Whitefolks Watching Roots Like: "Make America Great Again."

I swallowed it whole on Roots. 
Wasn’t it nice? 
Wasn’t it nice? 
Slavery was so cool. 
And all you had to do was wear derbies and vests and train chickens 
And buy your way free if you had a mind to. 
Must be the devil. 
It wasn’t no whitefolks. 
- Amiri Baraka “Dope” 

The Memorial Day debut of the refurbished version of Alex Haley’s Roots didn’t captivate a hundred million viewers like the 1977 rendition. Maybe the audience dwindled because OJ Simpson wasn’t re-cast? Regardless, the updated mini-series entertained millions and enjoyed widespread appreciation for providing a historical context for racial turbulence in the United States in the era of Black Lives Matter. 

The Miami Herald’s Leonard Pitts Jr. and a multitude of others insist that when it comes to slavery and the history of Racism, Whites and blacks alike are often ignorant; we’ve “never been given the tools to face the ugly truths America hides from itself, [have] never been taught how to have the conversation” about the American empire being founded on shackled black bodies. 

That bit of racial rhetoric is oft repeated, always false. 

Whites cannot flunk Racism. 

Smartphones and Hollywood are making it increasingly impossible for Whites to claim obliviousness about the ceaseless pillaging of black people. Eric Garner (a black male choked to death by New York police in 2014) and Sandra Bland (a black female found hanging dead in a Texas jail under suspicious circumstances in 2015) garnered more television time than many of the 2016 presidential candidates. While the box office and Netflix hemorrhage viewing options of chained, bludgeoned black people. 

Before the Roots reboot and FOX’s Empire there was: The Book Of Negroes (2015), Belle (2013), 12 Years A Slave (2013), DJango Unchained (2012), Case départ (2011), Feasts of All Saints (2001), Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000), Beloved (1998), Amistad (1997). 

This is a stingy sample of the plantation genre and excludes oddities like Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012), documentaries like Katrina Browne’s insufferable Traces Of The Trade (2008), and exemplary projects like Halle Gerima’s Sankofa (1993). 

Whites haven’t ignored these flicks; they’ve directed, financed and doled out Emmy and Academy Award nominations to a sizable number of these projects. Authentic or dramatized, Whites maintain an insatiable appetite for depictions of black misery. 

Black suffering made America great. Seeing Kunta Kinte lashed, mutilated and broken affirms White Power. White historian Amy Louise Wood authored Lynching And Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940, which deconstructs the White thirst to visually consume blacks being castrated and brutalized. Her theory applies to the hundreds – often thousands – of Whites who attended lynchings, the dispersal of photographs and postcards of ceremonial White terrorism, and films like Birth of a Nation – and probably either version of Roots. She writes: 

The rituals, the tortures, and their subsequent representations [impart] powerful messages to whites about their own supposed racial dominance and superiority. These spectacles [produce] and [disseminate] images of white power… white unity and… [serve] to instill and perpetuate a sense of racial supremacy in their white spectators. Lynching thus [succeeds] in enacting and maintaining white domination not only because African Americans [are] its targets but also because white southerners [are] its spectators.

The “re-imaging” of the routine rape of Kizzy - which was an everyday trauma for enslaved black females, males and children -and the YouTube postings of Oscar Grant’s life being snuffed out to christen 2009, are the necessary “terror porn” that solidifies the worthlessness of black life, verifies undisputed White might. Woods corroborates that Whites recognize “the ways in which entertainment [is] bound up with violence, as well as the ways in which violence itself [is] a source of visual amusement.” 

We commit a colossal error thinking White viewers digest Roots or any other portrayal of black agony with guilt for the barbarism their racial ancestors meted out to our black relatives. Watching Kunta lose a foot won’t compel presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders to recalibrate his stance on reparations. LeVar Burton, Anika Noni Rose and Forest Whitaker’s best dramatizations fail to convince Arizona rancher and federal lawbreaker Cliven Bundy to reconsider; the southwest outlaw believes negroes were “better off as slaves, picking cotton.” 

