Hidden Figures: Laudable Lies

Tags

20th Century America, Civil Rights Movement, Dorothy Vaughan, Hidden Figures, Janelle Monáe, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, NASA, Octavia Spencer, Racial Issues, Taraji P Henson, The 1960s

I know that I promised my next post would be with the historical consultant for The Eagle. But I just saw Hidden Figures (2016, dir. Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly) and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it down in blog form. So I promise I’ll get to the interview in my next post.

Spoiler Alert: If you’re planning on seeing this movie, you may want to put off reading this, since I talk about major plot points.

Hidden Figures tells the fascinating story of three African-American women who worked at NASA in the 1960s. All three were originally hired to work as ‘computers’, women who did the low-status work of laborious mathematical calculating and double-checking the work of higher status male scientists in the era before the birth of electronic computers. Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson) is a mathematician whose calculations proved invaluable to the launch of the Atlas rocket that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) is the head of the ‘Western’ Computing group, a group of African-American female computers kept separate from the ‘Eastern’ Computing group, who were white women; realizing that her job will eventually be made obsolete by the arrival of an IBM computer, Vaughan teaches herself Fortran and becomes an expert in computers. Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) pursues her ambition of being an engineer for NASA.

All three women encounter racist obstacles at NASA. Johnson struggles with the fact that the only bathroom African-American women can use is located literally half a mile away on the Langley campus where she works, forcing her to take extended breaks simply to use the bathroom and thereby drawing the ire of the division head Al Harrison (Kevin Costner). Vaughan is long overdue for a promotion; she has been acting as the supervisor of the Western Computing group, but hasn’t been given the title or the pay of a supervisor, and the woman she reports to, Vivian Mitchell (Kirsten Dunst) doesn’t seem to care. Jackson needs to take night classes in order to apply for the engineering position, but the only school that offers such classes is segregated, and she has to persuade a judge to allow her to attend the classes.

Monáe, Henson, and Spencer

Ultimately, all three overcome their obstacles. Johnson repeatedly demonstrates her invaluableness to Harrison, who increasingly bends the rules to allow her to participate in the work of getting Glenn safely into space and back. Vaughan masters the newly-installed IBM computer before anyone else, and then teaches the other members of the Western Computing group how to work with it, thus saving all of their jobs and giving them a future on the cutting edge of computer science. This convinces Mitchell to arrange Vaughn’s over-due promotion. Jackson persuades the judge to let her attend the night school classes she needs and by the end of the film is on her way to becoming an engineer.

The story is well-told all around. The script is funny and does a good job of making the mathematical problems of early space flight intelligible to a general audience. The performances are all solid, especially Henson’s. And the costume designer does a very subtle job of highlighting the exclusion of African-American women from NASA; the white men tend to vanish into a sea of identical white dress shirts and dark ties, while the black women stand out in demur but colorful skirts and blouses, highlighting the absence of ‘colored’ people whenever they’re not around.

Katherine Johnson

The story it tells is an important one. These three women all played important roles at NASA and made major contributions to American space exploration for several decades. Their story deserves to be told, and it’s exciting to see the movie do so amazingly well at the box office. All too often, American history is presented as the accomplishments of white men, and Hidden Figures does a good job of reminding us that women of color have made great contributions to the country as well. It’s particularly nice to see a biopic about African-Americans who aren’t entertainers or athletes. These women are important not because they’re pretty or can sing, but because they’re smart. And the film confronts the problems of segregation head-on, particularly in Johnson and Jackson’s storylines. Americans need a reminder of just how ugly and unjust segregation and Jim Crow were.

The problem with the film is that in the pursuit of its goal of highlighting the struggles these three women had with segregation and racism, it significantly misrepresents what was going on at NASA in the 60s.

NACA and NASA

The organization we think of NASA began life in 1915 as NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. It existed until 1958, when it was shut down and replaced with NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NACA began hiring African-Americans to work as computers already in 1941, but like many branches of the American government in the period, NACA was segregated. It had a system of bathrooms, cafeterias, and other facilities for whites, and less well-maintained parallels for blacks.

Henson as Johnson solving a problem involving the space capsule

However, when NASA was formed in 1958, it wasn’t segregated. For example, NASA abandoned the system of segregated bathrooms, even though many of its properties were carried over from NACA. The story about Johnson having to run back and forth between buildings to use the bathrooms is actually a story that Jackson told about NACA in the 1950s. In the film, Johnson has to make several bathroom trips, once in the rain, trying to do her calculating work on the toilet so as not to fall too far behind in her work. Finally, when she breaks down and complains to Harrison, Harrison angrily goes out and uses a crowbar to tear down the sign labelling a particular bathroom as being for colored women. It’s a great scene that produces cheers in the audience, but it’s simply untrue.

Similarly, Vaughan was denied the supervisory position she deserved for some time, but that was during the 1950s. By the time the film opens in 1961, Vaughan had already been a supervisor for 3 years. Jackson was offered a position in an engineering team and then had to find a way to get into those classes, whereas the film suggests that she is kept from applying for the position because Mitchell is somewhat racist and unwilling to bend on the rules. So far as I can determine, the film consistently projects the segregation of 1950s NACA half a decade backwards onto 1960s NASA.

NASA in the 1960s was actually a tool for desegregation. Already when he was the Senate Majority leader, Lyndon Johnson saw NASA as a way to advance African Americans by hiring and promoting them into better-paying and more respectable positions. It’s no coincidence that NASA desegregated in 1958; Johnson was the head of the subcommittee that oversaw the passage of government act that created the agency.

Morgan Watson, NASA’s first black engineer

Katherine Johnson herself denied experiencing the treatment the film shows her receiving. “I didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research…You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job…and play bridge at lunch. I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.” Likewise, Jackson only recalled one instance in which she felt disrespected, and the man involved subsequently apologized when he realized that he was in the wrong.

So by painting early 1960s NASA as a strongly segregated environment, the film is somewhat unfairly tarring NASA for NACA’s failings, and denying NASA’s modest role in helping advance the interests of African-Americans. The real racism that the women experienced in this period seems to have been from the communities around Langley. Vaughn had difficulties find a place to stay. In the 1960s, many of the black male engineers encountered threats and violence from the white locals, and one white NASA employee was so badly injured and threatened that he left NASA entirely. Had it chosen to, the film could have made its point more honestly by contrasting the comparatively accepting environment of NASA with the much more racist environment beyond its gates.

Racism or Sexism?

The more I think about the film and read about the background, the more I find myself thinking that the real problem Johnson, Vaughan, and Jackson experienced wasn’t so much racism (although they clearly did encounter some of that) but sexism. Consistently, there is a pattern of the men doing the important, high-status work (such as figuring out the physics of space flight and designing the capsules) while the women (both black and white) are relegated to the low-status work of computing, even though the film makes clear that doing so is a waste of their talents, especially Johnson’s. Apart from Johnson, the only other woman in the Space Task group, Ruth, appears to be a secretary, and there are no women at all in the engineering group that Jackson is involved in.

Dorothy Vaughan

Johnson repeatedly insists that she needs to be involved in the key meetings where decisions are made, because excluding her means that she has to wait to get the data she needs, which often renders her work obsolete by the time she’s finished it. She persuades Harrison to bend the rules for her to sit in on briefings with the Air Force, and eventually he invites her into Mission Control when Glenn’s flight happens (a decision that the film claims probably saved Glenn’s life). The issue here is not that she’s African-American, but that she’s a woman and the men around her are uncomfortable with her presence.

While the film suggests that the white computers earned more than the black computers, the truth is that the two groups were paid the same, but that their pay was 40% less than the equivalent male pay, even during the NACA period.

So I think that the real problem with the film, at least for me, is that it was trying too hard to make its point about segregation, a point it could only make by misrepresenting the degree of segregation at NASA. Instead, the real story in the material seems to be the way that NASA was excluding women of talent from important roles. Their obstacles were clearly intersectional, involving both their race and their gender, but the film discourages us from thinking too much about gender by highlighting a simultaneous divide of gender and race; the scientists and engineers are all white men and the computers almost entirely black women (the exception being Vivian, who leads the white female computers, but who is never shown making any intellectual contributions to the project and who mostly acts as an administrative obstacle to Vaughn). The result is that whenever gender emerges as an issue, race is almost always there at the same time. There is one scene when Johnson’s future husband (an African-American) makes a sexist remark, but that’s almost the only moment when gender is highlighted as an issue. So the film tends to subsume gender issues under race issues in a way that makes it hard for the audience to see the gender component of the problem.

None of this makes Hidden Figures a bad movie, merely a movie that privileges its message over the facts. It tells an important story that people need to know. I just wish it had been a bit more honest with the facts.

(I feel a need to point out that I’m not a specialist in either American history or NASA history. I’m basing my comments on information I’ve been able to dig up online, and it’s possible that I’ve missed evidence that NASA was a more segregated environment than I realize. I’m certainly not suggesting that NASA was magically free of racism in the 1960s. It clearly wasn’t. I’m sure that these women encountered many obstacles due to their race, but they weren’t the specific obstacles the film offers.)

 

Correction: An earlier version of this post described John Glenn as the first American in space. I should have written that he was the first American to orbit the Earth, since Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom both flew high enough to be in what is defined as space prior to Glenn’s flight, but neither of them achieved orbit. I regret the mistake. Thanks to T Rosenzveig for catching it!

 

Want to Know More?

Hidden Figures is still in the theaters, so it’s not available on Amazon. However, if you want to do some reading about these women, their story is told in Hidden Figures, by Mary Lee Shetterly. Another book about them is Sue Bradford Edwards’ Hidden Human Computers. Richard Paul and Steven Moss’s We Could Not Fail discusses the history of African-Americans in the space program.

Finally, you could look at Steven Moss’s unpublished master’s thesis, NASA and Racial Equality in the South, 1961-1968, which is available online.

Nina: The Trailer

Tags

20th Century America, Nina, Nina Simone, Racial Issues, Zoe Saldana

So last week, the first trailer for Nina, the biopic about the black jazz singer and activist Nina Simoe, was released. Here it is.

The trailer has re-ignited a controversy that first flared when it was announced that Zoe Saldana had been cast to play Simone. The reaction on Twitter from many black people was quite negative, using phrases like “I am disgusted”, “it made me physically ill” “truly heartbreaking”, and “a rogue SNL skit”. You can see some of the reaction here.

As a white guy, this reaction startled me. I had only just heard about the movie a week ago, and I hadn’t heard about the controversy over Saldana’s casting. Why would so many black Americans be upset about this movie, including Simone’s own daughter? So I decided to dig into it a bit. White Americans like myself can often be quite unaware of how black Americans experience American culture, and I firmly believe that it’s the job of white Americans to try to understand the complexities of race without just asking black people to explain it to us; it’s not the job of black Americans to explain race to us. So this post is really about me trying to understand race from the privileged position of whiteness. My apologies if I do a poor job of it.

I first really noticed Zoe Saldana as a performer when she was cast as Lt. Uhura in the Star Trek reboot (a misbegotten film in my opinion, for reasons having nothing to do with Uhura, but that’s a totally different issue). She was also cast as Anamaria is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, a Caribbean pirate queen. Why, I wondered, would black people object to a black actress playing a black singer?

