First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 15, April 18, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Over the last few months, The Call’ has carried a number of articles reviewing and analyzing the ABC-TV presentation of Alex Haley’s Roots. While the television series brought some aspects of Black history to the screen, the ideology promoted through this presentation was fundamentally one that serves the ruling class and not the masses of Black people.
A clear example of the bourgeois ideology behind Roots can be seen in its treatment of Black women. The TV series, tracing slavery as it did, could not help but show some examples of the oppression and degradation Black women faced historically. For example, it graphically portrayed the selling-off of slave children and the rape of women slaves.
But absent from the Roots story is the real history of slave conditions. Absent, too, is the unity of men and women in this struggle. In Haley’s version of history, the majority of women are painted as passively accepting their conditions and even preventing their men from struggling.
To begin with, Roots presents the idealized view of women, along with men, as primarily being “house slaves” – doing the work of sewing, gardening, cleaning and caring for the master’s family. In the entire eight-part series, one sees only a few glimpses of women working in the cotton and tobacco fields or any of the other basic areas of the slave economy.
This in itself is a myth about Black history that has been promoted by bourgeois scholars in order to cover up the most fundamental aspect of slavery – the savage exploitation of slave labor, both of men and women, which continues today in the form of wage slavery.
In reality, slavery for women meant a double burden. Most slave women worked in the fields, often having to take their babies with them. Women and men worked together from sun-up to sun-down, but women still had to bear the added burdens of domestic chores and were constantly faced with sexual harassment and abuse from the plantation owners.
In response to such subjugation, Black women stood in the forefront of. Slave resistance. Roots offered a few examples of resistance, such as when Kizzy, the daughter of Kunta Kinte, aided her boyfriend in an escape attempt.
But in at least half a dozen episodes, women were portrayed as the brake on the slaves’ struggle. Fanta, the childhood friend of Kunta Kinte, for example, heaps abuse on him for his ideas of escaping. In other scenes, women are constantly shown urging the men in the house not to struggle, for fear that resistance will bring on more repression.
The facts of Black history refute this impression of women. Gerda Lerner, in her book Black Women in White America, pointed out: “In general, the lot of Black women under slavery was in every respect more arduous, difficult and restricted than that of the men ... Slaves, like all oppressed people, resisted their oppression .. . Slave women took part in all aspects of resistance, from slave rebellions to sabotage and passive resistance.”
A look at some of the real-life experiences of Black women also refutes the view presented by Roots. Harriet Tubman is perhaps the best-known among the women freedom fighters who developed out of the period of slavery. She escaped from a plantation and found her way to the North, living only on her burning desire for freedom and the abolition of slavery.
After gaining her own freedom, Harriet Tubman went on to become the “conductor” of the underground railroad, the secret network through which hundreds of slaves escaped to the northern part of the U.S. and Canada.
Not only was Tubman a fiercely rebellious individual, but she was a tireless organizer among the masses. The underground railway could never have succeeded without the political and material support of thousands of slaves, poor whites, and abolitionists who provided the food and shelter necessary for its operation. It was this network which Tubman played the leading role in organizing.
Tubman also became a legendary figure because she carried a pistol in hand and was never afraid to meet the armed terror of plantation owners with the people’s armed might. She was instrumental in providing weapons for many slaves and in organizing detachments of slaves to fight with the Union troops in the Civil War.
Another such hero among the women slaves was Sojourner Truth. After seeing all her relations, including her small children, sold away to slavery, she became a dedicated abolitionist. She toured the country speaking about abolition, linking it closely to other demands against capitalism, including the demands for union rights and the right for women to vote.
At an 1851 women’s rights convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth powerfully attacked a clergyman who had just spoken about the “natural inferiority of women.“ She stated: “Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me – and ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen most of ’em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me – and ain’t I a woman?”
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were only two of thousands of Black women who played a militant role in combating slavery and the special oppression of women.
Since the end of slavery, outstanding Black women have continued to come to the fore-front of the Black liberation movement. From Ida B. Wells, the editor of the Memphis Free Speech newspaper, to Rosa Parks, whose refusal to “step to the back of the bus” in 1955 sparked the civil rights movement, Black women have unceasingly fought alongside men for the self-determination of the Afro-American nation.
But Roots tried to paint a different picture in order to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Roots was designed to preach the myth that Black people should accept the present oppressive conditions of capitalism passively because the “Black American family has triumphed.” For this reason, it systematically downplayed the role of women in revolutionary struggle and constantly showed men and women in the slave family pitted against each other instead of united in struggle.
Every class uses culture for its own purposes. The capitalists would like to see Black women abandon the militant role they are playing today in the trade union movement, in the women’s liberation struggle, and in the fight for self-determination and socialist revolution. They would like to see men and women constantly divided so that the working class becomes too weak to struggle against the system.
The capitalists use their cultural tools like Roots to promote these ideas. While giving a little in the form of presenting some of the brutality of slavery, Roots was really designed to cover up the real revolutionary history of Black people, especially Black women.