The entire Django Unchained roundtable is here.
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Along with Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained forms something of a diptych for Tarantino insofar as both are revenge fantasies set in two of history’s greatest atrocities: the Holocaust and American chattel slavery. In the interview he gave at the screening I saw last week, he certainly thinks of them that way. But before either film could begin to be written, one crucial difference in their respective historical situations delimited the possibilities of fantasy: one can fantasize about the end of the Holocaust by killing the highest members of the Nazi party, whereas there is no easily imagined personalized end to slavery through a few targeted acts of vengeance. Thus, the use of explosives against the Nazis seems a tactical act, a logical means of warfare. The use of bombs against slavery would border on what we call terrorism these days, or “irrationally” violent outbursts against a society (targeting civilians who can’t do anything to change the way things are, or think of the portrayal of the Watts riots, for example: why did they destroy property?). Slavery was a deeply structural violence, an ontological domination of a people that didn’t obtain in the instance of the Holocaust. Any heroic narrative set in the slave-built Southern economy is going to have a major hurdle to overcome: there is no real end in sight, the villain remains like the renewable heads of a hydra, nor is there a place to go where the hero’s limited victory will be recognized, much less celebrated (excepting the audience who might applaud at the film’s end). As Frantz Fanon famously wrote in Black Skin, White Masks:
The Jewishness of the Jew, however, can go unnoticed. He is not integrally what he is. We can but hope and wait. His acts and behavior are the determining factor. He is a white man, and apart from some debatable features, he can pass undetected. […] Of course the Jews have been tormented — what am I saying? They have been hunted, exterminated, and cremated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history. The Jew is not liked as soon as he has been detected. But with me things take on a new face. I’m not given a second chance. I am overdetermined from the outside. I am a slave not to the “idea” others have of me, but to my appearance.
I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. Once their microtones are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species. A Negro, in fact! [p. 95]
That provides an alternative to the film’s plantation owner Calvin Candie’s theory as to why slaves don’t rise up and kill their masters. He posits phrenology, that the black skull is built to encase a servile brain. (Odd how the guy doesn’t know words like ‘panache’ while being up to date on phrenology, but I digress ….) Instead of racist science: the slaves had little chance of escape — only a minority could get to border countries and the free states would return them without proof of freedman status (even freedmen had trouble fighting against a legal challenge to their status). More fundamentally and universally, there was little possibility for or hope of fundamentally destroying the system of white power that, as Fanon described, defined them on every level of “civil” society (including free states and the minds of many, if not most, abolitionists). Blackness was placed on the outside, no place, as mere alterity to whiteness. It was not purely coincidence that liberalism, the philosophy of liberty, developed alongside chattel slavery. Slavery gave dialectical meaning to liberty by providing the liberals with something to negate (e.g., the American colonies would not be the slaves to the English any longer). (I highly recommend Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History, which provides a mountain of evidence for liberalism’s primary theorists either outwardly supporting or giving backhanded defense to slavery on such grounds.) In Frank B. Wilderson’s terms, blacks experienced a structural suffering that is not analogous to the social oppression so many other groups have been under throughout history. For hundreds of years, they were denied ontological status, relegated to non-being. blackness constituted as a comparison to whiteness — i.e., what it meant not to be white or a subject and, by extension, what it meant not to be free.
Any imagined heroic solution cutting through the Gordian knot of cultural accretion that was slavery would’ve had to involve a consensus towards revolutionary-styled destruction, a restructuring of fundamental principles, namely a zero-sum ending to the civil war that begins 2 years after the film’s beginning. That Django’s final solution to Candie’s plantation wasn’t actually applied to the Confederacy itself resulted in another century of racial oppression that reverberated up through the 1960s reaction to the Democrat-driven Civil Rights Bill as the Southern states became Republican (the Democrats no longer being the anti-Black party). Thus, the moral contradiction at the heart of Django Unchained‘s narrative: by providing a fantasy of Django’s triumph and cathartic escape from the slave system, it supports the lie of Candie’s scientistic racial theory. That is, besides servility and cowardice, why didn’t the other slaves rise up the way Django does? Instead, I suggest a super-slave could no more put an end to slavery by destroying a personal target than Superman can punch out poverty. Success would be determined by the upswell of violence inspired by the hero’s symbolic actions against the corrupt system. Structural suffering isn’t something that can be solved or coherently fantasized about solving within the heroic-revenge generic story arc without turning the hero into a terrorist, which tends not to be most people’s ideal (unless a fan of Georges Sorel, like maybe Frank Miller). Unfortunately, Tarantino tries.
But first, what the film does right: I’m not sure any image in Django Unchained is any more perfectly ridiculous and depraved concerning reified blackness than James Mason’s rheumatic plantation owner placing his feet on a slave boy’s stomach in Mandingo with the superstitious belief that the pain will be absorbed from white to black. Nevertheless, there’s plenty of chains, whipping, dog mauling, infantilization, banal use of epithets and cannibalistic black-on-black violence to convey the slave economy’s dehumanizing processes. Together, these images provide the movie’s answer to an ensemble of questions that Wilderson refers to as descriptive: “what does it mean to suffer?” [p. 126] The ensemble addresses the ontology of black as slave, the structural condition of black suffering as fungibility and accumulation. True, like a superhero, Django is never in much danger of experiencing realistic trauma, but neither was Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. This is a fantasy, after all, and a comedic one to boot, so the audience doesn’t expect an onscreen castration of the titular hero no matter how close the knife gets. It also isn’t that important if Mandingo fighting actually occurred. As a phantasmagoric image of the black body as cannibalized remainder, black subjectivity having been commodified as pure exchange value, it remains effective. A bored son of privilege not requiring the economic appreciation of a good black buck, Candie uses the Mandingo slaves as a leisurely expression of his absolute sovereignty. Like a rich kid wrecking his BMW, he can always get another:
The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both the figurative and literal sense, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave — that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceabilty and interchangeability endemic to the commodity — and by the extensive capacities of property — that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons. Put differently, the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion. [p. 21, Saidiya Hartman]
So despite its being a comedic fantasy, Django Unchained‘s horrific imagery conveys both bodily and ontological suffering under slavery. In fact, it takes a similar approach to blaxploitational horror (e.g., Ganja & Hess, Blacula), identifying the spectactor with what is typically the Monster/Other in Hollywood films to estrange normative positions: here, it’s Django, a black man as Slave, and Dr. King Schultz, a German traveler as Foreigner/Alien. (Mandingo, for example, is a tragedy about the plantation owning family and the Germans were almost completely alien in Inglourious Basterds, namely the enemy.) Tarantino is careful to acknowledge their differing ontological positions: Schultz doesn’t approve of slavery, but he’s still willing to use Django’s slave status to get what he wants, regardless of the latter’s desire. To paraphrase Fanon, whiteness can change with ideas, blackness is overdetermined by appearance.
