Posted on 06/08/2016 10:42:24 PM PDT by Mr. Mojo
The Lie That Won't Die
Wow. White folks really are wicked.
At any rate, this is the only judgment for a viewer to make upon watching the History Channel’s recent remake of Alex Haley’s Roots.
A mini-series coming in at over eight hours and airing over four nights, the newest Roots features numerous white characters: men, women, and children; Union and Confederate soldiers; British Red Coats and colonial American troops.
With a single exception—a white female Union spy—they are all portrayed as evil.
Granted, some white characters are more sadistic than others, but virtually all—including the children—are indistinguishable from one another with respect to their unrelenting obsession with subjecting blacks to every conceivable kind of torture.
Indeed, it is no stretch to say that the villains of Roots are about as nuanced—and evil—as such iconic comic-connish villains as Darth Vader and the Joker.
These frames of reference from contemporary pop-culture are even more apropos than one may initially think given that Kunta Kinte, the main protagonist, and his descendants are depicted not just as heroes, but as superheroes: From enemy tribesmen in Africa to crew members on board the slave ship that transported him to America; from an overseer at the plantation to which he’s been sold to American colonists fighting in the Revolutionary War—Kunta’s kills are many.
On the Lord Ligonier, in spite of having been confined to unimaginably brutal conditions chained in the ship’s hull for months, Kunta manages to break his shackles with one swift stroke of a blade and instantly batter to death several of his captors.
That this version of Roots is made in an age in which superheroes dominate both cinema and television is also gotten easily enough by the fact that upon receiving rigorous physical training by her father, Kunta’s daughter, “Kizzy,” manages to escape her chains and drop a male slave trader several times her size all within seconds.
As for “Chicken George,” Kizzy’s son, he seems more like Marvel comics’ “The Punisher” or Sly Stallone’s “John Rambo.” George goes from fighting chickens to dodging bullets and gunning down Confederate soldiers during the War Between the States. During the controversial Fort Pillow battle, only George and his friend (for whom George must do the thinking) escape the bloody fate that awaited the black and white Union soldiers who lost the battle to Nathan Bedford Forest and his troops. After the war ends, Chicken George jumps at the chance to do but more fighting against renegade Bushwhackers, and when he returns to his family for good, he shoots to death their former master right before the malevolent demon shoots George’s son Tom—who, as it turns out, engages in some super heroics himself:
Tom, while still a slave, goes on a secret mission as a spy for the Union and participates in the shooting deaths of Confederate soldiers who are friendly with his master’s vicious son.
A critic for Time wrote in 1977 that the original miniseries’ dearth of “sympathetic” white characters and surplus of saintly blacks made its depiction of slave life at once “dramatically vulgar and historically preposterous.”
He didn’t see anything until he saw this latest incarnation of Roots.
Roots is fiction. It is the roots of Roots, i.e. the truth behind the fiction, that have been suppressed like any other scandal.
And no wonder. Readers interested in a thorough disclosure of the facts can consult here and here. For now, a brief recap will do:
One year after the original Roots aired, Haley agreed to pay Harry Courlander, a white writer, a settlement of $650,000 (2 million dollars today) after Haley admitted in court to having plagiarized Courlander’s 1967 work, The African. “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by,” Haley was quoted as saying.
Not only is it the case that there is no formal corroboration of the oral tradition regarding his ancestors that Haley alleges to have received; historians and professional genealogists alike have established that all such evidence as exists—“plantation records, wills, census records”—actually contradicts Haley’s antebellum genealogy.
Nor does his account of his post-bellum ancestry fare much better. Courlander wasn’t the only person to have sued Haley for plagiarism. Black poet and writer Margaret Walker charged Haley with stealing from her Civil War novel, Jubilee.
Of course, Haley doesn’t shoulder the sole blame for all of this, for those portions of the book that he didn’t plagiarize were ghost written by “the very white, and Jewish, Murray Fisher.”
In February of 1993, Philip Nobile, writing in The Village Voice, described Roots as “one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times.” The late distinguished Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, a pioneer of ethnic history, declared of Haley: “A fraud’s a fraud.”
The famed black historian and “dean of Afrocentrist scholars,” John Henrik Clarke, confessed to having “cried real tears” when he discovered that Roots was a fake. Another Harvard professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.—a personal friend of Haley’s—spiked the first black author to have won a Pulitzer-prize from the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature that he edited. “Roots is a work of the imagination,” Gates told The Boston Globe, “rather than strict historical scholarship.”
He continued: “Most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village from whence his ancestors sprang.”
Even Clarence Page, of the Chicago Tribune, a Haley defender, in the end had to begrudgingly concede that Roots was myth. The New York Times, in a 2015 review of a Haley biography, states that this “literary Kim Philby” (a British traitor and Soviet “master spy”), as his own agent described him, “seems to have made up a great deal of the book [Roots] nearly wholesale.”
And yet the History Channel, along with producers Levar Burton and Mark Wolper, dishonestly insist that this remake of a fake is an “historical presentation.”