Zoe Saldana

 

Except, as it turns out, Saldana is Puerto Rican and Dominican (although she does have some Haitian ancestry as well). (And see Update below.) I realized I had been perceiving her as a black actress because Uhura is a black character. And Saldana is very fair-skinned, whereas Simone was a very dark-skinned woman. Additionally, while Saldana is classically beautiful, with straight hair, and a thin nose and lips, Simone had curly hair, and a wide nose and lips. In order to play Simone, Saldana had to wear a prosthetic nose, a wig, and skin-darkening make-up. So the controversy is primarily that Saldana does not look very much like Simone.

As I thought about it, my reaction was that this objection was unfair to Saldana. Essentially, the film’s detractors seemed to be complaining that Saldana wasn’t ‘black’ enough to play Simone. But who gets to determine who’s black and who’s not? As I’ve commented before on this blog, what Americans think of as race is really a social construct far more than a biological fact. So asserting that Saldana wasn’t black enough seemed to me to be reifing race, asserting that it is somehow a biological category after all. And saying someone is or isn’t black is playing the game that racists used for centuries, a new iteration of the infamous ‘One Drop’ rule that said that anyone with a single drop of black blood was fully black.

Nina Simone

 

And furthermore, I thought, arguing that historical characters can only be played by actors and actresses who physically resemble them is a serious problem. That would arbitrarily exclude many brilliant performers from playing many of the greatest roles in film and theater. Only certain Italians would be able to play Julius Caesar, for example, because few others would have the proper coloration and aquiline nose for the role. Only a very tall man would ever be able to play Charlemagne, since he was about 6’5. And going just a little bit further, nearly every role in Shakespeare would be closed to non-white performers, since nearly all his roles are Europeans.

But then it occurred to me that I was essentially thinking that black activists didn’t have a right to be upset, that I wasn’t giving them credit for thinking deeply enough about an issue they live with on a daily basis much more than I do, skin color. So I dug a little deeper.

And then I realized that there was another layer to the issue, one much more about historical attitudes toward blackness. A key element of Simone’s story is that she was considered too ‘black’ to be attractive, because she lived at a time when beauty was defined by white standards. For a black women to be pretty, she needed to have fair skin, a thin nose and lips, and straight hair. In other words, she had to look like Zoe Saldana, and not like Nina Simone. Simone’s life was to some extent shaped the fact that she didn’t fit the racially-charged beauty aesthetic of her day. Her success as a jazz singer and as a civil rights activist allowed her to serve as a role model for generations of black women who, like her, didn’t and still don’t fit the beauty standard of American society.

And some of her work explicitly addresses these very issues. Her “Four Sisters” directly addresses the stereotypes around black women’s bodies. Her jazz version of the traditional folk song “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” played with the fact that the song is traditionally sung about white people rather than black people.

Nina Simone in later life

 

The intensely negative reactions on Twitter were expressions of anger and pain that Hollywood has taken an important role model for an alternative beauty standard and given it to a conventionally beautiful women who was then ‘debeautified’ with make-up and prosthetics in order to play the role. Why, many of these people asked, couldn’t this role have been given to an actress who naturally looked more like Simone? Why couldn’t the film validate Simone’s model of beauty instead of undermining it? Why did they decide to put Saldana in blackface, at a time when blackface is considered entirely unacceptable in almost any other context?

And it doesn’t help that most of the production team for the film is white.

My whiteness affords me the privilege of thinking about casting historical roles purely on the basis of merit. It allows me to assume that most white actors can easily substitute for historical figures who did not share their appearance. But the complex, ugly racial realities that we live with don’t afford that same privilege to many black actors, who are often perceived as being ‘too black’ for some roles (i.e. not pretty/handsome enough by white standards) or not ‘black’ enough for others (i.e. black gang members or hustlers or prostitutes). Racial attitudes shape black performers’ careers in ways they don’t shape white performers’ careers, and a prestige role like Simone could have gone to many actresses who have probably been considered too dark-skinned or too wide-nosed or just too ‘black’ for many other roles.

Does this mean that Saldana shouldn’t have taken this role? Does Simone have to be played by a dark-skinned actress? I don’t know. In an ideal world, where race isn’t an inescapable issue, any actress who has the skill for the part ought to be considered for it. But in the world we actually live in, things are a lot messier. Race pervades most facets of our society, and it shapes things like casting decisions and how we understand films and performers. Ultimately I don’t think I have an answer to the question, but I think I understand the position of the people who are upset a lot better than I did before.

As I thought about this whole issue, I wrestled with whether I ought to post about it. I’m a white guy struggling to think about race, an issue that I have the luxury of being able to ignore when I want to. Do I understand the issues clearly enough to be able to say something intelligent about it? I hope so. Am I missing some additional facet of the situation that black people can see? Probably. Have I just said something clueless about race? I really hope not.

But it’s clear to me that race and white privilege is a huge issue in this country, and it’s at least as much the job of white people to think about race as it is the job of black people to explain it to white people. So I decided that even if my thoughts aren’t entirely on the mark, I had an obligation of a sort to post this. Hopefully I’ve been able to cast a little light on the problem for my white readers who may be as puzzled as I was about this controversy.

Update: A point that I had intended to include, but forgot to. Saldana has said that she doesn’t identify as black because “people of color don’t exist ’cause in reality people aren’t white.” So she rejects the social construct of race. That’s certainly her right, but it has definitely offended some in the black community. As the post I just linked to comments, “Saldana’s decision to accept the role of Nina Simone as a labor of “love” makes her view of race and racism all the more puzzling. It appears as if donning Blackface and depicting Simone has done little to connect the actress with the crooner’s spirit. You can’t portray Nina Simone without realizing how intricately race was intertwined with her life and career.” And it’s worth pointing out that it’s easier for a light-skinned actress to reject the social validity of race than for a dark-skinned actress to.

Here’s another blogger writing on the question of Saldana’s race and responding to the same quote.

Want to Know More?

The movie is not out yet. But if you want to know more about Nina Simone, you could start by reading her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You.

Robin Hood: Princes of Thieves: Black Muslims in Medieval England?

Tags

Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Morgan Freeman, Racial Issues, Religious Issues, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

One of the more unusual elements of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), a black Muslim who helps Robin escape from a Muslim prison in Jerusalem. He declares that he owes Robin a life debt (which, by the way, is pretty much an entirely literary concept, without much basis in the real world) and so he returns to England with Robin, whom he insists on calling “Christian”.

Azeem is a new additional to the Robin Hood corpus, with no parallel in the medieval literature or even the earlier Robin Hood films. He seems to have been inspired by the British tv series Robin of Sherwood’s Nasir, a Muslim assassin brought to England as a prisoner who eventually escapes and joins the Merry Men. In RH:PoT’s original script, Freeman’s character was called Nasir until the name was changed to avoid the risk of copyright infringement.

So the character is a very recent addition to the stories of Robin Hood. But he naturally raises the issue of whether people like Azeem were around in medieval England. This is really two separate questions. Were there black people in medieval England and were there Muslims in England?

Freeman as Azeem

 

Black People in Medieval England

There is some modest evidence that there were black people in Roman Britain (and again, as a reminder, race is a modern social construct, not a biological one, so speaking about ‘black people’ and ‘white people’ in the Middle Ages is a bit of a simplification). The Roman military routinely recruited soldiers from one region of the Empire and stationed them in a completely different region. Consequently, some of the Roman soldiers stationed in Britain may have included black men recruited from regions of North Africa that had contact with Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Egypt or Mauritania (Roman Morocco). Men from Mauritania were referred to as ‘Moors’, and an inscription near the Aballava fort on Hadrian’s Wall makes reference to a group of “Aurelian Moors” stationed there in the 3^rd century AD. Some of these men probably intermarried with local women and had children. A 2007 DNA study found evidence of a rare DNA marker from Guinea-Bassau in several men with modern Yorkshire surnames, who might therefore be descended from these soldiers. And in the late 2nd/early 3rd century, many high-ranking Roman officials came from North Africa, some of whom held office in Britain; there is some chance that some of these men were of Sub-Saharan descent. It is also likely that some of the slaves brought to Roman Britain were Sub-Saharans. So it is possible that still in the early Middle Ages, there were men and women of Sub-Saharan ancestry, although whether their skin color and facial features would mark them as black by modern standards is another matter.

In the late 7th century, Pope Vitalian sent Hadrian, a monk from somewhere in North Africa, to Britain, where he became the abbot of a monastery in Canterbury. Hadrian is described as being a Berber, and therefore was probably fair-skinned, but little is known about the man’s ancestry, so it is not impossible that he might have been of Sub-Saharan descent. During the Viking Age, Vikings raided the Iberian coastline and may well have raided parts of North Africa, so it is not impossible that they might have taken black people as slaves and brought them back to the British Isles, but at this point this is nothing more than speculation without evidence to support it.

By the 12^th century, when RH:PoT is set, it is unlikely that there were more than a tiny handful of men and women of African origin or descent in the British Isles. Whereas Italy and the Iberian peninsula had fairly regular contact with North Africa and thus did have modest numbers of black men and women living there, Britain was a fair distance from those parts of Europe. It is certainly possible that a few ‘Moors’ came to Britain, most likely along trade routes from the Iberian peninsula to ports like Bristol. But there were not large enough numbers of them to leave more than very sporadic evidence of their presence behind. For example, in 2013, analysis of a skeleton found in a river in Gloucestershire determined that it belonged to a woman between 18 and 24 who had come from Sub-Saharan Africa some time between 896 and 1025 AD. Who she was and how she got to England is a mystery, but the fact that her body was thrown into a river instead of given a proper burial suggests she may have been low-status, such as a slave. This body is the clearest proof that any person from Sub-Saharan Africa before the end of the Middle Ages.

Medieval people certainly knew that some people had black skin. St Maurice was pictured as a black man, and Balthasar, one of the Three Wise Men, was often depicted that way as well. A manuscript produced in England around 1241 depicts a black man clinging to a large initial letter. If some artists understood that some people had black skin, the most likely possibility is that they had seen such people or knew those who had.

St Maurice, in Magdeburg Cathedral

So it seems likely that there were at least small numbers of black men and women in medieval England. They were probably fairly rare, and most likely to be encountered in the larger cities, having come there probably from the Iberian peninsula for commercial reasons or perhaps as the slave or servant of a wealthy man or woman. But the notion of a black man who traveled from Jerusalem to Nottingham in the 1190s is not impossible, although such a man would certainly have been very unusual.

 

Muslims in Medieval England

Were there Muslims in medieval England? Here the basic answer is no. England was not a religiously pluralistic society. With the exception of the tiny Jewish community (expelled in the 1290s), by the 11^th century everyone in England was expected to be Christian, and would have been baptized into the Christian community a few days after birth. Muslims would have enjoyed no legal protection whatsoever. So it is very unlikely the Muslim merchants from the Iberian peninsula would have come to England to sell their wares. Not impossible, but extremely improbable.

