postulation that literate blacks read the works of other blacks, but then suggests that key

184
John W. Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves: Approaches and Problems,” in The Slave’s Narrative,
ed. By Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 78-97.
185
John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave
Narrative,” Callaloo, no. 32 (Summer 1987): 482-515, The Johns Hopkins University Press, DOI: 10.2307/2930465.

149
stylistic similarities within the genre are equally attributable to the publishing houses themselves.
First-person experiences were commonly transformed by literary conventions into popular
genres of the American romantic period: Native American captivity narratives, criminal
confessions, outlaw narratives, and slave narratives with themes of frontier expansion,
individualism, freedom, and spiritual awakenings. Moreover, Sekora traces a literary publishing
practice of white intervention in slave narratives, documenting how white secretaries and editors
were dictated to and shaped the literary outcomes of many narratives for a largely white
publishing industry and audience. Andrew Williams describes black autobiography between
1760-1865, and by extension much of the slave narrative, as “a black narrative severely closed
by the transcribing, editorial, and prefacing practices of white litterateurs….It is difficult to be
sure when we are hearing an authentic black voice instead of witnessing an act of literary
ventriloquism.”
186

Frequently, slave narratives were prefaced with endorsements of whites, which solidified
veracity claims in order to gain wider acceptance. Support and contributions made to literary and
folkloric discourses by white allies in the abolitionist cause such as the impassioned Harriet
Beecher Stowe (to whom Northup dedicated Twelve Years), or fiery William Lloyd Garrison lent
credibility to the claims of the former slaves. Common among the published pieces, authorizing
statements such as “taken down from his own relation,” “related by himself,” but is then
“arranged,” or “revised by a friend.” According to widely published writings on Northup’s
narrative, editor David Wilson (1818-1870) was not among the abolitionist amanuenses class,
but a lawyer by trade, New York state politician and aspiring novelist/writer, commissioned as a
friend by a member of the extended (white) Northup family to record Solomon’s experience.

186
William L. Andrews, To Tell a free story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865,
(Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, Illini Books Edition, 1988), 35.

150
Perhaps some of the overall procedural feel to Twelve Years can be attributed to Wilson’s
influence, whose contribution to Northup’s telling is believed to be so extensive that Wilson has
been referenced as Northup’s collaborator. Pioneering scholar in literary studies James Olney
(Memory & Narrative, 1988) asserts that much of the descriptive style in Twelve Years which is
elaborate and prosaic is clearly the work of Wilson (despite Wilson’s prefatory claim that
everything written in the narrative was from Northup’s lips to his pen). He points out how.
187

Historically, slave narratives have had doubt cast upon their veracity in varying ways and
degrees: the presence of white voices (which have been with the slave narratives from their
beginnings), is one such critique; initially for advancing abolitionist propaganda during the
antebellum period, and later skewed sampling and interviewer competency from those collected
during the Federal Writer’s Program (1936-1938).
With narrative similarities and continuities, certain generic conventions, aesthetics, and
characteristics emerged from the articulations of ex-slaves both stylistically (auto/biographical or
1
st
person POV, dialogical, phonetic dialect, poetry, etc.) and thematically (freedom, overcoming
adversity, perseverance, brutality, quotidian slave life, spiritual redemption). In his discussion of
slave narratives as autobiography, Olney points out their “overwhelming sameness,” and outlines
their literary conventions: the inclusion of an autographed engraved portrait of the subject; a
claim to authenticity as articulated by the subject himself; white testimonials that essentially co-
sign the authenticity of the black narrator; epigraphs; the actual first person accounting of
upbringing, family ties, daily life as a slave, name changes, escape to freedom, personal insights
on slavery and of men; and, appendices for inclusion of fact-based documents to back up the

187
James Olney, “’I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Callaloo, no. 20
(Winter 1984): 46-73.

151
narrator’s claims.
188
That a genre would emerge replete with stylistic and thematic conventions
not only points to their popularity, but also to that of a common and collective black experience.
Gates opines that this common and collective experience in slave narrative functions
synecdochically and pedagogically as the “communal utterance [of] a collective tale” allowed
former slaves to engage in a form of auto-didacticism, learning from each other’s work, grasping
the burden of racial representation in the eyes of blacks and whites (Gates, 2012). However,
beyond their aesthetic and literary functions, slave narratives – situated within the first person
point of view – function as testimony to eye witness accounts. The online southern heritage
repository “Documenting the American South,” at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
essentially affirms the work of contents as described by former slaves such:
Usually the antebellum slave narrator portrays slavery as a condition of extreme physical,
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual deprivation, a kind of hell on earth. Precipitating the
narrator's decision to escape is some sort of personal crisis, such as the sale of a loved
one or a dark night of the soul in which hope contends with despair for the spirit of the
slave. Impelled by faith in God and a commitment to liberty and human dignity
comparable (the slave narrative often stresses) to that of America's Founding Fathers, the
slave undertakes an arduous quest for freedom that climaxes in his or her arrival in the
North. In many antebellum narratives, the attainment of freedom is signaled not simply
by reaching the free states, but by renaming oneself and dedicating one's future to
antislavery activism.
189

188
Olney, “’I Was Born’: Slave Narratives.”
189
William L. Andrews, “North American Slave Narratives,” Documenting the American South: Primary Resources
for the Study of Southern History, Literature, and Culture, http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/intro.html.

152
With the above account in mind, testimony provided by ex-slaves become evidence that
violations have occurred: slaves are both the ‘scene of the crime,’ and witnesses to history.
While the narratives speak to the experience of the author and his/her close social circle, that
they are read and emulated in some instances by others reveals the “collective utterance” to also
be representative of collective memories of a traumatic history. As a hermeneutic, the first-
person account of the slave’s experience gives us a complex way of understanding the past via
analysis of the present, and of understanding the present via an analysis of the past.
In first person POV, Northup provides elaborate details and verifiable facts regarding the
rules, practices, and social relations regarding the daily life of the slave. For example, Northup
spends several pages of this slave narrative discussing “an ordinary day’s work,” which for
cotton-picking is a minimum of two hundred pounds of cotton; anything short draws lashes.
Northup elaborates on the skills necessary for sowing and reaping variations of corn, and cane
and sugar making. Northup also speaks of the necessary tools a slave needs to manage his own
life such as: the utility of gourds for storing one’s own grain, drawing water, and eating meals;
fashioning one’s own axe handles and fish traps, as well as hunting skills needed to supplement
the slave’s diet with raccoons and possums when bacon arrives from the master full of worms.
Other household matters include making one’s bed out of a wooden plank and creating padding
from discarded husks; many of these slave quarters can be seen today on tours of still remaining
Louisiana plantations, currently available as bed and breakfasts lodging, and wedding receptions
rentals. Slaves are afforded some ‘leisure’ time, Sundays off in observance of the Sabbath
(unless it is during harvest, or a slave has been given permission to go work another plantation to
earn his or her own “Sunday money”); but then Northup reminds us that no slave’s life belongs
to the self as they are at all times made available for the whims of the master. For example,

153
Northup describes how a frequently inebriated Master Epps would roust slaves to come and
dance and make merriment for his pleasure; Northup would play his violin, perched in a corner
where he could observe everyone’s interactions, only to be later documented in his narrative in
detached detail. After such elaborations, Northup affirms that “[s]uch is a true, faithful,
unexaggerated picture and description of the slave’s daily life.…Ploughing, planting, picking
cotton, gathering the corn, and pulling and burning stalks, occupies the whole of the four seasons
of the year. Drawing and cutting wood, pressing cotton, fattening and killing hog’s [sic], are but
incidental labors.”
190

Northup’s style stands out as his narration is more reportage than literary: it can be
characterized as evenhanded and straightforward, detailed to distraction in some places, and
absent the oratory swell found in the abolitionist-oriented works of others such as Frederick
Douglass or Olaudah Equino. From this style, one could argue that Northup’s project was
documentation, rather than entertainment or persuasion. In the preface, Northup makes clear his
intention to articulate his experience truthfully: “I can speak of Slavery only so far as it came
under my own observation – only so far as I have known and experience it in my own person.
My object is, to give a candid and truthful statement of facts….”
191
As such, facticity buoys the
veracity of his eyewitness experience, anchoring much of his narrative with materiality that can
be independently verified such as actual names, locations, and dates. To be clear, Northup has
his moments of despair and conveys as much to the reader, such as when he worries that he will
die and no one from his family will know, but what are we to make of such a stating of the
obvious:

190
Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Auburn, NY: Derby & Miller, 1853), 72.
191
Northup, 12 Years a Slave.

