How could you not after watching so many if these types of films . I belive it just the fact that everything was manipulated just out in public with absolutely no authority--even the bible . I don't even see how they could still be a Christin after knowing all this .
shareYep. I just totally wanted to cut my wrists after this big, long fcking guilt-trip of a movie. Thank you, Hollywood.
shareWhat I don't understand is why are YOU taking it so personally? They are portraying white people who owned slaves as evil. You seem to think that you are a part of everything that concerns someone who shares the same phenotype (physical characteristics) as you.
Your attitude and your personal racism is what makes you a bad person. Not the slave ownership of the past that has nothing to do with you or others today.
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The statement above is true.
"They are portraying white people who owned slaves as evil. You seem to think that you are a part of everything that concerns someone who shares the same phenotype (physical characteristics) as you."
Did our coward OP not do just what you're describing?
The OP is not a black person, he actually judging the people of that time, he is not judging himself or people today who had nothing to do with it. Try again.
I think it is perfectly fine to hate people who participated in Southern Slave SYSTEM.
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You're either too much of a coward to admit you made a fool of yourself, or reading comprehension isn't your strong suit.
"he is not judging himself or people today who had nothing to do with it."
The sentence "no wonder blacks hate whites" refers to the present tense. Not the past tense. "hate" is the tip-off word, there.
PC-warriors or Nazis are the ignorant bigots today.
First, we live in a very different time than they did back in the 1800s when this movie was set. We have luxuries and technology making our lives easier. People are too lazy and stupid to try and figure out why people like slave owners were doing back in the day. I can pretty much tell you why. Living and surviving nature was incredibly hard on people. They didn't have dish washers. They didn't have plumbing pumping water into their sinks whenever they turned a fosset on. They didn't have natural heat being pumped into every room to live through the winter. They didn't even have the "Thomas" crapper. They still had to use washing boards and buckets of soapy water to clean their clothes. For a lot of people, they still had to sew their own clothes and create their own blankets from scratch. They had to bake loafs of bread from scratch. It wasn't a choice. They had to do a lot more sh!t out of necessity. The idea of passing those jobs off to someone else to do was probably very enticing. That's why the rich were able to become rich. They had servants to do all of those time-consuming, back-breaking jobs for them. And those servants were paid so little, they might as well be called "slaves" by today's standards.
These movies will never show that even black people owned slaves. They will never show how Native Americans were turned into slaves. They will never show that Muslim blacks in Africa were responsible for catching and selling those black men and women in the first place.
Only 1% of the American population owned slaves. And they were as aristocratic, ignorant, arrogant and stupid as everyone is today.
So, before you start condemning those people as evil... DO SOME FVCKING RESEARCH!
And those servants were paid so little, they might as well be called "slaves" by today's standards.
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Actually many don't use slavery as a reason to hate white people today. It's the constant stereotyping we find so annoying, people trying to push us as a group into ONE size fits all box. Sometimes the box is good, sometimes the box is bad, and prevents us from getting jobs or housing. It's just exhausting so you have a population of people who find them annoying. You do have your extremists who hate people specifically because of the past but they are a very very small minority.
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Romance Novelist, stereotyping goes both ways. btw, you are hot and I often have jungle fever (although most Africans don't live in a jungle climate) but you know what I mean. I digress.
Another thing, in both the 2012 and current 2016 presidental races, African-American candidates were and are popular... Herman Cain and Dr. Carson. I am not saying the Dr. Carson will be nominated but there is an insidious stereotype inflicted on white Republicans and I don't even want talk about how black conservatives are treated by illiberal screwheads.
It is not a guilt trip movie. It is a great story.
I am an *beep* but my friends compensate for that.
How is it a guilt trip movie? The events in this movie really happened. Black people were really treated like that in the 1850's and a lot of people don't exactly know just how bad black people had it back then. If this movie didn't have any nudity, I would say that I wish that this movie was played in every High School in the Southern States.
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Sick. Somebody is in desperate need of mental help.
