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Selma…Say What?
By Lafe Tolliver, Esq
Guest Column
Now, don’t get me wrong. But I get a little bent out of
shape when certain seemingly “liberal” white folks get all
choked up about everyone should go see the movie, Selma.
No doubt it probably is an impressive piece of cinema.
No doubt it probably captures the flavor of the battles of
the Civil Rights era and the personalities who made it
possible due to their Herculean sacrifice and, for some,
their untimely deaths.
But…for people to act as if all black people need to
see Selma as opposed to wanting to see Selma,
now that is a horse of a different color.
My choice of audiences to see Selma? Any black
person under the age of 40 or was born in the 80s and
forward.
And as for the white folks who need to see
Selma? Everyone who is 90 years and younger!
Regrettably, you cannot force white folks to see
movies like Selma and
12 Years A Slave
or The Butler or Imitation of Life or Black
Like Me or One Potato…Two Potato and a host of
other films that attempt to bring to the celluoid screen the
tangibles and intangibles of being black and living in
America.
It is my supposition that many white folks do not want
to see such movies in which they are portrayed as the bad
guy. You know, the man or woman who revels in the brutal
treatment of people of color.
The kind of people who pray in their churches on Sunday
but raise hell with black people on Monday when it comes to
affording them equal pay and human dignity.
It is as if white people have a gene that informs them
that such a movie will make them squirm or make them
reevaluate their esteemed position on the economic totem
pole and they would rather not, thank you.
Many, many black people lived Selma repeatedly
while living in America and they have intimate knowledge of
family and friends who also went through that blast furnace
of injustice and injury in America. To relive scenes of such
degradation and humiliation is a tad too much for them, even
in 2015.
White America has long been running away from its
racial history.
It does not want to look in its composite historical mirror
and see the warts and pimples and racial scarring it has put
its psyche through and the real terrors it has put people of
color through since the slaves were first brought to these
unwelcoming and hostile shores.
If white America could, it would take a pill and
presto!…any ugly and despicable acts of past and present
mistreatment against black people would go away and away for
good.
White America does not do well when black people
bring up the “race thing” because when it happens, they have
an attack of the dry mouth and a brain freeze thinking that
what is about to be said about them will not be laudatory.
There is no national monument in the nation’s capital
that pays homage to the millions of people of African
descent who either did not make it here from Africa (they
died in transit due to foul conditions and brutality) and
those who did make it here only to be turned into human
chattel and be designated as three-fifths of a person for
scores of years.
Hundreds of years of oppression and denial have not
been duly noted by white America as a still unpaid debt to
the heirs and survivors of the African and American slave
trade.
Not enough has been documented and trumpeted abroad
about how the American colonies used the free slave labor to
build the critical mass of capital that allowed these
newly-minted United States of America to gain premier
rankings in the world as an early global super power and
which allowed capitalism to gain a solid foothold and
flourish as it did.
I mean, come on. Who would not benefit from hundred of
years of free labor and skills and depressed labor markets
that would allow a country (the U.S.A.) to become a colossus
in the financial markets of the world?
Early fortunes were made on the backs of black men and
women who toiled for nothing or for peanuts and got zilch in
return for their labor but yet whose blood, sweat and tears
made America the economic goliath that is was then and is
now.
So, yeah. Movies like Selma and a host of others
do and would make many white Americans cringe knowing that
they benefited (then and now) from the labor and creativity
of others and when those others said, “Hey give me a piece
of the pie I helped bake!” they were relegated to back seats
of buses and to the slavery block or to the lynch mob or to
ghettoes and to the front lines of America’s wars in
inordinate numbers.
So, yeah. Movies like Selma are not seeing long
lines from people who live in Rossford or Ottawa Hills or
Wauseon or Upper Arlington. People would rather see pulp
nonsense like Guess Who Is Coming To Dinner or see
movies with a cutey Shirley Temple tap dancing with a
grinning Bill ‘Bojanles’ Robinson or a Gone With The Wind
with a grinning black maid making a fuss over a white
spoiled Scarlet O’Hara.
No…white America chooses very carefully the “race”
films that it will support because if the film gets too
close to home and calls out white America to do the right
thing, the screen goes black and that is a blackness that
white America will support.
Will I see Selma? Do chicken have lips? Do
snake have hips? Does water run uphill?
Contact Lafe Tolliver at
Tolliver@Juno.com |
