What "12 Years A Slave" Has To Do With The Obama Presidency

 

What '12 Years a Slave' has to do with the Obama presidency. "This last weekend, I finally saw 12 Years a Slave. It was the most powerful movie I've ever seen in my life, an event so gripping and terrifying that, when I went to bed ten hours later -- it was a morning matinee -- I lay awake for five hours turning it over in my mind before I could fall asleep. I understand it not merely as the greatest film about slavery ever made, as it has been widely hailed, but a film more broadly about race. Its sublimated themes, as I understand them, identify the core social and political fissures that define the American racial divide to this day. To identify 12 Years a Slave as merely a story about slavery is to miss what makes race the furious and often pathological subtext of American politics in the Obama era."Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine