After hit director Quentin Tarantino won a Golden Globe on January 13, 2013 for the screenplay to his hit move "Django Unchained," he uttered the N-word during his response to a question about his decision to use the N-word so freely within the movie.
Tarantino responded by saying:
“If somebody is out there actually saying when it comes to the word [N-word], the fact that I was using it in the movie more than it was being used in the antebellum South in Mississippi, then feel free to make that case, but no one’s actually making that case.”
“They think I should soften it, that I should lie, that I should whitewash, that I should massage, and I could never do that when it comes to my characters.”
Now after this response, the question has now become: was Tarantino out of line for actually saying the N-word? The movie has already been under fire from people like comedian Katt Williams and director Spike Lee who accused Tarantino of trying to turn “American slavery” into a “spaghetti western.”
So what does it mean now that Tarantino has taken the N-word beyond the screen? Now Attorney Roy Miller appeared on Rob Redding’s Redding News Review The Show and echoed the sentiments of Katt Williams and Spike Lee and accused Tarantino of using his racially belittling movie to further his racist agenda of pressing the acceptable envelop on using the N-word.
Speaking as an African-American who has been called the N-word more times than my memory can account for, what Tarantino said did not offend me. In fact, he is absolutely right about not trying to whitewash the filthy, shameful, historical truth.
For example, back in 2011 a publishing company drew some harsh, literary criticisms for removing the N-word from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a revised edition. Since the word occurs more than 200 times in Twain’s iconic novel, the decision was made to replace the N-word with the word “slave,” which is about like the difference between being brain dead and being clinically dead!
That’s one of the foremost problems when history is whitewashed. The pain and the suffering is covered up and smoothed over, so the responsibility of acknowledging it, understanding it, and accepting one’s role within it can be polished up to the point where the oppressed become the objects of blame, so the oppressors can slink away to wash their hands of their role in that oppression!
The real outrage that African-Americans should be experiencing is the strong possibility that if African-American directors like the Hughes Brothers, Spike Lee, or John Singleton had directed "Django Unchained," they wouldn’t be holding a Golden Globe for their efforts like Tarantino holds right now.
Contrary to popular, conservative beliefs, Hollywood might appear to be liberally inclusive, but in reality it’s just as racist as so many other things in this country. Hollywood might not be a quote, unquote “good, old boys club,” but it is a good, new boys club, where the old and the new are different, but the slanted favorability of White preference and Black marginalization is the same, and the prennial overlooking of African-American actors and directors is a direct result of the systematic and often profitable Hollywood bias.
Comments