Two Currently Streaming Films Suggest U. S. Holocausts: Why No National Shame?
Two 2023 films currently streaming on U.S. televisions—Apple TV+’s Killers of the Flower Moon (hereafter Killers) and Netflix’s Stamped From the Beginning (hereafter Stamped)—suggest what I have earlier labeled “holocausts.” Why are we not (as a nation) ashamed? Do we deny that what we have done to Native or African Americans rises to the level of “holocaust”?
Before addressing the above questions, however, a little background. Both films are based on books with titles the same as the films. The first is a 2017 National Book Award finalist for nonfiction by David Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker. The second is an earlier 2015 winner for the same prize by historian Ibram X. Kendi, who also directs Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research and is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
A few months ago Rolling Stone magazine reported that Kendi’s “passionate reporting on the permeation of racist ideas throughout American history riled up conservative proponents, leading to three of Kendi’s tomes [including his Stamped From the Beginning] being banned in six school districts across multiple states.”
As films, Killers is directed by perhaps America’s most famous director, Martin Scorsese, who has directed such award-winning films as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. And Killers won the National Board of Review’s Best Film of 2023 and was also nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards. Stamped’s director is Roger Ross Williams, “who made history in 2010 as the first Black director to win an Academy Award with his short documentary, Music for Prudence.” And he was also one of the executive producers behind the six-part Hulu series “The 1619 Project” (2023), which won an Emmy for outstanding documentary or nonfiction series. (The series was itself based on a very controversial 2019 New York Times Magazine project.)
Now back to the question of why we are not more ashamed of our past holocausts. As I explained in my earlier essay (first appearing in 2020 on the History News Network),
I “do not use the word ‘holocaust’ carelessly.” But the word should not be limited to the Nazi killing of Jews in World War II. “This is only an Oxford dictionary’s second definition. The first is ‘a situation in which many things are destroyed and many people killed.’” What the United States did to Native Americans and later African Americans during the eras of slavery and segregation certainly fits that definition.
So why don’t we admit these past sins? A partial explanation is offered in Stamped when one of the many commentators explains why so many White people accepted slavery in the era in which it existed. They thought of Black people as inferior beings. “In order for you to do that [enslave others] and to make yourself feel good about it, you've got to come up with a reason why it was okay. Otherwise, what you have is brutality, you have theft, you have murder, you have rape. Nobody wants to think of themselves that way.” (All film quotes are taken from the filmscript.) Thus, by perverting truth, slavery was rationalized, justified.
Similarly, many White people today do not want to admit that we Whites, whether it was some of our ancestors or not, systematically killed or grossly mistreated Red or Black people. Thus we engage in various forms of denial or at least minimization.
Take Killers for example. The two main White characters are Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro). Orchestrated by Hale, they both engage in killing or have others do the killing of Native Americans (the Osage) in Oklahoma in the 1920s. Why do they do it? Ernest explains it at a trial. When asked why his uncle would want a couple killed (an Osage wife and her husband), he replies, “So to get their money.” (All Killers film quotes are taken from its filmscript.)
Because of the discovery of rich oil deposits on the Osage Reservation these Native Americans become some of the U. S.’s richest people. To gain their money so many of them are killed that the newly-formed FBI sends out a man, Tom White (Jesse Plemons) to investigate the murders. (Some of those killed are Osage women who are married by White men, often for their money; and Ernest marries the Osage Mollie (an excellent Lily Gladstone.)
So often in our U. S. past poor values—like prioritizing financial gain over all else, whether by corporations or individuals—have led to shameful behavior. At times the Biblical words “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10) seem to be especially pertinent to our own culture.
Killers of the Flower Moon
But not just our own culture. Such an aim is also present in many other cultures, but seems to be especially strong in European cultures and in offshoots of them like that of the USA. Near the beginning of Stamped, Ibram Kendi, who not only wrote the book, but also often comments in the documentary, says, “Prince Henry [of fifteenth-century Portugal] didn't want to admit that he was violently and brutally enslaving African people to make money. And so he dispatched a royal chronicler by the name of Gomes Zurara, to write his story. Gomes Zurara justified his slave trading by stating that Prince Henry was doing it to save souls, and that these people in Africa were inferior, were beast-like.” (Thus, another perversion of truth, this time to rationalize slavery.)
In her lengthy and highly-praised These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore indicates other instances of Europeans valuing money (or gold) more than the lives of Native and African Americans: “In sugar mines and gold mines [of the Americas], the Spanish worked their native slaves to death while many more died of disease. Soon, they turned to another source of forced labor, Africans traded by the Portuguese.”
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She also gives us some idea of the scope involved with Native and African Americans. “Between 1500 and 1800, roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas [note: not just the USA]; they carried twelve million Africans there by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease,” most of them because they had no immunity to the diseases passed on to them by those of European ancestry. As my holocausts essays makes clear, however, the subjugators did not just view these deaths as unfortunate accidents, but “from the very beginning intended to eliminate, one way or another, Indian civilization.”
My 2020 holocausts essay indicates how much further the Native American holocaust proceeded. In 1492 the future conterminous United States contained about 5 + million Native Americans; it “declined to but 600,000 by 1800”; and “to about 250,000 by the last decade of the nineteenth century.” As I quote one historian, “the destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”
Black death tolls during the eras of slavery and segregation are incalculable. But Ida Wells (1862-931), a Black investigative journalist and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is quoted in Stamped about one segment of this toll. Regarding a portion of the post-slavery years she writes, “more than 10 thousand Negroes have been killed in cold blood, without the formality of judicial trial and legal execution. The same record shows that during all these years, and for all these murders, only three white men have been tried, convicted and executed.” In my own 2021 essay “White Terrorism: American Lynching History,” I quoted a more recent report by the Equal Justice Initiative which documented over 5000 “racial terror lynchings” between 1877 and 1950. Whatever the exact number of lynchings—and other illegal killings—they were certainly in the multiple thousands.
