When the film “Harriet” was about to be released, a social media call for a boycott of the film was widely circulated. While the film had some problems, which I identified in my own review, the Twitter and Facebook campaigns focused on condemnations of claimed aspects of the film that were NOT, in fact, in the film. It seemed to me as though much of the disinformation about “Harriet” was originating with Byron Allen, who has a massive lawsuit against Comcast which owns Focus Features, the films studio. An honest critique of the film is always welcome, lying about is not.
Janell Hobson, a professor at SUNY Albany, wrote last month in Ms. Magazine that she too was disturbed by the misrepresentations of the anti-“Harriet” campaign.
the words “trust black women” are worth reiterating again and again, especially in the wake of a smear campaign against the film, which has been relentless since last year’s casting news of Nigerian, British-born actress Erivo in the leading role. Ignoring that Harriet is produced by an African American woman, Debra Chase Martin; directed by an African American woman, Kasi Lemmons; and co-written by Lemmons and an African American man, Gregory Allen Howard; the film’s dissenters have created a conspiracy theory in which “Hollywood” is undermining African American talent with “outside” black artists.
Perhaps that sounded too xenophobic, so they amped up the complaints by digging up out-of-context, six-year-old tweets from Erivo that suggested her “anti-African American” sentiments, a subject Erivo herself has addressed. If that weren’t enough, the next level of the smear campaign revealed that Comcast, which owns the Focus Features studio releasing the film—plus additional media companies and platforms, including some of our very cable providers that give us access to social media on which we freely mount our information and disinformation—is in partnership with the Trump administration to chip away at civil rights protections.
This latter news did not lead to a widespread boycott of some cable providers, since we’re still using the Internet, nor did it lead to boycotts of Xfinity games and various movies and TV shows—but it did lead one New Jersey chapter of the NAACP to cancel a planned screening of Harriet, the one movie highlighting a heroic black woman that is being made to pay for the sins of a major multimedia corporation.
Perhaps the most insidious of the smear campaign involved dissenters deliberately spoiling the movie’s ending, during the film’s opening weekend, suggesting that the story was a “white savior” narrative in which the main villain is actually a black bounty hunter and the great and fearless Harriet Tubman “forgave” her former white enslaver who had “rescued” her. This is an outright lie, and is nothing like what was actually shown in the film. Anyone who may have seen and thus interpreted such a narrative may well be suffering from deep-seated conditioning of endless metanarratives of white saviors and helpless black victims that have misshapen their gaze, so much so that their blurred vision prevented them from witnessing a true legend who boldly stood up to the forces of oppression and claimed her right to own herself.
In the film, Harriet Tubman does not forgive; she curses. She doesn’t return to slavery—the only reason her former enslaver wanted her captured alive. She instead maims him, steals his horse and rides off on that white horse into the sunset like the boss she is. She doesn’t even flee, because she no longer has to fear the man who tried but failed to own her outright. She had claimed herself in freedom since running away, 170 years ago in the autumn of 1849, and there is only one Black Savior in this movie, working within a network of allies—both black and white—rescuing those who sought to escape the hellish institution of chattel slavery.
The disinformation about the casting, distribution and story itself left me wondering: Why are so many afraid of Harriet Tubman and her story? What could a story about a fearless and faith-driven disabled black woman who liberated herself from the pernicious jaws of chattel slavery and then returned 13 times to free more of her people before offering her services during the Civil War to help abolish slavery from this nation—freeing 750 slaves for her part in leading a military raid with black soldiers in the Combahee River Raid, the first woman in U.S. history to do so—what could that story do for so many of us who feel powerless in our current era of misinformation overload and rising white supremacy and misogyny?
This is a good essay to read in its entirety.
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Thank you for this article. I’m constantly stunned by the resistance to the idea of a strong black men or women. When I wrote “Trouble the Water” based on the life of Robert Smalls, I saw how often people used words like “thief”, “betrayer”, “surprising” to describe a strong, smart, self-determined man. That language would never have been employed to describe a white male hero.
Thank you for your great website.