Mandingo starring Ken Norton addresses the trauma of race in America

I once got in big trouble while having a conversation with a friend when I blurted " OK. I'm into being very ahistorical right now. A black person is just a standard issue human being tinted a different color with slightly different features and a different cultural history. Basically you just get a human being capable of all the brilliance or all the vileness that all human beings are capable of". It was my way of trying to move away from the eternal narrative of oppression that colors all conversation about race. I was trying to articulate an idea...that...race is a detail not a final summary. I really pissed off my friend because he thought I was being blithe and therefore disrespectful of the history of racism in America. "You can't just pretend that something that exists, DOESN'T exist" he countered. Well this weekend I saw this film, "Mandingo", shot in 1975 by Richard Fleischer. It stars the boxer Ken Norton as "Mede" a magnificent and prized Mandingo trained by his owner to be a boxer and treasured precisely because his anticipated virility. Let's say that greatly anticipated virility triggers all sorts of plantation melodrama leading to a medley of deaths at the end.
The first thing I thought when the film ended was that artist Kara Walker's work suddenly made enormous sense to me. I now got (in a way I did not before) the brilliance in her harnessing that very 19th century technique, the cut-out silhouette to articulate her horror at the nightmarish narrative emitted by a very 19th century concept of race. In that 19th century narrative, "blacks" are sub-human.In the 21 st century I have the luxury of looking back at that as a sign of sheer idiocy. Human is human . The second thing that occured to me was how the film gave me an understanding of the efficiency of racism as a strategy . In other words I came to grasp its insidious way of justifying the complete exploitation of another human being. You simply argue that this other human...is not human.
Throughout "Mandingo" African-Americans are discussed as and treated as cattle. The language of the time as captured in the screenplay is both eerie and oddly poetic and it reminded me of the power language has in convincing people as to what they should be or what they wish to project. What was even stranger was my being forced to confront the idea that even though what I was watching was fiction, it evoked the very real behavior from a very real time in American history.
Through "Mandingo" I could see the codes of authority and the counter-code of anger that trapped both the oppressor and the oppressed in a pantomime of lies that came to represent a truth for some people. America still struggles to this day with the consequences in investing in that pantomime. I vaguely recall a quote from Thomas Jefferson, to the effect that slavery was possibly the worst idea the young nation of America could ever have engaged itself in. Of course Jefferson invested in the idea himself but that was the tincture of the time and people could not seem to think past a pantomime that since devolved into the traumatic shadow-memories that haunts the American psyche to this day. Just ask Kara Walker.
You don't have to deny history to transcend it. You can look at it, analyse it, defuse it and put it in perspective with understanding. I've never believed in racism. Racism for me is a chance to excercise an exacting mental discipline to remind myself of two things...1. We are not obliged to live with the lies of the past . That's the great luxury of looking towards the future no? 2. The other side of it is ...in our own century we can coin new ways of thinking. I really think this is possible.