I am looking forward to the show, and I honestly don’t really understand the outrage. Seems like so much wasted virtue signaling to me.
Did The Handmaid’s Tale get this kind of blowback? Did anyone think it was going to glorify the Patriarchy, Theocracy, or Sex Slavery and think that they’d have a hard time getting women to act in it?
I have enough faith in HBO that I’ll watch the first episode, but I’m not optimistic. I can imagine a few scenarios where the CSA might have achieved their independence, but I can’t think of any in which they would have developed into anything remotely like an economic power to rival the U.S.A… I’m guessing that within a generation they’d have been a loose confederation of banana republics, that with the Fugitive Slave Act nullified by the secession there would have been a bloodbath and probably a couple of slave revolts that would have made Nat Turner’s look like an argument over a baseball call, and as the Suez Canal made Europe increasingly lose interest in U.S. cotton and increasing automation and unlimited immigrant labor continued in the north and the west for the next few generations and even the fortunes that survived the war crumbled and not just because of slavery’s end- it would have been a more impoverished hellhole than the Jim Crow South ever dared be.
I can see it fueling a movie, but not a miniseries.
Now I can think of MANY alternative histories set in the south BEFORE the Civil War or set during Reconstruction and Jim Crow that could prove fascinating ground.
When I first heard about the show, I was concerned, because it’s a very high tightrope to walk. Then when I read the Vulture interview response to the backlash, I was a bit more concerned, since they don’t seem to understand the criticism, and also don’t seem terribly sharp on the history, with one of them not remembering the battle he’s talking about or if the book he read was the 2,968-page Shelby Foote book or not. And one the producers say something about how a continued Confederacy would affect the overall world in many ways, which is true, but says about rewriting the French Revolution, which was before the Civil War. But maybe I’m misunderstanding the point there.
I was specifically talking to a friend about this yesterday, and I said that if it was based off a specific book and so there would be an idea of where they were going with the story, I would be less concerned. And yes, if the novel The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t exist, and Hulu announced they were coming out with a show about women in a dystopian future being put under theocratic rule/into sex slavery, I would be deeply concerned, and there probably would have been an uproar. But since that show was based on a modern classic of feminist literature, people weren’t concerned that it would end up being something accidentally glorifying women being subjugated.
Also, like Elendil’s Heir, alternate histories about the Confederacy winning are some of the most common alternate histories, along with what if the Nazis had won. So it’s not like this is a new fresh idea that they have that must be shared with the world. They haven’t written anything yet, and just have some vague ideas it seems, so it just seems like a weird idea for them to do, and like they don’t quite get how thin of a tightrope it is to walk.
It doesn’t help that they don’t want criticism until it’s been seen. To fully critique something, it’s true that it’s best to see it, but you can critique an idea and say if it sounds like a good or bad one.
You can find a lot of people talking on Twitter with their thoughts about the show if you want to understand more why people are upset. But this blog post specifically summed up things pretty well I thought. And this in particular is something I’ve seen lots of people say:
As the OP, let me just restate: I have NO outrage at the basic idea of using slavery as a theme, as the setting for, or as a symbol in art.
My concern - the reason I have a bad feeling about this - is that the structure of a multi-season series is at much higher risk of getting…Lost. Having plot discontinuities and weird character or tone pivots may be forgivable in a show about being lost on an island, or one with dragons, but this topic is far more delicate.
Showing new and updated ways that Whites are owning, keeping track of, punishing, buying, selling and abusing people of color will be a minefield of complexity in terms of portrayals. If it can be done and done well, it will truly be something to watch and discuss. But that’s gonna be a triple-bank shot in terms of difficulty to pull off. One tone-deaf step and it will be a mess.
One way they could side step the issue is to have a present day CSA that doesn’t have slavery, technically, but have an apartheid type system that is basically the same. Many Historians agree that even if the CSA survived as a country, pressure from Britain (their number one customer) and automation would have probably ended the practice eventually anyway. Certainly before now. In Harry Turtledove’s CSA series that was how it began in the story. Still awful but not slavery, technically.
They won’t do it because it is probably too complicated for a TV premise but maybe?
Chattel slavery meets gratuitous nudity— get your Jergens ready, fellas!
I’m a sucker for alternate history so I would be looking forward to this but I’m guessing it gets derailed by complaints before one minute is shot.
Heinlein tried that and still got tarred as a racist, because black people are better than that. Or something.
Or maybe because Heinlein’s black slaveholders were cannibals as well.
