News HBO draws ire after 'Confederate' announcement

[Skipper]

Yep!

 

[Push The Button]

I haven't watched The Man in the High Castle, but I never assumed it was pro-Nazi because it took place in a universe in which the Nazis won. Let's wait until we find out more information.

MHC isn't pro-Nazi at all, they are still the evil monsters that we are familiar with, even in 1962. The Japanese occupiers on the west coast, while not exactly the good guys, actually seem to be a little easier to live under (relatively speaking, of course) than the "American Reich" that controls the eastern half of the continent.

 

[Tenacity]

Seems weird anyone would to think that in 2017 someone would write and create a pro-slavery tv show for a major network.

I missed where it was said this show was enthusiastically pro-slavery.

West World comes to mind as a show that depicted slavery. And while I don't watch Game of Thrones, isn't there slavery in that show too?

 

[Jayson1]

I missed where it was said this show was enthusiastically pro-slavery.

West World comes to mind as a show that depicted slavery. And while I don't watch Game of Thrones, isn't there slavery in that show too?

I was going off of what Ymindale said about it being pro slavery. It might be he was saying it might promote pro slavery attitudes but im not certain if that was the intent.

Jason

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I was going off of what Ymindale said about it being pro slavery. It might be he was saying it might promote pro slavery attitudes but im not certain if that was the intent.

Obviously no one with a functioning brain in today's society would dare to be pro-slavery. One can only hope that the writers of Confederate would be aware of this.

 

[Skipper]

Obviously no one with a functioning brain in today's society would dare to be pro-slavery. One can only hope that the writers of Confederate would be aware of this.

Define "functioning brain"
I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.

1) People think slaveholders "took care" of their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of economic interest
There is a surprisingly prevalent belief out there that slaves' rations and housing were bestowed upon them out of the master's goodwill, rather than handed down as a necessity for their continued labor — and their master's continued profit.

This view was expressed to me often, usually by people asking if the family was "kind" or "benevolent" to their slaves, but at no point was it better encapsulated than by a youngish mom taking the house tour with her 6-year-old daughter a couple of years ago. I had been showing them the inventory to the building, which sets a value on all the high-ticket items in the home, including silver, books, horses, and, of course, actual human people. (Remember that the technical definition of a slave is not just an unpaid worker, but a person considered property.)

 

[scotpens]

I've watched Spike Lee's CSA mockumentary twice . . .

Just for the record, the satirical film C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America is a British production. Spike Lee had nothing to do with creating or producing it; his company only took over U.S. distribution of the film after its initial release.

 

[Tesophius]

Despite this coming from the makers of Game of Thrones, I'm very excited about this concept, it sounds fascinating. I loved Sliders specifically because it explored alternative history.

 

[Skipper]

Despite this coming from the makers of Game of Thrones

Ok, you aren't the first saying something similar, but it isn't GOT one of the most successful tv show in the history? And it didn't win so many awards? You people talk about it like it's the offspring of Galactica 1980 and Supertrain.

 

[Skipper]

I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction

Many fiction writers have tried, to varying degrees of success, to reimagine slavery or create alternate histories where the Civil War never happened or never ended, or the Confederacy won.

Most recently, in the novel “Underground Airlines,” Ben H. Winters created an alternate history where slavery still exists in four states, there was no Civil War and segregation is the order of the day throughout the United States. I suppose it’s an interesting premise, but as is often the case with interesting premises, at what cost?

It has been more than 150 years since the Civil War ended, but it often feels like some people are still living in the antebellum era. In parts of the United States and, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s visit to Poland recently, the world, the Confederate flag is still proudly flown. This month, Ku Klux Klansmen marched in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a city park. They were not the first nor will they be the last to resist acknowledging that the Confederacy lost the Civil War.

At the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, in May, a noose was found in an exhibition about segregation. That was one of three nooses found in the city within a few months. There was a noose found hanging from a tree in Philadelphia. There have also been noose-related incidents in Maryland, Louisiana, North Carolina and Florida — quiet, insidious acts of violence, reminders that racial hatred is alive and well.

Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways. Those vestiges are visible in incarceration rates for black people, a wildly segregated country, disparities in pay and mortality rates and the ever-precarious nature of black life in a world where it can often seem as if police officers take those lives with impunity.

HBO last week announced it was willing to expend this energy with a series from the “Game of Thrones” creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss. In the show, “Confederate,” the South does, indeed, secede from the Union, the Mason-Dixon line is a demilitarized zone and slavery is the law of the land below it. Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, black television writers and producers, are also attached to the project. They have an incredible body of work behind them and will no doubt bring their considerable expertise to this show.