It isn’t until later, after having been given his freedom, that Django reveals his goal to his erstwhile master, that is, to free his wife, Broomhilda (who we’ll soon learn is the property of the aforementioned Candie). At this point in the story, the two heroes’ relationship is, in the final analysis, characterized by an economic quid-pro-quo arrangement, not the developing friendship, which still needs the recognition of Django’s subjectivity. So Schultz will help rescue Broomhilda if Django will help out with the bounty hunting during a busy season just as he was freed for helping to locate the Brittle Brothers. The friendship becomes primary when Schultz gives up the majority of bounty he’s earned over the past year to pay for Broomhilda’s freedom. Although done under duress — Candie’s threat of bashing in her head with a hammer — the doctor clearly doesn’t think twice about the exchange: only the money is truly replaceable. With Schultz, a nonracist foreigner, we can see how the temptation of white power was entangled with the supposedly amorality of capitalist exchange. He resists the former by accepting failure at the latter.
The moral setup is actually more complicated than Schultz’s development, though (which would’ve made the movie little more than another black tale about white awakening). On the way to the Candieland plantation, posing as a wealthy dilettante wanting to invest in Mandingo fighting with Django as his black slaver cum counselor, Schultz witnesses the way Candie deals with slaves who have lost their value. A fighter named D’Artagnan (after The Three Musketeers‘ protagonist) tried to escape because he felt too worn down to fight any more. Schultz loses his nerve, breaks character to save the slave from the dogs by offering to reimburse Candie. To repair the damage to their pretense, Django doesn’t flinch, saying this “pickaninny” ain’t worth buying, that Candie could do whatever he wants with his “property.” As Django explains, Schulz just ain’t as used to Americans. The foreigner looks as if he’s trying not to vomit, while the former slave returns a steely-eyed stare back at Candie as the hounds tear the decrepit fighter apart. This scene is pivotal as it shows just how desensitized to the spectacle of slavery Django is (his ability through habituation to suppress a horror too great for the white outsider) and how far he’s willing to go to get his wife back: D’Artagnan’s life for hers. Similarly, throughout the trip, as part of his act, he’s shown to be harsher on the slaves in chains than any of the real slavers in order to keep Candie “intrigued.” For the time being, he’s committed himself to the system of slavery, going beyond what it demands of him, in order to save the one person he truly loves. In his willingness to go through hell, Schultz compares him to the German myth of Siegfried. In other words, he must treat all slaves as fungible to rescue Broomhilda. Only she is seen as an irreplaceable subject.
In the next scene, arriving at Candieland, we’re introduced to Django’s mirrored antagonist, the “Uncle Tom” character of Stephen, which is where the film’s main problems lie. As Django had previously explained, the house negro is the lowest of the low, with the only thing lower being the black slaver. However, there’s one role he omitted: the white slaver as the representative of slavery itself. The reason Django remains sympathetic even after sentencing another black man to a brutal death is because of the enculturation to abject horror that’s forced on any survivor of such totalizing oppression. It wasn’t as if slaves could appeal to OSHA about the unjust treatment of one of their fellow slaves. Whistleblowing during slavery had no meaning, since the law enforced injustice. The “whistleblower” risked his own life for no possibility of justice. Thus, one had to learn to live with the violence. This habituation to depravity is what allows Django to stay focused on his goal. He can’t rescue every slave he comes across any more than all the slaves could’ve just fled to Canada to live a just life, equal to whites, because the manifold problems of slavery are structural, not just personal. If he had let Schultz save D’Artagnan, then it would’ve been more likely that Broomhilda’s life was being traded for a slave he had never met. This is not some utilitarian “greatest good” rationale being arrived at by the slave, but a forced choice being made for him by the white power structure in which he can do little more than survive. A lesson from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat: if one can’t save everyone in a lifeboat, then be willing to push some off the side and get used to the sounds of drowning. That, and it’s better to not save a spot for complete strangers.
Why, then, if the audience can still sympathize with a flawed hero who has to do some bad things because of an immoral system that doesn’t permit him a rational, disinterested reflection on the universal good, are we presented with Stephen, a potentially complex character, in such a simplistic, caricatured villain role? He’s revealed not as another slave who’s doing what he can to survive, any possibility of self-assertion narrowly circumscribed under the gaze of white power, but rather the maniacal evil genius behind the entire Candie clan. Consider: (1) He’s the first person shown to torture Broomhilda and it’s Candie who stops it. (2) Candie doesn’t figure out the con Django and Schultz are pulling, but Stephen does. He reveals it while sipping brandy in the library, holding the snifter like a Bond villain, and calling his “master” by his first name, Calvin. (3) After Candie’s death, it’s Stephen who gets all his master’s henchmen to stop firing while he negotiates Django’s surrender. Billy Crash has a gun pointed at Broomhilda’s head, but he doesn’t fire after Django throws down his gun because Stephen said she would live. Why would Crash care what one slave promised another? (4) Furthermore, he doesn’t castrate Django, because Stephen has convinced Lara Lee (Calvin’s sister) and the rest of the gang that breaking rocks at the mines is a much worse fate. (5) And, finally, if Stephen’s total control isn’t obvious enough, after everyone else has been killed, this antebellum Wormtongue throws down his cane and stands up straight to reveal his lameness an act. Whereas Django had to play tougher than he was, Stephen played weaker. They’re inverted images of each other: the former lied to protect someone from power, the latter to gain power (or, more sympathetically, to protect himself from power).
The reason for the appearance of a mustache-twirling cliched role (despite some admittedly funny, witty lines and a great performance by Sam Jackson) is, as I suggested above, the heroic-revenge generic structure. It requires a personalized villain of sorts, not a structural evil with which even “good” citizens are complicit. And what’s more personalized than the evil doppelgänger? For once, genre constraints have gotten the better of Tarantino. Thus, the film is an abysmal failure at addressing the other ensemble of questions Wilderson delineates, the prescriptive: “How does one become free of suffering? [Those] questions concerning the turning of the gratuitous violence that structures and positions the Black against not just the police but civil society writ large.” [p. 126] By giving the story a revenge motive, Tarantino reduced the suffering to a personal level, a subjective violence that one person might do to another — kill the oppressor, stop the oppression. This is a “failure,” because it applies a subjective resolution to a structural problem that was fundamentally the negation of subjectivity; “abysmal” because it achieved the biggest cathartic thrill with the killing of a black slave instead of any number of plantation owners in the film. If Tarantino had to make it all about subjective revenge, then why ignore the most narratively plausible candidate, Old Man Carrucan, the malicious old bastard who had treated Broomhilda and Django so cruelly and then sold them to separate owners out of spite after they attempted to run away? But it’s not even Candie who has the last, big face off against Django; it’s Stephen. Django mows down every trace of whiteness in the final (majestically rendered) gunfight, saving the fate of “snowball” for the big finale. Evidently, the house negro is more evil than the master.
