It seems Quentin Tarantino’s new movie ‘Django Unchained’ has managed to provoke a hearty dialogue as to whether the film director has once again gone overboard in his portrayal of African Americans and the way we as a society relate to them. Which raises the question why are we as a society so troubled by the raising of such loaded words as ‘nigger’ and why for that matter did the director unabashedly choose to explore such themes in the face of almost certain condemnation and accusations of racism himself?
That said, a flurry of comments were released this morning on Facebook page belonging to Scene’s Editor in Chief page. Peter Davis who thought to ask the relevant question: Is Quentin Tarantino being offensive or historically accurate?
Reflects huffpo: Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained has as much to do with the history and culture of American descendants of African slaves as Dumbo has to do with the plight of Weimar Jewry. Spike Lee says that it disrespects his ancestors. It does not. It has nothing to do with them. It has everything to do with one white man’s fevered, second-hand vision of what it would be like to be something he probably can’t conceive. It’s like me attempting to write an intimate account of the pains of childbirth. I may have held a baby and changed a diaper, but one would doubt my authority on the subject.
Tarantino obviously knows black people, but only a white man in America could believe that this provides him with the authority to speak on the black American experience. Like 99.9999 percent of the white population, he has minimal intimacy with the culture of the descendants of American slaves. That culture, imbibed from birth by American blacks raised in black American households, involves an intimate, often subconscious acknowledgment of history, of a unique place in the American hierarchy, of a struggle against mainstream paradigms of who and what we are.
