Muito mais que doze anos
E por que as pessoas querem continuar nos lembrando disto
Sobre Twelve Years a Slave, um artigo muito bom na American Thinker, que aborda também a tal onde de filmes sobre racismo em Hollywood, que remonta também ao século passado:
These films are generally of the "historical" genre, set in either the slavery period or the segregation era that followed. The storylines are cursory, and manipulated for political impact throughout. Characterization is on a cartoon level, with whites either evil racists or weak, vacillating types who simply go along. Blacks are uniformly noble and long-suffering. Abolitionists, where they appear, as in Amistad, are creepy religious types with their own agenda. Racial relations are the sole topic of interest, overcoming even the events of the Civil War, and leaving the impression that race, and race alone, is the crucial hinge of American history, one that swings only one way. The United States is a façade, its promise of freedom a lie, its idealism an exercise in hypocrisy. The only emotional responses allowed in this universe are outrage from blacks and guilt from whites. In a very real sense, they are the reverse image of D.W. Griffith's racist epic Birth of a Nation, which depicted blacks as vicious animals and the Klan as knights restoring an unsettled world. (It also acted as an inspiration to Woodrow Wilson in his policy toward blacks.)
These films comprise Hollywood's contribution to the liberal effort to maintain the "freeze" in black-white relations that has existed since the end of the civil rights era. At that time -- the late 60s and early 70s -- the vision of the early civil rights crusaders became corrupted by opportunism and a thirst for retribution. Equality became affirmative action, hope became cynicism, understanding was transformed into the bitter myths of the Black Studies covens. The result has been a decades-long ice age in racial relations in which, even as blacks have entered the middle class in growing numbers, the psychic distance between the races has grown to monstrous proportions.
All this was supposed to end -- or at least be ameliorated -- by the election of Barack Obama. A black president could not help but lead the country out of the gloom of past racial conflicts. His very presence would soothe old wounds and lessen current anxieties. With any other black that might well have been the case. But not with this one. With every step -- his hiring of the racist Eric Holder, who has deliberately and maliciously aggravated racial tensions, his response to the Gates misunderstanding, and his interference in the Trayvon Martin case -- Obama has turned the racial vise tighter. Today, the racial situation in this country is more fraught that it has been in forty years.