Tarantino has expressed in the past (on Charlie Rose) a keen interest in what I’d call the terrorist as symbolic hero, namely in his desire to do a biopic on the radical abolitionist John Brown, one of the director’s favorite historical Americans. With a self-described holy purpose, Brown sliced open the heads of pro-slavery activists along the Pottawatomie Creek, who hadn’t actually killed anyone themselves, was willing to go on a suicide mission at Harper’s Ferry in an attempt to inspire a mass uprising against slavery and, once caught, refused any possible chance to avoid hanging for a chance at martyrdom. As James McPherson tells it, “Democrats and conservatives denounced Brown as a lunatic and murderer” and the Republicans did their best to dissociate their abolitionism from Brown’s techniques. [p. 35] In other words, he was no more popularly recognized as a hero in the nineteenth century than terrorists are today. At least, among whites; blacks have mostly called him a hero (except pacifists like Martin Luther King, Jr.). Why not use this white abolitionist’s revolutionary violence as a model for Django’s own? It’s not like sympathetic terrorism as entertainment isn’t fairly popular these days: Che, Carlos, United Red Army, and, in a way, Homeland. Instead, each vengeful kill that Django makes is shown to be related to a personal act of violence against him or his. There is no killing of pro-slavery people who aren’t themselves shown to commit subjective violence. Each person acts as an individual and another reacts, ignoring the dangerous question of structural responsibility expressed by Malcolm X: “if you [whites] are for me — when I say me I mean us, our people — then you have to be willing to do as old John Brown did.” [p. 38]
Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection provides a plausible analysis of what’s going on here. She argues that in abolitionist literature, melodramas and eyewitness accounts from whites, there was an empathic tendency that attempted to make the horrors of slavery palpable to whites by projecting whiteness into the place of the black body in pain. This effectively erased the black person doing the suffering, making it a performance for white affect, and not unrelated to the way slaves had to perform for masters as if they accepted, even enjoyed, their subjugation. As she writes in the quote above, “the captive body [was] an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.” Thus, black suffering was narrated through the master’s discourse even for abolitionists. Let’s face it, other than avowed racists, what contemporary white people would fancy themselves as pro-slavery in a historical melodrama? Dreams of terrorism are probably more likely, despite the damn good chance that slavery sympathizer is what we would’ve been in such times. So, instead of a critical reflection of Django’s narrative, complicating his own generically derived existence as black performativity (cf. blaxploitation), Stephen is treated as little more than a blackface projection for white fantasy. As Tarantino has stated over and over in interviews, he clearly wants his audience to take sides, cheer at the ending — not, I conclude, reflect on the problematic that the house negro presents. Django is the oppressed that white folk would like to be in such a situation, fighting for freedom (just as they would now, of course), with Stephen’s freely working for subjugation the negation that gives such freedom meaning — as if chattel slavery and its concomitant subjugation of black identity were a choice made by the subjugated! This is, once again, Candie’s theory, only without the biological determinism. And when the film has audiences cheering Stephen’s downfall, one should recall the earlier scene of Mandingo fighting, in which one man’s death is reduced to spectacle for Candie and his guests.
I really like this piece, and agree with most of it. I think your right that the fact that the systemic injustice has to be personalized, and the choice to personalize it through Stephen specifically, is a real problem for the film.
I guess the one place where I don’t quite agree with your argument is in your claim (and Fanon’s) that prejudice against Jews and blacks is necessarily and always different in kind. I certainly think it’s different in some contexts…but, after all, black people can pass too. I also wonder if it’s really the case that it’s harder to imagine an end to slavery than to Hitler. Both were ended by war, after all.
I guess to me it seems like the different between Basterds and Django is less some sort of necessary structural difference between the Holocaust and slavery, and more a difference in how they’ve been imagined. Specifically, there are just a lot more films about World War II. Tarantino uses that in Basterds; it’s really a film about WW II films, more than about WW II itself, in a lot of ways, which makes it about what we wished had happened and what didn’t or couldn’t.
Django doesn’t have slavery films to draw on in the same way, I think in part because there just aren’t as many of them. So he tries to use westerns — but that ends up turning slavery into a western, which doesn’t really work.
Noah: “he tries to use westerns — but that ends up turning slavery into a western, which doesn’t really work.”
In other words: Lee is right.
The poster is quite explicit: Once Upon a Time in the South.
Great post, Charles.
Yeah, I think it turns out Lee is right. I still think there’s good things in Django Unchained, and I think Tarantino could have made some different choices and had it work out better…but in the end slavery as a spaghetti western doesn’t really gel, unfortunately.
I agree, this is a nice piece. One correction: in the sentence “(4) Furthermore, he doesn’t castrate Django, because Calvin has convinced Lara Lee (Calvin’s sister) and the rest of the gang that breaking rocks at the mines is a much worse fate”, it’s Stephen that convinced Lara, rather than Calvin.
And speaking of Lara, for the sake of argument, I suppose one could claim that Django killed her less out of vengeance for having wronged him and/or Broomhilda than because she was complicit in the practice of slavery. The distinction is pretty negligible by that point, since she had assumed control of Candyland following her brother’s death, but she had at least exhibited a little bit of kindness toward Broomhilda, by stopping Calvin from showing off her scars during dinner. She seemed like such an ineffectual leader, and she did little in the way of directly wronging Django, but he still blows her away, and it’s a hugely satisfying moment when he does so, since no matter how meek or friendly she appeared, she was still a symbol of slavery, somebody who stood by and reaped all the benefits of its horrors.
The idea of the viewer being satisfied with violence committed against a character is problematic because, then, the viewer is not morally better than the villains.
Except that watching pretend violence is substantially morally different from committing real violence.
I don’t entirely disagree with you or anything; revenge narratives have real world consequences which can be very bad. But it’s worth pointing out that consuming violent entertainment and committing violence are not ethically the same thing.
Of course not, because watching is not committing (the viewer can’t commit violence, fictitious or otherwise, against characters on the screen or out of it). but the viewer can sheer as an acolyte in the real world may sheer the violece committed by another.
As for the fictitious vs. real, I don’t agree with Robert Crumb when he (a character representing him to be exact) said, after tearing a woman character to shreds): it’s only lines on paper, folks! Or something like that…
Thanks, Matthew, I made the correction. Lara Lee had Django hung up and (probably) tortured, so her killing can still be seen as personal, I think. Granted, she and the lawyer are probably the closest to a “structural killing” in the film. It would’ve been interesting to see what Django would’ve done with Candie children, but that’s probably considered “too dark” for a Christmas audience.
Noah, what brought me over to Fanon’s perspective was thinking about whether I’d rather be (if I had to choose) universally categorized as an enemy or contaminating force, or as a tool, object or pet. I think the latter would have to cause a ontologically diminishing effect that the former does not. The enemy remains a subject of sorts. As for whether it’s easier to imagine a heroic solution to end Hitler than slavery, hasn’t it sort of been proven by history itself? Nazism was, in the overall scheme of things, ended fairly quickly. Whereas the effects of slavery affected the structure of our society for at least another 100 years (one could argue, and I’m betting you’d agree, that it still has ramifications). The difference isn’t so much about the intent of the bigot, but the structural effect of how the bigotry was implemented. And surely, on the whole, it’s much more difficult to hide blackness than Jewishness, right?
