The below is different from anything I’ve ever published on this website. I was compelled to write it due to increasing worries I have about what I believe is an impending authoritarian takeover of our government by rightwing extremists both inside and outside of elected office. I have never hoped more to be wrong. I will return to regular movie reviews with my next post.
Also, TW: Rape
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I’m making my way through Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. Set in the antebellum South, the story follows Cora, an enslaved woman who uses the underground railroad to attempt an escape to freedom from the Georgia plantation where she is witness to unspeakable brutalities at the hands of her ruthless and sadistic captor.
Whitehead and Jenkins both brilliantly use the device of magical realism to bring the alternate history premise to life. In Whitehead’s imagination, the underground railroad isn’t merely a network of abolitionists helping runaway enslaved people make their way to the free states in the days before the Civil War. Here, it’s an actual railway system running through a series of subterranean tunnels with train cars, conductors, and the like. In Jenkins’s hands, there is an ethereal, mystical quality to both the magical realism elements of the story and to the overall style of his Amazon Prime limited series.
Amazon dropped all ten episodes of The Underground Railroad in May of 2021, so I’m a year late to this extraordinary piece of filmmaking. I put off starting it because I knew it would be a tough sit. I’m only able to watch one episode a week, because Jenkins depicts the absolute brutality and sickening depravity of American slavery in graphic detail. There has been more than one occasion when I’ve had to look away from the television screen because the inhumanity on display was too overwhelming.
In the last episode I screened, the fifth, entitled Tennessee – Exodus, Cora has been caught by Arnold Ridgeway, a man who has made catching runaway enslaved people his occupation. He is transporting both Cora and another runaway enslaved person, a man named Jasper, back to the plantations from which they escaped. Jasper has lost all hope, and he is refusing to eat in a bid to end his own life and escape the earthly bonds of his white captors.
One scene in this episode – the one that made me decide to tie The Underground Railroad into this larger essay – showcases how brilliant Jenkins is at purely visual and symbolic storytelling. Ridgeway has made camp for the night; he is enraged at Jasper’s unwillingness to eat and Cora’s sullen, hopeless demeanor. The pitiless man sits near the campfire, stubbornly trying to light his pipe. The wind blows out each match he strikes before he can successfully light the tobacco.
There is no dialog in this roughly three-minute sequence, outside of Ridgeway angrily muttering to himself. To me, his repeated act of striking matches is a metaphor for work. In the Jewish tradition, God forbids his people from performing any work on the Sabbath. One of the items prohibited – something that the God of the Old Testament considers work – is lighting a fire, which includes striking a match.
So, here is a white man intent on getting work done. To broaden the metaphor, that means he’s trying to earn a profit, since, in a capitalist system, almost all labor is performed with the expectation that it will yield a return of some sort.
He is working even while one of his fellow human beings is starving himself to death, so lacking in strength that all he can do is lie flat on the ground in a near comatose state. Another of his fellow human beings sits staring blankly into space, completely devoid of hope. She has very recently narrowly avoided an associate of Ridgeway raping her.
Still, Ridgeway works. In this time and place in American history, people like Ridgeway didn’t only normalize this kind of barbaric and careless treatment of Black people, they saw it as ordained by God.
I likely don’t have to tell you that making money is still the predominant preoccupation of the human race. We Americans have elevated the lust for money into a sick artform; our North Star, practically since the nation’s founding, is the accumulation of wealth, often at any cost.
Last week I read a recent article from Jonathan Haidt, writing for The Atlantic, titled Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid. It’s a sobering account of how we got to our current state of disfunction and a warning of how things are likely to get much, much worse if we don’t take action. Haidt lays a lot of the blame at the feet of social media. I’m ambivalent about some of Haidt’s flirtations with both-siderism – what he writes about the Occupy movement of a decade ago was hard for me to read, but it served as a needed trip out of my own echo chamber – but his conclusions about how we got here are basically sound.
In the never-ceasing quest for higher profits, the heads of the social media giants tweaked their algorithms to serve up ever more incendiary and fringe content to their users. They did so because their research showed that the strategy keeps people engaged with their services longer. That means more coveted advertising revenue, the disastrous effects on our civil society be damned.
