On Friday my white girlfriend, BR, and I went to see the new film "12 Years A Slave". 12 Years is a powerful and emotional film that will make you cry and make you angry. The cinematography, with close up shots and intense imagery, was so fitting given the topic at play: the personal and nefarious intensity of slavery. The film will undoubtedly be the seminal feature about American slavery.
The slave mistress in the film was particularly brutal, maybe even more so than the slave master. She was vicious in her violent lust. Of course this was caused by the gender dynamics at play which was caused by her husband's "relationship" with a slave. There was no relationship; he was raping the slave, but that didn't matter to the mistress who scratched the slave's face, threw a bottle at her eye and so on.
On the car ride home I mentioned, almost in passing, how glad I was the film depicted the white mistress as equally savage given that white women have historically been enablers of white supremacy (SEE Rebecca Felton and read up on white female purity). BR said that we don't know if that was true. I snapped: "We do know that. Because the scholarship tells us so. We read Harriet Jacobs' Incidents In The Life of Slave Girl and in the book Jacobs spent a great deal of time on the white women who felt threatened by black female slaves and who, as a result, were just as inhumane against enslaved women."
After a period of silence BR retorted "White women had it hard too." That comment sent me over the edge. I never once argued white women didn't have it hard during the slave era --she was setting up a straw man. But to offer up such a response unveiled a certain level of defensiveness and ignorance of the black slave struggle. I thought of that passage from Obama's memoir where he recounted how he broke up with a white girlfriend after they saw a black play and the girlfriend made some sort of comment that caused Obama to realize that she just didn't "get it." I mentioned this tidbit to BR and she broke down in tears and accused me of being mean. But had I been speaking to a black woman about the subject her first thought wouldn't have been to come to the defense of white mistresses who were also responsible for the institution of slavery.
BR is a great woman who I admire because of her tireless efforts on behalf of oppressed and marginalized people. But was I wrong to lash out at her? Was she wrong for her comments?