I'm sad that The Wild Robot didn't win at the Oscars. I haven't seen the winner Flow, so maybe it was deserving too. Oh well. Award shows usually disappoint in multiple ways. Zoe Saldana won for a problematic movie, but that's been a thing since Hattie Mcdaniel won for playing a maid in Gone With the Wind. You do your best in the parts you're given. One can imagine it's a reward for a different role in Zoe's filmography instead.
On Paramount+ I can also access documentaries from the Smithsonian channel, and they had some interesting ones for Black History, such as Black cowboys in the Wild West. I found one doc called "Birthing a Nation: the Resistance of Mary Gaffney" which is very short, only about 20 minutes. Weird title but it talks about an important topic, the slave owners who would "breed" more slaves so they could get more free "property" without buying at auction. Besides raping the women themselves, some enslavers used to forceably pair off slaves to make them have children, treating people like animals/livestock, calling them wenches and bucks. This disgusting practice was part of keeping up the "domestic slave trade" after international slave trade was made illegal. However, Mary Gaffney apparently knew a secret contraceptive in cotton roots to prevent getting pregnant while she was enslaved, though after emancipation she had children with her husband. I like that she managed some agency, though there's resignation too in her just staying with the guy she previously said she hated. Also the documentary mentions the thousands of "slave narratives" from the Works Progress Administration interviewing the survivors of slavery who were still alive at the time. What important history could have been lost, if nobody thought to do this work during the Depression.
I fear the Trump administration will try to delete all this history, like they're deleting "DEI" photos from military history too. Do we have enough online archives that can save this history? Where can they download from?
