“I feel like Kunta Kinte.” – Psych
An unpaid internship is nothing like slavery. Slaves were given food and housing.
Body cams have undone tens of millions of dollars of propaganda effort spent during the 1960s through at least 2010. During that time period, thousands of hours of movie and television were spent on what I’ll call “sympathy porn” to describe emotionally laden content used to create sympathy for a group.
Roots is a prime example.
Back when there were only three channels in most places. Yes, three, ABC©, NBC®, and CBS™. Just as today, nobody watched PBS© because nobody needed a tote bag. ABC© decided to run Roots in January of 1977. I’ll have to note that the book the miniseries was based on was published in August of 1976, so it’s clear that the production of the miniseries started before the book was even released.
A quick check shows that filming started in May of 1976. And filming doesn’t start until everything is planned, so when were the film rights purchased?
1974.
The author of the book wouldn’t finish writing the book until November of 1975, yet his agent had already sold the film rights at least twice. The timeshare salesmen could learn from this guy.
I feel bad for my cousin in prison who stutters. Six months and he hasn’t finished his sentence.
Roots was an inevitable production, since it fell in line with the propaganda that had been everywhere since the end of World War II. The themes of the early films almost always featured a dignified, intelligent black protagonist, a white Leftist conscience figure, and a moral that showed the white people were wrong all along.
Most of them seemed to star Nonthreatening Well-Spoken Black Man® Sidney Poitier.
But that wasn’t enough because most people didn’t want to go see these movies. So, Roots. Let’s spend the equivalent of $40 million today making a movie to tell Americans they were rooting for the wrong side in all of those westerns.
The plan?
- Make white people feel guilty about slavery that hadn’t existed for over a hundred and ten years.
- Make black people angry about slavery that hadn’t existed for over a hundred and ten years.
- Profit!
And profit it did, but the profits came from, well, there’s no putting a pretty face on it: lies and plagiarism. But I guess there are a lot of Emmys® to be won using lies and plagiarism.
The court found me guilt of using clickbait titles. What happens next will shock you!
Examples? Alex Haley, “author” of the book Roots lifted over 80 passages directly from another novel into his. He also stole plot elements and scenes. How bad was it? The judge described it as Haley having “perpetrated a hoax on the American public.”
I said another novel. Roots was supposed to be non-fiction, right?
Well, if you can make up non-fiction, I guess Roots is that.
Huge numbers of the people claimed to be Haley’s family couldn’t have been based on records. Haley must have just made it up. A journalist going through Haley’s paper and notes came to the conclusion that every specific genealogical claim that Haley made was false.
Other lies in the film are blatant and I’ll linger on it a bit: the film has a white guy leading four black guys into the jungle to go find slaves. The actual people who found and sold the slaves in almost every case were black people. Blacks rounded them up, blacks took them to ports, and then blacks traded black slaves for gunpowder and horses and whiskey. Or PEZ©. Or whatever blacks liked back then.
More historically accurate than Roots.
Had the black captives not been sold into slavery, they would have been killed and eaten, and if they were lucky it would have been in that order. But in the movie, to create the idea that a black person could possibly do anything wrong was against The Message. So, they had to have a white guy be in charge.
There are people who defend Haley and Roots as “symbolic history”, but I’m going to stick with Sympathy Porn, which is what it is. Symbolic history is the last defense, apparently, after the footnotes die.
Roots was a nine-hour attempt to create sympathy in a public that, in many cases, didn’t interact with blacks at all. By the time I was 18, I had interacted with approximately six total black people.
It got cold on Wilder Mountain, and the numbers of blacks were pretty low.
Two of the blacks had been teachers, and they seemed okay and treated me well. They were married to each other. Their daughters were about my age but not in my grade, but I recall them as being mean little snakes. The other two? One had been brought from Houston by his brother, who went to the local college and was an assistant football coach.
The brother who was the only black that I knew of that had ever gone to that school. And he got arrested for bringing a .357 revolver into school and then, poof, back to Houston. I guess. Maybe he went to medical school.
It’s like I told my spine surgeon, “Get back to work.”
Roots was aimed at people like me. Young, impressionable people who hadn’t been around blacks and would be susceptible to Sympathy Porn. The adults had seemed to be okay, but the kids were all awful, but The Message was that it wasn’t their fault, somehow.
I guess that’s the same idea that Gemini® has, too. I asked it about the rates of black violence being so high, and it says, “it’s shaped by socioeconomic, historical, and systemic factors, not inherent racial traits.” When I ask why the richest black community is more violent than the poorest white community it breaks and flat refuses to answer the question.
And then it tells me I’ve been de-banked. I guess it’s the same priesthood, but customer service is worse. Stupid 2020s.
2026 is a year in which everyone can see who is causing the violence on video clip after video clip. It’s the blacks. It’s not all of them, but it’s always them.
We’ve reached the end of Sympathy Porn being able to shape the opinions of people who have had their eyes opened by the reality of the footage captured by the body cameras.
Maybe I should write a book about this. Any bids for the movie rights?
