The picture of slavery: disturbing but true

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“12 Years a Slave” is a disturbing film based on Solomon Northup’s 1853 mem­ oir. The author was a free Black man from upper New York, who enjoyed a life in many ways commensurate with whites. Like many other Black men and women, however, he was tricked, drugged, kid­ napped, and sent to the South—a slave. Black British director Steve McQueen’s film illustrates what happened to these un­ fortunate people. They, Northup among them, are rounded up like cattle, stripped naked, and hosed down. Wearing rough homespun shirts and pants, they’re loaded onto flatbed wagons, covered with can­ vas, and hauled south, where they are sold to brokers (ruthless Paul Giamatti), who auction them off to plantation owners. Unlike Tarantino’s over-the-top, grisly, yet sometimes humorous, film, “Django Unchained,” “12 Years” is somber and harrowing from the moment of Northup’s capture. A mother’s children are yanked from her arms. Slaves live cramped in a dark room in a house within sight of the Master’s mansion. “Genteel” folk sip ju­ leps on the veranda and glance at their slaves, toiling in cotton or sugar fields. McQueen has said that he believes Al­ fre Woodard’s character in the film, as a wealthy ex-slave who is married to a slaver, is shocking because most people don’t realize that Black people owned slaves, or on the other hand, that some of them actually bought their relatives back. Michael Fassbender plays an evil, in­ sane plantation owner, obsessed by a young Black female slave. In the most harrowing scene, we witness her being beaten almost to death for having left the plantation to obtain a bar of soap. Ejio­ for’s Northup comes off as relatively pas­ sive—yet heroic. In one scene, he is be­ trayed, beaten, and hung all day with his toes barely touching the ground as other slaves go about their work, not daring to glance his way.

To this day, many people are famil­ iar with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—which the white author had largely based on the published narrative of an escaped slave. McQueen made an interesting comment on TV per­ sonality Tavis Smiley’s show. He said that when “12 Years” came out in 1853, it sold 27,000 copies, which was a lot for those days. But “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published in 1852, quickly overtook it in sales—selling 300,000 copies in a year. Northup’s memoir was quickly forgotten. McQueen, in the same interview, said that he felt that the factual horror of slav­ ery had never been fully captured on film and never told from an African American point of view. He wanted to hold the cam­ era up, point it, and say, “Look at this, look at this.” He went on to explain that people were kept in servitude through the methods depicted in his film: Fear, beat­ ings, lynching, threats, and rape. He felt that he had to dwell on such harrowing scenes. “We have to tell the truth, other­ wise, there’s no point.”

He stressed, “This is neither Black American history nor white American his­ tory. This is about the history of America.

Three-hundred years of slavery was the longest time an industry has survived in the United States.”

The general public has never heard of Solomon Northup, although it is a rela­ tively well-known slave narrative to histo­ rians and scholars. Still, almost everyone knows Anne Frank. McQueen is optimis­ tic in believing that it’s possible that Nor­ thup’s book could be required in schools in America and in Europe. He wants it to become as much a part of the world’s con­ sciousness as is Anne Frank’s memoir.

McQueen stated that he feels there are a lot of Americans who say, “Get over this. You now have an African American president. We don’t need to be going back into revisiting what McQueen wants us to wrestle with. We’re past that now.”

He counters with: Would anyone ask a Jew to get over the Holocaust? He feels it should be very much in our minds, so it won’t happen again. “We feel the effects of slavery every day, and we need to deal with it. It’s just a case that the evidence is out there, and in our prisons and mental health, and it’s just a case of doing some­ thing about it, that’s all.” n actions of the labour bureaucrats and rul­ ing-class politicians who purport to repre­ sent the workers’ interests are getting more and more watered down and lacklustre.

The demands of workers can be advanced only when workers themselves raise them. In building unions, activists have created institutions capable of fighting for their interests, but the task of leading that fight cannot be successfully delegated. Left to its own devices, the labour bureaucracy de­ velops petty interests of its own, putting its jobs and privileges above all else.

The NDP can be a vehicle for change and a voice for radical populist movements like Idle No More and the campaign against en­ vironmental degradation—but not by trust­ ing politicians to take care of business. The task of achieving basic change can be ful­ filled only by applying continuous pressure from the bottom up—by the people whose lives are directly affected by the plunder of global capital. We need a radical labour movement driven by and for workers! n demonstrates that this never came to pass. The SWP demanded that I cease all contact with Burke and Grenada. They went further; the Oakland/Berkeley party organizer insisted that I unilaterally cancel the planned demonstration set for the San Francisco Fed­ eral Building the following day, a decision that had been unanimously taken by the ranks of the Grenada Solidarity Committee, with 100 activists present! “Do you know” the party organizer asked me, “that Bishop was in the minority of the Central Committee?” I responded, “I am in the minority of the SWP. Do you intend to murder me?” Ignoring this, the organizer demanded that I tell her what I would say about Bish­ op’s assassination. “I will oppose it,” I replied, adding, “We do not resolve internal disputes by murder.” The veneer of civility, not to mention comradely discus­ sions, disappeared forever in that exchange. I spent the next several hours preparing the final details for the protest and resigned from the SWP the next day. In my view, two parties had died that terrible day, both having irrevocably lost their revolutionary in­ tegrity. The degeneration of both had been long in the making. The history of the SWP’s degeneration has yet to be written. The few attempts to date miss the mark entirely.

Grenada’s Revolution set out to be an example to the world as to what Black Power and the fight for social­ ism could mean. Its heroic figure, Maurice Bishop, will not be forgotten. We honor his memory in this 30th year marking his brutal murder at the hands of a Stalinist thug. n