154
Suffice it to say, during the whole long day I came not to the conclusion, even once, that
the southern slave, fed, clothed, whipped and protected by his master, is happier than the
free colored citizen of the North.
192

The “whole long day” referenced was one spent by Northup dangling from the noose end of a
rope in the hot Louisiana sun; juxtaposed here, this line reads as a bit of gallows humor. When
coupled with his at-a-distance narration of the entire sequence – which begins as a fight with
under-master Tibeats and ends with a rescue by Master Ford – his descriptions are more
observational than emotive: the discomfort of the rope, the pacing on the porch of overseer
Chapin, speculation on what Master Ford’s reaction would be, wondering where Tibeats’ had
stolen away to after being chased by Chapin. Northup’s reverence for Master Ford is clear with
comments like “[i]t was source of pleasure to surprise Master ford with a greater day’s work than
was required,” and more fondly:
“During my residence with Master Ford I had seen only the bright side of slavery. His
was no heavy hand crushing us to the earth. He pointed upwards, and with benign and
cheering words addressed us as his fellow-mortals, accountable, like himself, to the
Maker of us all. I think of him with affection, and had my family been with me, could
have borne his gentle servitude, without murmuring, all my days.
193

Northup’s attributes affinity for Master Ford (and other kind slave masters such as “Buford,
[who] was a kind master and sheriff of the county”), and disdain for Master Epps to the system
and institution of slavery and its ability to turn masters into brutes. After sharing how a deal
between two white men at a nearby plantation ended with one dead in defense of the other’s
honor, Northup offers his analysis of whites and violence under slavery:

192
Northup, Twelve Years, 44.
193
Northup, Twelve Years, 40.

155
“Daily witnesses of human suffering – listening to the agonizing screeches of the slave –
beholding him writhing beneath the merciless lash – bitten and torn by dogs – dying
without attention, and buried without shroud or coffin – it cannot otherwise be expected,
than that they should become brutified and reckless of human life. […] It is not the fault
of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he
lives. […] Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears, that the rod is for
the slave’s back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years.[…] the
institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel,
unjust, and barbarous one
194

Northup’s comprehension of slavery as racialized systems and institutions of repression through
violence allows him to acknowledge the heterogeneous formations and performances of
whiteness as allowing for intermittent humanity among white slave holders. But he remains clear
and steadfast in rebuking any characterization whites may want to write about the institution as
fostering any sort of “pleasures of slave life” and insists that the reader know that slaves were
“intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of
freedom, as passionately as themselves.”
195
The effect of Northup’s style – reportage with honest
moments of participation and genuine affection, and attempts to balance performances of
whiteness – distances us from the monsterized horror of slavery, instead grounding Twelve Years
in actualized everyday life. Partly due to the past tense nature of the narrative, we never get a
sense that Northup is reliving his twelve years, but rather recounting his twelve years of
captivity. This style reinforces the documentary-like nature of slave narratives as proof of moral
injustice in the world. This sober approach allows us to critically examine the text in our

194
Northup, Twelve Years, 86.
195
Northup, Twelve Years, 86.

156
contemporary moment: since it is articulated in first person POV, persons, places, and things are
contemplated at arms’ length allowing the audience to see deeper structures of systemic white
supremacy unclouded by affective excess.
It bears noting that slave narratives are not only testimony to the institution and practice
of American slavery, but reveal the ideologies and practices of white supremacy. At the center of
slave narratives are black human subjects minimally forged into existence by laws, systems,
institutions, and cultures that reinforce white European colonialism and capitalism, fortified
through violence. David Theo Goldberg describes the normalization of white supremacy as a
process of European rationalization of “racial arrangements” designed to effectively:
…maximize both the grip on power globally – in colonies or within the European theater
of relations –and relatedly the extraction of profit and accumulation of wealth. By
extension, this global colonial spread, commercial interaction, and cultural intertwining
prompted conceptual seepage into (former) imperial powers. […] race clearly came to be
invested with new, if connected, significance. This can be characterized as networks of
racial conception and meaning, of racial value and power.
196

Imperialism, capitalism, and cultural hegemony would come to concretize a white supremacy
and power emanating from Anglo-Saxon sects of Europe. A normalizing “conceptual seepage”
of whiteness would establish itself as institutions, systems, and cultural infrastructures that would
grow its numbers, an absorption of non-Anglo-Saxon whiteness, and eventual conflation with
western democracy. A key tactic to the reorganization of whiteness included the identification of
threats to that whiteness and thus democratic ideals, in this case, the presence of non-whites.
That white men had the ‘right’ to pursue money under the guise of the pursuit of happiness

196
David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 3.

157
becomes part of a rationale that promises even the poorest whites that by aligning with white
superiority, they will benefit minimally via white privilege in the racialized American system of
democracy, regardless of their position on the ladder of upward mobility. What then would a
slave masters/overseers/auctioneers’ narrative sound like? Would it be a logically, well-reasoned,
matter-of-fact recitation of his experiences logically presented? Would they be painted as victims
of circumstances, products of their time, with expressions of reluctance or remorse? Would it
discursively engage with contemporaneous societal, juridical, economic, and cultural norms and
practices – the vestiges of which exist in the contemporary moment? Some argue that there
would be no need for codified slave masters’ narrative, because white narratives are pervasive
and privileged as normative society. Nevertheless, Blassingame argues that the utilization of
slave narratives methodologically need to include a critical examination into the lives of slavery
era whites:
Neither the whites nor the blacks had a monopoly on truth, had rended the veil cloaking
the life of the other, or had seen clearly the pain and the joy bounded by color and caste.
The perceptions of neither can be accepted as encapsulating the totality of plantation life.
Consequently, whether one focuses on the slaves or the master, one must systematically
examine both black and white testimony. But, just as there are some topics on which only
the masters can provide reliable information, there are some questions that only the slaves
can answer.
197

The idea of POV is problematized with the influence of the editor, complicating sentiments,
ideas, interpretations, intensities, and frequency of events. Perhaps in the process of
narrativizing, this is unavoidable – as storytelling is always under the influence of multiple

197
Blassingame, “Using the Testimony of Ex-Slaves.”

158
determinants. For slave narratives to stand as evidence of the truth, however, racialized alterities
are to be articulated by their corresponding racialized subjectivities.
Looking Back: Black Sociality

Interest in making 12 Years a Slave began in 2008 for Steve McQueen when his wife
Bianca found the book and gave it to her husband. McQueen felt pretty knowledgeable about the
African/Atlantic Slave trade and was familiar with the class of literature known as slave
narratives, however, McQueen was perturbed that he had not heard of Northrup’s story, a story
of free blacks snatched from the streets of America and sold into what Frederick Douglass
referenced as the “internal slave trade”:
ten percent of the African-American population lived free in the north. The story of an
African being taken from Africa to America had for me been told in a very powerful and
effective way through Roots. I wanted to deal with the whole idea of a native American,
as such, who had gone through the same ordeal…
198

McQueen, whose career began as a visual artist, seems to have a penchant for imprisoned,
tortured, yet redeemable souls. His first feature, Hunger (2008), is about the sixty-six day hunger
strike of Irish Republican prisoner Bobby Sands at Northern Ireland’s infamous Prison Maze in
1981; and Shame (2011) tells the story of an everyman who is victim and villain to his own
sexual addiction. The film 12 Years a Slave is similarly concerned with causes of imprisonment
and redemption whether self-imposed or by the hand of another. Despite the lengthy process that
is typical Hollywood studio filmmaking, the timing of 12 Years a Slave can be counted among
the cohort of films spanning the Age of Obama (identified for purposes herein as 2004-2016)

198
“12 Years a Slave Director Steve McQueen Interview,” ODN: On Demand News [online], January 8, 2014,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JqAsdlz_jw

