Hey, you may have been asking storylines in the book, but don’t act like your other responses in this thread didn’t imply black-led advocacy was limited to Frederick Douglass.
Um, no. When aborted fetuses are capable of standing outside the clinics, protesting the mistreatment of their oppressed race, then maybe we have an analogy worth talking about. Because–as should be obvious but maybe not given the comments in this thread–many ex-slaves were abolitionists. Would it make sense to label them perjoratively as lunatic fanatics? What about the whites who knew and respected blacks and thought they didn’t deserve to be treated as animals?
Your point was that slaves didn’t have interesting lives and thus it would be unrealistic to delve into their lives in a fictional story that includes whites. I think this is such a ridiculous notion when we have historical evidence that blacks played salient roles in society and had deep, often complicated private lives (as revealed in slave narratives), that I don’t know why you would have the need to reiterate this point again.
Black led advocacy of what?
And by the way, you do know Roots was a mixture of plagiarism and fiction, yes?
This is a pretty ignorant thing to say. Even in the darkest circumstances, people can develop into fully-developed human beings, even if they are damaged human beings. Think of Holocaust survivors, Anne Frank, Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northrup, and many, many more – these are all fully developed human beings, with fully developed wants, needs, desires, hopes, dreams, etc.
Ignoring the lives and contributions of black people was not “leaning towards history”. Black people were not bystanders of history – they were fully involved in American history since its founding. Black people helped free the slaves, and black people helped the Union win the Civil War.
Strawman. No one has said there were no black abolitionists. No one said Harriet Tubman didn’t exist. No one said blacks never served in Union troops. They did. And in Confederate troops near the end.
But there’s a reason Ken Burns featured so few Blacks by name in “The Civil War”. Other than key historical figures, most of their stories are lost to history. That sort of thing tends to happen when you’re a third class citizen.
Problem is, how do they fit into a story about two rich white families? How deeply should the writers have delved into the lives of slaves that weren’t going to contribute to the narrative as Priam and Cuffey did?
Oh yeah, forgot a third fully developed black character, Priam’s sister who Charles Main was sleeping with. Another reason out of many why Priam was pretty disgruntled.
Apparently some people spend more time reading history than rehashing an old miniseries based on some novels. I prefer real history or really excellent fiction–potboilers generally bore me.
Oh, the Confederate Flag that might show up on some Texas license plates is supposed to be a way to honor one’s forbears–either slavemasters or the poor ignorant fools they rooked into fighting & dying. To me, that flag will always mean “I’m a racist.” If that’s what somebody wants to proclaim, let them.
People are just stubborn fools. Contrarism at its finest. (See the Redskins debacle) You tell people they can’t do something, they’ll dig their feet in. Just ditch the flag on those license plates and replace it with a Rebel Soldier in Gray.
That’s a separate issue - I’m challenging your assertion that black people were not fully developed human beings.
There were very, very few black Confederate soldiers. Revisionists love to hype any possibility of black Confederates that they find, but the numbers were probably very very small.
That’s not what you said – you said black people’s lives and contributions were not particularly significant to the history of the Civil War, and this is false.
Perhaps you should talk to someone living under a totalitarian dictatorship. Most of those people are totally broken.
And there have been movies that have covered that. Not all movies have to do so. The portrayal of slaves in North and South was quite realistic. So was the portrayal of black soldiers in Glory.
Many probably are. And many of these are, nonetheless, fully developed human beings. One can be “broken” and still a fully developed human being. Trauma does not successfully dehumanize, as much as the traumatizers usually try.
Slave owners and supporters tried to deny or take away the humanity of black people. They succeeded in inflicting enormous amounts of pain and brutality, but they failed in their denial and theft of their humanity.
Fine. So you’re taking back your assertion that black people were not fully developed human beings.
I’m glad you appear to be taking back this false and ignorant assertion.
That depends on what you mean by fully developed. It’s understood as a given that a mistreated child will not fully develop. I’m not denying that they were human, I’m saying that slaves would have had the traits of people discouraged from thinking for themselves. People like that won’t be particularly interesting in a historical epic. Now of course once they are free, they can grow into the people they are meant to be. That’s a big part of what the movie Glory was about.
Okay, I think I understand what you were trying to say. But saying they were not “fully developed human beings” sounds like a perjorative and demeaning descriptor, considering that many of them were heroic, brave, and extremely admirable people.
No, I said it would not be that interesting to do so. What you’re argue is the niche collection of antebellum black Americans who lead interesting lives is important enough that it must be in a work about the Civil War / period in general or that work is somehow tainted/sullied/incomplete. But to me that smacks of the arguments I heard about how the Canadians and British weren’t shown in Saving Private Ryan. Well, that movie is about a specific beachhead where there were no British/Canadian troops, the only place they were replaced ahistorically is they wrote the Brits out of being the landing craft drivers, which was relevant for the first 8 seconds of the film.
If you’re just arguing there’s an interesting movie to be made about blacks in the Civil War era, yes there are. 12 Years a Slave is an interesting movie, I personally like the 80s movie “Glory.”
But these are focusing on the niche cases, you can’t seriously presume that a work focusing more on the broad story needs to showcase black life or it’s incomplete, when the broad survey of black life was dull drudgery in that time?
It’s not akin to The Patriot which shows Mel Gibson as a Southern patriot fighter during the Revolutionary War who is a wealthy land owner but only employs “free slaves”, and basically white washes history for nonsensical reasons.
Even North and South doesn’t focus on a broad story. Like I said, it focuses on two families united by a friendship two men had at West Point. The only reason for black characters to be there at all is as human bondage. Which is how they were portrayed. And even there, I maintain that the writers and original author went out of their way to give them stories.
This debate demonstrates why movies made about the Civil WAr today will inevitably be garbage unless focused like a laser beam on something specific, like Gettysburg was. Too many demands from various groups to get what they want into a movie, and to avoid portrayals they don’t like, even if they are realistic. We were a lot saner about these things in the 80s than we are now.