Thread by @ashtonpittman

Regarding Gone With the Wind, I recently rewatched it while my husband watched it for the first time. The depiction of kind slaveowners and happy slaves is certainly BAD.

But it made me realize, too, that there's a problem with modern depictions of slavery in films. 1/

In modern movies about slavery (30-40 years), slaveowners are almost always depicted in the most viscerally cruel ways (lashings, killing, etc).

It shows me the horrors of slavery.

But it also allows me, a white man, to feel distanced from it. 2/

What was unnerving about watching Gone With the Wind as an adult is that it asks you to identify with "decent" slaveowners. I'm tugged towards wanting to feel good about Scarlett's relationship with Mammy. And it's appealing, because the O'Hara's aren't viscerally cruel. 3/

Modern movies about slavery often distance "good" white chatacters enough from slave owning to keep them noble.

Or consider North & South, and how Kirstie Alley's character grows up in a slave-owning family, but redeems herself as a radical abolitonist & is hung for it. 4/

It is not ok for movies about slavery to make it look "kind" the way Gone With the Wind does.

But it's also not good that so many modern films go out of their way to represent slaveowners as so viscerally cruel that white viewers never have to ask: "Could that have been me?" 5/

Because the act of owning another human being as property IS cruel, even if you do present kindly (which is insidious).

Hollywood went from giving white folks a pass, 1st by making slaveowners appear too kind & later by making them so cruel you'd never see yourself reflected. 6/

In so many modern films, slaveowners are such callous,
vile brutes that there's no way those characters see themselves as good people.

But most people do see themselves as good & justify even atrocious actions in a way that preserves their sense of their own morality. 7/

In that sense, Gone With the Wind presents us a view of slavery and the O'Hara family that probably isn't far from how they would've seen themselves and their treatment of the human beings they *owned* (which again, alone is cruel & evil, even without brutal beatings). 8/

If the story were from Mammy or Prissy's POV, we'd likely have a much different sense of those relationships.

But Scarlett & the O'Haras, like white folks who don't think black coworkers mind their everyday casual racism, never had to consider Mammy or Prissy's perspective. 9/

So instead of making films that whitewash the horrors of slavery or make slaveowners too inhumanly vile for white folks to catch even glimpses of themselves, I hope we'll see more that accurately depict slavery while also inviting white viewers to ask: "Is that me?" 10/

The white folks of the 1860s South weren't genetically more predisposed to cruelty or malice. Nor were the people of Nazi Germany who watched the Holocaust unfold.

You can catch glimpses of that same humanity when "good" people defend & explain away caging migrant children. 11/

A meaningful modern film about slavery directed at a white audience would reveal to white viewers how much we are like, not unlike, the ones who once owned other humans, & challenge us to see how that same strain of human failure manifests in our treatment of others today. 12/x

Btw: None of this is to deny that there were indeed inhumanly cruel, sadistic, twisted slaveowners. There absolutely were, and we know this from formerly enslaved people's own accounts.

But when films only depict the most sadistic ones, it lets lots of white people off the hook.