159
principally concerned with historical looks backwards at blackness, real or fictitious, domestic or
diasporic. In addition to Django Unchained and The Help, theatrical film saw the release of
Selma, Red Tails, The Butler, 42, Race, Belle, the French comedy Casé Departe, Lincoln, Hidden
Figures, Free States of Jones, The Birth of a Nation, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Miracle
at St. Anne, Winnie Mandela; television saw The Book of Negros, Underground, the Roots redux,
and historical visitations such as Hell on Wheels, starring hip-hop artist Common as a former
slave, and documentaries such as Slavery by Another Name, 13
th
, etc. Perhaps McQueen was also
touched by Harvey Weinstein’s “Obama Effect,” or a wave of curiosity toward blackness,
sparked by the possibility of electing the first black American president, the excitement of which
sparked the most recent black production cycle spanning the first two decades of the new
century. Without explicitly stating the Obama Effect, in a January 2014 video interview,
McQueen acknowledges that there was something about this moment in the new millennium that
compelled him to tell this story, which had been previously produced for American Playhouse
television as Solomon Northup’s Odyssey by Gordon Parks in 1984:
It was a vile, disgusting violent time in history, and I think people are very ashamed of it
understandably so, but for me, now’s the time, to sort of again as an artist once you sort
of have a situation when you can work with material in a way that you can present it to
the public in a way that you feel is urgent, because it hasn’t been looked at in a real way
before as far as I am concerned, it makes it much more, sort of, how can I say, important
in a way.
199

199
“Steve McQueen on 12 Years a Slave: ‘There’ve been more films about Roman slavery than American,” The
Guardian, 6 January 2014, [online] https://www.theguardian.com/film/video/2014/jan/06/steve-mcqueen-12-
years-a-slave-video-interview

160
McQueen’s assertion that “now’s the time,” accompanied by his sense that there is something
“urgent” about the material (despite the fact that the book is more than one hundred fifty years
old) indicates that he was marginally inspired by the heightened curiosity and visibility of
blackness during Obama’s tenure. There criticisms of yet another film about the horrors of
slavery, however, chief among these complaints was Hollywood’s willingness to make movies
focused on black servitude and subjugation and white dominance and superiority, over and above
contemporary stories and/or high grossing action/genre films particularly those destined for
international distribution. On a $20 million-dollar budget, 12 Years a Slave earned respectable
numbers for an award-season prestige picture: over $56 million domestically in twenty-nine
weeks, and more than $131 million in foreign box office receipts from nearly fifty countries.
Nominated for nine Academy Awards, 12 Years a Slave became winner of Best Picture, the first
written and directed by black filmmakers, Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o), and Best
Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley), two BAFTAs for Best Picture and Best Actor (Chiwetel
Ejiofor), four NAACP Image awards including best picture, a Golden Globe for Best Motion
Picture-Drama. Still, some analyses point to “slave story fatigue” for its ambivalent reception,
especially among black audiences. For actor Morgan Freeman, the prospect of viewing the film
just seemed too much to bear:
I saw a television movie that was made a few years ago about the same character
[Solomon Northup]. But I don’t particularly want to see [12 Years a Slave] …I don’t
want my anger quotient exacerbated, you know? Things are bad enough as they are. I
don’t want to keep punching myself in the face with it.
200

200
“Morgan Freeman Says WTF to GOP, Dishes on Las Vegas, 12 Years a Slave and Batleck,” The Daily Beast,
October 23, 2013, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/23/morgan-freeman-says-wtf-to-gop-dishes-
on-last-vegas-12-years-a-slave-and-batfleck.html.

161
History has not been kind to descendants of the African Slave Trade and Hollywood has, since
its inception, defaulted to black subjugation as the dominant representation of blackness. The
industry’s logic has been informed by a historical record – slavery and its subsequent social
conditions – but not the only historical record of black life, and as such, if black actors and
content producers wanted to play Hollywood’s game, it frequently meant telling stories of
blackness overcoming whiteness but with dignity. Still other factors contributing to this
historical cinematic representation of blackness meant catering to white audiences. Like slave
narratives, Hollywood films are largely processed via acts of white ventriloquism for a white
gaze for better white consumption and palatability, prompting some to claim, as Ralph Ellison
remarked regarding 1949’s spate of cinematic blackness, that while “the role of Negroes in
American life has been given what, for the movies, is a startling new definition” including that of
humanity in films such as Intruder in the Dust, “these films are not about Negroes at all; they are
about what whites think and feel about out Negroes.”
201
One film critic, writing about the overall
ambivalence toward seeing 12 Years a Slave chalked it up to the film’s unflinching portrayal of
slavery, with friends and colleagues offering apologias such as “I’m sorry, I know it’s an
important film, but it sounds too depressing,” or “I know I should go see it, but I don’t think I
can sit through it,” and notes that perhaps President Obama passed on the White House
screening.
202
Yes, as all of the popular criticism has pointed out, 12 Years a Slave was a tough
movie to witness…but the reality of slavery was much more difficult to live; the least we can do
is remember and retell.

201
Ralph Ellison, “The Shadow and the Act,” The Reporter: The Negro Citizen and Other Features 1, no. 17
(December 6, 1949): 17-19.
202
Betsy Sharkey, “Oscars 2014: For many, '12 Years a Slave' is too hard to watch,” Los Angeles Times, February 27,
2014, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-12-years-a-slave-notebook-
20140227-story.html#page=1.

162
Looking Back: From Watching to Witnessing
What do we witness? Violence. And the mundane. It is not far-fetched to say that
violence is what stands out most for many when discussing 12 Years a Slave. In his now famous
review of the film, pop culture critic provocateur Armond White characterizes the violence as
“torture porn,” or excessive amounts of graphic, frequently stylized visceral trauma, likening it to
the slasher flick Saw, and gross out horror The Human Centipede. By McQueen’s accounting
203

the film contains seven incidents of explicit violence, with the Solomon-to-Platt indoctrination,
the tip-toe hanging, and Patsey’s lashing typically noted by audiences. Passionate yet matter-of-
fact about ‘normalized’ violence and verisimilitude, McQueen makes no apologies:
“The world is perverse…chaotic. Within that, one is always trying to find that calm, that
focus. That’s why we have societies. It drives some sort of structure within that sort of
environment [slavery was not proof of senselessness but about] money and power
obviously, and within that you get human suffering.”
204

For McQueen, the world is untamed, threatening, senseless, and it becomes humanity’s task to
impose organization and structure upon that world as a way of both controlling it, but also
making sense of things. By that logic, black humanity is deemed threatening, or ‘chaotically’
unsettling to the twin colonial projects of Enlightenment and modernity. Violence becomes a
central tool for forging structures of capitalistic inequity, with black subjugation both a secretion
of and a rationale for sustaining such a society. Presumably, the recognition of another’s
humanity should be generative of inalienable rights to life and liberty, but McQueen’s thesis
demonstrates how the professing of black humanity only intensifies black repression among

203
Dan P. Lee, “Where It Hurts: Steve McQueen on Why 12 Years a Slave Isn’t Just About Slavery,” Vulture.com,
December 8, 2013, http://www.vulture.com/2013/12/steve-mcqueen-talks-12-years-a-slave.html.
204
Lee, “Where It Hurts.”

163
various strata of white society, where “…white men with even miniscule amounts of authority …
destroy [black] social bonds through sanctioned violence.”
205
Saidiya Hartman is similarly
contemplative about the presence of black humanity and whether, “…the recognition of [black]
humanity held out the promise not of liberating the flesh or redeeming one’s suffering but rather
of intensifying it?... [if] acknowledgement was little more than a pretext for punishment,
dissimulation of the violence of chattel slavery and the sanction given it by the law and state, and
an instantiation of racial hierarchy?”
206
In this cycle of generative violence, the call for black
liberty, freedom, and self-possession continually disrupts the system of white supremacist
capitalistic social formations, and the violence is used by power in an attempt to re-order that
which threatens chaos, black humanity.
Violence in 12 Years a Slave penetrates the postmodernist superficiality of torture porn
with an intensification of trauma that is constitutively bound up with white supremacy’s
quashing of black humanity, the disciplining of black bodies, and black subject formation. Our
witnessing of such is not only revelatory of blackness, but also reveals how whiteness is forged
into subject positions of bystanding beneficiary of white supremacy. This violence is made
(more) perverse against the backdrop of the unspoiled nature of rural nineteenth century
American south. As a stylistic narrative choice, the juxtaposition of violence and its contingent
unpredictability (i.e. extreme, subtle, psychological, physical) with bucolic everydayness throws
both into sharp relief. Together they present a “grotesque realism” where, in a Bakhtinian sense,
the profane – black humanity – is made unrecognizable, undermined and/or otherized. Black

205
Daniel Pecchenino, “A Real American Horror Story: On Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave” Southern Spaces,
University of Southern California Review, February 9, 2014, https://southernspaces.org/2014/real-american-
horror-story-steve-mcqueens-12-years-slave.
206
Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.

