Confederate States of America/Rabbit-Proof Fence
Wednesday 16 May @ 18:05:20 |
 by DWIGHT HOBBES
If you didn’t get your favorite African American anything for Black History Month, there’s time for a belated gift. Highly recommended for the occasion: IFC Film and Spike Lee’s presentation of director-screenwriter Kelvin Willmott’s “Confederate States of America” (DVD), a fascinating “documentary” of what happened after the South won the Civil War. Willmott deftly uses dry, understated wit to depict an America where slavery never stopped driving the economy.
Coverage begins around the time of the hanging of notorious enemy of the state Harriet Tubman and the arrest and imprisonment of that scalawag Abe Lincoln—caught disguised in blackface, fleeing for the Canadian border. Then, richly, quite plausibly imagined, there’s a history and social terrain in which covert racism is unnecessary and white folk are free to be openly racist. Among name-brand products is Sambo motor oil. In a TV ad, a nicely dressed, pleasant faced young brother sits with other property—a car, the family house—as something you want to be mindful to have an insurance policy on. For home-shopping devotees there’s SSN, the Slave Shopping Network. “Leave It To Beulah” is a top sitcom and, instead of “COPS,” a hit reality series is “Runaway,” following law enforcers who track down and bring escaped slaves to justice. NAACP stands for National Association for the Advancement of Chattel People. Reparation for slavery is sought, in this framework, by owners who were cost slave labor by the War. Chinese folk don’t fare so well, either, as California railroad workers go from subsisting cheap labor to being s.o.l. as legal bondage, courtesy of the Yellow Peril Law. Indians catch enough hell to make what they go through now look like the proverbial life of Riley.
In short, white supremacy as a good old time going straight to hell with itself. And culminates in the film’s must-see ending.
“Rabbit-Proof Fence” (Miramax DVD) provides an illustration of racist society that, regrettably, is based on the real-life story of 14-year-old Molly Craig, who, with her younger sister and cousin, were legally snatched from their home in Jigalong, Western Australia and put an internment camp. See, as recently as 1931 the Australian government decide to do something definitive about its notion of racial purity. Authorities instituted policy by which adults who were “half-castes” (of mixed blood with facial features halfway between black and white) had to get permission to marry —and consistently were refused allowed to marry anyone but a white person, the idea being to breed the color out of successive generations. Also, “half-caste” kids, once they no longer were babies, fell victim to lawful kidnapping. The police would drive up, take children kicking and screaming from heartbroken parents, put them in the car and be off with them.
When this happened to Molly, her sister Daisy and their cousin Gracie, the teenager determinedly refused to sit still for it. Once at the camp, lorded over by hatchet-faced nuns who hypocritically called themselves looking out for the children’s’ best interest, Molly grabbed the two younger ones and lit out for home—some 1,500 miles away. You want to talk guts? This kid, beautifully portrayed by Evelyn Sampi in her film debut, has it by the bucketful. And what she goes through is going to tear your heart out. Kenneth Branagh lends his considerable talent as A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines (that, I swear to God, is his title) who, for a next quarter-century, presided over the policy of removing mixed-race Aboriginal children from their parents in his resolute belief that biological absorption was the key to “uplifting the Native race.” The film is a profoundly moving experience that will have you, by turns, sad, angry and, ultimately, quite despairing. The truth is like that. ||
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