12 Years a Slave and White Guilt in 2013

When the credits began to roll at the end of 12 Years a Slave, nobody in the theatre made any sort of move to leave. There was no popcorn crunching, no soda slurping, just dead silence. In part, this was because it was a fantastic movie - probably the best of the year - but it was also because, as an almost exclusively white audience, nobody was quite sure how they should feel. 

12 Years a Slave, which is only the third film by director Steve McQueen, is based on the true story of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in New York who was captured in 1841 and sold into slavery. The film follows Solomon (the incredible Chiwetel Ejiofor, who will almost certainly be nominated for best actor this year) as he gets moved around from slave owner to slave owner, trying to stay alive and somehow return home to his wife and children. As I mentioned, it’s a spectacular movie - the acting, the directing, and the cinematography are some of the best I’ve ever seen - and yet I can’t think of film in recent memory that has had so much Oscar buzz while simultaneously being something that people are almost afraid to talk about. 

So, to clear the air, I’d like to talk about 12 Years a Slave. 

Racism is an incredibly daunting thing for me to write about, and the more I look up at the title that I’ve given this piece, the more I have to wonder if it’s something I have any right talking about at all. As a middle class white guy from Vermont, I have almost no first hand experience with the topic apart from what I’ve obtained over the years through different kinds of media. My parents are not racist in the slightest, and I was raised to constantly be disgusted that people could judge others based solely on the color of their skin. Just because I’ve read Invisible Man and The Autobiography of Malcolm X doesn’t mean that I claim to have any real connection to or knowledge of black culture. Who am I to judge a brutally honest film about slavery?

I’ve done a little bit of research ever since I watched 12 Years a Slave, and I’ve found lots of articles that both praise and criticize the film; many, understandably, written by black critics. Some, like Orville Lloyd Douglas’s, make fine points about why Hollywood should make more “black” movies that focus on more than just the topic of race and that don’t try to make white people feel guilty. I understand where he’s coming from; with 12 Years and The Butler hitting theaters around the same time, it feels like someone’s really trying to make a point. However, other people, such as Wesley Morris, argue not only for the artistic merits of the piece as a film, but for how McQueen pulls no punches in the portrayal of white people; this is a film about slavery where the slaves stand alone; there are no white men pushed into the foreground, no Lincolns or Christoph Waltzes, to save the day for them. I agree with this aspect as well. 

But I still believe many people are missing the point. When I’m asked how the movie was, I typically respond “it was incredible, but there was an unbelievable amount of white guilt in that movie theatre.” Someone on YouTube even took the time to create a series of parody videos on that very topic. But this shouldn’t be anybody’s response. I’m fully aware that race is still a very prominent issue in our country in 2013, but there is no reason any person - white, black, hispanic, asian, or anywhere in between - should feel guilty when watching this film. By all means, we can be disgusted at how Solomon is treated by white people throughout the course of the movie; we should be. But taking that guilt - the guilt that slaveowners should have felt over 160 years ago - and applying that to ourselves today is wrong. 

I’m convinced that 12 Years a Slave defies all boundaries of a normal Hollywood film in a few different ways. There’s no real target audience: while the art house crowd might eat it up, no matter who you are, this film is for you. It’s a film that spends a painfully long time lingering on the botched hanging of Solomon, with the man, front and center, desperately trying to gain some traction with his toes in the mud pile beneath him. It’s a film that takes its time, utilizing really long takes and interspersing certain segments with shots of nature. It’s certainly not your standard Oscar-bait film. It is not a “black” film, and it’s not a “white” film. It’s not even a wholly American film (both McQueen and Ejiofor are British). More than anything, it’s a human film. 

Perhaps that’s what some people are missing, and what gives me the right to talk about racism and 12 Years. It is truly impossible for any white person to know what it’s like to be black and vice versa, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that this is a powerful film that affects each individual that sees it. Disagree with me if you want, tell me that the filmmakers are playing to my innate sense of white guilt and I’m not qualified to talk about this, but you’d be wrong. When you see Solomon come home after 12 years to find that his family is barely recognizable, and you see that no amount of happiness can fix the years of hell that he was forced to endure, you don’t have to have any necessary qualifications, apart from one. You just have to be human.