4/29/2005 02:12:00 AM|||Dave|||The examples are countless: In the late '70s, ABC ran a popular mini-series called Roots, based on the Alex Haley autobiographical novel. The depictions in this mini-series (a tranquil, idyllic village of peaceful Africans invaded by mean white men from the New World who snatch them up and haul them onto slave ships) arguably did more to shape America's popular conception of the history of slavery than any other cultural artifact.

Just one problem: The Village Voice, not exactly a conservative publication, published in 1993 an in-depth investigation ("Alex Haley's Hoax") uncovering the fact that Haley's entire account of his own family's alleged history (the basis of his book and the movie) was a complete hoax. Oops! That didn't stop the memetic force of the Roots juggernaut though, which will take another 50 years to recover from (when it's not further being incubated by crap like Amistad).

Beautiful Atrocities points to the Amistad historical whitewash that emanated from Hollywood's multicultural love-fest:

Barry Unsworth's novel Sacred Hunger included an English slave ship bartering for slaves with African slave merchants. This is historically accurate: when the Portuguese arrived in Africa, Arabs had been trading for African slaves for 1000 years. Yet Hollywood film backers said they would not fund the movie version if it showed black slave traders. Spielberg's Amistad omitted the fact that the slave Cinque returned to Africa & became a wealthy slaver himself.

Were Spielberg to supply his film with that little inconvenient, contextualizing fact, it would've spoiled the effect of having white Christian men as the cookie cutter bad-guys. It also might've triggered viewers to say, "Hey, maybe black Africans were just as complicit and essential to the worldwide slave trade as were whites from America." And we can't afford any of that in our race 'dialogue'.|||111475517501839464|||Hollywood Whitewashes