164
bodies are made to perform what would be, in any other context, normal acts and displays but
under the plantocracy are made unimaginable. Flannery O’Connor’s thoughts on the grotesque,
freaks, and the vision of the author (albeit literary) is equally useful here. For the southern writer
of southern Gothic, O’Connor articulates characteristics of the grotesque where the author “has
made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the
ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.” O’Connor’s comments underscore that
in this type of storytelling, the transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary need not be
aided by magic realism. Instead,
connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored,
that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and
customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not
always a coherence to their social framework. […] Even though the writer who produces
grotesque fiction may not consider his characters any more freakish than ordinary fallen
man usually is, his audience is going to; and it is going to ask him—or more often, tell
him—why has he chosen to bring such maimed souls alive.”
207

O’Connor’s discussion of character coherence – diegetically, ontologically, and in its ability to
mimic or match the material world – speaks to one of the ways we make sense of what should
otherwise seem fantastical and/or surreal. This coherence allows us to eventually comprehend
these systemic and institutional grotesqueries as today’s hegemony. As Jonathan Chait writes in
a piece entitled “12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era” for New York Magazine, the film reveals
the roots of institutional oppression where “the social system embedded within slavery as

207
Flannery O’Connor, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,”
http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/grotesque.html, Soundcloud.com
https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/flannery-oconnor-grotesque.

165
depicted in the film is one that survived long past the Emancipation Proclamation – the one that
resulted in the murder of Emmett Till a century after Northup published his autobiography.
208
I
argue that as a form of testimony, 12 Years a Slave documents the comingling of the sublime
with the abhorrent, normalizing racialized violence and the coming into being of black disparity
well documented by Myrdall, Moynihan et al, which is still experienced today by black
communities globally.
McQueen routinization of violence via a grotesque realism is not for exploitation but so
that contemporary witnesses can withstand the journey, joined at the hip with our cinematic
interlocutor because “vessel is Solomon Northup. Everyone in the audience is Solomon
Northup.”
209
The levels of intensity of the violence foreclose any possibility of desensitization;
instead of a visceral experience that moves us toward empathy, guilt, then catharsis, we are both
distanced from and connected to those moments through his aesthetics (meditative long takes,
handheld camera, etc.) where we achieve epistemological comprehension of how blacks and
whites endured an everyday existence that was admixture of extreme brutality, humanity,
banality, and beauty. A realism of the grotesque then allows us to witness how others see and not
see, how violence against black corpus, including that of the “family,” leads to a marking of
blackness as degraded. We see an unknown female character engaging in sexual congress with
Solomon then rolling over and crying. Mistress Ford asserts that Eliza will soon forget her
children who have been sold away from her. Solomon’s “pass” allows him to travel
unaccompanied to purchase household goods for Mistress Epps, but his freedom falls flat when
he stumbles upon a random lynching in the woods (which reminds us that white surveillance can

208
Jonathan Chait, “12 Years a Slave and the Obama Era,” New York Magazine, December 4, 2013,
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/12-years-a-slave-and-the-obama-era.html.
209
“TIFF’S 12 Years a Slave Paints a Complex Portrait of Slavery,” CBC news, September 08, 2013,
http://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/tiff-s-12-years-a-slave-paints-complex-portrait-of-slavery-1.1701787.

166
emerge from anywhere at any time). There are children blithely playing in the background as
Solomon dangles from the noose tied to the tree; laconic shots of unidentified blacks in the hot
sun picking cotton; Master Epps happily holding a little black girl of about five years old in his
arms perhaps grooming her for sexual exploitation, a Patsey-in-waiting. The cumulative effect of
random and spontaneous acts of psychic and physical violence, the always-present watching
whiteness, the disavowal of black natal connection and familial importance, the act of black
seeing and not seeing (which will be elaborated upon shortly), all suggest a surreal quality to the
management of habitus, or power relations regulated by socio-cultural strictures and practices.
Furthermore, McQueen’s cinematic testimonial to American slavery also demonstrates
the complex and fragmented formation of a black body politic. Solomon Northup was born a free
black man in the north, his speech bespeaks intellectual engagement with a bourgeois class (i.e.
he talks ‘white’),
210
he was skilled at engineering, carpentry, and a violinist. Once help from the
north arrives, Northup takes it, and in a very non-Hollywood happy ending adhering to the facts,
leaves Patsey and the others with whom he had bonded behind. This abandonment is an
excruciatingly painful action but, to tell the truth, what any member of the viewing audience
would have also done. Jared Bowen, Arts Editor for WGBH Boston, in an on-air
review/discussion shares that “it’s incumbent for everybody to see [12 Years a Slave],” as it is
“the best depiction of slavery ever committed to film” and acknowledges the fraught nature of
black and white living from the period as very uncomfortable to watch largely as a result of

210
Criticisms aimed at the sophisticated speech of Northup and Eliza seem to disregard literacy and constant
exposure both had in circulating in privileged white culture in the north: Northup had the aid of a white editor/co-
writer, David Wilson but nonetheless had to dictate the narrative contents and presumably read the text for
approval; Eliza was the mistress of a prominent local white businessman, the father of her daughter, who exposed
her to levels of sophistication and refinery until his death at which time the businessman’s daughter sold Eliza and
her children to internal slave traders.

167
difficult ‘choices’ and “how they managed these untenable situations.”
211
While there is no
expectation that blackness would exist monolithically, McQueen makes visible the uneven
development and relations among blacks, and how for some the conditions of slavery stifled
notions of solidarity in favor of individual gain, as much as it drove others to conspire against
power. Indeed, Northup reveals his own forced complicity when he describes his role as slave
driver (wherein he claims to have faked floggings to other slaves), or moments of ‘fairness’ to
whites whom he counted as allies. The idea of a black body politic, which assumes a solidarity
among a differentiated, non-monolithic blackness unified at a minimum for the prevention of
anti-black genocide, struggles to take form in 12 Years a Slave. McQueen makes the uneven
development and relations among blacks visible during Northup’s early capture as he and other
black men attempt to strategize a way out of their captivity in the holding pen, and where upon
the boat’s arrival to the dock, one of the captives runs like an infant into the arms of his white
patron, rather than remaining with his black brethren and staging open revolt. Once divided,
individuals could achieve personal gain (albeit limited). As part of this same public television
review/discussion, Vincent Brown, professor of History and African American Studies at
Harvard agrees that the film is illustrative in making the fractured nature of blackness visible:
What you see is how difficult and how hard won and how fragile solidarity is in this kind
of situation where there is always an advantage to breaking solidarity with someone weak
and powerless, another slave, and trying to make an affiliation with someone powerful
who can do something for you who can elevate your circumstances….rather than make
common cause with another slave.
212

211
“12 Years A Slave A Stirring Portrayal of Slavery,” WGBH News, October 24, 2013,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT4UA495Ihs.
212
“12 Years A Slave A Stirring Portrayal of Slavery,” WGBH News.

168
To Brown’s point, the fractured relations created by white divide & conquer strategies
along with the prospect of upward mobility, problematize the idea of a “linked fate” among
blacks, where “African Americans believe that their own self-interests are linked to the interests
of the race.” Professional sports offers high profile examples where race and capitalism clash:
from Jack Johnson, Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson in the Jim Crow era, to Muhammed Ali’s
conversion to Islam and protest of the Viet Nam war, and the Tommie Smith and John Carlos
recuperated black power fist at the 1968 Olympics, to conservative attitudes held by OJ Simpson,
Michael Jordan, and Arthur Ashe in the post-Civil Rights, the latter of which lamented about the
burden of representation that comes from “the socially mandated responsibility for prominent
African Americans to have a social role”
213
to uplift the race, to professional football quarterback
Colin Kaepernick’s silent/kneeling protest of police brutality against black communities in the
post-racial era. These sports figures are a mere sampling of a non-monolithic black
consciousness constantly and dynamically negotiating what it speaks back to power. Displays of
power producing trauma, dissociation, dislocation, and destruction could happen at any time,
frustrating assemblages of family and community, much less solidarity. Writing in 1997, Saidiya
Hartman summarized the impact of white displays of power that reinforce various aspects of
master-slave subject positions such as:
…forcing the enslaved to witness the beating, torture, and execution of slaves, changing
the names of slave children on a whim to emphasize to slave parents that the owner, not
the parents, determined the child’s fate, and requiring slaves to sing and dance for the
owners entertainment and feign their contentment. Such performances confirmed the

213
Ajay Singh, “Arthur Ashe’s Burden: not racism, but ‘being black’,” UCLA Newsroom, February 21, 2007,
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/070221_ashe.

