March 10, 2014

The second would be based on the book White Cargo. One in a long series of books and essays that have exhaustively documented this otherwise whitewashed phenomenon, White Cargo goes into great detail regarding the brutality of the white slave trade to America and how English and Irish adults and children were kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and worked to death in the New World. For a touch of personal pathos, the screenplay might focus on the tale of a skeleton that was discovered in a Maryland basement in 2003 “in a hole under a pile of household waste.” The remains are presumed to be those of a 16-year-old so-called white indentured servant who”€™d been worked to death and cast aside as white trash rather than given a proper burial. Let’s see that poor soul’s story up on the silver screen, Mr. Weinstein.

I won”€™t hold my breath. For now, the film industry’s moguls seem content to keep hammering down the nail that sticks up the most. It is a myopic and divisive strategy, yet division probably best serves their interests. The maniacal fixation on black slavery and the concomitant denial of white slavery is used both as a truncheon to instill universal white guilt and a crutch to explain away all black failure. To even acknowledge that white slavery happened would disrupt The Narrative, and once The Narrative is even slightly rewritten, the whole screenplay falls apart. And that would be the last thing Hollywood wants.

 

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