We haven't changed!

Emancipation (2022)
Director: Antoine Fuqua

This movie is about an Afro-American slave in Louisana who lived around the 1860s during the American Civil War. A man who never knew his ancestry, age or birth date. His master called him Peter, so Peter he was. All he ever wanted was freedom and to be with his wife and children. What he got was incarceration, and he was transported to slog it out as a manual labourer on the expanding American railway line. Even though he heard about a decree that freed slaves, all he got were abuses and beatings. The photograph of his bare back, laden with keloid-filled scourge-whipped scars, was a selling point for abolitionists. This graphical representation not only manifests the pains the slaves had to endure in the development of the country but also shows the gall a fellow human being would inflict on his own kind. 

Parents tell their children to be kind and loving. The Book instructs us to love one another and that God created us in his own image, but that advice is only applicable to his own kind or the white race.

'Scourged back' of Peter or Gordon (~1863)
The former slave whose photo was
circulated by the Abolitionist Movement
during the American Civil War.

150 years moving forward, are we any wiser? I do not think so. Our wisdom remains skin-deep. We continue beyond one's colour and justify our evil deeds with the selective interpretation of the Book. Despite all these, we are told to stay hopeful and be the change for better things to come.

To appease the woke generation, films like these reinforce the idea that continued racial persecution is the primary reason for the discrepancy in living standards of blacks in America 150 years on. Academicians like Thomas Sowell continue denying this postulate. He vehemently stresses that affirmative action only produces a weak generation.

As a history student at the primary school level, what I grasped from my school books was that people from the North felt terrible for the slaves and wanted to free them. How naive?

In reality, it was all about economics. Abe Lincoln had no undying compassion for the blacks. He had no unending desire to break bread with them or drink with them. He only wanted to free them and pack them off to Africa, maybe Liberia. The South depended heavily on slaves to move their labour-intensive agricultural sectors. Cotton picking and sugarcane production needed much manpower. The South was not willing to surrender their slaves so easily, hence the Civil War.

Unfortunately, even though The Emancipation Bill was passed, the former slaves were ill-prepared to withstand the pressures the Bill brought. Lincoln was assassinated. The blacks had the power but not the ability to partake in deciding their fate. Then came the Ku Klax Klan and their hooded witch-hunts. Jim Crow laws ensued. All these measures did nothing to their well-being. 

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The movie revolves around Peter's escapades as he escapes from the clutches of slavery to the grasp of the guard dog, the jaws of the swamp crocodile, and the end of the barrel of the gun. He was finally rescued by the Union Soldiers and lived to tell his account of his misadventure.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.