I loved the original...even knowing that it was partly fiction. It seemed realistic and believable. It was also well made.
Everyone in the country watched the series at the time. I'm not so sure that this will have the same impact with the public.
I do thank you for that information, but I wasn't gonna, and I ain't gonna, watch this thing!
I am a retired high school teacher, and a substitute teacher now in a middle school. I can tell you that all students are being directed toward certain sites, including the History Chanel. This is a convergence of hardware and software, Apple & Bill Gates & Leftist software.
“ghost written by “the very white, and Jewish, Murray Fisher.””
I liked the movie also-—but not the false perceptions that it created. That Black weren’t slavers (and they were all saints) when they probably originated the universal institution. Slavery is an evil institution, but Hollywood wants to place the blame on America when we just inherited the institution and the first slave-owner in America, a Black man, sued in court to keep slaves and make slavery legal in America.
The fact that the “very white” guy was Jewish is important-—since this whole “slavery Marxist meme” is to destroy Christianity, (tear down America which was founded with Christian Ethics of Free Will and Individual Natural Rights from God only.
To destroy Western Civilization is important for NWO (total slavery of the masses/collectivization/socialism), since it is only the Christian Nation founded on true Christian concepts of Free Will and Individual Natural Rights from God only—not a king, lord/tribal king or whatever.
Worldview is everything and it is ONLY the Christian Worldview which rid the world of the idea that Slavery is Good. It is ONLY Christianity which never allows any human being to be used as a Means to an End. All other religions are socialistic systems of “group think” which has no Free Will or Individual natural rights from God-—just collective rights from the State/Man.
I never had any intention of watching this racist leftist farce. The “History” Channel needs to change its name.
I’ve been wondering about this new series. I personally, will never watch it but, I’m curious to know what the ratings are for it. Would anyone here know where I could obtain that information? Thanks in advance.
bfl
Huh? the universal institution was developed by various cultures when they moved from hunter-gather lifestyles to agricultural or animal husbandry lifestyles, but blacks were not the first to do so -- the first were probably Semitic Akkadians or Amorites.
This and McConaheys new film can both go into Ari Gold’s trash quick
When will enough south bashing and black victim crap be enough?
Never
Do a film on black hatred and murder and rape of white the last half century
An incubating genocide with numbers that dwarf the vice versa and not a peep from lalalaland
I watched the original with a friend and neighbor. He decided to trace his roots. He was disappointed to find his family were immigrants, not slaves.
How does the name “The Propaganda Channel” sound? I think it would work especially since in the bottom right corner their on-the-screen-all-the-time logo would be :
PC
Millions watched the original Roots in the 70’s and it did what it was intended to do, make whites feel guilty about slavery. Haley sold the book as his family history and was lauded as one of the best writers of his day. Then like most black accomplishments, it turned out to be a fraud. When I heard about the remake I knew it was intended to further demonize whites and appeal to the BLM crowd of white haters so I refused to watch. Sounds like the correct decision. Another shot fired in the war on whites.
I disagree. That's a bit unfair. Whether fictional or not, the 1977 version of Roots, IMHO, was a quality piece of creative television, including winning a Golden Globe award for Best Dramatic Series.
I was probably around 12 at the time it aired. It was very popular with both Whites and Blacks, and I don't recall feeling guilty at all. The 1977 Roots was a somewhat cathartic experience which the entire nation seemed to collectively share.
Unlike this new abomination, which by most objective accounts is hysterically heavy-handed and extremely over-the-top, the original series was much more balanced, with excellent casting, realistic writing, and redeeming characters from all represented races.
Then like most black accomplishments, it turned out to be a fraud.
That's a rather broad and inaccurate brush you're painting with, IMHO. Whether the story itself was purely fictional or not, the portrayal of slavery as a historical reality seemed accurate enough.
When I heard about the remake I knew it was intended to further demonize whites and appeal to the BLM crowd of white haters so I refused to watch.
There's absolutely no doubt about that. The new production seems intentionally divisive.
But back in 1977, when political correctness was not yet ascendant, the production had a much more unifying feel to it.
The original Roots is a classic piece of television, IMHO. Heck, it even had OJ Simpson!
Vote Trump!
Is a lot of melodramatic hog wash... throw away the history book and make it up the way you want.
I wonder what it’s like to live in a dream world where you just put it in your head and call it true
The sad part is that there is a market out there for a good miniseries about slavery and that focuses on slaves during the Antebellum period. But we will never get one because Roots has crowded them out.
***I’m not so sure that this will have the same impact with the public. ***
There was a minor riot in Hot Springs Ar after the original aired years ago.
***the Muslim role in the slave trade? ****
Ever wonder why there are so few black descendants from slaves in the Middle East? It is because the Arabs whacked off certain very important parts of their male slave captives.
***Heck, it even had OJ Simpson!***
And he got to RUN! and put Kunta K in a headlock!
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