I disagree with Domingos that all violence is morally the same (at least, that seems to be the logical result of his position). There is the difference between fictional and real violence, of course, but, even within a fictional world, there can be violence done for a moral good. Shouldn’t we be more satisfied with the killing of a violent slaver than the killing of a slave by that slaver? Likewise, in real life, some people should die. I was happy that bin Laden was killed for example. (This doesn’t mean that getting to the point where he could be killed was entirely moral, only that I see his death itself as a moral good.) So my views on the morality of fictional killing aren’t unrelated to my views on real killing. It’s just that the former didn’t cause my views on the latter, rather I used both types to arrive at a moral position. On the other hand, Tarantino’s constantly used rejoinder that real slavery was so much more violent than what he depicts neglects the point that slavery’s real violence wasn’t there for entertainment. Or when it was seen as entertainment, we should consider that as highly immoral.
And did anyone else read Armond White’s take on Sam Jackson:
Charles: “I disagree with Domingos that all violence is morally the same[.]”
Well, yes and no: I’m not naive enough to believe in Democracy and the justice system, but I also think that, with its flaws and all (there’s justice for the wealthy and then, there’s justice for poor people), it’s still the best way. I oppose State terrorism as well as rebellious terrorism and vigilantism (the vigilante is not much better morally than the villain he’s killing, as shown in many a Batman story, I guess because I don’t read those). Everybody deserves a fair trial. Also: I strongly oppose the death penalty.
I think the question of whether killing or violence can be a moral good is a really difficult one. I tend to think not, but I can see the point of Charles’ view as well. I guess in general I feel like abrogating to oneself the right to decide which people it is good to kill can tend to lead to bad places pretty quickly. Extra-judicial killing is very satisfying in fiction; in real life, it seems more problematic. (And yes, a willingness to consider Candie children in Django Unchained would have gone some way towards confronting this problem.)
Charles, I need to think about that. I’m not really certain that it’s always easier for Jews to hide; after all, in some times and communities Jews have had religious obligations to appear and dress a certain way. On the other hand, like I said, some “black” people really aren’t “black” at all, and there’s been a ton of effort over the years in the US to define blackness. In terms of which was hardest to get rid of…it’s true that the Nazis were eliminated…but anti-Semitism was around for a really, really, really long time. It’s possible to see the Holocaust as a final, apocalyptic conclusion to thousands of years of hatred, rather than some sort of brief, relatively easily overcome episode, I think.
I think trying to figure out which group is more oppressed or has it worse is largely pointless and more than a little distasteful in any case. Be that as it may, I still think that Tarantino’s problem’s in Django vs. his successes in IB are more a function of genre choices and the history of film available to him more than they’re a function of some sort of innate structural difference between anti-Jewish and anti-black prejudice.
I mean…as an example, I think IB actually critiques, or questions your notion that the Holocaust could be easily finished, in some ways. The revenge on Hitler is so clearly an ahistorical fantasy — a filmed moment — in that film, that it calls into question the idea the the real life victory was actually a real life victory, in some ways. WWII films give us heroes who save the day — but that’s a fantasy. In reality, when you’ve got that many dead, it’s very hard to see the day as particularly saved.
Oh…and Domingos, I agree it isn’t just lines on paper; it’s ideas. And ideas matter; ideologies of violence matter; people are ethically responsible for what they say just as they’re ethically responsible for what they do. But saying and doing still aren’t the same thing. I think it’s worth making those distinctions.
Domingos,
I oppose the death penalty, too, but not because some people shouldn’t be killed. There’s too many problems with its implementation. If, in a controlled scenario like a revenge movie, one person kills someone who has just murdered that person’s entire family, I don’t have a problem with that. Of course, there’s no way to a practically make and enforce a law based on such situations, so I’m not for vigilante killing be legalized. I just don’t see all vigilante killings as immoral. Some could be heroic, even, but I can’t think of any particular examples right now.
And Batman doesn’t kill.
Noah,
Blacks are often held responsible for their statistical inability to fully integrate into society. We still get books like the Bell Curve, and like it or not, Jews have been seen as able to overcome their oppression, which is used as a rhetorical bludgeon. So, distasteful though it may be, it seems we have to address what’s unique to black oppression. If there’s nothing unique about it, then Charles Murray and Calvin Candie are correct that the problem is ultimately genetic.
Oh, I think different oppressions are differently historically specific, absolutely. That’s different than saying that those oppressions are semi-ontological, or saying that one is worse than the other, or that it’s because blacks really are innately easier to single out than Jews. I’d argue that the fact that blacks appear to us to be innately easier to single out is part of the historical specificity of their oppression. It’s a symptom, not a cause.
I mean, for instance, my understanding is that a big part of the inequities in black and white income in the present day is due to the fact that blacks were excluded from GI Bill mortgage loans, and so failed to be part of the subsidized affluence which essentially created the post-War American middle-class. That’s a huge deal…but it doesn’t necessarily have a ton to do with the particular mechanics of how blacks are stigmatized per se.
Batman doesn’t kill…but he actually does torture people, which I presume you consider worse than killing, Charles? I mean, again, I don’t exactly agree, but I think there’s some coherent argument for killing some people in certain circumstances being morally okay. It’s hard to come up with an excuse for torture though.
Are you willing to say that blacks have had it worse than whites in this country? If do, then you’re willing to compare oppressions. These comparisons are built into any ability to any talk about justice. I’d be curious how one could describe differing effects without doing comparisons. What’s key is to not dismiss other oppressive situations because slavery might’ve had longer lasting structural repercussions. And I don’t think I was doing that.
Hmm, torturing someone for revenge, rather than just killing them. I’m not sure how I come down on that. Would it be immoral to slice up parts of Idi Amin and make him eat them? Is that too much? Maybe some people deserve torture. As for practical justifications, if it could be shown that many people are saved because a person was tortured, then I wouldn’t see that as somehow worse than killing. Reality kind of fucks up such lucid analyses, though.
“do” –> “so”
There’s very little evidence that torturing anyone leads to useful information. Whenever you talk to interrogators, they say it doesn’t.
You can make an argument for killing someone I guess on the grounds that they need to be stopped. Torturing someone though is purely about revenge, or sadism, to the extent they can be separated.
And, you know…you might consider thinking a bit about whether reflexive/joking appeals to complexity or tough-mindedness or whatever really make the kind of case for your view here that you think they do? I think the appeal of revenge and torture and violence is often precisely that it seems “real”, or tough-minded. There’s a huge, visceral attraction to doing the dirty work of justice; to being strong-minded rather than weak-willed. I think that attraction is something to be very leery of — not least because it’s a mindset — should I say a trope? — that I think would be quite familiar to folks like Idi Amin.
Blacks are oppressed in the US; whites aren’t, and never have been. Groups that *became white* were oppressed before they got to be white, but that’s kind of a different thing.
I just think arguments over whether the Holocaust or slavery were worse than each other, or whether the Holocaust was the worst atrocity ever…it’s just a tiresome and I think counterproductive discussion. That doesn’t mean you can’t look at historical specifics and point out that rhetoric around Jews and rhetoric around blacks was not the same. I just think it’s dicey to go from there to saying, racism is ontologically or structurally worse than anti-Semitism in some sort of absolute way. That seems to be erasing specificity rather than elaborating it.
