First Published: The Organizer, Vol. 3, No. 2, February-March 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
Roots ... People are still talking about it. 80 million people tuned in as Roots captured the top spot on T.V.’s all-time hit parade, beating out the Super Bowl and Gone With the Wind.
The reaction to Roots has been almost as fully discussed as the program itself. The overwhelming majority of Black viewers, finding much in its portrayal of the Black experience that rang true, gave the series positive marks. Beyond finding an educational value for the Black community, many Blacks took satisfaction in the knowledge that white viewers were being exposed to truths that Black people have long known and have labored to explain to whites.
White reaction confirmed that Roots touched the abysmal ignorance of whites in relation to Black America. One white woman, for example, had always thought that some Blacks had lighter colored skins because they came from different tribes in Africa. Roots convinced her that these different shadings in skin color had origins closer to home. Other whites, possessed of the most hidebound sort of racial prejudice, simply refused to believe what they saw. A Bucks County man said he was surprised to see that the village of Kunte Kinte in Africa was so clean and neat. He accused the producers of “making it that way” in order to conceal the fact that “Blacks are dirty.”
Some white critics complained that the film presented the slave masters in too harsh a light, while still others complained that we “must put slavery behind us,” The reaction to Roots made it crystal clear that the question of racism is far from being “behind us” – if we needed any reminding. Black people still feel its sting, which is why Roots is not dry-as-dust history, but living drama. And whites remain enmeshed in the attitudes and behavior of white supremacy.
As for Roots itself, it has to be approached from several different vantage points. When viewed against the backdrop of the achievements in Afro-American literature, drama, and history, Roots is at best tame and shallow. Anyone who has read the novels of Richard Wright or Ralph Ellison, the poems of Langston Hughes, the plays of Ed Bullins or LeRoi Jones or the history of W.E.B. DuBois, would learn nothing new from Roots and would find plenty missing.
But to see only this misses the point. Most people have not been exposed to these works. Instead, they are daily exposed to Starsky & Hutch, Sonny and Cher and the Six Million Dollar Man. For whites, at least, their understanding of slavery is derived not from DuBois but from Gone With the Wind. What is remarkable and of real value is that 80 million people saw a 12-hour drama that by the standards of television and popular entertainment generally gave a surprisingly accurate and moving portrait of slavery.
The strength of Roots is its fidelity to the day-to-day realities of slavery ... the whip, the manacle, the destruction of family life, the conspiracy to maintain the slave in ignorance and the deliberate nurturing of a slave personality based on total obedience, passivity and careful attention to every whim of the slave master. It’s almost impossible to watch Roots and come away still believing that slaves were happy being slaves. Roots lets you know what it must have felt like to be a slave.. . to experience the powerlessness, frustration, and humiliation of belonging to somebody else.
We are forced to think what it would be like to routinely have members of our family taken from us without any notice, to never be seen or heard from again ... the way Kizzy was taken from Kunte Kinte and Belle. We have to imagine what it is like for a woman to live knowing she can be raped and forced to bear someone else’s child at any time and do absolutely nothing about it ... the way Tom Moore raped and impregnated Kizzy. We reflect on what it must be like to have to bow, scrape and grovel before another human being for the most minor infraction of the rules or simply because of a whim ... like the Driver Sam and Tom Harvey were forced to do. These images bring home the human cost of slavery more than any documentary or piece of scholarship could possibly do.
In the face of systematic and brutal repression, Roots portrays the attempt of one family of slaves to survive from one generation to the next and to keep the dream of freedom alive. In its portrait, Roots gives recognition to at least one side of the reality of Black resistance. Instead of presenting a one-dimensional picture of the slave as a contented, banjo-picking cotton picker or as a militant in constant revolt, Roots shows the enormous pressure to submit which co-existed with the fierce yearning to be free within each slave.
Each slave experiences the dialectic between accommodation and resistance in different ways. Even the proud Kuntu Kinte finds himself torn between the desire for freedom and the demands of his family and compromises. And even Fiddler, who preaches the futility of resistance and acts the part of the happy “darkle” at the planter’s hoedowns, secretly aids and comforts Kuntu Kinte and dies with a bitter lament about “white folks music” on his lips.
