MANSFIELD: Django Unchained

By Mansfield Frazier

The firestorm of controversy surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s latest flick, Django Unchained, which has Jamie Foxx in the title role as a freed slave turned bounty hunter, was as expected and predictable as it is interesting. The reviews, articles and online comments have been just as varied as I had imagined they would be, and in the end mostly all of the viewpoints are legitimate and very healthy in terms of furthering a conversation that’s largely been avoided in this country, except, perhaps, in academia.

Blacks as a rule don’t care to have anything to do with the memory of slavery because of the pain of having to recall the subjugation and utter degradation of a large percentage of our ancestors, and whites tend to avoid the subject out of unresolved guilt over The Peculiar Institution, which was the title of the 1956 seminal, groundbreaking book on slavery by Berkeley Professor Kenneth M. Stampp.

But this movie isn’t for those ignoramuses who take the position that since the formal institution of slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the problem was then solved; but it wasn’t — and in fact — it had just begun. However, from Reconstruction on there’s always been a tight-knit group of southern conservative white supremacists in this country who are still fighting the Civil War, and now they literally run the Republican Party. The wild talk of secession that surfaced immediately after Obama won reelection is simply the tip of the ugly, dirty historical iceberg that Django unflinchingly explores.

While black public intellectual Ishmael Reed finds much to fault with the film, much of which I agree with — especially the part about blacks being able to be in control of and tell their own story — if I had to select a white to bring it to the screen Tarantino would be my first choice as a writer/director.

While the movie certainly was over the top in many respects, it was historically accurate in other regards. The character of Dr. King Schultz (played brilliantly by Christop Waltz) was German for a reason: Germans, as a nationality, were among the most vocal critics of slavery (on religious principles) and put their own well-being and property on the line by secretly hiding runaway slaves, while very publicly leading abolitionist movements in many cities across the north.

One negative reviewer’s main point of contention was that the storyline was “ahistorical,” which means it doesn’t conform to her version of the facts or reading of history. But all movies are to some degree or another “ahistorical,” even such films as Lincoln and Argo, both of which also took liberty with what’s historically factual. But argue as she might, she can’t challenge the authenticity of the depiction of the scars on the backs of the slaves.

What disturbed me wasn’t the lack of historical accuracy, but the amount of gratuitous violence perpetrated throughout the film by the two main characters; they would have still made their point quite well if they had killed fifty percent fewer bad guys. It got quite a bit too gory for my tastes at times — so much so it was distracting. But Tarantino makes his living knowing what the public wants to see on screen and he delivers — big time.

The film’s brutal honesty in regards to just how rotten to the moral core the institution of slavery was (and how sick and demented those who perpetrated it were) offers ample proof that as a people there’s nothing wrong with us black people … but that something indeed was done to us. And, while I understand we all wish the national healing was going faster, I also understand it takes centuries, not merely decades, to shake off the lasting remnants of slavery and this film, in a sense, gives voice to that reality. In spite of having a black president, on some levels relations between the races haven’t changed all that much since the era depicted in Django.

Online comments about the film by a goodly number of whites advises blacks to “just get over it” in regards to the past, when it’s actually they who are clinging to it. It’s they who want to turn the clock back — just look at the reactionaries they vote into office. What arch conservative doesn’t fondly recall a past where the white male reigned supreme and unchallenged … and was the master of all he surveyed?

The brutal depictions of the total dehumanization that went hand and glove with slavery (whites had to think of blacks as sub-humans otherwise they could not have been so brutal towards them for hundreds of years) might outrage black — and progressive white — moviegoers, but those in denial that need to see it of course never will.

To view such atrocities, even on the screen hundreds of years later, might prick the conscience of the progeny of the southern aristocracy, and as a group they certainly don’t care to have their noses rubbed in the sins of their forbearers. And in more than one scene Tarantino certainly clowns the backward whites, making them out to be complete idiots and buffoons.

Still, no kind of apology to blacks from whites for the transgressions of the past will ever be forthcoming, since, for whites to do so would first require an admission of guilt, which, in turn, could spark a conversation regarding the past due debt of billions upon billions of dollars in repayment for uncompensated labor; the kind of debt that never goes away … it has to one day, in some way, be satisfied.

And this form of reparations rightly owed to blacks shouldn’t come as some kind of checks for the descendants of blacks who suffered through slavery, but in the form of funding for programs that ensures every newborn child in America (black, white, Hispanic or Asian) gets off in life on a good educational footing.

Every family in America that wants or needs one should have access to an in-home tutor that provides them with hands-on help with the skills of child-rearing … from day one. In this way the lingering results of the sins of slavery — and what it did to whites as well as blacks in this country — that are so accurately depicted in Django could be wiped away in one generation, and the nation at last made whole. Tarantino’s masterwork might not win any Oscars, but it just might inspire a revolution of conscience … at least among those who have one.

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://www.neighborhoodsolutionsinc.com.

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