Tag: roots
History Not Obliged To Make You Feel Good

History Not Obliged To Make You Feel Good

Dear Snoop Dogg:

You could have been honest about it. If you had, I’d still think you wrong as two left shoes, but at least I could give you points for guts.

As it is, I can only shake my head in appalled wonder at your entirely gutless Instagram attack on the remake of “Roots” that aired last week on the A&E Networks. You called for a boycott, saying, “They just want to keep showing the abuse that we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago. . . . When you all going to make a (expletive) series about the success that black folks is having? The only success we have is ‘Roots’ and ’12 Years a Slave’?”

Thus spoke the star of “Soul Plane.” And it raises a simple question: Negro, are you out your d–n mind?

Allow me to share some Wikipedia research. No, that’s not a definitive source, but the results were still persuasive. Know how many productions — TV, feature film and documentaries — about the 246-year epoch of American slavery I was able to identify? Forty-six. That’s since “Birth of a Nation” in 1915. By contrast, I found 136 American productions about the 12 years of the Holocaust, which ended in 1945.

Somehow, I have never once heard the complaint that there are too many Holocaust movies being made. And it is simply inconceivable to me that a Jewish entertainer would say something so asinine.

Yet, here you are complaining about too many slave films. Not that you’re alone. Every time some film or TV program dares recount this grim history, I hear some white people argue that telling these stories is “divisive” and even “racist.” “‘Roots’ is depressing,” writes columnist Cal Thomas.

Well, boo-hoo.

Few people ever really tell the truth, ever admit the real reason they say such things. People like Thomas do not admit they fear feeling blame and guilt at seeing what ancestors did. People like you do not admit they fear feeling shame and fury at seeing what ancestors suffered.

I learned long ago that white guilt is about the most useless emotion there is. Anything that makes you feel guilty, you will eventually resent and react against. So I don’t need or want white people’s guilt. I’d be happy to make do with their acknowledgment of historical and present-day reality and maybe a little simple human compassion.

As to black folks’ shame and fury, well, I can’t imagine it’s a barrel of laughs for a Jew to watch “Schindler’s List,” either. Admittedly, a Jew doesn’t walk out of that movie and rub shoulders with the heirs of Nazi Germany while you and I do live side by side with the heirs of antebellum (and Jim Crow) America. In that sense, at least, ours is the heavier emotional burden.

Still, I think Jews, by and large, understand something that escapes people like you and Thomas: History is not obliged to make you feel good. Its job is to tell you who you are and where you came from so you can pass that down to your children, and maybe anchor them in identity — and purpose — beyond that imparted to them by the video channel.

I suspect Jews also understand that if you don’t tell your story, others will, and in the end, you won’t recognize it. A docent on a Southern plantation recently wrote of white visitors asking if slaves got paid for their work, signed up for jobs they wanted, or “appreciated” how well cared-for they were. It’s safe to say none of them were ever “depressed” by “Roots.”

It’s a funny thing, Snoop. Back when rappers like you were being condemned for your profane tales of street life, you defended yourselves by arguing that you were simply reporting the truth of urban America. This was real, you said, and you challenged critics to deal with it.

So it’s ironic, a quarter-century later, to find you whining about “Roots.” You want real? Brother, this is as real as it gets. And it turns out the one who can’t deal with it is you.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

‘Roots’ Kindles In Us The Courage To Confront The History That Made Us

‘Roots’ Kindles In Us The Courage To Confront The History That Made Us

Everything was different, the day after.

If you are a child of the millennium, if you’ve never known a world without 500 networks, it may be difficult for you to get this. You might find it hard to appreciate how it was when there were only three networks and no DVR nor even VCR, so that one major TV program sometimes became a communal event, a thing experienced by everybody everywhere at the same time.

So it was on a Sunday night, the 23rd of January, in 1977. I was a senior at the University of Southern California, working part time at the campus bookstore. When I went to work the next day, you could feel that something had shifted. Your black friends simmered like a pot left too long on the stove. Your white friends tiptoed past you like an unexploded bomb.

We had all watched the first episode of “Roots,” had all seen the Mandinka boy Kunta Kinte grow to the cusp of manhood, had all borne witness as he was chained like an animal and stolen away from everything he had ever known. Now we no longer knew how to talk to one another.

I had a friend, a white guy named Dave Weitzel. Ordinarily, we spent much of our shift goofing on each other the way you do when you’re 19 or so and nothing is all that serious. But on that day after, the space between us was filled with an awkward silence.

Finally, Dave approached me. “I’m sorry,” he said, simply. “I didn’t know.”

It is highly unlikely the new version of “Roots,” airing this week on the A&E television networks, will be the phenomenon the original was. There are, putting it mildly, more than three networks now and, with the exception of the Super Bowl, we no longer have communal television events.

But the new show will be a success if it simply kindles in us the courage to confront and confess the history that has made us. I didn’t know much about that in 1977. Sixteen years of education, including four at one of the nation’s finest universities, had taught me all about the Smoot-Hawley tariff, but next to nothing about how a boy could be kidnapped, chained in the fetid hold of a ship, and delivered to a far shore as property.

As a result, I had only a vague sense of bad things having happened to black people in the terrible long ago. It stirred a sense of having been cheated somehow, left holding a bad check somehow, but I didn’t really know how or why.

I was as ignorant as Dave.

Small wonder. The history “Roots” represents embarrasses our national mythology. As a result, it has never been taught with any consistency. Even when we ostensibly spotlight black history in February, we concentrate on the achievements of black strivers — never the American hell they strove against. So you hear all about the dozens of uses George Washington Carver found for a peanut, but nothing about Mary Turner’s newborn, stomped to death by a white man in a lynch mob.

We don’t know what to do with those stories, so we ignore them, hoping that time, like a tide, will bear them away. But invariably, they wash up instead in mass incarceration, mass discrimination and the souls of kids who know their lives are shaped by bad things from long ago, even if they can’t always say how.

Almost 40 years later, I’m embarrassed by the righteous vindication I got from Dave’s apology. Dave Weitzel, the individual man, had not done anything to me. But like me, he had never been given the tools to face the ugly truths America hides from itself, had never been taught how to have the conversation.

So we had only his shame and my anger. Had we managed to push through those things, we might have found common humanity on the other side. But we couldn’t do that because we didn’t know how.

Indeed, as best I can recall, we never talked about it again.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for The Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.

(c) 2016 THE MIAMI HERALD DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: PBS.