This movie is about SLAVERY, specifically, a free man who is taken as a slave. Yes the white slave owners are acting like they did at the time, so if you're interpretion is they are being portrayed as devils/evil, you'd be right.
shareNo s * * t Spike's a racist, wbaholic. Here's a cookie for passing the third grade.
As for "12 Years a Slave", all the pro-white hate B.S. is old. It's not trying to accuse ALL white people of being racist slave owners. It's trying to make sure we don't forget there was a time where the country was divided because of inequality between all races to make sure such a ghastly atrocity never happens again.
You would of been racist like Malcolm X to if your family was harrassed and killed by whites.
Tell it.
shareYou would of been racist like Malcolm X to if your family was
What academic resource(s) are you using to solidify the fact that only 5% of whites owned slaves? C
shareThe smaller numbers often cited by Neo-Confederates, only incorporate the 'one' white male head of household as the slave owner, but it is much more telling when we look at the amount of people that lived in slave owning households.
(All data is as of the 1860 census)
Households that owned slaves.
Mississippi: 49%
South Carolina: 46%
Georgia: 37%
Alabama: 35%
Florida: 34%
Louisiana: 29%
Texas: 28%
North Carolina: 28%
Virginia: 26%
Tennessee: 25%
Kentucky: 23%
Arkansas: 20%
Missouri: 13%
Maryland: 12%
Delaware: 3%
In the Lower South (SC, GA, AL, MS, LA, TX, FL -- those states that seceded first), about 36.7% of the white families owned slaves. In the Middle South (VA, NC, TN, AR -- those states that seceded only after Fort Sumter was fired on) the percentage is around 25.3%, and the total for the two combined regions -- which is what most folks think of as the Confederacy -- is 30.8%. In the Border States (DE, MD, KY, MO -- those slave states that did not secede) the percentage of slave-ownership was 15.9%, and the total throughout the slave states was almost exactly 26%.
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Maybe you didn't understand what I was responding to, but of course none are alive today. I haven't even heard of anybody claiming such a thing. I don't care if your great great grandfather owned slaves(mine did). I do not blame people for the sins of their forefathers. Plenty of people have drunkered, abusive parents--would I blame and hate the child for what the parents did? No. But I wish as a nation would could just all accept that SLAVERY was horrible, it was wrong, and is was wrong for our country to have kept it legal for so long. That Jim Crow laws were also wrong and unjust as were the lynchings. People alive today did not own slaves (there may be still some old folks who enforced Jim Crow. I know my parents grew up during this) and they are not responsible. But the USA was wrong and we need to accept it.
My great grandmother was a big part of my childhood. She died when I was 9. Her father was a Southern Senator/Slavemaster, and her mother had been his slave. My family is still very close to his family, and in fact, we are family.
I worked in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a private contractor. KSA still practices slavery. The Saudis advertise for workers in foreign countries. All foreigners who work in KSA are known as Third World Nationals (TCNs). When the TCN enters KSA they must surrender their passport to their employer. The employer issues the TCN an internal travel document called an igama. The employer can refuse to pay (and often does), can beat the TCN (and often does) and can sexually abuse the TCN (and often does). The TCN can do nothing. They cannot leave unless the employer returns their passport (which they refuse to do); in effect, the TCN has become a slave. Common practice, Filipinos do the house-keeping, cleaning and gardening, often times Western women are recruited as nannies or executive assistants and become sex slaves. The Saudi homes can be like a fortress with large outer walls, the Filipino TCN guards the exit doors, the Western female TCN is forbidden to leave, not paid and used for whatever the Saudi "sponsor" wants.
I actually got in trouble with my employer, because I made a big stink about it. I will never work for that company, and I try to stay away from businesses that support the KSA.
So even though the US had slavery in the PAST. The homeland of islam, KSA, continues to LEGALLY practise slavery TODAY.
The 1860 census shows a total of 385,000 slave-owners in the US.