I haven’t seen Django Unchained, but is there a chance (and did I miss this being brought up) thatTarantino is talking less about slavery than about more contemporary art forms? Like blaxploitation, and possibly also gangster culture, and modern African violence? Westerns are invoked in hip-hop with at least some frequency.
Not that “modern African violence” is an art form, for Heaven’s sake. I’m not a racist Stockhausen. But there is a pretty intriguing African film industry, which does deal with horror and magic.
Bert, that’s an interesting point. He’s definitely referencing blaxploitation and gangsta culture to some extent…but it’s not super-clear that it’s terribly effective or interesting. The gangsta/rap/blaxploitation violent tough guy tropes just get mapped onto the cowboy tropes fairly directly and without much questioning, as far as I can tell. I guess someone else might have a different take, but I didn’t think he did anything all that clever with it.
“It’s not like sympathetic terrorism as entertainment isn’t fairly popular these days: Che, Carlos, Red Faction Army…”
By “Red Faction Army” did you mean The Baader Meinhof Complex movie? The lead characters in the film weren’t given a sympathetic depiction. The tone was pretty neutral overall to their actions.
“But there is a pretty intriguing African film industry, which does deal with horror and magic.”
Like the Nigerian film industry?
Yes, west African I think, Nigeria and Ghana and such.
Has anyone seen Roots? I really need to.
And wouldn’t it sort of be more poignant if Django killed some innocent (possibly black) bystanders? Not that we need more black corpses in American cinema, but it would possibly function as more of a critique of the vengeance killings that are tearing up Chicago.
There are various ways Tarantino could have added complexity…. Black bystanders, white children…letting Samuel Jackson’s character show some level of resistance, and/or suffer some level of violence from Candie…I dunno, there are a lot of possibilities. Didn’t happen, though.
Though, it could have been worse, too, of course.
Oh Tarantino isn’t bad, but to expect complexity from him? Who do you think he is? Mizoguchi?
Jackie Brown is thoughtful and complex, I think. So is Death Proof, actually. That’s if you’re willing to see pulp as capable of complexity, which I know you’re at least skeptical of Domingos.
It was not purely coincidence that liberalism, the philosophy of liberty, developed alongside chattel slavery.
In Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber talks about how the concept of “freedom” emerged along the concept of slavery. “Having freedom” means owning and having absolutely power over yourself, an idea that only makes sense in a world where you can also own and have absolute power over another person. He talks about this in an interview here.
Django is in a bind because, as you mention and unlike slavery in the ancient world, his slavery is tied to his skin color, so even after he “owns himself” he isn’t able to enter into agreements with other free-white-people (all concepts linked). That’s why Schultz’s offer to team up is so important: it’s an agreement, and only free people can enter into agreements.
I think Django makes these points quite effectively, without any out-of-character speechifying that would have thrown the viewer out of the movie.
As for Stephen, he’s guilty of the sin of loving the system of slavery with his whole heart. He’s not a self-preserving man who becomes a collaborator to protect himself or in exchange for certain perks. Rather, he loves Calvin Candie as his own son, which means by extension (from the personal to the structural) that he loves the whole system of owning slaves as if it was his own system. He has the power he has in the movie because Calvin and all the other whites around the plantation understand this at a deep level: he loves them, so he’ll never be a threat to them.
In other words, the problem with Stephen isn’t that he lacks the courage/ability to act, as was the case for other slaves. Taratino gives us all these close-ups to show that even while those slaves are forced to accept the system, they hate and resent it. Meanwhile, the close-up on Steven shows that he hates and resents a free black man. The movie judges him for his attitude, not for his actions.
Personally I think people should be judged for their actions because who can prove attitude and what’s the use of attitude without action? But that’s not how Tarantino thinks.
This actually also has the effect of redoubling Stephen’s role as Django’s doppelganger. Even though it came out of deep familiarity with the system, even though he was playing a role at the time, Django is the one black character who gets a closeup from Tarantino where he isn’t barely suppressing revulsion or contempt at the horrors of slavery and those who perpetuate those horrors. The other black characters, rightfully, hate him for that. He redeems himself from their hate at the end when, through his actions, he proves that he like all right-thinking people HATES the system and would destroy it.
All this emphasis on thought-crime is a bit of a problem maybe… but then, even as a slave, the thinking goes, the one thing we continue to “owns” is our thoughts. Which goes back to the ancient world, and the division created between the mind and the body in order – according to David Graeber – to explain how it was possible for a person to own himself (i.e., if the mind and body are separate, the mind can own the body).
Sorry for all the typos. ^^ Probably should have saved this for my article, too. Consider this a preview!
Tying loving-the-white-man-more-than-your-own-kind up with Stephen’s performance of blackness which is a performance of blackness we can recognize our TV sets and from people who are alive today is one of the more inflammatory sides to Django. More than the gangster-rap stuff mapped on to Western stuff, that’s the part of the movie that most directly speaks to the modern audience.
Also, though, Stephen’s lines got a lot of laughs in the theater when I saw the movie. If there’s an engagement with modern movies, part of that has to be an engagement with Tyler Perry-style movies… was that Tarantino, or was it Jackson? Movies are collaborations, after all.
The problem with having Jackson love Candie like that is that…it’s just the Uncle Tom stereotype, and that’s all it is. Where’s Stephen’s family? Where’s his wife? Where’s his kids? Where’s his mother and father? To get him to the point where it makes sense for his whole focus to be Candie, he has to not be a person. No sex, no family — just this flat, cardboard image white people want to see, which would fall apart if everyone wasn’t agreeing not to look behind it.
Not that there weren’t, or couldn’t be, blacks who sympathized with white people to some extent, or who would make some of Stephen’s choices. But there weren’t blacks without families or sex organs, and that’s what Tarantino, and the Uncle Tom myth, are telling you that Stephen is.
Jackson’s performance is amazing; the portrayal and the writing are very nuanced. But the nuance is all within the context of this really invidious stereotype which simply is not challenged or really even thought about. It’s a pretty serious problem for the film, I think.
You’re point about the importance of entering into contracts is really good.
I can imagine a situation where Stephen’s family is forcibly taken from him, maybe even at a young age, and the trauma is so great that he never constructs another. But that does kind of point to the problem of the Uncle Thom myth in another way, because that’s a really sad tragic backstory for a character have and if the audience knew about it, they’d probably be at least a little bit sympathetic to the character. So, I can see your point. A split-second establishing Stephen as a tragic figure as well as a villainous one wouldn’t have weakened the movie’s focus on him as the final baddie.
Steven, I meant Koji Wakamatsu’s United Red Army (I have a hard time keeping the names of leftist cells separate), which is now corrected above. I agree about Baader-Meinhoff Complex; it does make them out to be snotty brats.