Each generation of the family of Kuntu Kinte learns about his message of freedom, expressed in a handful of words from his native Africa, from those that have gone before them. But each generation only learns the true meaning of this message through its own bitter experience.
Kizzy finds out her childhood “best friend”, Missy Ann, wants to buy her for “mah own little slave” and can’t understand why Kizzy is not at once delighted. Chicken George, the happy-go-lucky sportin’ man, finds out about slavery’s version of Catch 22 when he learns that because he is resourceful enough to earn money for himself, he is thereby too valuable to his master to sell at any price. It is then that the words of Kuntu Kinte take on meaning. Illusion gives way to bitter truth – and that truth fuels the quest for freedom.
One problem with the treatment of the family of Kuntu Kinte is the way Black women are portrayed. In real life, because of their role as the rearers of children it was Black women who provided what strength and stability there was in slave family life. And Black women, immortalized by the likes of Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, were in the forefront of the fight against slavery. But in Roots it is mostly men who counsel resistance and mostly women who warn against it. Kizzy is the strongest woman in the series and, with the exception of Matilda, the wife of Chicken George, the other women are basically accomdationist in their outlook.
Yet another strength of Roots is its uncompromising picture of the Masters. In the traditional racist stereotypes, we have the “good” masters and the “bad” masters. , . the former, kindly arid well-providing, the latter, brutal and indifferent. Roots exposes the contradiction that there can be such a thing as a ’good’ master, Dr. Reynolds is the epitome of the paternalistic slave master. He rarely employs the whip and he keeps families together. He speaks to his slaves in civil tones and deplores the excesses of overly zealous slavecatchers and overseers. But Dr. Reynolds in return for his “generosity,” expects that the slaves will obey his “rules” and if they don’t they lose their “privileges,”
His rules are the laws of slavery itself: unpaid labor, total obedience, and complete illiteracy. Only a man with the deformed morality that denies someone else their humanity can insist on the observation of such rules. And that is how we see Dr. Reynolds in the end when he sells Kizzy to Tom Moore; Can we call such a man “good”?
Moore, of course, represents the other end of the spectrum, a completely uncivilized brute. And undoubtedly things were better with the Dr. Reynolds’s. But as Matilda put it to Mr. Harvey, another master of Dr. Reynold’s type: “You were better than most ... a parcel.”
But there is another way we must look at Roots. We can’t forget who made it: The American Broadcasting System, the same folks who daily bring us hundreds of programs which aim at bolstering and reinforcing the ideology of the capitalist class – a network that until a few years ago featured an almost all-white cast of characters and never concerned itself with the realities of Black life. And what about the multitude of corporations that sponsored Roots. . . Firestone Rubber, General Motors, AT&T ... hardly great friends of the cause of equality for Black people.
Roots inevitably reflects the perspectives of its makers and sponsors. The media chieftains and the owners of the monopoly corporations are now forced to admit that slavery existed and that it was rotten and immoral. But they will not and cannot afford to let us know where slavery came from.
The reasons are not difficult to understand: Slavery was fostered by their “free enterprise” system. Behind the planters stood the bankers, the big cotton merchants, and the textile manufacturers. The slave trade and the plantation system fueled the industrial revolution both here and in England. Capitalist development demanded slavery. But all this is invisible in Roots.
Nor can the makers of Roots allow us to understand the real dynamics of the struggle against slavery and its remnants. This is the most serious flaw in the series. Roots gives us a picture of individual resistance to slavery, but collective resistance to the planters is almost completely ignored. There were well over 200 slave revolts in the U.S. There was a successful revolution led by the slaves in Haiti. But in Roots the- only revolt that is mentioned is Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1835, and the slaves are pictured as largely passive observers to this event.
The most glaring historical fault of the whole series is its treatment of the period of Reconstruction following the war. In Roots, the only choice for Black people is either work the land as sharecroppers or leave. The program does expose the evils of sharecropping and the employment of nightrider terror to make it work. But what it leaves out is the militant resistance of the Black people.
The former slaves organized during Reconstruction. They demanded “Forty Acres and a Mule” as compensation for the years of labor they had been forced to give to the planters. They used their newly won political power to elect state governments sympathetic to their aims, and they armed themselves to ward off the terror of the Klan. In many cases, the Black farmers seized the land and farmed it themselves in spite of the planters.