The population stood at 31,443,321 (again, see 1860 US Census).
That is 1.22% of the nation.
Trying to count infants as slave-owners is absurd. The (extremely generous) definition of including the spouse and eldest son, along with the assumption that ALL owners had both a living spouse and an eldest son, would still leave the total number under 4% (3.67, to be exact).
That may be, but 5% of the population couldn't sustain the practice of slavery if the other 95% had been opposed to it.
Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?
No... this movie portrays some of the white men that one man encountered in his life as devils. The fact is this is one man's story and what he experienced in his decade as a slave. People who say this is a white guilt movie need to get over it... some people were ass holes that abused people. Period. If you feel that the point of the movie was to say that all white people are evil then you are mistaken, misguided or actively trying to diminish the message of the movie. To stereotype and group all white people together as horrible racists and slavers is the very mentality the movie is condemning... that the color of someone's skin matters (or should matter) when it comes to an individual's personality and/or status and that people of the same skin color are all the same and not in fact individuals capable of making up their own minds.
Some people can't stand to have the horrible truth that is American history put in their face in a tangible way such as film. I think it's important that these movies make us uneasy and shameful... it shows that we can now recognize that what was once considered acceptable and indeed lawful was wrong. We need to feel horrible and guilty for what happened all those years ago... it's human history and as long as we despise those archaic mentalities we can find better ways to move in the future and work toward being more compassionate toward one another.
And you know it's true because SpaceMonkey -> said so.
I would say that I wish that this movie was played in every High School in the Southern States.
they show schindler's list in all highschools history classes now....why not also show 12 years a slave?
they are both ESSENTIAL history films that NEED to be seen by everyone growing up.
this type of evil needs to be seen for what it truly was in order to keep it from ever happening again.
a lot of young people don't know what it was truly like with these two events...it needs to be seen.
Jesus, god, lord.
I'm a black woman that went to high school in the south. Not one high school student or person in the south or anywhere else in this nation are former slave owners from the 19th century. I don't know why people act like we southerners are backwards and still living in the 19th century. I now live in the suburbs with other white collar professionals of all races from different walks of life. I don't experience racism here. You thinking that this movie should be curriculum in southern schools shows how backwards you are. I have a feeling you live in the same town you were born in and never moved out. Your experience in this world, and in this nation, is limited.
Well, most of the white people in this movie were slave owners or slave traiders and I wished that they died in that movie
shareWhat an incredibly ignorant and racist thing to say.
shareHow is it racist to take the side of the black slaves in this movie?
I did not hate all the white people in this movie, just the slave owners and slave traders. THEY WERE EVIL AND WICKET. A lot of them hung black people and you can't tell me that they deserved it. No one deserves to be murdered except for the rapists and child molesters and slave owners of the 1800's if time travel was real. How is that racist? I am white
They were not as "EVIL AND WICKED" as you think. Just because this movie portrays them that way does not change why they were the way they were. They were a product of their environment. You and every other ignorant bigot have NO IDEA how harsh their environment was in that time. The offer of having a free servant to do things for them was probably impossible to deny.
shareIf you genuinely think they cannot be held responsible for their actions because they are a 'product of their environment' then I genuinely pity you. You must live in a world of determinism, where nobody should be morally held to account because 'hey man, it's their genetics and upbringing'. All I see here is just a sad, pathetic kid defending some detestable humans for truly wicked acts.
shareAt the end of the day is telling the story from the point of view of a black (non) slave therefore it's bound to be anti-white when seen from his perspective. It's worth remembering he had white friends at the start and it was white friends that came to get him so the film is not saying all whites are racist bad people. To portray all the white people in the film that way would in itself be racist. There does seem to be a growing trend of accusing all white people as being racist lately almost as much as there are white people feeling they need to apologise for what their ancestors did. The past is the past. Will the French ever apologise for the Normans imaging my country or the scandanavians apologise for the Vikings? No. And why should they. It's a film about the past. Anyone feeling false guilt now is a teensy weensy bit pathetic in my eyes.