Noah, that’s what I’ve heard about torture’s results, too. I’m not sure what you think was a joke, but the difference between us is that I don’t simply dismiss the retributivist argument, eye for an eye and the like. It’s in play in my head just like utilitarianism and other ethical codes are. If it were to come down to a choice between letting Idi Amin live out his days and die of old age or giving him a taste of the torture he performed on others, unlike you, evidently, I’d choose the latter. He really deserved it. Similarly, I don’t see killing merely as a pragmatic measure, but also as just deserts. That’s why the option of torture versus killing is open for me, but, practically speaking, it isn’t likely to be an issue we’ll ever have to debate.
And none of this has shit to do with what you consider machismo. For me, it’s just as macho to stoically resist violence (and pop culture sometimes suggest this: such as a melodrama when a woman is shown to be going hysterical, slapping a guy, but he doesn’t retaliate; that’s even the message of Billy Jack, even though he has a funny way of showing it). But there is (like Billy Jack) something of the need for nonviolence to rest on the possibility of violence rather than the state of being too weak to be effectively violent. Going along with that, if America says, “I could whip you, but I’m above that,” that’s just as macho as “I’m whipping you, because you deserve it” and even more macho than “I really don’t want to whip you, but morally I must.”
And, really, my point was the structural difference of two atrocities, not asking which was worse. For whoever’s experiencing such acts, I’m sure that never much matters. In dealing with the long lasting effects, though, it does matter, and I don’t see how you figure out such effects without thinking about the differences. (And it’s not that every problem related to blackness was caused by slavery per se, but the views that made slavery an option underlie a lot of the subsequent problems.) And you know that whites have been oppressed, because there are so many examples of it. What you mean is that whites haven’t been oppressed in the same way that blacks have, which is exactly what Fanon is doing in his comparison. Basically, as I’m reading him, he’s saying that the Holocaust was closer to white oppression than black oppression. Maybe it’ll help to quote Sartre’s point to which Fanon was replying:
The problem is with what’s happened to Jewish self-definition, which is still being acknowledged here, whereas Fanon’s point is that blacks were robbed of even having that, since the “inside” was being overdetermined/fixed from the “outside.” There wasn’t the conflict between some tradition of who black slaves might be and how they might’ve been currently defined, because the former connection was completely dismantled piece by piece over a long period of time. I don’t have my mind made up on any of this, but I do think it shouldn’t just be shoved under the rug, because it’s unsightly. If there isn’t a lot of comparisons between oppressions, then why are there so many movies about the Holocaust and so few about slavery (not just American, but worldwide)?There’s something going on there it seems to me. A comparison has been going on, even if it’s all out of view.
And, thanks, Subdee, that book sounds amazing. Looking forward to to your whole take.
One final note to go along with what I was saying: poetry was working just fine after slavery, after the genocide of the Native Americans, but it became impossible after the Holocaust. I’m sure there are plenty of examples like this. These comparisons always go on, even when one side of the comparison is ignored (which makes comparative judgment all the more finalized).
Noah: the above was written more in tongue-in-cheek mode than anything else.
Charles…yeah, I think an eye for an eye is not a good idea.
Re masculinity…it can function in a lot of different ways, sure; it’s an ideology and a myth, not a fact. But…if you’re suggesting that myths and ideas about masculinity don’t have anything to do with performing violence, or that Django’s threatened castration and amazing proficiency with guns have nothing to do with ideas about black emasculation/masculinity and blaxploitation images of manhood — well, we just disagree, I guess.
White people really aren’t oppressed for being white people just about ever — certainly not systematically. But…would it help if I said that comparing genocides or mass atrocities to see which is worse is not particularly helpful? (And I really don’t understand the poetry thing — we should make comparisons between genocides because here’s one clearly stupid comparison and we need more of those? I’m sure I’m not following the logic there….)
I agree that the erasure of the history of slaves is a big deal, and different from how Jews have been discriminated against. there are arguments about how total it was, and about whether slaves really did lose all their heritage though. Eugene Genovese in Roll Jordan Roll makes a strong case for continuities between African culture and slave culture.
I kind of thing comparing genocides is not entirely silly, in terms of their long-term consequences. And so is killing as vengeance/release. Both Africans and African-Americans continue to endure unspeakable atrocities, at the hands of each other as well as at the hands of whites (and now the Chinese, in the case of Africa). Jews got Israel, and are reproducing a certain colonial evil, and Maus navelgazing and Elie Wiesel warmongering. Native Americans seem to just be quietly disappearing, largely through integration probably (witness the far more salient presence of Latinos, who are rarely thought of as Indians).
I need to read that author Subdee mentioned about “freedom” being constructed as an opposition to “slavery.” I thought it maybe had at least something to do with political/economic authority (indentured servitude and prison both being relevant to current black experiences) as much as the actual direct denial of existence in Fanon and Douglass and Twain.
Bert, I don’t have the book anymore but Graber talks about a lot of the moral, legal, and social institutions we take for granted being developed in societies where people owned slaves. He’s interested in the language people used to describe concepts like “free” (=not a slave) and “debt” (=sin). It’s an excellent book.
Yeah; I really didn’t mean that talking about differences and similarities was a bad idea. There can just be this oppression sweepstakes where folks are competing to have suffered the worst atrocity of all. I just don’t think that goes anywhere good.
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Charles Reece says:
I suggest a super-slave could no more put an end to slavery by destroying a personal target than Superman can punch out poverty.
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Hah! Bravo; the idiocy could not be more hilariously exploded…
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The reason for the appearance of a mustache-twirling cliched role… is…the heroic-revenge generic structure. It requires a personalized villain of sorts, not a structural evil with which even “good” citizens are complicit…By giving the story a revenge motive, Tarantino reduced the suffering to a personal level, a subjective violence that one person might do to another — kill the oppressor, stop the oppression.
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Indeed so! An outstanding analysis; you both note how the very nature of “the heroic-revenge generic structure” requires such simplistic hero/villain interactions (which preemptively shoots down “why couldn’t ‘Django Unchained’ have been more complex and nuanced” arguments)
…and how as an inescapable result of following genre tropes, the complexity and massive intractability of the institution of slavery was “dumbed down.”
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And what’s more personalized than the evil doppelgänger?
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Remember how in “Unbreakable” Jackson was…?
As for Tarantino ramping up the villainy of an Uncle Tom, could that not be a way to make the movie less “anti-white,” in consideration of the makeup of the majority of his audience?
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
The idea of the viewer being satisfied with violence committed against a character is problematic because, then, the viewer is not morally better than the villains.
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Ummpf. That’s like the ludicrous “thinking” that if you put to death a brutal, remorseless killer of innocents you’re “just as bad as he is.” Therefore, the life of a Hitler or a Ted Bundy is just as precious and valuable as the life of any of their victims, or that of a Gandhi or Martin Luther King…
There are so many great points in this thread; please forgive me if my response seems disjointed.
Regarding Mike Hunter’s last post above, I second every sentence, especially his praise of the Superman analogy.
