I Watched 12 Years A Slave for the First Time

It was difficult but needed.

Greetings! This blog will have new posts twice a week on Thursdays and Fridays. Posts will be between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Thursdays and between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. on Fridays. One post will revolve around a book I am currently reading. The other post will revolve around a film that I have watched. Tomorrow, I will share my observations on Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist program based on my reading of Empire of Liberty (2009) by Gordon S. Wood. Today, however, I share some thoughts on mustering the courage to watch 12 Years A Slave (2013). Ideally, Friday will be the film reflection day as it pairs with my love of Friday movie nights from when I was a kid. But today, I will offer film reflections. Examining cultural products and historical scholarship that both challenge and confirm my priors is a way I find joy, and that can be done without directly fixating on the present.

Hopefully, this structure can allow you, the reader, to enter the weekend with productive food for thought!

Sincerely,

Steward Beckham

Wikimedia Commons: Logo of the film 12 Years a Slave directed by Steve McQueen

Recently, I watched Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning film 12 Years a Slave. Although the movie was released in 2013, I avoided it because of its dark and unsettling overtones. As an American minority, I can find the brutality embedded in that period haunting. But the current political era has taught me that I was naive to believe in the myths about equality, exceptionalism, and progression in our contemporary world. Believing those myths is likely an outcome of privilege.

The film is beautifully made and tells the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man from Saratoga Springs, New York, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. In the story, Solomon is betrayed by con artists and sold down the river into slavery. This happened to countless free African Americans living in the Northern states. Northup is an eloquent and worldly Northerner who wakes up in chains after being drugged the night before by the two white men who promise him a gig as a traveling musician. Thus, Ejiofor’s character begins a long journey into the dehumanizing, uniquely American system of raping and pillaging Black bodies at an industrial scale as generations of African Americans are born into the legal designation of being someone else’s property.

In 19th-century America, the agribusiness of the South incentivized a way of life and a racial caste system. The legacy of that race-based class system perpetuated at such a large scale and codified into social and cultural life with no possibility of freedom has reverberated throughout time. The nation’s marriage to anti-Black social pathogens is deeply connected to working people’s contemporary inability to articulate their concerns over the state of our economy without using frames that demonize one group to satisfy the anxieties of another group.

The sadness of this movie is undoubtedly demanding. Still, the only hopeful aspects are seen through Solomon’s steadfast attempts to retain his humanity (and birth name) despite a systemic effort to rip it away. I don’t want to spoil too much for those who haven’t seen it. But, I will say that the granular ways in which the brutal slave trade wrecked the morality of people witnessing it and made many of the slaves themselves wish for their deaths are on full display. Through Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon, we experience the way slaves survived and fought against all odds, and through Lupita Nyong’o’s Patsey, we experience sharp hopelessness. In the grand scheme of human history, the traumas of this time were just yesterday.

I’m glad I watched this film as I reflect on parts of my ancestral history that have been difficult to unpack. Maybe this was not easy for me because it would chip away at the American exceptionalism I have carried throughout my life. (A disintegration that has been happening for a long time now.)

Too many of us want to believe that the past is only in the past. With that framing, studying history can be easy and not shed light on contemporary public problems. But as an American of color, I do not have that luxury. Real and unsanitized American history is painful for me. However, I find joy in our actual history because I want to know my story and authentically understand my environment. The conundrums W.E.B. Dubois writes about in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are still present in the lives of African Americans today.

Gaining a clearer sense of myself and my surroundings also brings me joy. That means the darkness of chattel slavery and the systems that arose from it are part of my story. I cannot fully self-actualize and be a dutiful student of history without embracing the pain of the American story and the hardships of my ancestors.

That shouldn’t be something that American minorities disproportionately have to do.

Sold as if human beings were products to be tested at a specialty store. A system that profoundly informs the present.