Having said that, however, archaeologists digging in the remains of the Franciscan friary in Ipswich, England, in the 1990s discovered a skeleton of a man born somewhere in North Africa (probably Tunisia, and probably of Berber or Arabic descent) in the period between 1190 and 1300. This means that he was almost certainly born as a Muslim. But he had lived the last decade of life in England, probably at the Franciscan friary. An additional 8 skeletons found on the site also appear to have come from North Africa. Who were these 9 presumably Muslim North Africans and how had they come to live out their last years in a Franciscan friary? One plausible theory is that they were prisoners captured during the 8^th Crusade, which briefly attacked Tunisia. The Franciscans are also known to have attempted missionary work in North Africa in this period, so perhaps these 9 were converts won during one of those missions. Regardless, the fact that they were buried in a Franciscan cemetery strongly points to them have converted from Islam to Christianity. So while there may have been a small number of men and women who were born as Muslims living in England, it is improbable that there were any practicing Muslims, although we cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a Muslim dignitary or merchant having briefly visited the region. So while Azeem as a black man in England is possible (if somewhat unlikely), Azeem as a Muslim is pretty implausible.

The so-called Ipswich Man

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

There isn’t a whole lot of scholarship on black people in medieval England, but there is an excellent Tumblr devoted to People of Color in European Art History that demonstrates that some medieval artists definitely knew that black people existed.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Does It Whitewash?

Tags

Aaron Paul, Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Racial Issues, Ramesses II, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Whitewashing

In my last post I dug into what we know about the race/ethnicity of ancient Egyptians. In this post, I want to dig into the accusations that Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) was whitewashing its story.

 

Film vs Fact

The story of the Exodus involves two distinct groups, the Egyptians and the Hebrews. The Egyptians of the 19^th dynasty period, as I explored last time, were probably somewhat ethnically mixed and would probably look to us like Middle Easterners, perhaps with some Nubian features. Ramesses II, according to a French analysis of his mummy, was fair-skinned and red-haired, and therefore might have looked somewhat more ‘white’ than the people he ruled over. The Hebrews of the period would definitely have looked Middle Eastern.

Ridley Scott

So who did Ridley Scott cast in his film? (In this list, I identify the actor’s country of origin, his or her ancestry to the extent I can determine it, and my subjective opinion of what ‘race’ the actor appears to be based on publicity photos)

Here are the Eygptians:

Ramesses II: Joel Edgerton     Australian, of Dutch and English descent,

White

Seti I: John Turturro                American, of Italian descent, White

Tuya: Sigourney Weaver           American, of British descent, White

Priestess: Indira Varma            English, of Indian and Swiss descent, Mixed

Hegep: Ben Mendelsohn          Australian, of British descent, White

Bithiah: Hiam Abbass              Israeli, of Arab descent, Middle Eastern

Nefertari: Golshifteh Farahani  Iranian, of Iranian descent, Middle Eastern

Vizier: Ghassan Massoud           Syrian, probably of Arab or mixed descent,

Middle Eastern

Farahani and Egerton as Nefertari and Ramesses

Here are the Hebrews:

Moses: Christian Bale             English, of English and white South African

descent, White

Nun: Ben Kingsley                   English, of English and Indian descent, Mixed

Joshua: Aaron Paul                  American, of British and German descent,

White

Zipporah: Maria Valverde     Spanish, probably of Spanish descent, White

Jethro: Kevork Malikyan        Turkish, of Armenian descent, Middle Eastern

Miriam: Tara Fitzgerald         English, of British descent, White

Aaron: Andrew Tarbet            American, uncertain descent, White

Maria Valverde, who played Zipporah

(I classified Varma and Kingsley as looking ‘mixed’ because in different photos they can appear variously as White or Middle Eastern.)

So the major Egyptian characters (those who appear in multiple scenes, have a decent number of lines, or play an important role in a scene) are almost entirely played by white actors. Of the non-white actors, only Farahani’s Nefertari is presented as a significant character, and objectively it’s not a large part. Varma’s unnamed Priestess does appear in several scenes, usually with a line or two in each, but I wouldn’t call her an important character.

Of the Hebrews, the only character of significance played by a non-white actor is Nun, played by the mixed-race Kingsley, whom most Americans probably think of as a white actor. Malikyan’s Jethro does play a prominent role in a couple of scenes when Moses is meeting Zipporah, but disappears into the background after that.

Ben Kingsley as Nun

The only characters of any significance at all played by actual Middle Eastern actors are Nefertari and Jethro, neither of whom is truly a key figure in the film.

But among the Egyptians are large numbers of Middle Eastern and black actors playing minor characters like “Egyptian soldier #3.” If you scroll through the IMDb full cast list you’ll see lots of black and Middle Eastern actors playing uncredited roles like “Moses’ General”, “Fan Handler”, and “Egyptian Civilian Lower Class”.

So all of the important characters are played by white actors, a few supporting roles are played by Middle Eastern or mixed-ethnicity actors, and the minor or uncredited roles are played by a mixture of Middle Easterners, blacks, and Latinos (to judge by surnames and photos).

This photo perfectly captures the racial make-up of the cast

Now, as far as Ramesses, Seti, and Tuya are concerned, one could possibly make a case for casting white actors in those roles. As I noted in my previous post, Ramesses II seems to have been fair-skinned and red-haired, although his statuary suggests he might have had Nubian facial features. One of Seti’s few statues depicts him with thin lips (the nose is missing), and his mummy certainly suggests that, at least in terms of facial features, he could have passed for European, although what he looked like in life is a guess. About Tuya we don’t have much to go on. But if Ramesses was fair-skinned, at least one of his parents might have been as well. So if Ridley Scott had wanted to, he could have said something like “Based on the best evidence we have, Ramesses II and his parents appear to have looked European, so in the interests of historical accuracy, we decided to cast white actors in those roles.” It might not have been a very good answer, but at least there would have been a little historical support for it.

Seti I’s mummy

But that’s not how Scott responded to accusations of whitewashing. What he actually said was “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such….I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.”

I’ll give him credit for admitting that money and studio politics were a major factor in his casting decisions. What he’s basically saying is “Look, the studio and the financial backers wouldn’t let me do a big budget film with non-white leads, so I didn’t even consider casting non-whites in the important roles.”

Weaver as Tuya

But I don’t buy it. He’s insisting that because he was making a blockbuster film, he needed actors who can really pack theaters, and whether we like it or not, big name white actors ‘open’ movies much more reliably than non-white actors. But let’s look at the big names in that cast list again.

Christian Bale is undeniably a hot actor, having done Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy in the past decade. So Bale can definitely ‘open’ a big film effectively. Sigourney Weaver is a wonderful actress and probably still a household name, but she hasn’t carried a major film since 1997’s Alien Resurrection, or perhaps 1999’s Galaxy Quest if we’re being a little bit charitable. Ben Kingsley, like Weaver, is a marvelous actor and highly respected, but his only ‘big’ film was 1982’s Gandhi. Like Weaver, he mostly adds prestige to a film rather than drawing the kinds of audiences blockbusters require. Joel Edgerton is nice actor (you might remember him as the lead from 2005’s Kinky Boots or in 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty), but he’s not a huge box office draw; I didn’t even know the actor’s name when I saw the film. Aaron Paul is best known from Breaking Bad, so maybe he brought in some fans of that series, but I doubt the studio was banking on him; he’s in a modest supporting role. And after that we get to character actors like John Turturro and Indira Varma. So Bale was cast for his ability to carry a blockbuster. Weaver, Kingsley, and Turturro add some gravitas, but probably weren’t critical to getting the financing for the film, and Edgerton, the number two lead, seems sort of like an afterthought.

Bale in front of a painfully white-looking Sphinx

When you look at in that light, Scott’s defense reads much more like an excuse. He’s shifting the blame for his casting choices onto the nameless suits of the Hollywood system and essentially saying he had not control over whom he cast. Sure, Bale was the anchor; the film wasn’t going to get made without him, so we probably just have accept that Moses had to be played by a white guy. But Ramesses could probably have been played by almost any young male actor, and certainly Seti and Tuya could have been anyone who could plausibly have been presented as Ramesses’ parents. They could even had cast Tuya as a different race from Seti. And they could have cast Joshua, Aaron, and Zipporah with Jewish or Middle Eastern actors, since only Aaron Paul has any significant name recognition at all. Scott’s defense rings mostly false, and I think the real issue is that he just didn’t want to be bothered to go to bat with the studios and try to produce a more ethnically-appropriate cast.

For me, there’s one thing that seals the deal, that really demonstrates that Scott didn’t particularly care that he was whitewashing his film and producing a cast that makes no historical sense whatsoever.

This character:

That’s Malak, the manifestation of God/angel/boy/figment of Moses’ imagination that speaks for God. This character could have been played by literally ANYONE. The character could have been any race whatsoever, could even have been played by a young girl. The character is entirely made up, so he could look however Scott wanted. No one was going to the film to see the total unknown who played Malak (except presumably that actor’s family), so casting for box office draw wasn’t an issue. If Scott had cast a Yoruba child, a Sudanese, a Latino, a Haitian, an Arab, a Japanese, or an Eskimo, it’s not like the studio could say, “There are no angels of color. God has to be white.”

But Scott cast this kid:

Isaac Andrews is a lily-white English schoolboy. That’s right, Scott choose a white kid to represent God. Even Cecil B. DeMille’s 10 Commandments, made at the height of 20^th century American racial insensitivity, didn’t dare to make God white. So in addition to all the actually important and authoritative characters being white, so is God. Whitewashing doesn’t get any worse than that.

Exodus: What Race Were the Ancient Egyptians?

Tags

Afrocentrism, Ancient Egypt, Black Athena, Cheikh Anta Diop, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Martin Bernal, Mary Lefkowitz, Racial Issues, Ramesses II

If you were paying attention when Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) came out, you probably remember the controversy over whitewashing. Scott was accused of casting white actors in all of the major roles and only casting black actors in non-speaking, servile, or villainous roles. These days, the issue of whitewashing historical films has become a serious issue in many films. So let’s dig into this issue.

Race and Ancient Egypt

First off, let’s address this idea of ‘race’. While Westerners, especially Americans, tend to view race as a biological, and therefore innate, characteristic, the reality is that race is essentially a social and not biological characteristic. In American history, for example, among the groups who have been at some point considered to not be ‘white’ are the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, all groups that today are generally seen as ‘white’. The Irish and the Italians weren’t white because they were Catholic, and the Jews weren’t white because they weren’t Christian; religion was (and perhaps still is, in the case of Muslims) a key element of whiteness, even though Americans are trained to think of it as being entirely about genetics.

Thinking about race as a biological characteristic was very useful to 19^th and 20^th century Europeans and (white) Americans because it provided a seemingly physical justification for the highly unequal treatment accorded to whites and blacks, and enabled them to engage in things like slavery and later colonization with a clear conscience. If race was a physical quality, then it could be used as evidence that some people, especially sub-Saharan Africans, were biologically inferior and therefore did not have a legitimate claim to their land, resources, and culture.