Reece, regarding your point about the difference between the number of movies made about slavery and the greater number made about the Holocaust, I offer the following hypotheses:
Only a relatively few nations have vibrant, active film industries that churn out movies in volume. The setting of most stories is within the society of the storyteller. Slavery happened all over the world, but American slavery of Africans was unique in some respects, and only happened here. Even slavery in the Spanish colonies was different. Catholics didn’t feel the same need to rationalize slave ownership with a white supremacist mythology. The Holocaust, on the other hand, affected many nations because of the German conquest of Europe, the global nature of World War II, and the Jewish diaspora.
Your structural point: It is much easier to separate — even artificially — good guys from bad guys in a Holocaust narrative. “Nazis make the best bad guys” is a cliché because it’s true. The pervasive effect of American slavery, which Noah discusses in another Django blog, makes narrative more complex and more difficult. A narrative about German anti-Semitism set within Germany, with Germans as both protagonists and antagonists, might be similarly complex.
We (Americans) didn’t commit the Holocaust. Consequently, we can watch movies about it and experience unalloyed, cathartic, self-esteem-enhancing glee when Americans (and Canadians, Brits, and Russians, but why mention them?) come in and save the day. Higher art may inspire morally edifying introspection , but it does not sell the popcorn.
The American movie industry is headquartered in southern California, with branch offices in New York City. More Jews live in those places than in much of the rest of the country, and so people in the industry know Jews or are Jewish themselves. If the American movie industry were centered around Atlanta, I am confident you would see many more movies about slavery in America.
To continue on your point about structural differences between oppression of blacks and oppression of Jews, I think the structure is much more similar if you compare American slavery to Hebrew slavery in Egypt or Babylon, or even the caste system (with occasional ethnic cleansing) that occurred in medieval Europe and the Ottoman Empire. American society’s encounter with Africans didn’t occur until the early 1600s. The story of Hebrew / Gentile interaction began over 4,000 years ago, when Hebrew identity first came about. So time and place are huge factors in the perceived structural differences.
During most of that history, Hebrews (and then Jews, under the Roman term), self-identified with different diet and habits because God told them to — not as difficult a condition to get around as melanin, but still pretty tough. The fact that the difference was seen as a willing one (and that Jews believed themselves to have a special relationship with God) was (in some cases) part of the polemic against them and a cross that blacks in America didn’t bear. As with the shy girl at school, outsiders sometimes perceived the separation to imply a supremacist attitude. A few Jews even genuinely had that attitude, despite the clear scriptural teaching that the chosen people were not chosen because they were the coolest.
Regarding the awesome-sounding Graeber book that subdee brings up and the point that freedom is defined in contrast to slavery, I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I think the reason 18th century slave-owning Virginians were such staunch advocates of American independence (despite most British oppression occurring further north) is that they knew what slavery looked like. Once they realized that the British did not see them as equals and fellow Englishmen — that they were “something less” — they could not abide as British subjects. They knew that once you were an inferior “other,” any oppression or degradation becomes easily justifiable.
Furthermore, Graeber’s point mirrors a larger theological point (with which you may not agree) about the purpose of evil in the universe. Moral good becomes starkly apparent when contrasted with evil, and freedom from sin is more meaningful when contrasted with subservience to a carnal nature. Without conflict, there is no victory. I think good still exists as a positive without evil, but evil sure makes it easier to demonstrate. With a title that includes the words “5,000 Years,” Graeber probably covers that within the scope of the book.
I’d recommend Graeber’s book to everyone. I couldn’t recount his points adequately but he traces the origins of market exchanges to violence, war and slavery, where things and people are ripped out of the social context that binds societies together.
The chapter about the effects of the slave trade in interior West Africa is particularly harrowing. The logic of the market corrupts and reshapes societies far removed from any direct European contact.
Reading my copy of the Jan. 14th “New Yorker” last night, ran across a piece about a documentary about how “harsh drug sentences have blown communities apart.”
After a screening of the film, its creator said, “Wasn’t James [one of its subjects] great?…And yet making a movie about human stories is a trap. The audience walks out thinking not about the larger issues — the system — but about the person they liked.” (Emphasis added)
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Ormur says:
…The chapter about the effects of the slave trade in interior West Africa is particularly harrowing. The logic of the market corrupts and reshapes societies far removed from any direct European contact.
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Yeah:
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The Shrunken Head Trade
In the late 19th century Europeans and Americans, hearing stories about the Jivaro and their unusual traditions, started buying shrunken heads as curiosities. The going rate by the 1930’s was about $25 per head. The tribesmen soon learned that they could obtain money or a firearm in trade for a tsantsa [shrunken head]. The use of guns led to an increased number of more deadly feuds, which in turn created more heads for the trade. Because the demand for shrunken heads by tourists was actually causing the Jivaros to do more headhunting, the governments of Peru and Equator enacted strict laws forbidding the buying and selling of tsantsa in order to slow the slaughter. In the 1940’s the United States also banned the import of shrunken heads.
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Emphasis added; from http://www.unmuseum.org/headshrinkers.htm
From the excellent “Smithsonian” magazine:
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The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson
…“One cannot question the genuineness of Jefferson’s liberal dreams,” writes historian David Brion Davis. “He was one of the first statesmen in any part of the world to advocate concrete measures for restricting and eradicating Negro slavery.”
But in the 1790s, Davis continues, “the most remarkable thing about Jefferson’s stand on slavery is his immense silence.” And later, Davis finds, Jefferson’s emancipation efforts “virtually ceased.”
Somewhere in a short span of years during the 1780s and into the early 1790s, a transformation came over Jefferson…
The critical turning point in Jefferson’s thinking may well have come in 1792. As Jefferson was counting up the agricultural profits and losses of his plantation in a letter to President Washington that year, it occurred to him that there was a phenomenon he had perceived at Monticello but never actually measured. He proceeded to calculate it in a barely legible, scribbled note in the middle of a page, enclosed in brackets. What Jefferson set out clearly for the first time was that he was making a 4 percent profit every year on the birth of black children. The enslaved were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, “I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.” His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.
In another communication from the early 1790s, Jefferson takes the 4 percent formula further and quite bluntly advances the notion that slavery presented an investment strategy for the future. He writes that an acquaintance who had suffered financial reverses “should have been invested in negroes.” He advises that if the friend’s family had any cash left, “every farthing of it [should be] laid out in land and negroes, which besides a present support bring a silent profit of from 5. to 10. per cent in this country by the increase in their value.”
The irony is that Jefferson sent his 4 percent formula to George Washington, who freed his slaves, precisely because slavery had made human beings into money, like “Cattle in the market,” and this disgusted him. Yet Jefferson was right, prescient, about the investment value of slaves. A startling statistic emerged in the 1970s, when economists taking a hardheaded look at slavery found that on the eve of the Civil War, enslaved black people, in the aggregate, formed the second most valuable capital asset in the United States. David Brion Davis sums up their findings: “In 1860, the value of Southern slaves was about three times the amount invested in manufacturing or railroads nationwide.” The only asset more valuable than the black people was the land itself. The formula Jefferson had stumbled upon became the engine not only of Monticello but of the entire slaveholding South and the Northern industries, shippers, banks, insurers and investors who weighed risk against returns and bet on slavery. The words Jefferson used—“their increase”—became magic words…
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http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Little-Known-Dark-Side-of-Thomas-Jefferson-169780996.html?c=y&page=1
Mike, does that mean the story that the “wage slavery” of immigrants in the north was more economical than slavery, and thus slavery would have died out on its own, is a canard? I’ve also been taught that Jefferson was an abolitionist his entire adult life, but believed in white supremacy until he got to know educated, free black men. Does that jibe with your sources? Maybe it has no bearing on his bottom line.