And, of course, in addition to all the murders there were also other atrocities, some of which are recounted in Stamped. One of them is taken from Life of a Slave Girl (1861), written by Harriet Jacobs, a mother and fugitive slave. As Stamped quotes: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belong to him and swearing by Heaven and Earth that he could compel me to submit to him. He'd people my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. Do as I say. I saw a man 40 years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his property. That I must be subject to his will in all things.” Jacobs adds, “I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to the condition of two million women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered. And most of them far worse.” (Besides the occasional voice and presence of author Kendi, most of the others that we see and hear comment are Black women, the points of their words often illustrated by television footage or animation.)
As mention of TV footage suggests, Stamped continues its treatment of the exploitation of Blacks far past the eras of slavery and segregation all the way up to early 2020s. One commentator remarks that “every time there's a huge...push forward, there's a tidal wave back. A wall of white supremacy that shows up and says, like, ‘This far and no farther.’” Another voice says, “Police violence is modern day lynching. State violence against Black bodies, inside and outside of prison cells, is lynching. It is a form of racial terror, meant not only to punish the Black individual, but to send a message to all Black people, to stay in our place.”
All the statements in Stamped don’t have to be accepted as a hundred percent true for us to admit of the oppression of Blacks, of the great evils of slavery, segregation, and even continuing prejudicial acts up to the present. Take for example the statement of one commentator,” Lynae Vanee, described by one web site as “a poet, producer, writer, director, and social media star who uses TikTok to create content that educates, inspires, and empowers people of color.”
In Stamped, she says “Thomas Jefferson was full of shit. He was someone who was very well aware of the atrocities that existed in slavery. He wasn't willing to let go of that divide because of what slavery did for for him.” About Lincoln she says, “He is painted often as a figure who saw the moral wrongs of slavery, but let's be clear. He was just anti-slavery because of how he felt the economy could benefit from moving away from slavery.”
My own “take” on Jefferson is not so harsh. I remember cautioning students about being too judgmental about past individuals. I reminded them that if they lived in the south and were well-to-do whites with similar friends—as was Jefferson’s case—they too might have had mixed feelings about slavery. Very few people are original thinkers whose thoughts are ahead of their time. My feelings about Lincoln and his motivations are also more nuanced than those of Lynae Vanee. Most historians are wary of statements like her “[Lincoln] was just [my italics] anti-slavery because of how he felt the economy could benefit from moving away from slavery.” The causation of human actions is seldom due to just one cause.
Yet, contrary to the ideas of many who think like Donald Trump, history should also not be a tool for teaching patriotism—or anything else. For thinking about it as a tool is the wrong approach. As I’ve written before, history’s main aim should be “telling the truth about the past.” Using it as a tool threatens the integrity of that main purpose.
In a 2017 article “Who Are We?” conservative columnist Ross Douthat indicated that the Trumpites’ one-sided view of American history led them to prefer “the older narrative” of U.S. history, the one that glorified Columbus, the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett, the one that emphasized the melting pot (not multiculturalism), and the U.S. Christian tradition. “Trump’s ascent is,” added Douthat, “an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence.” The columnist recognized that it “required correction,” for example incorporating the “truth about what befell blacks and Indians,” but he still somehow hoped that we could come up with a truer history that the Trumpites could “recognize as their own.”
The “truth about what befell blacks and Indians.” “Ah,” as Hamlet said, “There’s the rub.” First, many people don’t know enough history. Secondly, what people do know is often skewed by their own biases. In a 2020 review of David McCullough’s Pioneers I made a number of points that included the following: “We . . . should seek truth rather than a confirmation of our biases...Our nation’s history, like that of all nations, contains both noble and ignoble deeds...We need the national humility to own up to dishonorable deeds like decimating Native Americans, slavery, and racism.
Besides a passion for truth and humility, we need something else—empathy. Almost eight years ago my essay “Historians Need to Write and Teach with Empathy” appeared. It explained empathy as “the ability to project oneself into the time and place of the actors under study, to see their world through their eyes. This does not mean sympathizing or siding with those whose actions we would ordinarily condemn, but understanding why they believed and behaved as they did.”
Admitting our holocausts does not mean we are a terrible nation. Nations are like human beings in that their pasts contain good things and bad things. None of us are perfect. If we have lived long enough, most of us have done things that we are proud of, but also things we are ashamed of, or at least wished we hadn’t. Our history contains evil things we did to Native Americans and African Americans, but it also includes the more noble acts of presidents like Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as the praiseworthy efforts of individuals like Frederick Douglass, Dorothy Day, and the man whose birthday we just commemorated and made into a federal holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Note, I do not suggest that any of the latter were perfect people, for they too had their flaws. And to suggest otherwise would also pervert historical truth.
Finally, regarding history, it is not “bunk,” as Henry Ford said, and it cannot be dismissed by such statements as sometimes made like, “Okay, we might have done some bad things in the past to Indians and Blacks,” but let’s concentrate on the present and just treat everyone fair.” Rather, as psychologist and futurist Tom Lombardo has written, “Memory of the past [and I would add true understanding of it]...is the knowledge foundation for both present and future consciousness, as well as wisdom.” Past sins, especially grave ones, continue to have profound effects. Ignorance of these offenses or ignoring or minimizing them can only make things worse.
The opinions expressed here are solely the author's and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the Hollywood Progressive.