Most discussions of Egyptian ‘race’ turn on questions of skin color and facial features, so that’s what I’m going to focus on here. Were ancient Egyptians fair-skinned and therefore what we would call ‘white’? Were they dark-skinned and therefore what we would call ‘black’? Or were they something in between, darker-skinned but not what we would call ‘black’? Right away we run into the problem that many people today considered black do not possess particularly dark skin, perhaps because they have mixed-race ancestry but are culturally seen as ‘black’. (To call attention to the culturally-constructed nature of this issue, I’m going to use ‘white’ and ‘black’ in single quotes to refer to the modern notion of race, and terms like ‘Indo-European’ and ‘Nubian’ to refer to ethnic groupings in the Ancient period. I realize I’m over-simplifying a complex issue, since Indo-Europeans were not a single ethnicity but I want to keep this post to a manageable length and I’m not an expert in the extremely complex question of ethnicity in the Ancient World.)

The question of Egyptian ‘race’ is also complicated by the fact that over the 3,000 year history of Pharaonic Egypt, the country was ruled by 32 different dynasties, some of them ruling different parts of Egypt at the same time, and these dynasties did not all have the same ethnic background. (Just to put 3,000 years into perspective, Cleopatra is closer to us chronologically than she is to the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.) Nor did these dynasties all arise from the local population of Egypt. The last dynasty, the Ptolemids, were of Greek origin, and the 27^th and 31^st dynasties were actually the shahs of Persia, ruling through appointed satraps (about whose ethnicity little is known). At least two other dynasties originated outside of Egypt proper as well. And in addition to considering the ethnicity of the different dynasties, we need to also keep in mind that the dynasties may have had different ethnicity from the native people under them.

Another complicating factor is that by the 19^th century, discussions of Egyptian ‘race’ had taken on distinctly cultural and sometimes racist overtones. It was clear to 18^th and 19^th century Westerners that ancient Egypt was a remarkably advanced society, capable of impressive engineering feats such as the Pyramids. Because 18^th and 19^th century Westerners were wrestling with the issue of enslaving black Africans on the basis of their supposed inferiority, many Westerners were unwilling to see ancient Egypt as being ‘African’ in the same way that those from Sub-Saharan Africa were. Arguments were offered that the Egyptians were Caucasians, or at the very least, that they were not Sub-Saharan. Western society wanted to include Egypt in its cultural heritage, and was distinctly unwilling to consider the possibility that ‘black’ people might have made major contributions to that heritage.

On the flip side of the issue, by the 1960s, the emerging Black Pride movement began to assert that Egypt was part of Africa and therefore that the ancient Egyptians were ‘black’. The Senegalese scholar and politician Cheikh Anta Diop, a critic of colonialism, argued for the importance of viewing Egypt within the context of Africa and that Egypt was fundamentally African and therefore ‘black’. The British historian Martin Bernal became deeply interested in the question of Egypt. In 1987, he published Black Athena, which offered the controversial argument that Egypt had essentially colonized ancient Greece, that major elements of Greek civilization were of Egyptian origin, and that 18^th century Europeans had essentially whitewashed the ancient Greeks, willfully obscuring the African roots of Western culture. Although Bernal did not assert that Egyptians were necessarily dark-skinned, the implication that ‘white’ culture had ‘black’ roots was a very attractive one to African American intellectuals, who saw it as a challenge to the racial politics of 20^th century culture.

Martin Bernal

The Black Athena thesis was aggressively criticized by specialists in Classical Greek culture, especially the Classicist Mary Lefkowitz, whose Not Out of Africa accused Bernal of having invented a new origin for Western culture because of racial motives. Classicists have broadly rejected the Black Athena thesis, criticizing its methodology, its lack of solid evidence, its numerous linguistic errors, and its simplistic use of ancient myth. But Bernal and his supporters insisted that Lefkowitz and her followers were displaying their own racial biases. Consequently, the ‘Afrocentric’ interpretation of ancient Egypt is a highly-charged issue for many African Americans, who see non-Afrocentric readings of the evidence as being rooted in cultural bias.

Mary Lefkowitz

An unfortunate aspect of this whole scholarly debate, which I am going to refer to simply as the ‘Afrocentric debate’, has been the tendency for the race/ethnicity of those involved to be seen as a factor. Many of the Afrocentrists have tended to be African Americans and Africans, and they have sometimes been accused of allowing their desire for a more glorious ‘black’ heritage to lead them into serious scholarly mistakes. On the other side, most of those arguing for a more traditional reading of Egyptian ethnicity (the ‘Eurocentrists’, although I think that’s a problematic term) have been accused of either actively trying to co-opt Egypt into the European past or simply to deny ‘black’ people a piece of their rightful cultural heritage. Both sides of the debate frequently express frustration and bafflement that the other side fails to see what “is plainly true”.

Adding to the issue is that few of the Afrocentrists have been trained Egyptologists (Diop was a chemist and anthropologist, Bernal an expert on Chinese history). Their opponents argue that their lack of proper training has caused them to misunderstand Egyptian culture and misread the facts, while their supporters argue that the Afrocentrists are able to see the facts more clearly because they are not trapped inside a West-centric perspective. In some cases, Afrocentrists have accused their opponents of deliberate fraud meant to perpetuate a racist narrative of Western origins. (To me as a scholar, this is one of the biggest weaknesses of the Afrocentric position; historical data can be exceptionally misleading unless you’ve been trained how to understand it. So the fact that few of the leading Afrocentrists have the specialized training to sift through the evidence fully makes me less willing to accept some of their analysis. But it doesn’t in and of itself render their analysis invalid.)

Cheikh Anta Diop

Some General Issues

Most 20^th century scholars who have looked at the ethnic origins of the general Egyptian population seem to agree that the general population was probably indigenous to the Nile Valley, having been there since before 3000 BC, when recorded Egyptian history begins. So these people were Africans, but not Sub-Saharan in origin. However, there is also evidence that before 3000 BC, there was a migration of Middle Eastern peoples into Egypt. If that’s correct, the basic population of Egypt would have been a mixture of the indigenous Nilotic people and Middle Easterners. Studies of Pre-Dynastic skeletons have shown that Egyptians had a mixture of cranio-facial characteristics similar to other Africans, Middle Easterners and even some Indo-Europeans. Their body proportions are similar to Sub-Saharan Africans.

Dental evidence suggests that the basic Egyptian population remained relatively constant from the Pre-dynastic period down through the end of Pharaonic Egypt, so that there is not likely to have been a major shift in ethnicity during this period. The study’s author, Joel Irish, has said that his evidence suggests the population was a mixture of several distinct groups, including Saharans, Nilotics, and Middle Easterners. Their teeth most strongly resemble modern North Africans and Middle Easterners.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t tell us much about skin color. For that, we need to turn to artwork. Egyptian tomb art, which depicts skin color much more clearly than monumental reliefs do, tends to follow a pattern in which men are colored reddish-brown and women are colored a lighter yellow-brown. This is often seen as being a result of the tendency for Egyptian men to spend more time out of doors and therefore to be much more deeply tanned, but it also sometimes seen as being part of a common pattern in which fair skin is considered a mark of feminine beauty (we find the same dichotomy in much Indian artwork, and arguably in modern American entertainment media as well). So tomb paintings aren’t particularly useful in determining what color Egyptians’ skin was, although the Egyptians did sometimes depict Sub-Saharans with black skin, suggesting that they may have seen skin color as a difference between the two groups.

Note the way the males and females have different skin colors

The Egyptian name for their country was Kemet (strictly, it was KMT, since Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t really have written vowels in the English sense. But conventionally those three letters are translitered as Kemet). The linguistic root of Kemet is ‘black’, so the word is generally translated as ‘the Black Land”. Scholars have traditionally seen this as a reference to the fertile black soil deposited by the Nile during its annual flooding, which allowed for settled agriculture. Kemet is contrasted with Deshret (DSRT), which means “the Red Land” and which referred to the barren sand that characterizes Egypt away from the Nile. However, Afrocentric scholars, including Diop, argued that Kemet was a reference not to the land but to its inhabitants. However, Egyptologists have not been persuaded by this reading.

The Tomb of Ramesses III contains a mural referred to as the ‘Table of Nations’, a common element in tomb painting in which a series of people provide guidance for the soul of the deceased to reach the Underworld. A drawing of this (referred to as Plate 48), done by the early German archaeologist Richard Lepsius was published posthumously. Diop pointed out that Plate 48 depicts the Egyptians and the Nubians as both being black-skinned. From this, he concluded that the Egyptians were black. In 1996, the Czech-American Egyptologist Frank Yurco examined the Table of Nations in Ramesses’s tomb and pointed out that Plate 48 is not an exact depiction of the mural; rather it’s a pastiche of four different figures that Lepsius drew next to each other when those figures are not next to each other in the mural; he also noted that the first figure is incorrectly labeled an Egyptian when it’s actually a Nubian in the original mural. Manu Ampim, professor of African and African American Studies, has accused Yurko of deliberate misrepresentation of the mural. (If you want to explore Ampin’s analysis, he’s posted a whole webpage of it here. However, his assertion that ‘rmT’ means ‘Egyptians’ in hieroglyphics is wrong; it’s a determinative sign meaning ‘people’, but it needs additional glyphs to designate a specific group of people. So he seems to be mistranslating the hieroglyphics.)

Lepsius’ Plate 48

Afrocentrists frequently point to a passage in the writings of the 5th century BC historian Herodotus in which he describes the Egyptians as being “melanchroes“, which means ‘dark-skinned’. But the Eurocentrists respond that the term doesn’t mean ‘black-skinned’, since Homer describes Odysseus as being melanchroes. Eurocentrists also point to several ancient historians who specifically say that the Egyptians do not look like “Ethiopians” because they’re not so dark-skinned. You can read more about that facet of the debate here.

The Pharaohs

Looking at individual dynasties and specific pharaohs gives us another perspective. As already noted, the 27^th dynasty, the 31^st dynasty, and the Ptolemid dynasty (technically the 32^nd dynasty, but they’re usually not given a number) were of non-African origin and so were Middle-Eastern and Greek. The 25^th dynasty (ruled from c.760-656 BC) were rulers of Nubia who conquered Egypt from the south. They definitely register as ‘black’ by today’s standards; in artwork they are shown with wide noses and full lips even when their skin color is not clear. The 23^rd dynasty (ruled 880-720 BC) came from Libya, meaning they were Berbers and thus fairly light-skinned. Many Berbers can pass for Europeans today.

Pharaoh Taharqa of the 25th dynasty, depicted as a sphinx

But beyond those five dynasties, the evidence gets less clear. The first two dynasties came from Thinis, somewhere in the southern reaches of Upper (South) Egypt, which could have had a larger Sub-Saharan population simply because it was closer to Nubia (one ancient historian says that the southern end of Upper Egypt was a mixed-ethnicity zone but that the inhabitants were not as dark as the Nubians). Other dynasties from Upper Egypt include the 11^th, the 17^th-19^th, and perhaps the 16^th, and thus may also have had greater Nubian influence. The other dynasties were based in Lower (North) Egypt, further away from Nubia and therefore probably had a smaller Nubian element. But this doesn’t automatically mean that rulers from Upper Egypt were themselves Nubian.

