Antoine Fuqua’s “Emancipation” is yet another movie about slavery. Our Black colleagues express a resounding fatigue with films on Black oppression and triumph.
Watching these films is stressful, and people grieve those ancestors brutalized for profit and pleasure. But the main reason these movies drain so many people is that they risk rendering the past as over and offer only salvation as a route to survival.
Critical portrayals of U.S. history are timely: The Supreme Court is debating outlawing affirmative action, and critical race theory is under attack. Yet, at the very same time, there is widespread acceptance of films about Black oppression — as something in the past. This speaks to an appetite for identifying oppression as an era from which we have arrived and to which we could not return.