169
slaveholder’s dominion and made the captive body the vehicle of the master’s power and
truth.
214

Borrowing Hartman’s characterization of blackness as “social relationality rather than identity,”
we comprehend the degree to which violence and power (personal or otherwise) structure
everyday blackness materially and representationally. If Northup’s assertion that the system and
institution of slavery is productive of whites’ inhumanity toward blacks, then this system would
also be productive of black powerlessness. Brown’s comments reflect the mindset and
experiences of slavery-era blacks who, given few to no options, participated in various strata of
the institution if for no other reason than as a survival strategy.
The aligning of oneself with power as part of the system and institution of slavery is
perhaps most startling among the non-elite whites, ‘bystanders’ who choose to align themselves
with ruling class whites rather than coalescing with other labor and poverty class proletariat in an
overthrow of capitalist oppression. This type of whiteness, where poor whites are made to
believe in their own superiority to the social, economic, and political exclusion of other races,
can compel lower class whites to operate against their own self-interest if the alternative means
that other races will benefit. At the end of the day, the poorest and most downtrodden white
classes can take comfort in their white poverty and say “at least I’m not a nigger.” Allegiance to
whiteness can be seen in the figures of: Tibeats, the contract laborer who is upstaged by
Northup’s carpentry to the pleasure of other slaves who congratulate Solomon with backslaps;
the well-meaning liberal-minded Master Ford who when forced to make a choice, sends
Solomon away rather than have a confrontation with Tibeats; and Mistresses Ford and Epps, the
latter of which knows that her husband prefers Patsey, “queen of the fields […] nigger among

214
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 8.

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niggers” as Epps refers to the slave in the film, over herself but chooses to remain with Epps
(and terrorize Patsey). In these examples, 12 Years a Slave shows us how the illusion of white
superiority is simultaneously seductive and heretical: the egotism of white American
exceptionalism that manifests into an ‘entitled’ American Dream (predicated on systems of racial
oppression) trumps Christianity’s command that we love one another, in effect elevating white
supremacy over Godliness.
Thus far, we have witnessed how in 12 Years a Slave violence couples with the mundane
to produce grotesqueries as normal life, disintegration of family as normal, and how it
undermines notions of black solidarity for the promise of perceived individual gain. Further, we
see in the film how blacks were denied citizenship status, regulated under legal statutes (slave
codes), denied protections under common law, and were recognized for agency under the law
only when criminalized.
215
The planting of these seeds continues to bear fruit in contemporary
black life, particularly when we consider that the family unit is sine qua non the core of an
organized society. McQueen’s take on the use of violence has been one where the violence
cannot be separate from the institution. In a 2013 Vulture.com interview, the filmmaker is clear
with writer Dan Lee that his use of violence was “a surgical exercise,” taken to mean that given
the poetics of storytelling, each instance was an economical and expedient way toward revealing
character, advancing plot, or both. Lee recounts his conversation with McQueen in which the
filmmaker reflects on what he believes to be an acceptable amount of violence in the film:
By [McQueen’s] recollection, there are just six instances in the film. He began counting
them on his fingers. ‘There’s Solomon getting beaten for the first time. One person being
killed on the boat, stabbed to death. What else is there? After that, there’s the hanging.

215
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85.

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The lynching in the woods. The bottle impacts his face…’ The scratching of Patsey’s
face? I offered, referring to when Epps’s jealous wife digs her nails down Patsey’s cheek.
He looked at me with surprise. ‘Really?’ he asked. ‘The scratching?’ It had struck me as
one of the most horrible things I’d seen on film. He paused. ‘Then maybe there’s about
seven […] or so in a movie which lasts two hours and ten minutes.’
216

Interestingly, in McQueen’s recounting of incidents, he does not count the rape of Patsey as a
moment of violence. When asked about Epps’ treatment of Patsey, specifically as her captor and
rapist, McQueen states that while Patsey garners tremendous compassion, he has “huge
sympathy for Epps because he’s in love with Patsey. The funny thing about love: You can’t
choose love. Love chooses you. […] Epps is a human being,…And as much as we want to think
of him as a monster, as a devil, he’s not.”
217
Conventions of classical Hollywood storytelling
demand certain narrative elements, most notably a goal-oriented protagonist, formidable
antagonists, and conflict. Not only does 12 Years a Slave provide audiences with a non-
traditional atypical hero in the form of Solomon Northup as witness-to-action, but its filmmaker
‘humanizes’ one of the film’s formidable villains, Edwin Epps, whom Northup refers to in his
slave narrative as “a hard, cruel, unjust man” by having him be in love with Patsey.
In his written text, Northup provides no specific story or occurrence where he witnessed
sexual violations against Patsey, but instead makes mention of Epps’ licentiousness and Mistress
Epps’ jealousy toward Patsey, a “victim of lust and hate, [who] had no comfort of her life.”
218

Nevertheless, McQueen, Michael Fassbender, and Sarah Paulson who play Master and Mistress
Epps in the film, have independently shared during junket interviews that Epps is in love with

216
Lee, “Where it Hurts.”
217
Lee, “Where it Hurts.”
218
Northup, Twelve Years a Slave, 80.

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Patsey but does not understand why. As such he is compelled to destroy what he does not
understand, thus they render his violence toward Patsey consistent and rational within the
construct of that character-- in a word, Epps is ‘conflicted.’ In his written discussion of her
sprightliness, ability to pick more cotton than any other slave on the plantation, and overall good
natured personality, Northup lingers momentarily on the brutality Patsey experiences at the
hands of Master Epps: his fixation upon her, and his accusatory ways towards her. Actions of
kindness, tenderness, or a desire for intimacy are absent Northup’s characterization of Epps.
Furthermore, it is worth noting that Edwin Epps was not a character but an actual person to
whose interiority Northup was not privy.
Why then, does the filmmaker choose to represent the rape of Patsey as motivated by
Epps’ deep abiding affection for his chattel property? Why must this battered, bruised, and
broken black woman’s mind, body, and soul remunerate Epps’ sympathy? Aside from her
‘grooming’ from Mistress Shaw (Alfrie Woodard), a black former slave in concubinage to a
nearby planter, Patsey has one moment of comfort as she fashions dolls from discarded husks
and fronds even if it is under the surveilling and jealous eye of Mistress Epps from on high. In
our omniscience, we witness a moment where someone called Patsey is simply being. Since
Northup makes no specific mention of sexual acts between Epps and Patsey within his book,
other storytelling choices could have been made by McQueen regarding the character Epps’
softer side. Truthfully, 12 Year a Slave could not, nor should it have, avoided a white-slave-
master-raping-black-slave-woman scene, what one could call a convention of the Civil
War/plantation/slavery subgenre as established by Gridlestone’s attempted rape of Sylvia (who,
unbeknownst to him, is in fact his daughter) in Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film Within Our Gates.

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The argument here lies in looking back into the past and witnessing a subject position-defining
moment that provides insight into contemporary social relationality of black women.
Hortense Spillers and Saidiyia Hartman, two black female scholars, have written
extensively on the black female sexual subjection. From their writings and others, we understand
the socio-cultural and political inscription of the black female form as one of degradation that
first ‘invites,’ then rationalizes sexual domination. Rape is only one of many tactics used to
transform the black female into the slave, or an instance of Hartman calls the “dispossessed
subject/object of property.”
219
In addition to sexual violence, Patsey experiences other acts of
psychological and physically violence, tactics used to reinforce her subject position as slave such
as a blow to the head from a thrown crystal decanter, constant whip-cracking from an overseer
while in the fields, fingernails dug into her cheek by Mistress Epps, and the much-reported
flogging. We should keep in mind that this was daily life for Patsey and countless others over
centuries. For Spillers, slavery as a “spectacle of successive displacement” constantly works to
“square a circle,” or transmogrify black Africans into slaves (and white Europeans into masters).
Further, within slave systems of dominance and under the hegemony of ethnicity, black bodies
lose gender differentiation where the “female body and the male body become a territory of
cultural and political maneuver.”
220
Patriarchy, with its historical demonstrations of sexual terror
globally, shares a mutually constitutive relationship with slave technologies, institutional
sanctions, and violence for purposes of empire-building and ethnic cleansing in producing male
dominated social structures. This suggests that gender is at least as relevant to this discussion as
is race. Where American slavery is concerned, the female black body once objectified and

219
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85.
220
Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 20.