An important case in point is the 18^th dynasty pharaoh Ramesses II (the guy I argued in my last post was most likely to be the Pharaoh of the Exodus). A 1974 French study of his mummy determined that he was fair-skinned and had red hair, with a beaked nose. So even though his dynasty came from Upper Egypt, he does not appear to have been Nubian.

Ramesses II

We do possess the mummies of many pharaohs, but the desiccated and decayed state they are in makes analyzing skin color and facial features extremely difficult. Tutankhamun’s DNA was recently analyzed and while it revealed some interesting information about his ancestry, the scientists who conducted the study concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to give a clear statement about his ethnicity. (Sadly, that didn’t stop some racists from insisting that the study proved Tut was Caucasian.) And it’s unlikely that DNA studies will shed much light on this issue, because most mummies have been handled so often, both in modern times and in the ancient period, that they are badly contaminated with other people’s DNA.

Egyptian statues of pharaohs are often made from black stone and thus depict their subjects as black-skinned, but that may simply be a question of materials. It might also be meant to associate the pharaoh, who as a living god is the source of Egypt’s abundance and fertility, with the fertile black soil of Kemet. And other statues are painted red the same way that Egyptian men in tomb paintings are red.

Bust of Tutankamun

In terms of facial features, statues of pharaohs are a mixed bunch. Some certainly depict pharaohs with wide noses, full lips and other features that suggest they were ‘black’. Take a look at this gallery of pharaonic statues to see what I mean. (I’m not persuaded that all of them have ‘black’ features, but a good number of them certainly do. Note that the first image is of Narmer, the first pharaoh of Egypt, but it was made during the 25th dynasty and so does not offer evidence of what the historical Narmer looked like. Instead it reflects the influence of the Nubian dynasty ruling Egypt at the time.)

But other pharaohs are shown with thin lips and narrower noses, like this statue of 18^th dynasty pharaoh Hatshepsut.

Hatshepsut

And some have thin lips but wide noses. Of course, much of this rests on the assumption that lips and noses are solid guides to ethnicity, which they aren’t. They’re good clues, but not proof.

And all of this assumes that Egyptian statues are meant as portraits in the modern sense, when in fact they may be intended to convey symbolic truths rather than to offer a genuine likeness (as I said, many scholars think that black skin is intended to suggest fertility, so perhaps other features were symbolically-loaded as well). Consider for example the statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel; they show him with Nubian features even though that 1974 study suggested he was fair skinned and red-haired. Of course, with mixed ancestry, one might have fair skin and still have Sub-Saharan features.

Ramesses II

And consider the famous bust of Nefertiti.

Nefertiti

From her facial features, she could easily be mistaken for a European, even though her skin color is a bit darker. However, some Afrocentrists insist that they see Sub-Saharan features in Hatshepsut and Nefertiti. I don’t, but an Afrocentrist might suggest that my ‘white’ eyes are trained to not see African features. And that brings us back to the social construction of race. Both Afrocentrists and Eurocentrists are looking at the same images and reading them in contradictory ways.

Nefertiti’s not a pharaoh, only a pharaoh’s wife. And that raises another issue. Most pharaohs had multiple wives. Some were their biological sisters (and in a few cases daughters), but other were royal women from other kingdoms. It’s highly likely that many pharaohs had wives who were variously Egyptian, Nubian, Berber, Mesopotamian, Hittite, and perhaps even Greek (those last two being Indo-European). There was no fixed rule for determining which son succeeded his father as the next pharaoh, so it’s likely that many dynasties were ethnically mixed, with the mothers of pharaohs coming from different ethnic groups even within a single dynasty.

The problem here is that we are looking to put ancient Egyptians into modern boxes. We have a category of ‘race’ that probably would have meant very little to them, and their concerns are hard for us to make sense of because their mental world and artistic conventions are so far removed from ours.

Were the pharoahs ‘white’? No, not the way we mean the term. I highly doubt that even fair-skinned, red-haired Ramesses II would have looked ‘white’ by modern standards, though he might have looked close to it; the 23^rd dynasty might have as well. Were they ‘black’? In the case of the 25^th dynasty, absolutely they were. In the case of other dynasties, I think it’s probable that some of them might well have looked like modern African Americans (who are themselves often of very mixed ancestry), at least if the statuary was trying to offer a realistic portrait. Others probably would have looked very Middle Eastern to our eyes. Unless DNA studies advance to the point that they can give us clear scientific evidence to answer this problem, I think the best answer is to say that over the course of 3,000 years, Egyptian pharaohs were a very mixed group in terms of their ancestry, skin color, facial features, and hair.

In my next post, I’ll tackle what all of this means for Exodus: Gods and Kings.

Want to Know More?

Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985, Volume 1) is the first of four volumes on his theory. Mary Lefkowitz’ Not Out Of Africa: How “Afrocentrism” Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History (New Republic Book)  is the appropriate companion piece to read with it, to get both sides of the argument.

Suffragette: The Controversy

Tags

20th Century Britain, Anne-Marie Duff, Carey Mulligan, Emmeline Pankhurst, Meryl Streep, Racial Issues, Sarah Gavron, Suffragette, Whitewashing

Suffragette (2015, dir. Sarah Gavron, screenplay by Abi Morgan) tells the story of Lower Class laundress Maud Bates (Carey Mulligan) who gets drawn into the world of the militant women’s suffrage movement in Britain around 1912. The film explores the struggles that the Suffragetttes encountered and the extremes they went to in order to be heard.

The film does a very good job of addressing the issue of class. Maud and her friend Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) are working wives at a time when respectable women were not supposed to be work outside the home. Maud and her husband Sonny (Ben Whishaw) live in a very tiny apartment on a street filled with other Lower Class families. The film makes a point of exploring the power that Maud and Violet’s boss exercises over their lives, and when Violet loses her job, her 14 year old daughter is left as the only breadwinner in the family. Later in the film, Violet tells Maud that she is pregnant again in a scene that drives home the despair of poor women who know they cannot support another baby.

In the film’s most heartbreaking (if somewhat unlikely) scene, Maud learns that Sonny has decided to give away their son George because he cannot take care of the boy all alone. The couple he has found are clearly Middle Class, so there is a sense that this childless couple is using their class privilege to get a child at Maud’s expense.

The film clearly acknowledges the role that Lower Class women played in the Suffragette movement, which serves as a helpful corrective to the common idea that the Suffragettes were mainly a group of Middle and Upper Class women. The film doesn’t try to explore the tensions that might have existed between the two classes in the movement, but it’s nice that the film decided to make class a major theme.

The film, however, has been widely criticized for excluding minorities. For example, Hanna Flint has raised the issue, pointing out that Indian women participated in the Suffragette movement. The most prominent example is Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last Maharaja of Punjab, who not only vigorously campaigned for the movement but was also a prominent financial supporter of it. Flint also points out that the film essentially whitewashes the Indians out of Bethnall Green, Maud and Violet’s neighborhood.

Princess Sophia selling Suffragette newspapers

 

The film-makers have responded to these criticisms. Abi Morgan certainly knew about Princess Sophia; in an interview, she mentions a biography of Sophia as one of three books she read about the Suffragettes before writing the script. Director Sarah Gavron has acknowledged some of the criticism in an op-ed. She argues that they chose to omit Princess Sophia and other Indian women for two reasons. First, the film was focused on Lower Class women, and Sophia and the other major Indian Suffragette, Bhikaiji Cama, were Upper Class, and because the records of the period do not show evidence of substantial minority participation in the more militant end of the Suffrage movement. The one known photo of Indian women protesting for suffrage dates to a year before the events of the film and depicts a non-militant protest. And Duff insisted to Hanna Flint that there were in fact women of color in the laundry scenes, although I didn’t notice them and Flint points out that their names don’t appear in published cast lists.

 

Indian women protesting for Suffrage at George V’s coronation in 1911

 

So the omission of women of color was not born out of ignorance, but was rather a conscious decision on Gavron’s part. In her opinion, there were not enough Lower Class Indian women involved in the movement to justify their inclusion in the film. While her choice is problematic because it produces an all-white cast at a time when there is a strong push for more racially-inclusive film-making, as a historian, I can respect the fact that she made her choice based on what she thought was the best evidence available and the explicit focus of the film.

On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that the main character of the film IS COMPLETELY FICTITIOUS. Bates, as I commented in my first post of the film, is essentially an Everywomen Suffragette, designed to illustrate the enormous sufferings that some Suffragettes experienced. That somewhat undermines Gavron’s defense that the film’s cast was dictated by historical fact. If it’s ok to make up Maud (and Violet and Ellen, and every other female character in the film other than Meryl Streep’s Emmeline Pankhurst), surely there was room to include an Indian women or two. There are several scenes at the WSPU offices where Suffragettes of all classes interacted, so surely there was an opportunity to include Princess Sophia there.

So I guess what I’m saying is that while I understand Gavron’s decision, and I can admire that she thought about the issue in a serious way before making that decision, I’m not sure it was the right decision. And feminists of color have long objected to the tendency of white feminists to ignore racial issues, so it’s not like this criticism was unexpected.

 

Suffrage and Slavery

The film has also attracted some criticism over a photo-shoot for Time Out London in which the cast of the film was photographed wearing (white) t-shirts with the phrase “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” on them. Director Ava DuVernay, for example, has said that the photos were at best racially insensitive. The objections to the slogan are three-fold, first that it implies that legal slavery was voluntary and therefore slaves were to some extent complicit in their slavery, and second that the word ‘rebel’ in conjunction with ‘slave’ implies the Confederate States of America. Third, the sense that the film-makers were being insensitive to racial minorities conjures up the problem of white feminists ignoring the concern of non-white feminists.

The Time Out London photos

 

Time Out London responded that this phrase is a quote from a speech given by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1913. The full quote is “Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.” They also pointed out that the photo shoot was specifically carried by Time Out London, an English magazine, and that suggestions that the quote refers to American slavery or the Civil War are therefore unreasonable.

19^th century feminists were very aware of the anti-slavery movement, and in fact the American feminist movement emerged directly out of the Abolitionist movement. One of the first American suffragists, Lucretia Mott, was a leading Quaker abolitionist. In 1840, she and five other female abolitionists traveled to London to participate in the General Anti-Slavery Convention, as did Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another important abolitionist. But the male delegates refused to allow Mott and her group to participate and forced the women to sit in a gallery as observers. Many of the American men in the delegation moved to the gallery in protest. This incident spurred Mott and Stanton to begin organizing a woman’s rights convention, which eventually led to the famous Seneca Fall Convention in 1848, usually taken as the birth of the American Suffrage movement.

British feminists such as Harriet Taylor Mill occasionally used slavery as a metaphor for the oppression of women, insisting that married women were often treated more as domestic servants than wives. Pankhurst’s statement clearly falls within this rhetorical tradition, and it derives its persuasive force from the assumption that slavery is fundamentally immoral. So on the surface, the photo-shoot seems like a reasonable way to promote the film to British audiences.

But once you dig a little deeper, I think the photo-shoot becomes more problematic. Although the quote is historically accurate, that doesn’t mean that there’s no racism here. Pankhurst was employing a metaphor of black slavery that, as critics have pointed out, implies that black slaves were partly to blame for not resisting slavery enough. At a minimum, she was ignoring the meaning of slavery for the blacks who experienced it and simply repurposing racial slavery to make a point about women’s domestic servitude without bothering to reflect on the ways the comparison was inappropriate.