Unscrupulous politicians and bad-faith actors saw the opportunity in serving up ever more polarizing “content” for fun and profit. Add to that an aging white middle-class who see the demand for social and economic equity from historically marginalized groups as a zero-sum game wherein the former must lose economic security and political power if the latter are to gain it. This (marginally) ruling class, at the behest of their leaders, who are also willing to do anything to keep the levers of power under their control, are desperate to shut down any talk that makes them uncomfortable.
They want to make America great again, which, to them, means ensuring that they have someone below them in the racist and classist caste system that was cemented in place when the transatlantic slave trade was implemented four centuries ago.
As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Those heinous and despicable practices of nearly a half-millennium ago continued to have an impact in the not-too-distant past (think the Jim Crow South and the practice of redlining) right up to the present moment (racialized gerrymandering and voter restrictions that specifically target non-white and poor people).
That’s all to say nothing of the further radicalization of hard-core fundamentalist Evangelical Christians who refuse to recognize the humanity of the transgender community (or, more broadly, the larger LGBTQ+ community, resulting in disgusting legislation like Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill) or the right of a pregnant person to obtain abortion care. (My home state of Texas has led the way here with a draconian bounty-hunter system that makes obtaining the legally protected (for now) right to an abortion nearly impossible.)
So why am I writing all of this? I’m writing it because I feel a responsibility to use the modest platform that I’ve set up for myself to effect positive change. I’m writing this because I feel like we’re on the precipice of something really terrible.
I’m writing this to the millions of people who are either not engaged in political discourse or who haven’t thought through the ramifications of supporting a political party – the Republican party, in case you weren’t sure – that has abandoned reasonable, good-faith debate and turned toward authoritarianism.
Please seek out analysis on what overturning Roe v Wade would do to poor people who can’t afford to fly to a state that allows a woman the right to make decisions about her own body. Please seek out the work of fascism and authoritarian scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Think about Trump’s tactics – and the tactics of the mini-Trumps that have sprung up in the last five years – compared to what’s described in Ben-Ghiat’s book. Please read Dark Money by Jane Mayer to learn how the constant fire-hose stream of money in politics is killing our democracy.
Most of all, please seek out people in your own life who don’t think like you do. Ask them their opinions about Critical Race Theory, or the Black Lives Matter movement, or LGBTQ+ rights. But make sure to stress that maintaining a civil tone and mutual respect is non-negotiable. Even people with the best of intentions can let their emotions get the better of them.
In my own life, I want to stop hating people I don’t agree with, because that’s really what’s tearing our society apart. We’ve been trained for at least a quarter-century now to think of our political opponents as evil. We’re all capable of stripping away the humanity of those who don’t share our story of how the world works. Lest you think I’m indulging in both-siderism myself, the increasingly-authoritarian right has become much more aggressive about demonizing the left. They are calling us pedophiles and Satan-worshipers.
Me.
Marjorie Taylor Greene and the like are painting me, and people like me, as pure evil. This kind of rhetoric must end.
The way I’ll do my own part in ending it is to judge every person on a case-by-case basis. Regressive and harmful policy and behavior must be called out. People who cynically use divisive tactics to stay in power or who are true-believers in hateful positions – Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis, Marjorie Taylor Green; I’ll let you decide who’s who – deserve to be challenged. But my days of assuming any and everyone who professes rightwing beliefs is either stupid or evil are over.
(Consequently, the tactic of progressives dunking on right-wingers on platforms like Twitter also isn’t helping anything. Both sides have engaged in that behavior for over a decade now, and things have only gotten worse, not better.)
Going forward, I will lead with empathy and kindness in my heart, including when I’m calling out destructive actions and beliefs. I listen to a progressive politics podcast called The Best of the Left. I can’t recommend it highly enough. The host of that show, Jay Tomlinson, has a simple guiding principle for all public policy decisions and personal ideology: Reduce suffering. I want to reduce suffering in any way I can, and the best way to do that is with love.
I was recently very moved by the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. (You can read my reaction to it here.) During the movie’s climactic fight sequence, our hero, Evelyn, tells her sweet, goofy, caring husband, Waymond, that she will fight like he does, using love and compassion as her weapons.
We all have to do whatever we can to make the world inclusive, kind, loving, and accepting to everyone. If we don’t, things will only get worst. It won’t be as bad as the world depicted in The Underground Railroad. Hopefully humanity will never again see that level of depravity. But nothing is guaranteed, and we all have to actively create the future we want, or someone else will.