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othered, is considered the source of an “irresistible, destructive sensuality…[as] the black body is
always ready for ‘pornotroping,’” or the power to lay the black body bare for sexualization,
wherein the slave “embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general
‘powerlessness.’”
221
Hartman argues that “the normativity of sexual violence establishes an
inextricable link between racial formation and sexual subjection”
222
and that this mode of
dominance functions as a self-perpetuating “vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation, and
enjoyment.”
223
The continued denial of power – political, personal, and sexual – among slaves
was the necessary outcome to the white regime’s displays and performances of power. Not only
did the raping of slaves produce female subjection and powerlessness, it also established the
black female form as the locus for demonstrations of male physical and psychological perversity
of the sexual nature.
The scene opens with the wide shot of the evening sky, where a full moon hangs in the
upper left corner framed within the frame by nighttime clouds. It is bedtime. We cut to the
interior of the slave quarters, the faint creak of a wooden porch precedes Master Epps’ arrival
through the entrance; Epps peers down at someone. We cut to a medium close on Solomon, his
motionless body rests on his palette eyes forward; his slightly furrowed brow is the only clue we
have of his awareness of two sets of legs that pass between him and us. Next we see Epps and
Patsey in the night air, both in profile, Epps towering over her petit frame, full of anticipation
staring into her face, her avoidant gaze fixed on his chest. Gently Epps allows his forehead to
meet and rest against Patsey’s, whose body slightly buckles from his contact, her retreat into
powerlessness visible. She gently collapses backwards, prostrate onto a low edifice, face now

221
Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 206.
222
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 85.
223
Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 26.

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slightly turned toward us. Save for the hint of moonlight across her cheek, the night colludes
with Epps and her dark skin: Patsey’s powerlessness and retreat manifests as invisibility.
Crickets and other night time resonances cut through their tension-filled silence – words are
unnecessary for what is to take place. In a medium close two-shot, Patsey’s body convulses with
each of Epps’ repeated penetrating thrusts. Patsey’s face reveals that she has retreated into a sort
of “third space,” where the oppressed dissociate from their bodies as a survival strategy against
sexual terror. Desperate to turn silence into seduction, compliance into consent, Epps grunts and
claws at her neck, turning her chin toward his own. He searches her face and looks into her eyes
for connection. Even though they are face to face, Patsey looks above Epps’ hairline, refusing to
allow him access to her soul. We, the audience, are denied ruptures in time and space as there are
no cuts here: for seventy uninterrupted seconds we witness very up close, how Epps defines
aspects of his own power as he orchestrates Patsey’s retreat into powerlessness. While
domination reveals itself as the patriarchal order’s purpose, race in this instance is what gives it
its social, cultural, and legal power to rape with impunity, as “political domination frequently
produces a sexual dimension that cannot be controlled by the forces that (re)produce it.”
224
It is
only after Epps has completed his business and Patsey remains in her retreat, do seduction and
complicity expose themselves to be self-made lies and delusion: Epps, pathetic in his
countenance, slaps and chokes Patsey who continually refuses to give him what he wants –
approval.
Representationally, the filmmaker assumes that he has the power to determine the
meanings coded within his captured images, revealing a desired truth, which for McQueen et al,
is love. But his ideological camera collapses under the weight of an historical record that coded

224
Alexander G. Weheliye, “Deprivations: Pornotropes,” Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 71-72.

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black women as anathema as a result of both their sex and race. No matter how hard he tries to
add narrative complexity to his antagonist, McQueen’s camera reveals that it is not love that
moves Epps, but the physical gratification that accompanies the power to commit sexual terror.
In framing the cinematic moment as love – alone under a moonlit evening sky, high gloss
resolution, low-key/high contrast lighting for dramatic emotional effect, crickets, heavy uneven
breathing, guttural utterances – McQueen has reasserted a form of eroticized racialized
domination as seductive, irrational romanticism. This is problematic because the black form for
many still signifies degradation and subjection, silence, invisibility, and powerlessness which
continue to confound black female sexuality with sexual and physical violence among men of all
races in the contemporary moment. For over twenty years (1988-2010), Lonnie David Franklin
Jr., an African American school bus mechanic, dubbed the “Grim Sleeper” kidnapped, murdered,
then raped black women in South Los Angeles, many of whom were drug addicts, sex workers,
or both. All of their bodies were found in alleys or secluded street spaces. Convicted in 2010 of
ten homicides and sentenced to the death penalty in 2016, the Los Angeles Police Department
was negligent in informing the community of the presence of a serial killer and slow to
investigate; doing so might have prevented many of these deaths. The dismissal of these
homicides in this black community lead many to conclude that if these crimes had occurred “in
Westwood or Mount Washington [white, affluent] by a single nut case operating over 23 years, it
would be big news at City Hall.”
225
In 2015, Oklahoma City by Police Officer Danial Holtzclaw
was convicted of the rapes and assaults of thirteen black women and sentenced to over two
hundred years in prison. In both the Franklin and Holtzclaw cases, most of the victims were

225
Christine Pelisek, “Grim Sleeper Returns: He’s Murdering Angelenos, as Cops Hunt his DNA,” LA Weekly, August
27, 2008, http://www.laweekly.com/news/grim-sleeper-returns-hes-murdering-angelenos-as-cops-hunt-his-dna-
2155416.

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black women with histories of prostitution, drug addiction, or both. The implication is clear: the
always already pornotroped black female body can be easily targeted for victimization because
black women do not matter.
Violent deaths of mostly black males largely perpetrated by police officers across the
United States during the Age of Obama sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, founded by
Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, three black women, subsequent to the murder of
seventeen-year old Trayvon Martin in 2012. The preponderance of, and subsequent
spectacularization on social media of black male homicide would for some obscure the domestic
terrorism experienced by black women; ‘black’ in #BlackLivesMatter came to mean black
males. Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights activist, critical race theory scholar, and law professor
would initiate #SayHerName in the wake of Sandra Bland’s 2015 death while in police custody.
This movement was not a “me too” or “what about us” gesture intended to undermine
#BlackLivesMatter; instead it sought to remind us that while race codified the target, sex
rendered violence against black cis- and transgender women negligible and therefore invisible.
By saying her name – from Eleanor Bumpers in New York in 1984 (and far too many before her)
to a pregnant Charleena Lyles in 2017 Seattle – the memory of denigrated black femaleness
would not disappear into powerless, silent retreat like Patsey or be relegated to back alleys.
In so many ways, 12 Years a Slave shows us from whence came the ease with which we
see anti-black trauma, yet look away (for complex reasons) and therefore take no mind and no
action. Frustratingly, what gets left out of this type of commentary is that 1) indeed millions of
blacks and whites not only survived but participated in the institution of slavery, and 2) that the
violence was the enforcement of western democracy’s normalization of their respective subject
positions resulting from colonial capitalist conquest. As Blessingame has required, we are also

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witness to how whiteness has come to see and not see anti-black domestic terrorism: what would
Mistress Shaw’s response have been if Platt (Northup) had disclosed having stumbling upon the
lynching party in the woods while on the way to the store? How different would it have been
from deniers of slavery’s lasting legacy of racial disparity, or more pointedly, deniers to the
history of state-sanctioned use of excessive force against blackness, such as the spate of anti-
black homicides committed with impunity by modern day law enforcement? Would she have
blamed the black man hanging from the tree for his lynching?
It is the normalizing of the walk to the grocery store wearing a tag that identifies you as
someone else’s property, then dutifully returning to the plantation that is the horror. We realize
that Northup and countless others like him had moments, sometimes fleeting, where their
physical, emotional, sexual, spiritual, intellectual, expressive, familial, and financial being was
not under the surveillance and control by representatives of white social strata. The violence of
12 Years a Slave is discomforting for audiences because its juxtapositions throw into sharp relief
the forging-then-normalizing of racialized and gendered American social relations of dominance
and subjugation. We also realize that narratively Northup’s character is not a hero in accordance
with Joseph Campbell’s narrative mythology, but instead he is our guide toward understanding
how blackness has co-existed with whiteness within centuries of trauma, oppression, and
violence, yet still finds moments to steal away from master’s constant surveillance to make dolls
from discarded husks.
Stylistically, Vincent Brown calls out the “psychological realism” of 12 Years a Slave
and suggests that different moments in history demand different stylistic approaches to the
representation of slavery. The stylistic change, largely in tone and subjectivity, can be attributed
to history; it is not slavery that has changed, but the viewing audiences. We can mark 1977’s