Additionally, the Women’s Suffrage movement had considerable numbers of racists in it. In the US, black Suffragists, such as Ida B. Wells, were frequently excluded from Suffrage rallies or forced to march at the back of Suffragist parades, and it’s not hard to find racist quotes by American Suffragists. I don’t know of any evidence that the British Suffragettes actively worked to exclude non-whites, and Sylvia Pankhurst, Emmeline’s daughter, was a vocal opponent of racism and colonialism, but the British Suffragist and Suffragette movements certainly had their share of racists as well; Mildred Fawcett was appalled that, when New Zealand enfranchised women, it meant that Maori women had the vote when white women in Britain didn’t. In the 1930s, at least three prominent Suffragists, Mary Richardson, Norah Elam, and Mary Sophia Allen, became supporters of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Even if most Suffragists didn’t go that far, many would have accepted the casual racism and white supremacist attitudes that were so deeply embedded in British culture at the time. It seems unlikely that Emmeline Pankhurst would have rejected those attitudes.

Norah Elam in a BUF cap

Perhaps we can forgive Pankhurst for the casual racism her statement reflects. At the time she said it, I doubt anyone would have even considered the racist overtones of what she said. And, as a historian, I firmly believe it is a mistake to judge the people of the past according to modern standards. We must judge the past in its own terms. So use of the quote in the film itself would be legitimate (I don’t recall whether it’s included in Streep’s brief speech or not).

But the photo-shoot didn’t take place in the context of 1913. It took place in 2015, half a century after people began confronting the social and psychological consequences of slavery and decades after black feminists began pressing white feminists to acknowledge racial issues in the feminist movement. The photo-shoot repurposed Pankhurst’s quote for its own commercial purposes, which was to sell magazines and promote a film. So regardless of whether the quote was inappropriate in 1913, in 2015 the racist element of the quote makes it inappropriate now. The people who organized the photo-shoot should have paid more attention to the issue.

And the photo-shoot unfortunately cast Gavron’s decision to focus exclusively on white Suffragtettes in a new light, because it created a situation where the cast of white women were sporting a racially-insensitive slogan, thereby validating the charge of black feminists that their concerns aren’t taken seriously by white feminists. The photo-shoot unintentional demonstrates that mainstream feminism has a race problem. And that in turn suggests that Gavron’s decision to have an all-white cast is an example of that problem.

So by failing to consider that a slogan taken out of its proper historical context takes on a new set of meanings, the people who organized the photo-shoot carelessly re-wrote the context of the film and give it a new meaning. This is why an understanding of history matters.

 

Want to Know More?

One place to start would be Emmeline Pankhurst’s Suffragette: My Own Story. Sylvia Pankhurst’s account, The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement. Krista Cowman, the historical consultant for the film, has studied Women in British Politics, c.1689-1979 (Gender and History), and her book has a substantial section on this period.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Ronald Reagan and Racism

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20th Century America, African Americans, Alan Rickman, American Presidents, Apartheid, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Nancy Reagan, Racial Issues, Ronald Reagan

One accusation that has been leveled against Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels) is that it depicts the Reagan White House unfairly. For example, Michael Reagan, President Reagan’s son, wrote that to depict “Ronald Reagan as a racist because he was in favor of lifting economic sanctions against South Africa is simplistic and dishonest.” Ben Shapiro of Breitbart News complained that “[Eugene] Allen had warm relations with all the presidents with whom he served, and left the White House in 1980 with a hug from Ronald Reagan; Cecil Gaines, leaves the White House in rage over Reagan’s stance on South African apartheid. The film depicts Eisenhower as a colorless milquetoast, largely ignores southern Democrats’ support for Jim Crow during the 1960s and paints Reagan as slightly senile.” Reagan biographer Paul Kengor blasted one scene in which Reagan refuses to accept a bill that would have imposed economic sanctions on South Africa due to its Apartheid system of segregation, because the film offered no wider political context for Reagan’s decision.

So does the film merit such criticism?

It’s clear that Eugene Allen, the man on whom The Butler’s Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker) is based, was treated at least somewhat better than Gaines is in the film. Whereas Allen retired as the White House Maitre d’hotel at the end of his career, Gaines spends 30 years as a butler and quits when he is refused a pay raise and promotional opportunities by an unnamed supervisor. While the incident represents Gaines’ acknowledgment that some of his son Louis’ (David Oyelowo) complaints about American society are valid, the scene as it literally plays is false, and in that sense, Shapiro’s objection is valid. It undeniably misrepresents Allen’s decision to retire. (But Shapiro’s claim that Gaines quits “in rage” is a serious exaggeration; Whitaker plays the scene very quietly and calmly, with no expression of emotion at all. Nor is Reagan’s stance on Apartheid the actual issue, although it does seem to prompt his demand for a raise.)

Eugene Allen and his family posing with Ronald and Nancy Reagan

But the film includes an incident from Allen’s life in which Nancy Reagan (Jane Fonda) invites Gaines and his wife to a State Dinner as guests rather than staff. There’s a suggestion that Gaines is uncomfortable at the dinner when his co-workers are waiting on him, but apart from that, the film plays the scene as the Reagans respectfully acknowledging his long service.

The Allens with Nancy Reagan

The film’s whole approach to the scenes with presidents is to show Gaines quietly serving in the background while the various presidents are discussing political issues with advisors. Periodically, one of the politicians will briefly acknowledge Gaines in a more personal way. President Kennedy tells him that he didn’t understand how deeply black people were hated until he saw the treatment the Birmingham marchers received, and after the assassination, Jackie Kennedy gives him one of her husband’s ties. Gaines receives a tie-pin from President Johnson. The film also shows him attending Johnson in a vulgar scene in which a constipated Johnson is sitting on a toilet discussing racial issues with his advisors just outside the bathroom door. The film spends more time on Richard Nixon (John Cusack) than anyone else, showing him as Vice-President trying to get the black staff at the White House to vote for him, and as President discussing how to deal with the Black Panthers and then drunk and despondent just before his resignation. Ford and Carter don’t even appear, except in news clips. So in most scenes, the presidents and their advisors treat Gaines as a domestic servant, but the film scatters in a few brief personal conversations, at least one each for Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan.

The Kennedys greeting the White House domestic staff, with Cecil Gaines (Whitaker) on the right

In Reagan’s case, the personal scene comes when Reagan (Alan Rickman) asks Gaines to mail a letter to a constituent. The constituent is having economic problems, and Reagan wants to send some money, but Nancy and his staff object to him doing this. So he asks Gaines to do it on the sly. It’s a scene that humanizes Reagan for the viewer, although it doesn’t say anything about Reagan’s attitude toward Gaines. Personally, I think Reagan comes off quite well in that scene.

Nor does the film “paint Reagan as slightly senile” as Ben Shapiro charges. I certainly saw no sign of that in the film. And it’s worth pointing out that Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s 16 years after leaving office, almost certainly had the disease while he was president. His son Ron Reagan Jr has said that he saw traces of the characteristic confusion in his father as early as 1984, and reporter Lesley Stahl did as well. So had the film chosen to explore that facet of Reagan’s time in office, it would have had justification for doing so.

Reagan and Apartheid

However, the essence of the complaints about the film is really that the film treats Reagan poorly because it includes a scene in which South African Apartheid is an issue, and implies that Reagan was racist. Gaines is serving Reagan during a meeting with unnamed Republicans who are seeking to persuade the president to not veto the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which aimed to impose economic sanctions on the white South African government because of the country’s system of segregation, which became infamous during the 1980s. During the scene, Reagan says twice that he has made up his mind to veto the bill, without explaining why.

Jane Fonda and Alan Rickman as Nancy and Ronald Reagan

Reagan did veto the bill, which had bipartisan support, but his veto was overridden by a substantial margin in both houses. It was, in fact the first time in the 20^th century that a veto of a foreign policy bill was overridden, and it was seen as a significant defeat for Reagan. After the override, Reagan released a statement attributing his veto to a concern that the bill would hurt the people it was intended to help.

So the scene is essentially accurate. Republicans did press Reagan to accept the bill and he did in fact veto it. And it’s hard to argue that the film should have ignored the event. The whole film is about the dismantling of segregation in the US, and the CAAA played in role in helping to bring about the end of Apartheid in South Africa, so its inclusion in the film is appropriate. But the film does not make any statement that Reagan was motivated by racism. Kengor is correct that the film does not explore any wider context for the bill or Reagan’s decision, but I’m not sure that the film could have provided a meaningful context without going substantially out of its way.

Is this film biased against Reagan? Does it depict Reagan as a racist? I don’t think so. If it had wanted to paint Reagan in a negative light on race issues, it could certainly have done so by including reference to his use of the racist Southern Strategy to woo racist whites into the Republican Party, for example by using coded language about ‘welfare queens’ and ‘young bucks’, or his decision to kick off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, an obscure town whose only claim to fame is the lynching of three Civil Rights activists in 1964, or his 1982 defense of Bob Jones University, which was losing federal funding because of its ban on interracial dating. It could have mentioned that Reagan declared the Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South”, or that he described Confederate president Jefferson Davis as a personal hero. It could have highlighted Reagan’s 1980 campaign manager, Lee Atwater, who explicitly acknowledged the role coded racism played in the campaign. In a film dealing with race and racism in the United States, inclusion of these events would have been entirely reasonable.

Reagan at the Nashoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi

The fact that Reagan was friendly to domestic servants in the White House and once hugged Eugene Allen doesn’t really occlude the numerous ways that Reagan used racism as a tool during his political career. Michael Reagan insists that his father was not a racist and at various points did nice things for black friends; that may well be true but it doesn’t mean that Reagan can’t have exploited racism to further his own goals. It is entirely possible to have black friends and yet still say and do racist things. So whether Reagan’s veto of the CAAA was motivated by racism or something else entirely, the film uses the incident as an example of the way Reagan’s policies looked quite different to blacks than to whites. Given that the whole movie is about how black people viewed America and American politics in this period, that’s an entirely reasonable approach. Could the film have gone into deeper detail about Reagan’s decidedly mixed record on racial issues? Could it have provided more of the context Paul Kengor wanted by delving into the Reagan administration’s policies and the political strategy Reagan used to win two elections? Absolutely, but had it done so, I think Reagan would have come off much worse than he does in the film.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.

Lee Daniels’ The Butler: Upstairs, Downstairs at the White House

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20th Century America, African Americans, American Presidents, Civil Rights Movement, David Oyelowo, Eugene Allen, Forest Whitaker, Lee Daniels' The Butler, Oprah Winfrey, Racial Issues, Washington DC

Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013, dir. Lee Daniels, duh!) tells the story of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), the son of a Georgia cotton-picker who leaves after being trained as a domestic servant and eventually works his way up to being a well-respected butler at the White House. He starts working there under President Dwight D. Eisenhower and quits during President Reagan’s tenure, serving through various famous events, such as the Little Rock school desegregation crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Voting Rights Act, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Vietnam, Nixon’s resignation, and the debate over South African Apartheid under Reagan. At the end of the film, after voting for Barack Obama, he is invited back to the White House as an honored guest.