When I first read about “Confederate,” however, I felt exhausted, simply because I have long been exhausted by slavery narratives. That’s a personal preference, not a metric by which art should or should not be created. There are works that do capture my interest, that make me think, that remind me of why there are still stories from that era to be told. Octavia E. Butler’s “Kindred” and Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” come to mind. It is probably no accident that these are novels by black writers who found a way to reimagine history in speculative fiction without making slavery into an intellectual exercise rather than plainly showing it as the grossly oppressive institution it was.

My exhaustion with the idea of “Confederate” is multiplied by the realization that this show is the brainchild of two white men who oversee a show that has few people of color to speak of and where sexual violence is often gratuitous and treated as no big deal. I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands. And when I think about the number of people who gave this project the green light, the number of people who thought this was a great idea, my weariness grows exponentially.

This show’s premise highlights the limits of the imagination in a world where oppression thrives. These creators can imagine a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War and black people are still enslaved, but they can’t or aren’t interested in imagining a world where, say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved. Or a world where slavery never happened at all. What would happen in a show where American Indians won the conflicts in which they were embroiled as the British and French and other European nations colonized this country? What would happen if Mexicans won the Mexican-American War and Texas and California were still part of Mexico?

It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed.

“Confederate” is slavery fan fiction, as the writer Pilot Viruet put it, and it will probably look beautiful — low light, sweeping cinematography, exquisite costuming. The dialogue will be crisp and the narrative tensions utterly compelling. HBO spares no expense on its prestige dramas.

I have no doubt that in “Confederate,” the painful history of slavery will be reimagined with aggressive competence. The showrunners will say all the right things in the countless interviews they do. People will watch, life will go on, and we will still not know what could have been in a world where white people imagine their own oppression rather than how they suffer from the oppression of others.

As a writer, I never wish to put constraints upon creativity nor do I think anything is off limits to someone simply because of who they are. Mr. Benioff and Mr. Weiss are indeed white and they have as much a right to create this reimagining of slavery as anyone. That’s what I’m supposed to say, but it is not at all how I feel.

Creativity without constraint comes with responsibility. We do not make art in a vacuum isolated from sociopolitical context. We live in a starkly divided country with a president who is shamefully ill equipped to bridge that divide. I cannot help worrying that there are people, emboldened by this administration, who will watch a show like “Confederate” and see it as inspiration, rather than a cautionary tale.

Given the nearly unfathomable incompetence and unabashed racism of Donald Trump’s administration, I tend to think of time in terms of how many days we have been without Barack Obama as president — 186, as of Monday.

There are many critiques that can be made about Mr. Obama as president, but for two terms, he served this country well. He was competent and intelligent. He made progress on several fronts. Though he made decisions with which I disagreed, I never worried that he was incapable of serving as president. I never worried that he was incapable of understanding what he did not know and doing what was necessary to address such knowledge gaps. Overall, I found him extraordinary in demeanor, charm, eloquence and his ability to make America feel like a place where change was possible.

We have lost all that. Or, rather, we have the memory of all that and are forced to face the horrifying absence of everything Mr. Obama and his administration offered. And worse yet, with each day that Mr. Trump serves as president, we face the imminent danger of all manner of bad history repeating itself while we watch it on TV.

 

[Doom Shepherd]

Any scenario where slavery still exists in the South in the modern area can be assumed to be pro-slavery. Even Turtledove's stories assumed slavery would die out (in his case, as the price of the assistance from France and the UK that enabled the South to achieve independence).

I believe a surviving slaveholding south resides firmly in the realm of the ASB's,* as they say over at alternatehistory.com.

*ASB - a scenario so unrealistic that it would require the intervention of powerful, presumably extraterrestrial forces (Alien Space Bats) to bring it about. See Also: Operation Sealion, Red Dawn, Emperor Doom Shepherd.

 

[Tesophius]

Ok, you aren't the first saying something similar, but it isn't GOT one of the most successful tv show in the history? And it didn't win so many awards? You people talk about it like it's the offspring of Galactica 1980 and Supertrain.

I know it's very critically acclaimed, but ultimately I care about enjoying a show and being entertained and not just knowing that someone else likes it. Frankly, it doesn't matter how many people like it if it's just no good.

 

[Yminale]

Obviously no one with a functioning brain in today's society would dare to be pro-slavery. One can only hope that the writers of Confederate would be aware of this.

