Watching \u201cSelma\u201d in a theater full of black teenagers, was interesting, to say the least.<\/p>\n
Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend \u2014 an effort that was duplicated for students around the country.<\/p>\n
The kids did plenty of talking and texting, and plenty of fighting over whether there was too much talking and texting. Slowly but surely, though, the crowd was drawn in by the Scheherazade skills of the \u201cSelma\u201d director, Ava DuVernay.<\/p>\n
The horrific scene of the four schoolgirls killed in the white supremacist bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church stunned the audience. One young man next to me unleashed a string of expletives and admitted that he was scared. When civil rights leaders are clubbed, whipped and trampled by white lawmen as feral white onlookers cheer, the youngsters seemed aghast.<\/p>\n
In a delicately wrought scene in which Coretta Scott King calls out her husband about his infidelities, some of the teenage girls reacted with a chorus of \u201coooohs.\u201d<\/p>\n
DuVernay sets the tone for her portrayal of Lyndon Johnson as patronizing and skittish on civil rights in the first scene between the president and Dr. King. L.B.J. stands above a seated M.L.K., pats him on the shoulder, and tells him \u201cthis voting thing is just going to have to wait\u201d while he works on \u201cthe eradication of poverty.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many of the teenagers by me bristled at the power dynamic between the men. It was clear that a generation of young moviegoers would now see L.B.J.\u2019s role in civil rights through DuVernay\u2019s lens.<\/p>\n
DuVernay told Rolling Stone that \u201cI wasn\u2019t interested in making a white-savior movie.”<\/p>\n
Hollywood has done that with films like \u201cMississippi Burning,\u201d which cast white F.B.I. agents as the heroes, or \u201cCry Freedom,\u201d which made a white journalist the focus rather Denzel Washington\u2019s anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko.<\/p>\n
Instead of painting L.B.J. and M.L.K. as allies, employing different tactics but complementing each other, the director made the white Johnson an obstacle.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is art; this is a movie; this is a film,\u201d DuVernay said. \u201cI\u2019m not a historian. I\u2019m not a documentarian.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cHey, it\u2019s just a movie\u201d excuse doesn\u2019t wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.<\/p>\n
On Friday night, the American president screened \u201cSelma\u201d at the White House. Guests included DuVernay, Lewis and Oprah Winfrey, who acts in the film and was one of its producers.<\/p>\n
On matters of race \u2014 America\u2019s original sin \u2014 there is an even higher responsibility to be accurate.<\/p>\n
DuVernay had plenty of vile white villains \u2014 including one who kicks a minister to death in the street \u2014 and they were no doubt shocking to the D.C. school kids. There was no need to create a faux one in L.B.J..<\/p>\n
Source: NYT<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Watching \u201cSelma\u201d in a theater full of black teenagers, was interesting, to say the least. Thanks to donations, D.C. public school kids got free tickets to the first Hollywood movie about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his birthday weekend \u2014 an effort that was duplicated for students around the country. The kids … Continue reading “Not just a movie: Inciting racial hatred”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[156,7416,10875,10876,745],"class_list":["post-17497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-blacks","tag-oprah","tag-racial-hatred","tag-selma","tag-usa"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17498,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17497\/revisions\/17498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}