Spielberg, Lincoln and Frederick Douglass

Finally saw Spielberg's LINCOLN this week, and I loved it, but one thing bothered me: A story about the end of black slavery in America largely pushes Black people to the margins. That's somewhat understandable -- the country was run exclusively by white men, so depicting the political machinations of the age is going to be very heavily focused on white men. But it's a movie about the fate of Black Americans in which Black Americans have very little screen time.

I thought of the movie today when reading Frederick Douglass's "What tot he Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech. Particularly this part:

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for Republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to be understood? How should I look to-day, in the presence of Americans, dividing, and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom? speaking of it relatively, and positively, negatively, and affirmatively. To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. — There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

In other words: It's absurd that human beings should find their very existence and dignity as human beings debated by other humans. The existence of the debate itself, even when there are people on the right side of it, is belittling and dehumanizing.

And that kind of debate is pretty much the entirety of LINCOLN.

I'm not throwing away the baby with the bathwater here, so let me elaborate. There's a scene in LINCOLN when Thaddeus Stevens, played by Tommy Lee Jones, decides to profess a desired state of black equality that is short of what he really believes. He does this because he believes that without that rhetorical hedging, he won't get the 13th Amendment at all -- he wants the whole loaf, but he has to talk about getting half a loaf in order to get any part of the loaf at all. He compromises his ideals in order to achieve his ideals. (It's played with relative subtlety, but I'm glad the movie depicted that.)

Similarly, it was both absurd and insulting to debate the rights and freedom of Black Americans and also absolutely necessary to have that debate so that those rights and freedoms would begin to become manifest.  

I'm not sure there's a way out of that conundrum, then or now, or even what to do with this tension -- except, perhaps, to acknowledge it. Maybe wiser folk than I can offer some insight.