Why django is racist

More often than not, the answer to that question is answered in the affirmative. It is precisely because of the extant mythology of black subservience that these scenes pack such a cathartic payload. In my sixteen years of teaching African-American history, one sadly common theme has been the number of black students who shy away from courses dealing with slavery out of shame that slaves never fought back.

It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this. The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution. Nearly two hundred thousand black men, most of them former slaves, enlisted in the Union Army in order to accomplish en masse precisely what Django attempts to do alone: risk death in order to free those whom they loved.

The alternate history is found not in the story of vengeful ex-slave but in the idea that he could be the only one. The central conflict is not between an ex-slave and a slaver but between two archetypes—the militant and the sellout. But in creating Stephen, Tarantino necessarily trafficked in the stereotypes he was ostensibly responding to. Samuel L. The use of this character as a comic foil seems essentially disrespectful to the history of slavery.

Oppression, almost by definition, is a set of circumstances that bring out the worst in most people. Jamie Foxx: 'Django' controversy is good Given advance hype for the movie as extravagant as its violence, I doubt that audience members, whatever their race or age, bought tickets with the expectation of seeing some historically faithful saga of antebellum life, and neither did I.

We were buying a comic book. Many people have a grievance against the very notion of comic books, but I don't. Expect a movie or a comic book to explain everything about anything and all you earn is surplus sadness that you don't really need. Nevertheless, there are many who, unlike Lee, have seen the movie and carry the same grievances as he does. The most scathing attack came from that novelist-satirist-poet Ishmael Reed, writing in The Wall Street Journal: "To compare this movie to a spaghetti western and a blaxploitation film is an insult to both genres.

It's a Tarantino home movie with all the racist licks of his other movies. I doubt Jackson felt the blow. He has, in fact, further provoked the movie's antagonists by running straight at an interviewer asking about the movie's prolific use of the "N-word ," refusing to answer the question unless the reporter, who is white, actually says the dread epithet aloud. He didn't.

It's worth emphasising that these words are not from a Tarantino script, crafted for Hollywood shock value. They were written by a slave owner desperate to preserve his brutal way of life. And, while the physical violence of slavery is masked in Caldwell's letters, they betray his warped sense of morality. In a letter written on Christmas Eve , Caldwell made the outrageous claim: "My slaves live much more comfortably than I do. The fact that phrenology was used to justify slavery is perhaps unsurprising.

What would one expect from such an overtly racist science? But it wasn't just the slavers. My research revealed that some of the most vocal anti-slavery campaigners of the 19th century were also advocates of phrenology, and used it to justify their stance. Lucretia Mott , a particularly uncompromising American abolitionist, sent her children to phrenological lectures and spoke of the "truth of phrenology" in letters to friends. When she visited Britain she stayed with the renowned Scottish phrenologist George Combe , himself an anti-slavery campaigner.

Horace Mann , another major figure in abolitionist politics, was so keen on phrenology that he subscribed to the official journal. After becoming president of Antioch College in Ohio, he even boasted in the same sentence that the professors he employed were both "anti-slavery men" and "avowed phrenologists". These are not isolated examples.