The only times Bob handled race well were when he didn’t comment on it.
Can’t wait for somebody to announce a new TV show about the Draka, who in their S. M Sterling book series were basically what would happen if you combined the Nazis and the Confederacy but somehow made them 10x worse.
Most common ancestry in the US (at least until quite recently), IIRC.
Does “we are neither Germany nor Japan” mean that people from those countries are expected to barf at MitHC but can enjoy Confederacy?
Confederatzis. I hate those guys.
I just had an image of a mini-series that lingers long and hard on African slaves being captured by OTHER Africans, and the other half of the series concentrating on “Irish slavery”.
I think I can hear the collective alt-right boner from where I’m sitting right now.
I’m genuinely curious if this series will concentrate on the North clamping down hard on any ‘excursions into the South’ to free slaves or any ding-dong reason because the North feels its better to not have your former brothers be furious enemies along a thousand mile border. Not to mention still wanting to hold onto their own slave states like Maryland.
AND for personal reasons I want to see what becomes of Indian Territory.
The reason Guns of the South doesn’t raise the same objections this new project does is that Turtledove posited a major deus ex machina–time travelers bringing modern weaponry to the 1860s South–as the reason that the Confederacy survived.
Whereas this new project appears to be positing that the actual real-life Confederacy had all the strengths and virtues it needed to survive, if only a few things had gone differently. (If Lincoln had sat in a different seat on his train, or such.)
This message is obviously rather likely to be cherished by some and reviled by others. It’s also historically wildly dubious: really, black Americans would simply go on being slaves, with no further revolts of the type that actually happened in the years leading up to 1860? How is that not a massively racist premise?
Yep. This is why they’re doing this project. Tons of nudity and whippings and nude whippings. That, and the shivery-exciting fun promised by the barely-disguised racism of the premise. Ooooo! Subversive!
Classy.
Revolts by people with almost no access to firearms are not likely to be successful. South Africa was able to maintain apartheid into the 1990s even though whites were a far smaller percentage of the population than they were in the Confederacy. Revolts might well have occurred, but they would have been brutally suppressed as they were before.
The Haitian Revolution is essentially the only example in history of a successful slave revolt, in which slaves gained their freedom permanently at the national level as a result of an uprising. And in Haiti slaves made up about 95% of the population.
History provides no support for the idea that, if the Confederacy had gained independence, slavery would have ended there due to slave revolts.
This is the problem they will face. People will posit nonsense like this to paint the show as racist. There’s literally no way they can make this show without significant backlash.
South Africa’s apartheid, vicious as it was, was not slavery. It severely constrained its various classifications of non-whites from doing things and owning things, but it did not enslave them. It did not enforce their labor as a means of production for (white) owners. It is therefore a poor historical analogy in this instance.
Haiti is a better analogy. In the American South in 1860, the plantations–the reason slavery was economically viable–did have populations roughly analogous to the 5% white, 95% black Haitian situation that you cite. (In the American South as a whole, of course, this was not the case.)
To assert that American blacks would have gone on picking the cotton simply because they now lived in The Confederate States of America, rather than in the United States of America, is–yes–a racist delusion.
In the late nineteenth century, forced labor imposed at gunpoint was not going to be economically viable for much longer anyway (due to technological innovation). The fantasy that it could have survived into the present day is egregiously ahistorical.
Strictly for the sake of devil’s advocacy, I’ll throw in a little speculation on how slavery might have “evolved” in a more humane fashion. Enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws against slave holders. (They’re here to work, not be your sex toys.) The CSPCS (Confederate Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Slaves) would be active combating the worst practices of physical abuse. Things along those lines.
Left Hand of Dorkness wrote further up on how the word “evolution” could have a different meaning. I’d say we’re likely to see a little bit of both.
It demonstrated that a highly oppressive system could be imposed at the point of a gun against a large majority well into the twentieth century. It is an excellent analogy.
The plantations might have, but the ratio in the society at large was nowhere near that. In the Confederacy as a whole, whites were a majority.
Nonsense. They would have gone on picking cotton because they wouldn’t have had much alternative. And there’s nothing racist about it. Any people could be subject to the same treatment under the same circumstances.
The situation in North Korea would argue otherwise.
You vastly underestimate the control a repressive government can exert over an oppressed population with little access to arms. They can do so even when they are a small minority. In the Confederacy, whites were the majority. That system could have been maintained for a long time if sufficient force was imposed. After all, the Soviet system lasted 70 years or so.