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Roots, airing on ABC, a major network, as a “no sh*t” exclamation point to our modernist
awakening from the self-delusion of American Exceptionalism, as the first Hollywood-produced
and globally-circulated counternarrative to dominant narratives of slave era daily life. Winning
nine Emmys, the eight part, ten-hour long miniseries, estimated to have been viewed by over half
of the US American population, by over 130 million Americans. It was a watershed moment in
the level of ignorance and occlusion of truth to America’s history. It would take another seven
years for us to revisit the subject, again on television, with Gordon Parks’ Solomon Northup
Odyssey, arriving at the dawn of President Reagan’s war on drugs which would decimate black
communities and prime the nation for the tidal wave of black and brown incarceration of the
1990s. While Odyssey was PBS’s American Playhouse (a much smaller audience), ABC would
air in 1985, 1986, and 1994 North and South, about the US Civil War. Not until Edward Zwick’s
1989 Glory does Hollywood filmmaking take up this issue with any appreciable effort and
impact. Following Brown’s comments, Hollywood has taken a gradualist approach to shedding
key light on the actualities of slavery, however pabulum the approach. It makes sense then, that
in an era of desensitization to graphic violence, 2012’s 12 Years a Slave would strip us bare to
the flesh of the issue, because as Brown offers “he who feels it, knows it.” Among all of
slavery’s ugly truths, we meet Solomon Northup, the filmic protagonist, as a non-hero – he could
not fight the system, he could only wait and bear witness. As embodied moral virtue, Northup
rendered in the melodramatic mode moves from “victim to victorious.” In the Obama Era,
however, Northup’s victory is bittersweet as we know countless blacks remained enslaved – and
because of Northup’s direct address into the camera, we, the audience, are marked not as slaves
and masters, but as bystanders, on the sidelines at the scene of the crime, bearing witness.

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CONCLUSION

Looking Forward: Traces of Change
Under no circumstances must America be addressed and told that the only alternative to the
status quo is to overthrow that civilization which we consider to be the faith of our fathers, the
faith indeed of your fathers, this is what must animate whatever ameliorism [sic] must come
because if it does finally come to a confrontation, a radical confrontation, between giving up
what we understand to be the best features of the American way of life which at that level is
indistinguishable so far as I can see from the European way of life, then we will fight the issue.
William F. Buckley, Cambridge, 1965
In 1965, writer/intellectuals James Baldwin and William F. Buckley participated in a
debate at Cambridge University titled “Has the American Dream Been Achieved at the Expense
of the American Negro?” Save for Baldwin friend Sidney Poitier, the decidedly liberal nearly all
white and male audience in attendance listen with rapt attention at the presenters’ orations on a
topic for which there is only one answer: yes. Entertaining yes, surprising or revelatory, not
really. But Buckley’s above quote from 1965 has implications for today and the future, as it calls
back to Frederick Douglass’ pronouncement about power. In a moment global decolonization
with ‘new’ nations declaring independence in former European outposts, Buckley declares that
the American regime of whiteness, or “status quo,” will not go quietly without a fight, as
evidenced by aggression toward the Civil Rights movements. This was evident then, and
continues to be apparent presently. To wit, reaction to the election of the first black president of
the United States of America was both revered and reviled. It is the argument of this project that
President Barack Obama increased black visibility and curiosity both domestically and abroad.
That heightened visibility led to elevated participation of blacks through all sectors of society,
but also increased surveillance and containment of blackness. The seemingly increased number
of black murders by law enforcement and civilians signaled an alarming paradox and
contradiction associated with black visibility during the Obama Age: the Charleston church

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shooting, the police killings of Alton Philips and Philando Castile one day apart in 2016, Samuel
DuBose in 2015, John Crawford in 2014 and countless other shootings tracked by The
Washington Post reveal how just being black is a risk factor for this type of violence,
demonstrates a fundamental conundrum of being black in America that is only amplified by the
post racial moment. Inclusive of President Obama’s two terms in office sustained obstruction
from Congress gave proof to the fact that whiteness will fight to maintain its own status quo and
where following the rules was never a guarantor of black enfranchisement and full societal
participation in mainstream society.
Obama’s commitment to see all sides of an issue, and to be president for all of the people
appears to have been shaped by a broader set of factors that did not just speak to the black
American condition. Benedictine monk and poet John Lydgate’s words made famous by
President Abraham Lincoln of not being able to please all of the people all of the time was never
more evident than during President Obama’s tenure. What would be considered acceptable
performance expectations for any non-white, non-male US president? What measures of black
progress could one anticipate given the nation’s history of white supremacy, institutional racism,
and violence imposed to maintain established racial hierarchies? And, does President Obama’s
presence reveal lasting tensions in black progress gradualism/integrationist thinking and that of
black nationalism and self-determination? As Michelle Obama oft stated, when they go low, we
go high; but it is unclear as evidenced by these incidents whether this tact will lead to the
eventual undoing of the shackles of white supremacy that continue to structure, contain and
immobilize blackness.
The title “Historical Depictions of Slavery and Civil Rights in 21st Century American
Film: Global Circulation of Post-racial Ideology in the Age of Obama” was a long one but

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necessary in an effort to capture Hollywood’s participation in elevated black visibility and
curiosity in this moment. Hollywood’s reaction was a sustain look at blackness via one of its
periodic black production cycles, and more interestingly, its sustained look backwards at
blackness, via a constant stream of narratively centered black subjectivity historically situated.
This sub-cycle of films, notably focusing on the antebellum slavery and Civil Rights eras seemed
to respond to the question, why is the election of nation’s first black president so important with
“well, we need to look at from where blackness has come to truly understand,” reasserting the
notion of black progress.
In summary of the research, this examination of the Hollywood lore that “black do well
in foreign” as a general Hollywood rule for mainstream film productions pointed to a need to
reflect upon those instances where Hollywood broke its own rule. One way to have disproved the
lore would have been to have tracked the success of black stars such as Sidney Poitier, Eddie
Murphy, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith Halle Berry, and Denzel Washington, to name a few.
These performers have demonstrated their international “bankability,” or ability to attract
sufficient financing against the ‘promise’ that monies will be recuperated from box office
receipts. But there are too many other variable that contribute to the popularity of individual
performers who at least since studio reprioritization of international box office in the early
1980s, typically performed characters who happened to be black in all white worlds. This
project was more concerned with sustained moments of black cinematic production as supported
by Hollywood that would receive global distribution and with it marketing and promotions, that
centralized black themes or the black ‘condition’ as its narrative thrust. Of primary concern were
the catalysts for Hollywood breaking its own rule; and secondarily, what conditions precipitated
these cycles; and, what type of product was produced?

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The approach or focus was to capture the most recent moment and articulate these
conditions that encouraged, supported, and sustained Hollywood’s extended look at blackness,
and more specifically, its look backwards in time at blackness. In no way exhaustive, some key
elements proved to be at play. The election of the first black president is at the center of this
observation: by looking backwards at various moments of blackness overcoming obstacles of
whiteness during Obama’s presidency, we are able to say in the affirmative, that there has been
black progress. But we know that the idea of progress is problematic given widespread inequality
of average blacks across all sectors particularly health, economic, incarceration, and as
mentioned, deadly acts of police and community violence ostensibly due to a presumption of
black criminality. It can also be said that our relationship to history has played a role in this
moment: that films such as The Help can fabricate a historical timeline, that Django Unchained
can fantasize a particular form of black liberation, and that 12 Years a Slave and recall history as
a form of contemporary testimony demonstrates a pliable history that in the hands of filmmakers
represent for audiences, multiple truths.
The relevance of such a discussion reveals a need for more attention to be paid to history
and how it is manipulated to suit certain ideological and political agendas. For example, The
Help in both novel and film formats is used in schools as a way to education elementary age
children about history when both are undeniably and significantly flawed both in its facts and
racial representations. Django Unchained sparked ire from cinema historians and critical race
theorists who castigated Quentin Tarantino’s presentation of an “exceptional negro” when there
were indeed black cowboys, and blacks who rebelled against slave conditions. And 12 Years a
Slave, while effectively demonstrating from whence came the seeds of black social and
communal destruction, regressed in its romanticizing of sexual violence against black women for

