In Tarantino’s vision, slavery’s definitive injustice was its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation house—and Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoons—and the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls, Tarantino’s slaves do no actual work at all; they’re present only to be brutalized….
Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated—systematized, enforced and sustained—through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholder’s succinct explanation: “‘For what purpose does the master hold the servant?’ asked an ante-bellum Southerner. ‘Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?’”
That absolute control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantino’s depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free labor—as the absolute control of a worker over her person—that is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained. Django Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.
Adolph Reed, Jr. “Django Unchained, or The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why”
This won a writing award at the oscars, didn’t it?
(via towerofsleep)
Yo, but for how fucking long has this been painfully evident and repeated ad nauseum? 30 years?
(Source: theawl)
Did we ever figure out a Most Useless And Boring Tumblr “Politics” Blogger?
I know that’s pulling from a pretty pathetic pool, but there’s gotta be a creme de la crap, right? I’m guessing it’s either Ari Kohen or Squashed.
A map produced by the Chicago Teachers’ Union of the areas targeted for school closings by the city’s administration.
oh Rahm Emanuel, you NeoLiberal piece of literal scum.
Growth of Income Inequality Is Worse Under Obama than Bush
Listen, electoral politics is horseshit, I’ve grown to despise talking about it even tangentially, but this is a pretty decent reminder of why that’s so. It’s just so you know/Keep in mind that this is what underlies all that “The Economy is recovering/showing good signs” talk and why “Vote for X because Y is bad for the economy” talking points are for suckers.