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@wbaholic
Honestly, just shut your *beep* mouth. I know many black people who work hard and go to school----what the *beep* do you do besides spew racist bull**** all the time? Shut your keyboard wanna-be Klanman mouth the hell up, and stop making s*** up. The reality is, slavery is the reason we STILL have racism in this country--it practically instituted it. There are still racist white bastards (like you) around today that need to be put in check. I don't see anyone asking for s***, so once again, just STFU for once.
I hate to say it but that actually did happen and it's not racist to scoff at it. Some people really did petition for "slavery reparations" from the government. They wanted an official apology (which I can somewhat understand) and a truckload of money (which zapped any sympathy I might have had for them). I can't remember if they actually saw any money but even a lot of African Americans thought it was completely stupid and merely an attempt to get free money. The sad thing is that for a time the media grabbed hold of it and tried to make it out that this was a legitimate request and that all white people should feel guilty for existing.
Myself, I can watch a movie like this and enjoy it (if you can actually enjoy something as brutally visceral as this movie) for the history that it presents. But I do not feel guilty personally as a Caucasian and I do not feel my daughter should feel guilty. These things happened and they were very wrong. But we can't go back and fix it, as much as we'd like to. All we can do now is make sure that we are good people, that we love ALL people regardless of their race and we strive to ensure that this never happens again.
No TV and no beer make Homer something--something!!
Go Crazy?
Don't mind if I do!!!
I hate to say it but that actually did happen and it's not racist to scoff at it. Some people really did petition for "slavery reparations" from the government. They wanted an official apology (which I can somewhat understand) and a truckload of money (which zapped any sympathy I might have had for them).When slavery ended, the people were promised reparations to help them start new lives. That never happened. The issue of reparations is not about just "giving" people money. It's about giving descendants back what was rightfully theirs. Any Black person that is a descendant of the slaves here in America and does not know/understand where the reparation discussion originated is simply ignorant of their own history.
Thank you for clarifying this.
Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?
The issue of reparations was covered very well by Zabbree, below.
I will just add that slavery was not something which simply ended, leaving no trace behind. Slavery itself did not suddenly end, but slowly and gradually eased to a halt. Emancipated slaves were still kept in de facto slavery by many means. Black Americans were even taken back into actual slavery temporarily on many occasions, including once in the 20th century, when the Red Cross, in need of assistance while dealing with a natural disaster, instructed its people to find and, in effect, kidnap as many black men as they could. The men were forced to work until the situation improved, then were released again. All this was possible because of the tacit acceptance of the government and legal system.
Lynching, Jim Crow laws, segregated and unequal school systems, the practice of performing medical experiments on minorities (last done in the 1980's), restriction of voting rights, and ultimately a severe imbalance in the lives of white and black Americans, had their start with the institution of slavery, but its effects continue to this day. Slavery was not something that was done long ago and is now over. We still suffer the effects, and those that only have to deal with the suggestion that they should feel guilty are the ones who suffer least.
Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?
I might add that were it not for the enormous worldwide outrage generated in response to the efforts of Mr. Hitler and his cohorts, there would very likely still be millions upon millions of dollars invested in research to scientifically prove the genetic inferiority of the "non-white" races.
shareYes, very likely.
Tell me the truth. Are we still in the game?
@wbaholic
Honestly, just shut your *beep* mouth. I know many black people who work hard and go to school----what the *beep* do you do besides spew racist bull**** all the time? Shut your keyboard wanna-be Klanman mouth the hell up, and stop making s*** up. The reality is, slavery is the reason we STILL have racism in this country--it practically instituted it. There are still racist white bastards (like you) around today that need to be put in check. I don't see anyone asking for s***, so once again, just STFU for once.
At the end of the day is telling the story from the point of view of a black (non) slave therefore it's bound to be anti-white when seen from his perspective.
Because money makes everything ok.ha.
shareYeah they raped kidnapped killed and sold slave away and broke up families.