The film is “inspired by true events”, which is Hollywood-speak for “it’s basically made up.” In this case, the film was very loosely modeled on the life of Eugene Allen, who worked at the White House from 1952 to 1986. Shortly after the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the Washington Post ran an article on Allen, which prompted the film.

But while Allen was the inspiration for the film, and Gaines’ time at the White House covers almost the same range of years (Gaines starts in 1957), there are only a few similarities between the two men. Allen was married with one son, whereas Gaines is married with two sons; Allen’s wife Helene and Gaines’ wife Gloria (Oprah Winfrey) both die just before the 2008 election. Jackie Kennedy really did give Allen one of her husband’s ties after the assassination, and Nancy Reagan really did invite Allen to a state dinner.

Eugene Allen

But beyond these details, the film takes enormous liberties. Allen was from Virginia, whereas Gaines is from Georgia. In the film, his mother is raped by her employer, who promptly shoots Gaines’ father for protesting it. That’s complete fiction; it’s purpose is to help establish for the viewer the legal and social inequalities between blacks and whites that is really the theme of the whole film. Nor, so far as I can tell, did a young Gaines break into a bakery to get something to eat and be taken in by a black employee.

In the film, Gaines starts at the White House as a butler and 30 years later is still just a butler. He periodically asks the Maitre d’hotel (the head of the domestic staff at the White House) for pay equal to the white employees and equal career opportunities, and continues getting turned down until he finally quits as an act of protest. Allen, however, started out not as a butler but as a pantry worker, shining silver and doing similar chores. He was promoted to butler and by the end of his career he was the Maitre d’hotel. So the film’s claim that the White House did not permit its black employees to advance at all is false.

Allen (right) serving President Eisenhower (center)

However, while these details are untrue, they do serve to dramatize a basic problem at the White House; while the domestic staff included large numbers of black men and women, there were comparatively few blacks in political offices of any level; usually no more than one or two in any administration. The year after Allen retired, Colin Powell became the highest-ranking black man to hold any White House position when President Reagan named him National Security Advisor in 1987.

Father and Son

Daniels smartly focuses on race issues in the film by contrasting Gaines’ service to various presidents with the experiences of his son Louis (David Oyelowo), who is essentially fictional (Charles Allen was not a political activist). When he graduates from high school, Louis decides to go to Fisk University where he meets Carol (Yaya DaCosta). While Gaines appears to be a Republican for most of the film (as considerable numbers of blacks were in the 1950s, since the Republicans were “the party of Lincoln”) Louis and Carol slowly become radicalized by their experiences, which allows the film to depict numerous moments in the turbulent racial politics of the 1960s.

Whitaker and Oyelowo as Cecil and Louis Gaines

At Fisk, Louis meets James Lawson, an early advocate of nonviolent political action (who did, in fact, work with students at Fisk), and Louis and Carol participate in a lunch counter sit-in. The specific training in non-resistance they participate in and the violent treatment they receive at the lunch counter are some of the most powerful scenes in the whole film, showing how the Civil Rights movement involved carefully planned strategy, not just spontaneous events. (A good example of this is Rosa Parks; contrary to the usual depiction of her, Parks was not simply too tired to get up from that bus seat; her action was a very intentional gesture. As the secretary of local NAACP president E.D. Nixon, she understood that the NAACP was looking for a good candidate to trigger a lawsuit over the bus system’s discriminatory policies, and she knew there were plans for a local bus boycott.) The Sit-in scene is a damn good piece of film-making.

After Louis gets arrested, he has a falling out with Cecil and they part ways, barely seeing each other for years. Louis and Carol participate in a Freedom Ride and narrowly survive an ambush by the KKK. They get arrested repeatedly, have fire hoses and dogs turned on them in Birmingham, are present at Selma during the Voting Rights march, and are with Dr. King when he is assassinated in Memphis. They become advocates of Black Power and join the Black Panthers, but Louis eventually becomes disenchanted when the movement starts drifting toward violence.

Louis being arrested after the Lunch Counter sit in

All of this makes the film a virtual primer on the Civil Rights struggle. The film repeatedly contrasts scenes of White House gentility with scenes of racist violence, and Gaines hears a good deal of discussion about the politics of race issues by various presidents and their advisors. Gaines and his son travel in opposite arcs, one from conservatism to activism and the other from radicalism to more moderate forms of protest, finding reconciliation when Gaines finally finds the dignity to quit his job after being refused another pay raise. And it’s true that Eugene Allen did live through all of these upheavals while working at the White House.

But the tidiness of it all simply feels false. It makes sense that Gaines saw Jackie Kennedy after her husband was assassinated and spoke with a despondent President Nixon shortly before his resignation, because he was a domestic staffer whose job including waiting on the First Family. But to have his son constantly be thrust into similarly important moments during the Civil Rights struggle from the side of the activists simply strains credulity too much for the film to be truly persuasive as a depiction of history; it’s several coincidences too many.

Which is a pity, because the underlying story the film is telling us is both true and important. Looking at the Civil Right era from these twin perspectives provides a more nuanced depiction of the black experience during this period than one normally gets in film or television. The conflicting viewpoints of Gaines and his son show how complex the political choices facing black people were at the time. Louis thinks his father is being subservient to power until Dr. King comments that the dignified service of black servants was a powerful way of undermining stereotypes of blacks as lazy and stupid. Gaines thinks his son is being disrespectful by protesting, and slowly comes to realize that perhaps being respectable isn’t enough. Both Gaines and his son slowly become disenchanted with the organizations they belong to because the one seems to ignore the needs of black citizens and the other becomes too radical.

Gaines, the film’s central character, is written to be quiet, dignified, and stoic, apart from one brief outburst at his son. While that may be true to Allen’s personality (or perhaps simply his public persona), it doesn’t always give Whitaker much to work with, and Gaines sometimes feels like a cipher. Louis often comes across more sympathetically than his father does. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better job of aging in character in a film; by the end of the film Whitaker does genuinely come across as a frail old man.

The best performance, however, is by Oprah Winfrey, who sinks her teeth into the surprisingly nuanced role of the alcoholic Gloria, who is at different moments proud of and resentful of her husband’s job, deeply in love with him and sexually frustrated by him, angry at Louis and worried about his safety. It’s a role to remind you that she’s an Academy Award nominated actress. And it’s a nice break from the noxious Hollywood tendency of casting inappropriately young actresses as romantic partners for much older male stars.

Winfrey as Gloria

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is not a perfect film; the inclusion of the radical Louis Gaines as a central character simply feels too pat and strains credulity. But it does an excellent job of introducing the viewer to the turbulence of racial issues in the 1950s and 60s, and the concept of making a movie about this period in which white presidents are merely supporting players in a story about the political and personal struggles of a black family feels gently subversive. Watching famous white actors like Robin Williams, John Cusack, Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda having cameos while the black actors takes center stage is a pleasant change of pace from normal Hollywood casting. Although the film occasionally feels like it’s straining to prove it’s a prestige movie, the subject matter alone makes it worth watching and the solid performances make it enjoyable.

Update: In the original draft of this column, I made a comment about the inclusion of Lee Daniels’ name in the title. It has been pointed out to me that this was actually forced on Daniels, who would have preferred to use the title “The Butler”, which was a title legally owned by Warner Bros. Thus Daniels was not responsible for the decision. Since it wasn’t Daniels’s choice, I’ve removed the comment.

Want to Know More?

Lee Daniels’ The Butleris available on Amazon. The article that inspired the film was released as a promotional piece for the film, along with some material about the making of the film. You can get it as The Butler: A Witness to History, but it’s probably not worth the money. You can find the original article here.

If you want to know more about the below-stairs work at the White House, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House might be a better choice.

There are many good books on different aspects of the Civil Rights struggle. One good general treatment is Daniel Luck’s Selma to Saigon: The Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War (Civil Rights and Struggle). You might also consider looking at the various primary documents of the movement, collected in The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, which is a companion piece to the acclaimed PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Movement

Amistad: What It Gets Right

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Amistad, Djimon Hounsou, Joseph Cinqué, Racial Issues, slavery, Steven Spielberg, The Middle Passage

In a previous post, I highlighted ways in which Amistad (1997, dir. Steven Spielberg) deviates from the details of the Amistad story while still getting many of the basic facts correct. But I don’t want to suggest that the film doesn’t have any historical virtues, because it does. It offers a chilling cinematic depiction of the horrors of the Middle Passage.

The Middle Passage is the general term used for the maritime journey of slave ships from West Africa to parts of North, Central, or South America (in La Amistad’s case, from Sierra Leona to Cuba). The term derives from the fact that this was the middle leg of a triangular trade route that saw money and manufactured goods taken to Africa to purchase slaves, slaves taken to the Americas to sell for commodities such as coffee, sugar, or cotton, and those goods taken to Europe to sell, with the money acquired serving to repeat the process.

A map of the ‘Triangular Trade’ system, including the Middle Passage

During the first trial, Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) gives an extended narrative of his journey from Sierra Leone to Connecticut, which the film offers in the form of a flashback. He describes being captured by African slavers and taken to the Lomboko Slave Fortress where he was purchased along with hundred of others and forced into the hold of a slave ship. The film forces the viewer to watch a truly harrowing sequence of events.

Hounsou as Cinqué waiting at Lomboko

The slaves are kept naked and packed in so tightly they can barely move. Many are screaming or crying out. Rough weather causes many of them to become seasick and they vomit on each other. One woman is smothered to death, her small baby being passed over the pile of bodies to another slave. When it is time for feeding, the slavers come down with a pot of gruel and simply dump the food into outstretched hands, but they skip some slaves they decide are too sick to survive. The slaves frantically eat the meager food and fight for each other’s share. One woman hungrily wipes food off another woman’s face to eat it. Then, for reasons that are unclear at the time, the slavers decide they have too many slaves on the ship, so they chain a group of slaves together, weight them down with a bag of stones, and push them overboard. A resistant slave is flogged bloody, and during the process, a woman with a baby chooses to throw herself overboard to die.

I haven’t been able to find out the details of the historical Cinqué’s testimony, so I’m not sure that what the film shows us bares any relationship to what Cinqué actually said in court. But absolutely everything in this sequence is solidly based on actual details of the Middle Passage. A typical slave ship held between 350 and 450 slaves, only about half of whom had to survive in order for the journey to turn a profit (and that’s not considering the insurance on the slave cargo; dead slaves could in some cases be written off to insurance, thereby providing some profit even if they died on the journey).

As a result, there was no particular incentive for the slave traders to treat their human cargo gently apart from the fact that healthy slaves fetched more on the market than sickly or weak ones did. The brutal treatment was considered necessary because it helped break the spirit of the captives and prepared them psychologically for a life of servitude. One might also theorize that dehumanization was a coping technique for the crew, who must in many cases have understood how harsh the conditions were.