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John Hennings says:
Mike, does that mean the story that the “wage slavery” of immigrants in the north was more economical than slavery, and thus slavery would have died out on its own, is a canard?
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Plenty of other sources prove that slavery was by far a better “investment.” Workers in the North were resentful that they had to compete with the cheaper slave labor in the South. That resentment was a significant reason why the expansion of slavery into new areas of the country was so fiercely resisted.
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In the North, labor was expensive, and workers were mobile and active. The influx of immigrants from Europe and Asia provided competition in the labor market, however, keeping wages from growing very quickly. The Southern economy, however, was built on the labor of African American slaves, who were oppressed into providing cheap labor…
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http://www.historycentral.com/CivilWar/AMERICA/Economics.html
Other charming info:
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Above all, the planters regarded the slaves as investments, into which they had sunk nearly $2 billion of their capital by 1860; slaves were the primary form of wealth in the South and as such they were cared for as any asset is cared for by a prudent capitalist.
Accordingly, they were sometimes spared dangerous work and if a neck was going to be broken, the master preferred it to be that of a wage-earning Irish laborer rather than that of a prime field hand, worth $1,800 by 1860 (price had quintupled since 1800)
Tunnel blasting and swamp draining were often consigned to itinerant gangs of expendable Irishmen because those perilous tasks were “death on blacks and mules.”
Women who bore ten plus babies were prized as “rattlin’ good breeders” and some of these fecund females were promised their freedom when they had produced ten…
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http://www.apstudynotes.org/us-history/outlines/chapter-16-the-south-and-the-slavery-controversy-1793-1860/
Re Jefferson’s variable attitude:
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Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves, yet he was opposed to the ultimate continuation of the institution of slavery throughout his life and privately struggled with the dilemma of slavery and freedom and its compatibility with the ideals of the American Revolution. Historians are in disagreement with how much Jefferson was committed to the anti-slavery cause.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson . See the “Slaves and slavery” section there…
Thanks! That all makes sense, but it wasn’t info I had seen before.
This all brings another thought to mind. Due to the value of the investment, and the physical incapabilty of some owners (little old ladies had house slaves), it could not have been “constant violence” keeping slaves in line, but the constant threat of it. Like a minimum security prisoner on a work detail, a slave could walk away pretty easily, but then what? An escape would probably activate the community, desperate to keep the system in check. The slave can’t disguise his fugitive status, and retribution was severe, as a message to others. This probably all seems obvious, but I think some of the round table commentary has exaggerated the frequency of violence, although probably not the severity.
Just got done watching Django Unchained. I actually enjoyed this one. I had an issue or two- namely Tarantino needs to stop using pop music in these things- the movie doesn’t need it and it’s a distraction. Second, the end revenge bit is slightly redundant- if should have figured in the last bit amending to the first shoot em’ up where Django surrenders. Leonardo Di Caprio does some of his best work here. Also, the issues brought up about slavery and how much this film addresses it is a an empty suit. This is just a really good action flick, like all of his pictures. A great action director creates an environment that hyper activates the suspense- drawing you into the tension of the moment, and Tarantino does this very well here. Using the slave trade as a back drop is a near master stroke in creating a vile place we cannot wait to get out of- like Nazi Germany, or a warehouse with a dead cop. The movie gets to say some things about slavery, demonstrating a gross, inhuman violence, used for both purposes of revulsion and cranking up the tension. While everybody was crowing about the importance of the story, they forgot to plainly understand that within a truly great action film- The Running Man, Terminator, French Connection- you have always been given a compelling, nasty gutter to swim through in order to make the catharsis work more on your brain than complete bloody nothing. I nearly agree with Spike Lee that this may just be a Slave Auction Spaghetti Western, but that would be missing out on a thrill ride of a film that says no less about racism than Do The Right Thing did- except Tarantino chooses to pick at the past in an effort to show the horrors of chattel slavery, and the revenge fantasy that plays out. As a grand statement on the slave trade itself it would be a failure in total, due to it’s reduction of scope, depth, and complete perspective of the thing itself- it’s almost too big a moral enterprise to have your cake and eat it too. While Spike Lee used humor and neighborhood characters eating at each other on the hottest day of the year to create his tension, Tarantino does what he knows best- how to kill the bad guys with an honest to goodness, righteous reasoning that is immune to objection of motive. This came as a surprise to me.
Noah: “if you’re suggesting that myths and ideas about masculinity don’t have anything to do with performing violence”
No, I was saying your ideas about masculinity aren’t reflected in my ideas on violence.
I agree that any group of white people being oppressed isn’t the same as racist oppression. My point was that you have to make qualitative distinctions about the form of oppression in order to have any conversation about the effects. And that’s really not different in kind from what Fanon was doing. What the Adorno thing was about was pointing out that he neglected all the previous atrocities by saying the most recent (the Holocaust) was what ended poetry. That’s an implicit comparison, much like the disparate amount of slavery movies relative to Holocaust movies is a comparison. Finding it distasteful to talk about and letting that emotion determine conversation only reinforces the dominant discourse that accepts the Holocaust as the most important atrocity. But I do agree with you about “the atrocity sweepstakes,” except onto-structural considerations don’t fall into that problem.
Your point about continuities between African culture and slave culture is a good one, and should be considered. Clearly, black slaves weren’t merely left as empty vessels, which my rhetoric might’ve inadvertently suggested.
John H., well, shit, you bring up a lot of good stuff. I think your reasons why there are fewer American slave films are all plausible, and probably correct. I still think that constitutes a complicit comparison between atrocities. It just hasn’t been seen as relevant a subject matter as some others.
And the difference between suffering because you’re the chosen people versus suffering because you’re the chosen object of people seems like a pretty important difference to me. I don’t mean that it lessens the physical suffering or horror in the former case (this, btw, would be an example of a bean-counting comparison between historical traumas), but it does seem to reflect a difference in structural suffering. Maybe the afro-pessisimists that I referenced in the essay don’t consider the chattel slavery that existed before black slavery enough, but they’re persuasive to me in arguing the way blacks were overidentified with chattel slavery through a unique characteristic, their skin.
I think this LA Times article brought up some interesting points about how some black audiences are reacting to the film.
Hey Matt. I put a link to the article and removed the text. Hope that’s okay; I’m all for fair use and free culture, but copying out the entire article seems a little borderline to me. Hopefully people can click through and read it easily enough.
Ok sounds good
Re that “how some black audiences are reacting to the film” (thanks for the heads-up, Matt), that was illuminating:
-Some are offended by it, some aren’t;
-Some like some parts of the movie, dislike others;
-Some are bothered by Tarantino making the movie, others are not…