White jurists and former prosecuting attorneys like Staten Island, New York’s Dan Donovan (now a Congressman and a Trump supporter) and Ohio’s Timothy McGinty watched authentic footage of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice being killed and concluded it didn’t even warrant a trial – much less a conviction. A celluloid recounting of antebellum black lives undeserving of White respect does little to alter 21st century dedication to White Supremacy. 

If anything, a growing chorus of Whites openly wishes for a return, a reconstruction of earlier eras of White Supremacy when the only Obamas at the White House were butlers or mammies. White teenyboppers at Grosse Pointe South High School, a Detroit, Michigan suburb, summarized their presidential platform for a potential 2040 campaign: "Bringing back slavery, burning black people with brands and sending them back to Africa." After four decades, Roots returns to the airwaves when presidential front-runner Donald J. Trump’s political rallies have often rhetorically and literally echoed the flagrant White sadism of plantations where black people are mauled with impunity. 

The commercialized rape of black bodies made America great. 

Must we see it again?

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia: Original Racism

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has simultaneously recalibrated talking points for the upcoming presidential election and intensified the importance of President Obama’s remaining months in the White House. Scalia reportedly died over the weekend while on a hunting trip in Texas. He occupied the highest bench for three decades since being nominated by President Ronald Reagan and unanimously confirmed in 1986. 

Like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump, Justice Scalia is a Racist Suspect. 

Before his SCOTUS residency, Scalia commanded the United States Court Of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where, according to the New York Times, he issued opinions “skeptical of claims of employment discrimination.” In 2013, he helped erode the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which he branded a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.” And during the courts re-reconsideration of Affirmative Action, Scalia echoed predictable “Bell Curve” dogma about the intellectual ineptitude of negroes. The late justice explained that, “Most of the black scientists in this country don't come from schools like the University of Texas. They come from lesser schools.”

Scalia wasn't practicing White Supremacy. He was looking out for our best interest, so that aspiring black scholars don't strain our puny colored brains.    

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, a third generation physician and author of The Isis Papers, discussed Scalia’s assessment of black aptitude during one of her final lectures before her 2016 death. 

“150 years since emancipation, and [Justice Scalia] is justifying why black people should not be admitted to the law school because they don’t have what it takes. Maybe there’s a little nursery school law school that they can attend. That’s kind of more suited to what we’re going to allow them to do anyway.” 

The American Slave Coast, co-authored by Ned and Constance Sublette in 2015, explains how the United States was founded and thrived on a slave system that required the perpetual rape of black people. The organized sexual exploitation of black bodies informs the genesis of the United States Constitution that Scalia was charged with decoding. The Sublettes write: 

“The story of the Constitution’s making in 1787 has been told any number of ways, typically suffused with a cue-the-kettledrums aura of religiosity and an assumption of American triumphalism. Constitutional historians have tended to portray their subject as the most important political document in world history, in the greatest nation in history. In extreme cases this has involved elevating the framers to a sort of secular sainthood, as in the post-Reagan years, when a school of constitutional interpretation called 'originalism' emerged in American jurisprudence. Most prominently associated with archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, originalism is a fundamentalist movement that seeks in effect to construe the Constitution as static and unchanging by mind-reading the intentions of the presumably divinely inspired Framers - a word Scalia writes with a capital F, the way they did it in the eighteenth century. His opinions are shot through with variations on phrases like: 'The Framers recognized …,' 'The Framers contemplated …,' 'The Framers viewed…,' and 'The Framers’ experience …' This is a peculiarly subjective lens through which to view a document created by so many people, at such sharp cross-purposes with each other.

'Aware that the South would not join a Union that prohibited slavery,' writes Scalia’s generally dissenting colleague, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who does not capitalize 'framers,' 'the framers in effect postponed the question of slavery’s continued existence by writing into the Constitution a series of compromises.' But if we were to follow the notion of original intent from the point of view of the South Carolina Framers, we would see the Constitution as protecting the right to own and trade [and rape black people.]”