Revisionist History

This country is leaps and bounds away from properly dealing with the sensitive subject of race. That is not to say that we haven’t made strides in inter cultural relations but there is still a long way to go. One of the areas that is still murky and causes contention is how we describe the history of our country. My friends and I often joke that years from now, history will show that slavery happened, it was a bad thing, everyone came to a mutual understanding of such, it was abolished, and the next year they elected Obama to the presidency! History is written from the view point of the author. That’s human nature. America’s history reads differently in the South than it does in the North because of who was building the monuments and retelling the stories. Which brings me to the point of my blog today…

Every time my wife and I watch a Martin Scorsese movie, we have an issue with the way he portrays Black people. More importantly, I take umbrage with what he decides to portray. He seems to relish the opportunity to use the N-word in his scripts and is derogatory to Black people in his films and now, television shows. Now Scorsese does a lot of period pieces so that’s the way his characters spoke at that time. But increasingly so, the references to Black people are not germane to the plot and seem to be ‘thrown’ in for shock value under the guise of authenticity. Or is he depicting the scene as accurately as believes it occurred? That’s one question. Another is, do we get to pick and choose how we’re depicted in slave time and in the post emancipation era?

Friends of mine have gone to plantation tours in the South and one of the irritating things for them is that the tours never mentioned the slaves that worked on the plantation. They don’t ever go out to the slave quarters and seem to suggest that the cotton and tobacco field were worked by free market labour as opposed to the free labour that toiled on those crops. When I have visited Colonial Williamsburg, I was shocked by the lack of depiction of African slaves and when I did see them, that they were portrayed as poor but happy town folk. It seemed like pandering. But what did I want to see? Did I want to have slaves being whipped in the streets while children enjoyed their funnel cake? Should there have been a public auction next to the roller coaster? Or better yet, should there been a habitual nightly rape scene acted out after the blacksmithing demonstration? Clearly, that not what I’m advocating for.

But therein lies the quandary: how do we properly recreate and represent a horrible time in the country’s past without shoving the actual horror of it in people’s face? Can I be mad at Scorsese when he opens a scene with a Black man shining the shoes of a character in Boardwalk Empire when it has NOTHING to do with the plot or should I compliment him for being one of the few people who aren’t afraid to show how this society really functioned in our past? These are my thoughts…what are yours?