Sun. Oct 13th, 2024

5 thoughts on “Review: 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen, 2013)

  1. Thank you for this review. I just had an experience where someone talked about the romanticism of the Antebellum South and I felt personally affronted by that thought. Although this sounds very rough, it’s important to show the reality of slavery and dispel any of those romantic myths about that time period.

  2. I can not wait for this to touch down in Dallas I am all in. Thank you for making this movie come to life now I can see its geneology as well.

  3. OPEN
    LETTER

    Thank
    you Steve McQueen & Brad Pitt

    For
    12 Years a Slave that Resurrects the

    Consciousness
    of John Brown and Nat Turner

    John Brown,
    facing his sentence of a hanging death, is quoted as saying, ”you can dispose
    of me very easy as a matter of fact, I’m already disposed of but this Negro
    Question; the end of that is not yet.”

    Brad Pitt, a
    White Man using his Money and Steve McQueen, a Black Man using his Gift of
    Moviemaking takes the Negro Question to the next level by telling the
    experience of a Free Black Man, kidnapped into “12 Years of Slavery.” Like Cecil B. DeMille’s Ten Commandments
    examined the life of Moses, we journey through time and visited the “Peculiar Institution”
    of Slavery thru the life of Solomon Northrup.

    John Brown and
    Nat Turner fought to Emancipate the Bodies of Chattel Slaves. Brad Pitt and Steve McQueen forces today’s
    African American to deal with the Negro Question. Seeing themselves as Crimes Against Humanity
    Descendants and Survivors of Unjust Laws of Segregation Jim Crow/genocide has
    been a missing link. Who will remove the
    shackles from their minds?

    Knowing who put
    them there is not enough. The Slave Creator
    that put the chains on the minds of the enslaved Africans never intended to
    remove them. In fact, they cannot even,
    if they wanted to. Only the enslaved can
    liberate their mind.

    In 1841, the
    free man didn’t have a Xerox Copy of his freedom papers and Fugitive Slave Laws
    meant he could lose that Kunta Kinte Identity and become Toby, at any
    time. Whether kidnapped from Washington
    D.C., an anti-slave state, or kidnapped from Africa; We as a People must acknowledge
    the slave mentality and only ourselves can liberate ourselves from Toby back to
    Kunta Kente…from Platt back to Solomon
    Northrup.

    Blacks had no
    rights that Whites were bound to respect.
    They were a Subjugated Race, inferior and subordinate, whether they were
    emancipated or not, according to the United States Supreme Court Dred Scott
    Decision of 1857; so their freedom was
    conditional, not an inalienable right.

    12 Years a
    Slave examines the many levels of the SlaveOwner’s Mentality. They could be obsessed with the Black Woman
    while seeing her and other slaves as a non human property thing that he owned. Yet, he must have recognized their humanity

    at some level
    because he used the Bible to keep them in check and to justify bullwhip
    beatings. The Slave Master is your Lord and if you don’t obey the Lord…you will
    get many stripes…many lashes from the whip, 40, 50 or 150.

    12 Years a
    Slave examines the despair of a slavery mother losing her children, as compared
    to a father losing his children. Slave
    Rachel’s weeping for their children, if they could not be comforted, were put
    away as unseemly.

    We get to
    examine the Slave Master’s Wife and her hatred for the Slave Woman that her Husband
    lusted after day and night. When the
    object of his obsession did not return his affection…it turned to hatred. His perverted affection turned to grooming
    little slave girls to soothe his sickness; no one had sanctuary, especially a
    pretty little girl child.

    Some enslaved
    women took the lesser of two (2) evils so they could avoid the lash, the fields
    and be served instead of serving. As in “Roots,”
    they wanted to be warm, not cold and fed, not hungry.

    12 Years a
    Slave let’s you see how talent and beauty was more of a curse for a slave than
    a benefit because it could cause jealousy and increase punishment.

    The journey of
    12 Years a Slave is why Mary Robinson, the U.N. Secretary General, suggested on August 29, 2001 (when the United
    Nations voted Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade as a Crime Against
    Humanity and always has been),

    “that the World Community needs to honor the Memory of the Victims of these
    Tragedies.”

    My hope is that
    December 18, 2013, the 148th anniversary of the Signing of the 13th Amendment
    will be honored as a Annual National Holiday to Celebrate the truth of the blood, sweat and tears of a
    people for centuries that made America rich; and their Descendants without
    financial repair or cultural respect. That
    would make us free of the Legacy of Race Hatred Rooted in Slavery that
    diminishes us all.

    Thank you Steve
    McQueen and Brad Pitt, in the Spirit of John Brown and Nat Turner revisiting
    the Negro Question that 12 Years a Slave, forces us to answer. Hatred was learned, now love can be taught.

    EvAngel Mamadeelove YHWHnewBN

    PO Box 21050, Chicago, IL
    60621

    (888)
    399-YHWH/9494

    newbnqueen999@yahoo.com

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