Roots

Well, since a lot of TV is preempted by March Madness basketball until early April, I've been looking for shows and movies on streaming. I haven't been keeping up regularly with Gilded Age that much, though I still enjoy Peggy's story. I hope the finale will be good.

I just recently discovered that HBO Max has the 1977 version of Roots, (but it's been edited to 6 episodes instead of 8). I had always heard about this miniseries but never found it available before. Alex Haley's book had originally been treated as nonfiction, but he later admitted to plagiarizing some of it, so it's more like a historical novel based on oral traditions in his family. Anyway, I was always skeptical that Haley really could have traced his family all the way back to a specific man from Africa, because on  Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates says it's rare and lucky to be able to find a slave ancestor prior to 1870. I can think of Kunta Kinte and his family as just symbolic stand-ins representing generations of history for many African American descendents of slaves. Just like Lee Daniel's The Butler fictionalized a real man's biography so he could portray an epic about Black America under different Presidents in the White House.

Anyway, I've just watched the first episode of Roots, with Kunta Kinte living in Gambia before getting captured by slavers. Levar Burton plays the fifteen year old boy living with his parents, then he effectively conveys his change in attitude after returning from the ritual training for all the village boys. Once he is officially declared a man, Kunta doesn't defer as much to his mother anymore and says a woman should not give him orders. So African tribes have their own version of patriarchy. But his grandmother visits him in his new home as if to remind him to still defer to his elders. This unfortunately leads to his capture.

Meanwhile, the captain of the slaveship acts like he's uncomfortable with the slavery and the brutality of it, yet he lets the first mate Slater talk him into believing that the Africans are subhuman cannibals who totally deserve subjugation and cruelty. At first Davies protests at the idea of raping the women slaves, though he only talks of the fornication as a sin damaging to the ship's crew, not about the damage to the women. Slater insists that the ship's crew need it, and Davies acquiesces. I keep thinking, "Why can't you say no to him? Why can't you forbid him, since you're the captain?" But the only thing that Davies gives a firm no on is overcrowding the ship with 200 slaves, tightly packed. Davies insists that 170 slaves "loosely packed" is just fine for the cargo. And later Slater brings an African woman to the captain's cabin, and Davies doesn't refuse. He presumably rapes her, though thankfully we don't see it. We don't even hear screams from the other women who are probably being raped too. It's really chilling to see that even white men like Davies still uphold the racist system and do nothing to stop the evil. I guess that's the power of this miniseries, confronting mainstream America with the ugly inhumanity of slavery.