184
purposes of dramatic characterization. It must be remembered that all of these films and
numerous others produced in the Obama Age were globally distributed and contributed to a
larger global cultural imaginary of blackness which rooted in colonial racist past, must
continually be “overcome” if Hollywood’s lore is to be believed. While it is not possible to
please all of the people all of the time, Hollywood’s need to balance good storytelling with social
consciousness remains fraught.
As a trend, film cycles come and go, usually catalyzed by some “inciting incident” or
occurrence that fuels the moment. Once that moment has spent its fuel and consumed its own
energy, the cycle comes to a close. What is problematic about Hollywood’s tradition of black
film cycles is their perceived disposability: they are treated as if they operate outside of “the”
industry so that once the cycle has consumed itself, there is no negative effect to the “real”
industry once it spins itself into exhaustion. However, these film cycles typically leave traces
which are then recuperated into the mainstream of the industry. At a minimum, the demonstrated
profitability of emerging new talent drives agents and managers to continue to find new projects
for their black performers; because of having had access to the process, opportunity to establish
credible relationships, and demonstrated box office successes, black creatives (writers, directors,
composers, etc.) and technicians (cinematographers, make-up and hair, etc.) find themselves
working on ‘mainstream’ industry productions. And black executives (development, producers,
distributors, etc.) are able to work their way into more of those rooms where projects are
“greenlit.” The trend here is that as more diversity occurs in front of the camera, so too will
diversity find itself behind the camera, below the line, and behind the desks. Further, with
growing audiences conscious about these elements (especially among millennials), the growing
power of fandom and the internet, industry players will be compelled to respond. For example,

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actor Ed Skrein walked away from playing Major Ben Daimio in the Hellboy 2, which is a mix-
race Japanese character. Emma Stone, Tilda Swinton, and Scarlett Johansson all played
Asian/mixed race Asian characters in films during the Obama Age which did not go without
public condemnation. This is made more interesting when considering Asian characters played
by Mickey Rooney, Shirley McClain, and John Wayne in eras past. This is not to say that
Hollywood will avoid this type of star stunt casting in the future; instead it points to the pressure
that the public places on actors to not engage in this type of whitewashing non-white characters
made more obvious during the Obama Age. We can expect that as racial demographics and
global geopolitics shift, audience demands will too. The good news is that film and television has
made interesting choices in black representation during the Obama Age. Films such as the 2016
Best Picture Oscar winner Moonlight by Barry Jenkins, about black masculinity and love
revealed a poignancy rarely afforded black males and when considered in the context of
President Obama’s masculinity and his emotional displays at the numerous national racialized
tragedies which occurred under his watch, helps us to see black masculinity in more complex
ways. Other films such as Jordan Peele’s 2017 popular gothic horror/melodrama Get Out, which
harkens back to Bakhtin’s grotesquery and violence normalized for blackness, became the first
debut film to earn $100 million at the box office (on a $4.5 million budget, the film eventually
grossed $175 million domestic, $77 million internationally). Television, cable and streaming
have all taken a millennial approach to race which is open discussed in the post-racial moment:
Blackish, Atlanta, and the re-boot of 24 all gained audiences in the post Obama Age. And,
audiences are eagerly anticipating the arrival of Marvel’s Black Panther set for a 2018 release, an
all black cast, directed by black filmmaker, Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed).
The largest observation has been in this nation’s struggle with having arrived at its

186
current state of post-racialism where we are both acutely aware of how race continues to
structure and order society as well as individuals, but are at a stalemate as to what is to be done
about its negative effects. In effect, for the Obama Age, post-racial is not the absence of racism
but a paradox that simultaneously acknowledges and disavows racism: heightened visibility
of/curiosity about black progress intensifies resistance to black progress. Further, as the films
examined here in as produced by Hollywood demonstrates, blackness continues to be bound up
with whiteness. Finally, the entirety of this project underscores the need for further research into
market conditions and distribution practices that track film box office performances
comparatively, demographically, geographically, and temporally. As long as the industry has
become more corporate minded, these results can become factors in future decisions regarding
industry practices, and ancillary relations (film schools, festivals, criticism, scholarship, etc.).
In the Post Obama Age, the United States has shifted radically to an overtly racist
discourse led by Donald Trump, who built his political legacy inciting “birthers” to challenge
Barack Obama’s legitimacy for the presidency. At the same time, the alarming growth in police
killings of Blacks, as well as the disturbing numbers of viewings of Black deaths shot on camera
phones—many millions of them by whites, presumably repeated viewings—have returned this
country to a time when the most virulent racism has become acceptable, even prevalent.
White Europeans have a long history of death rituals as spectacles – hanging, beheading,
drawn/quartered, stoning, crucifixion, burning at the stake – but implicit in its occurrence in
black spectacular death is an affirmation of whiteness and assertion of its power. One way to
think about this is to perceive blackness’ claim to inalienable and legal rights as crimes against
the state: to prosecute and execute restitution against this claimant, is to uphold the state (and its
rhizomorphic relationship to whiteness). In his famous July 5
th
1852 oratory “The Meaning of

187
July Fourth for the Negro,” Frederick Douglass draws parallels between the American’s
Revolutionary War and its institution of slavery, which point to American hypocrisies between
liberty idealized and liberty practiced:
To say now that America was right, and England is wrong is exceedingly easy.
Everybody can say it; the dastard, not less than the noble brave, can flippantly discant on
the tyranny of England toward the American Colonies, It is fashionable to do so; but
there was a time when, to pronounce against England, and in favor of the cause of the
colonies, tried men’s souls. They who did so were accounted in their day plotters of
mischief, agitators and rebels, dangerous men.
226

The claim to freedom for blacks was a crime against the state in the antebellum period; and in the
Obama Era, the claim to legal gun ownership for blacks unsettles whiteness and power,
compelling gun rights groups to push legislators and the public away from legislative remedies,
toward suppression responses, which creates more spectacular black deaths at the hands of the
state. Its public display is material evidence of the state’s power which it claims to have which
citizens confer via ‘consent.’
Since the American Revolution, blacks have demonstrated their support for the “grand
ole flag” or, the US National Flag, a symbol for a republic that by its very nature and
construction is fraught with contradiction and hypocrisy with each successive version from
thirteen to fifty stars a marker of the nation’s inhumanity toward non-whites. Thus, as impossible
as it is for Obama to escape his blackness, it is equally impossible for the grand old flag to
escape the colonial-racist context in which it was formed. Nevertheless, blacks would serve the
nation and stand behind what the “Stars and Stripes” symbolically espouses and to what it

226
Frederick Douglass, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro,” 1852.

188
aspires. Black participation in representational politics since Reconstruction has largely been
shaped by an assimilationist and integrationist ethos, at its core, a desire to demonstrate fidelity
to God, country, and family; in a word, Americanness. In effect, in efforts to demonstrate good
citizenship and improve the black American condition, blacks entered into the political sphere
and engaged the political machines established under a white supremacist regime, the terms of
which would shift in accordance with white supremacy’s need to remain in power behind each
manifestation of black progress. This can be evidenced from southern Democratic collusion to
turn the post-Reconstruction south into a Jim Crow apartheid, to post-2008 election
gerrymandering to impede minority voting. But as blacks and all ethnic minorities become more
“Americanized” is this what we mean by equality? Is assimilation a capitulation to a certain kind
of structure, without questioning the structure and a reinscribing of all those elements from
which we fought to be liberated?
President Obama’s two terms as president of the United States bookends this moment.
His successor, Donald Trump has motivated many to look back at Obama’s presidency with
reflections and questions of progress as Trump sets about undoing much of what the first black
president was able to accomplish, including Obama’s key policy achievement, the Affordable
Care Act also known as Obamacare. But that Americans would elect a Donald Trump, someone
who campaigned on anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-woman platform and who once in office
works against the common man, boggles many. Perhaps James Baldwin, in that same debate
with William F. Buckley said it best:
[whites] have been raise to believe and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter
how terrible their lives may be, and their lives have been quite terrible, and no matter
how far they fall, no matter what disaster overtakes them, they have one enormous
knowledge in consolation which is like a heavenly revelation, at least they are not
black….
227

227
James Baldwin, “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro” Cambridge, 1965.

189

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Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Asset Metadata

Creator Aldridge, Leah (author)

Core Title Historical depictions of slavery and civil rights in 21st century American film: global circulation of post-racial ideology in the Age of Obama

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 12/05/2019

Defense Date 10/25/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag #BlackLivesMatter,12 Years a Slave,a Slave,Age of Obama,Barack Obama,Black cultural production,Black masculinity,Black production cycle,Black subjectivity,Black visibility,blackness,cinematic Blackness,Civil rights,Django Unchained,double consciousness,FLOTUS,genre cycle,grotesque realism,Jim Crow,Katherine Stockett,Michelle Obama,Millennials,neoliberalism,nostalgia,OAI-PMH Harvest,pornotrope,post-racial,POV,progress narratives,Quentin Tarantino,racial profiling,reconstruction,sankofa,Slavery,Steve McQueen,Tate Taylor,testimony,The Help,The Obama Effect,Tomas Dixon,Trayvon Martin,Twelve Years,White ventriloquism,witness

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Seiter, Ellen (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email laldridg@usc.edu,msleah715@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-460780

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