Confronting Our History

12 Years a Slave
Directed by Steve McQueen
Three and One Half Stars

By Rollan Schott

In 1841, a free black man living in New York by the name of Solomon Northup was lured to Washington D.C. by two white men, promising him some good money to be made quickly with his violin. Northup was drugged, kidnapped, and smuggled south to be sold illegally into the slave trade, where he lived for twelve years before finally being returned to his family. During Northup’s time as a slave in the Antebellum South, he observed, as an educated, erudite and thoughtful man, the ways that empathy and compassion and religion and virtually every other facet of human behavior navigated their ways around the racism innate in their culture, the ways that men could be purchased as property, forced to work without pay, and yet spoken to with respect and dignity, the ways that black men could be spoken to with respect and dignity yet still be addressed as that most execrable slur. To reconcile one’s humanity with the needs of an archaic plantation infrastructure, huge concessions were made where they must not have been made: in the realm of human decency.