I'm glad you asked. This is a long read, but please take the time to check it out.
So, I gave a presentation to a group of "highly educated" individuals a year or two ago regarding this very subject. In fact, this was when A Birth of a Nation came out and many of the "woke" sisters at Yale and Harvard were protesting the movie. We did an early screening of the movie and had a panel discussion afterward. Nate Parker was a part of the panel. A question raised by several of the elitist feminists in attendance was, "Why do we need another 'slave' movie?" As a member of the panel, I answered the question like this:
The history of black Americans can not be told without fully exposing all of the horrors and untold truths of our kidnapping, involuntary servitude, rape, murder, sodomy, and numerous other inhuman injustices committed by our white oppressors. Our history has been stolen from us and will be almost impossible to recover unless serious advancements in DNA and RNA tracing take place. However, all we have now is general knowledge of Africa, the reemergence of our native American heritage, and our experience here in our country during slavery. I say our country because it is our country. Though it is not ideal, we are as American as hotdogs and baseball. Without the melanated black man, there would be no U.S.A. as we know it. However, beyond that, let's discuss relevance. According to "his"-story, the first enslaved African landed in Jamestown in 1619. That is
402 years ago. The Emancipation Proclamation was delivered in 1863. However, it wasn't until the 13th amendment abolished slavery in the United States which was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified on December 6, 1865, that the melanated people of the United States were actually free from slavery, notwithstanding the numerous slave owners who did not tell their wrongly kidnapped people that this has taken place several years later. This is
247 years after the "first" kidnapped African landed on the shores of the country. We know that it would not be until 1964 that the Civil Rights Act would be passed by Congress, granting melanated people equal rights as a human in this country. We know that up until then, the freed slave was still treated as a slave and second class citizen. This is
345 years since the first kidnapped African landed on the shores of the U.S. This brings us to today, where we still fight to be treated as equal. Not that "Only Black Lives Matter." But that "Black Lives Matter Too." So here we are, only
57 years since the Civil Rights act. Here are the facts:
61% of our existence in this country was as a kidnapped human. Another
24% of our existence in this country was us fighting to be seen as human. And we have only had
14% of our existence since the Civil Rights Act, and we can not wholeheartedly say that we are truly free.
So, why do we need these movies? Because these movies can monument or history for generations to come. We can tell the stories in our own words for the first time. We can tell the stories without censor. All the brutality, but also all of the triumph. We need to teach that there were numerous examples of black folks who decided death is better than living as a slave and they dedicated their lives to fighting so that you and I could lead the lives we currently lead. Why do we need these stories? Because to not tell our stories would be to ignore
86% of our existence as well as all of our ancestors who fought for us in our own country, because again, this is our country.