Again it is not difficult to see why the producers sidestepped this part of the story. They don’t go much for the idea of the masses of exploited people demanding the means of production for themselves.
The ending of Roots underlines its whole politics. Chicken George and his family resettle in Tennessee. They “make it.” Stripped of all the frills, Chicken George makes it because he made a lot of money cockfighting and thus could buy some land. The masses of Black people didn’t have any money, so this was no solution for them. In reality, any gains they made came as the result of the mass movement for political equality and land reform.
Whereas Chicken George made it on his hustle with the Roosters, the masses of Black people only got ahead to the extent they banded together and fought. Naturally, ABC and their corporate friends want us to believe the road to freedom is paved with hard work, patience and creative business enterprise and has nothing to do with people seizing land, going on strike, or sitting in at lunch counters.
It’s important too that the producers choose to end the story when they did. After all, it has not been a bed of roses for Black people over the last century. While we’re all happy for Chicken George and his family, we shouldn’t confuse a few acres in Tennessee with “freedom,” which is the impression the producers want to leave us with. Again it’s not hard to see why. Talking about racism in the twentieth century gets a little close for comfort for the monopolies.
There is plenty of politics in the treatment of the white masses in Roots too. Besides the slave owners and their retinue of overseers and slave catchers, there were millions of poor white farmers in the South who were driven down by the planters and the slave system.
In Roots we only see one poor white farmer – “Old George.” Old George is free from race prejudice, is befriended by the Harvey family, and eventually aids them in the flight to Tennessee. Old George seems to be included in the series to show that not all whites were brutal racists. But his motivation is improbable, and he lacks credibility as a character.
First of all, he’s kind of stupid (the implication seems to be that if he had any brains he’d be a racist). Secondly, his support of Chicken George’s family is based solely on personal friendship and morality. And thirdly, we are never told why he was free of race prejudice -- beyond that the area he came from had few slaves.
What is missing here is any concept of class interest. In fact, the Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina where Old George hailed from had been a stronghold of white anti-slavery sentiment. The poor whites of this region were not free of racial prejudice (they hardly could be, given that it was so deeply interwoven into every aspect of Southern life). These whites opposed slavery, not because there weren’t any slaves around, but because the plantation system had driven them off the better tidewater lands into the mountainous piedmont region where they could barely scratch out a living farming.
In Roots, the phenomena of “good” whites and “bad” whites appears to be largely an accidental matter and purely a question of attitude. The social and economic condition of the masses of whites, their exploitation by the planter class, is simply left out. This too is predictable. Naturally, ABC is not going to show the real stake of the white masses in ending slavery. Just as today, no T.V. network is going to dramatize why white workers need to unite with Black workers to fight racism.
All this should help explain why ABC would be willing to fill one week’s worth of prime time with something as extraordinary as Roots. On the surface, Roots seems to break with everything that T.V. entertainment is all about. But when we look closer we see it ain’t necessarily so.
On the one hand, the strength of the Black Liberation Movement has forced the media to discard its most blatantly racist programming and at least make some concessions to programming that is more realistic and more sympathetic to the Black experience. And that’s a good thing.
But on the other hand, the media in no way ceases to be an instrument for strengthening the hold of capitalist ideology over the masses. The media barons simply adapt themselves to the new circumstances.
Forced to say something real about Black history, they nevertheless omit and distort much of its meaning. They manage to turn an exposure of the evils of slavery into a morality play which preaches the capitalist ethic of individualism. They present slavery abstracted from the system that spawned it and the social forces that destroyed it.
Capitalist exploitation and class struggle, the major actors in the whole drama, don’t even get bit parts on T.V. The ideological control of the Black masses requires more sophisticated forms today and if in the process some whites are incidentally educated about at least part of the truth about racism, that’s a price the opinion-molders are willing to pay.
In short, the Leopard has not shed its spots. But the vast audience for Roots shows that the masses of working people, so often blamed for the trivial and vulgar content of T. V. programming, do respond to something with real substance. And more importantly, it shows that the Culture Kings of T.V. can no longer get by with the shuck and jive of Amos ’n Andy or the racist never-land of Gone With the Wind. Capitalism is definitely going to survive Roots. But T.V. will probably not be quite the same again.