Uhuh like no one with a brain would vote for Donald Trump.

 

[Yminale]

Any scenario where slavery still exists in the South in the modern area can be assumed to be pro-slavery. Even Turtledove's stories assumed slavery would die out (in his case, as the price of the assistance from France and the UK that enabled the South to achieve independence)..

Slavery didn't die out. It just changed names. Segregation, Jim Crow, War on Drugs, and my personal favorite right to work (aka no unions).

A recent FBI report stated over 100,000 people are in human bondage in the US alone.

 

[Snaploud]

Any scenario where slavery still exists in the South in the modern area can be assumed to be pro-slavery. Even Turtledove's stories assumed slavery would die out (in his case, as the price of the assistance from France and the UK that enabled the South to achieve independence).

I could turn it around and say that any depiction of a modern Confederate non-slave-holding nation is just propaganda for southerners who like to pretend that the Civil War was not fought over slavery.

Of course, both perspectives are as ridiculous as saying that dystopian fiction is assumed to be pro-dystopia.

 

[JD]

Any scenario where slavery still exists in the South in the modern area can be assumed to be pro-slavery. Even Turtledove's stories assumed slavery would die out (in his case, as the price of the assistance from France and the UK that enabled the South to achieve independence).

I was actually just about to ask about this, his series is probably the biggest and longest examination of a successful post Civil War CSA, so it would probably be the closest thing to this series right now.

 

[Jayson1]

I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction

I wouldn't mind a idea of a show that had white people become slaves in America as well. In fact I recall a John Travota/Harry Belafontie movie were society was kind of reversed and white people were treated like second class citizens and black Americans were the oppressors. If the movie had been better I think it might be seen as a classic, today.

Also I don't see the alt right falling for a show were they are the bad guys and even if they did I wouldn't care because people shouldn't have to worry about what they think. It gives them to much power.

I think we can't understimate that this will be HBO. If CBS was doing this then I would be worried but HBO has a very proven track record at doing edgy material and making it work.

Jason

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction

I find this argument fairly unconvincing. First she wants them to imagine other alternate history events - well, sure, why not? I'm game. But that has nothing to do with whether this should be made or not.

Then she says the show is 'slavery fan-fiction'. This is pure bullsh1t. The show doesn't even exist yet - no one knows exactly what it will be.

Then she doesn't like who's in charge because Game of Thrones is white and violent - but GoT is massively violent in the source material (and I think fairly white, as well, though there arguably was more room to alter that, since the violence is basically the whole point of GOT) and she already acknowledged that Benioff and Weiss actually are working together with accomplished african american creatives.

Then she says you shouldn't constrain a writer's creativity, but let's do it this time anyway because idiots might get inspired to be bigger idiots.

And then she brings up Trump - which, seriously, I'm amazed there's anyone in the world who actually likes this president, but he is still completely, utterly, entirely irrelevant to HBO making a tv show about the Confederacy.

 

[Kor]

... Plenty of Christians in the North were anti slave abolitionists or, at the least, opposed slavery. ...

Nice blanket statement about "Christian ancestors",.

In the American part of my family tree, there was a Baptist lay minister in the north who preached against the evils of slavery and in support of Lincoln. His youngest son was moved by this to run away and join the Union army at sixteen years old, even though his parents didn't want him to at that age. The son was injured in battle and captured by the Confederate army and taken to Andersonville Prison, where he died.

But I digress. Anyway, as much as I find alternate history fascinating, I would find it hard to watch a hypothetical contemporary setting where slavery still existed, unless the focus was on how bad the institution is and how the protagonists are working to bring it down.

Kor

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

In the American part of my family tree, there was a Baptist lay minister in the north who preached against the evils of slavery and in support of Lincoln. His youngest son was moved by this to run away and join the Union army at sixteen years old, even though his parents didn't want him to at that age. The son was injured in battle and captured by the Confederate army and taken to Andersonville Prison, where he died.

Thank you for sharing your family history. It only adds to the facts--standing against the ridiculous, blanket statements about Christians in this matter, which do not match history.

But I digress. Anyway, as much as I find alternate history fascinating, I would find it hard to watch a hypothetical contemporary setting where slavery still existed, unless the focus was on how bad the institution is and how the protagonists are working to bring it down.

Kor

It seems like a cheap way to dig the knife of controversy into the skin of viewers just for that reason--not for some conversation on different personalities and beliefs with contemporary slavery as a backdrop,