A schematic of a slave ship

The Middle Passage and its horrific conditions have long been known to historians, but it has rarely been depicted in cinema, and certainly not in a big budget mainstream film like Amistad. So despite the rather problematic elements of the film as a narrative about how wonderful whites are in helping blacks overcome the evils of slavery, Amistad forces American audiences to confront one of the most awful elements of the 18^th and 19^th century slave system, and it pulls few punches. It is a disturbing sequence to watch, but one that I think is extremely valuable for audiences to see. One scholar who saw the film reported seeing at least two couples, one black and one white, who both seemed visibly disturbed by this element of the film, and I suspect that’s a pretty common reaction to the Middle Passage sequence.

At a time when some commentators are trying to recast American slavery as not being so bad, or even actually a positive thing, this portion of Amistad is a reminder of how absurd those claims are. The American slave system was in fact one of the most brutal forms of slavery humanity has ever invented, far harsher in some respects than, for example, the Graeco-Roman or early medieval slave systems, and that brutality started with the Middle Passage.

Watch the Middle Passage sequence from Amistad. It’s not pleasant, but it’s unfortunately fairly accurate.

Want to Know More?

Amistadis available in different formats on Amazon.

If you’re interested in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the masterwork on the subject is Hugh Thomas’ The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870. It’s a massive (900 page) work the surveys of the four-century history of the slave trade. This is a Kindle version. If you’re looking at something slightly less hefty, try David Bryon Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, which opens with the Amistad case.

Amistad: Joseph Cinqué and All the Other Nameless Blacks

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19th Century America, Amistad, Colonial Africa, David Franzoni, Debbie Allen, Djimon Hounsou, Joseph Cinqué, Morgan Freeman, Racial Issues, Sierra Leone, slavery, Steven Spielberg

The story of La Amistad is an important story in the history of black Americans. When Debbie Allen discovered William Owen’s Slave Mutiny: The Revolt on the Schooner Amistad (1953, republished in 1968 under the title Black Mutiny), she became convinced that this was a story that Americans, particularly black Americans, needed to know. So she persuaded Steven Spielberg to make the film in 1997. His previous foray into a “black” film, The Color Purple, had been criticized within the black community for both softening Alice Walker’s novel too much and for its harsh depiction of black men as abusive to women. Unfortunately, decisions that Spielberg made while editing the film produced a film that is much less about the Africans on the Amistad than the white Americans who helped them win their freedom.

The film opens aboard the Amistad, with Joseph Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) slowly prying a nail from a piece of wood. Once he has worked the nail loose, he uses it as a simple lock-pick to open the cuffs he is wearing, and then liberates the other slaves. (Historically this is wrong; the slaves used a file that they found, not a nail, and it’s not clear that Cinqué is the one who accomplished their liberation. I’m not sure that it makes too much difference, other than situating Cinqué as the leader of the whole revolt.) Having armed themselves, they attack the crew, take Ruiz and Montez prisoner, and attempt to sail back to Africa only to be tricked by their prisoners. They are taken captive by Lt. Gedney and put into a Connecticut prison.

From that point on, the focus of the film is almost entirely on American characters, with the exception of Cinqué. The Africans are treated largely as an undifferentiated group. Apart from Cinqué, only one of them, the fictional Yamba, gets any character development. There is one scene that highlights the ethnic differences between the various Africans, but since the scene deals with an argument about where to place a table, the scene mostly acts to demonstrate how irrational the Africans are rather than to illuminate anything about their culture.

A contemporary image of Cinqué

Language Matters

Part of the reason for the obscuring of the Africans apparently has to do with Spielberg’s decision about how to deal with language. Early on, Spielberg and screenwriter David Franzoni made the decision to treat the language realistically; the Africans speak Mende rather than English. He could have done what many previous Hollywood films did and simply have everyone speak English anachronistically. So Spielberg deserves some credit for trying to treat the Africans realistically on this point. This choice has the effect of highlighting the cultural barriers and differences between the Americans and the Africans, and that enables the film to set up a story arc in which Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and Cinqué gradually come to understand each other’s perspective.

Cinqué and other Africans at the first hearing. Note how crudely they are dressed.

But the decision to have the Africans speak Mende creates a problem for the film; since the audience is unlikely to know Mende, the film will have to subtitle all their dialogue for the audience to understand it. But American audiences in the 1990s were notoriously resistant to subtitled films (and not much more receptive today), so there was a good deal of concern that the subtitles would keep audiences away from the film. As a result of this concern, Spielberg chose to minimize the amount of subtitling he provides in the film. Most of what the Africans say goes untranslated.

Spielberg’s guiding principle in deciding what to subtitle seems to be how critical the dialogue is to understand what’s happening on the screen. In the opening scenes, most of the Mende goes untranslated, but the Portuguese spoken by Ruiz and Montez gets translated. Later, Cinqué’s dialogue gets translated while other Mende does not. Once a translator is found who speaks Mende (Chiwetel Ejiofor in one of his earliest roles), Cinqué’s dialogue is no long translated, except when he is talking to Yamba.

The unfortunate effect of this choice is to render the Africans the exotic Others in the eyes of the audience, because most of the time the viewer has no idea what the Africans are saying. The choice strips these characters of much of their identity and agency. Perhaps the worst moment in the film for this comes after Judge Juttson renders his verdict in the first trial. The Africans do not understand that the judge’s verdict has been appealed and that there must be a second trial. Instead, they celebrate by lighting a bonfire in the courtyard of their prison and dancing around it, because apparently Africans dance around bonfires. When Cinqué learns that there has to be a second trial, he responds by angrily stripping off his Western-style shirt and going over to the bonfire. Cinqué’s angry speech is translated, but the rest of the Africans are not translated.

The effect of this is to present the Africans as primitive savages in contrast to the more civilized (and clothed) Americans. Unfortunately, this undermines what Spielberg seems to have intended with the film, the idea that the Africans are people like the Americans.

While the film is to be commended for trying to present the complexities of communicating across linguist barriers, to accomplish this it greatly exaggerates the challenge involved. The film devotes a great deal of time to Baldwin’s attempts to communicate with Cinqué, when in fact the abolitionists found translators fairly quickly, which allowed several of the Africans to offer testimony in court.

 

The Role of Christianity

Another problem is the way the film treats Joseph Cinqué, whose actual name was Sengbe Pieh. Descriptions suggest that the real Cinqué was a fairly small, unimpressive-looking man, and not the tall, muscular Hounsou, but that’s a fairly minor point. Cinqué became the spokesman for the Africans after their arrival in the US, but it seems less clear that he was the leader of the initial revolt as the film shows.

Cinqué on modern Sierra Leonese currency

The historical Cinqué converted to Christianity at some point during his captivity, as did a number of the other Africans. Many of the abolitionists were opposed to slavery for religious reasons, and others were eager to establish a Christian mission in Sierra Leone and saw the Africans as useful intermediaries for evangelization. When the Africans were finally liberated by the Supreme Court ruling, they were hosted in Connecticut by abolitionists who arranged for them to receive some education in English and Christianity. President Tyler was unwilling to help the return of the Africans, so instead, the abolitionists raised money by taking the Africans on tour to various churches where they demonstrated their knowledge of Christianity.

By the end of 1841, the abolitionists had raised enough money to charter a ship to send both the Africans and five missionaries to Sierra Leone. Most of the surviving Africans abandoned the missionaries as soon as they returned home, but enough stayed that a mission named Mo Tappan in honor of Lewis Tappan was established.

Cinqué’s history after his return is somewhat unclear; he discovered that his wife and children had disappeared, probably victims of the civil war raging in the country. What he did after he left the mission is unclear, but at the end of his life, he reportedly returned to the mission and requested Christian burial. How important Christianity was to Cinqué is unclear, but it is clear that he at least nominally converted to Christianity and cared about that conversion at the end of his life.

The Africans during the first trial. Note the clean white shirts

In the film, however, the role of Christianity is sharply downplayed. The main abolitionist characters (Joadson and Tappan, basically) never seriously mention Christianity as a motivation. There is a group of Christians who sing “Amazing Grace” and offer Bibles to the Africans, but they don’t have any actual lines and there’s no clear explanation that they are abolitionists. There is no suggestion that Cinqué converts to Christianity. Instead, the fictitious Yamba somehow teaches himself enough English to make sense of the story of Jesus, thanks to a Bible he’s given by the missionaries. He explains Jesus’ story to Cinqué, or at least an inoffensive Hollywood version of that story, but never clearly converts either.

The result of this is that once the liberated slaves arrive in the US, the film wanders away from the genuine elements of their story. It focuses almost exclusively on Cinqué’s story, as if only his experience mattered. It almost entirely removes Christianity from the story, even though Christianity was a major motivation for the abolitionists. The actual Africans navigated their situation in a fairly sophisticated way. They recognized that getting back home required them to please the Christian abolitionists by embracing Christianity long enough to return home; in doing this they adopted a common strategy, often employed by powerless or lower status people, of appeasing those with the power long enough to achieve their ends. But the film completely strips them of their agency by presenting most of the Africans as passive recipients of American benevolence.

In doing this, Spielberg unfortunately turned what Allen had apparently seen as an important story about a group of blacks liberating themselves from slavery and finding a way to return home to Africa into a story of how white Americans graciously fought to liberate blacks who weren’t really very civilized until they encountered the transformative power of American benevolence and love of liberty.

Adams and Cinqué before the Supreme Court. Note Cinqué’s Western clothing

Spielberg reinforces this notion of transformation with a costuming choice he made for the slaves. When the Africans are slaves, they are naked. After the rebellion on the Amistad, the slaves wear random pieces of clothing. Over the course of their time in jail, their clothing slowly gets more sophisticated. Partway through the first trial, they begin wearing clean white shirts; by the Supreme Court trial Cinqué is dressed more or less as a well-off American. When they are returned to Africa, most of the Africans are wearing white shirts, but Cinqué is just wearing a sheet wrapped around his torso and a pair of pants. I think this last detail is intended to suggest the most famous painting of Cinqué (which depicts him as a noble savage), but it comes off as a suggestion that he can’t dress properly without American help. The closer Cinqué is to his natural African state, the more crudely he dressed, while the more he depends on Roger Baldwin and John Quincy Adams, the more sophistication his clothing shows.

Nathaniel Jocelyn’s 1840 painting of Cinqué

Allen recognized that the story looked very much like one in which white men rescue oppressed black people. So she insisted on the insertion of the fictitious Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman). As she has said, “There were wealthy educated black men at this time. And hundreds of them were involved in the abolitionist movement.” Unfortunately, because Joadson was inserted into a story whose narrative was already fixed, that left the character without much to do dramatically. So Allen’s worthy attempt to show a black man working to free other blacks isn’t enough to overcome the thrust of the narrative as Spielberg presents it.

Cinqué returning to Africa. Note the white sheet.

So on the surface, Amistad is about the struggle of Joseph Cinqué and Theodore Joadson to free Cinqué and his fellow prisoners. In reality, it’s about how wonderful it is that white men struggled to free Cinqué and the others with a little bit of help from a black abolitionist.

Want to Know More?

Amistadis available in different formats on Amazon.

Markus Rediker’s The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedomputs the focus squarely where it belongs, on the Africans fighting for their freedom, rather than on the faux-heroic abolitionists and lawyers of the film. In doing this, he breaks from earlier treatments of the Amistad incident and writes the story that Spielberg ought to have.