First Published: The Call, Vol. 6, No. 18, May 9, 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Three months have passed since ABC-TV presented its eight-part series based on Alex Haley’s book, Roots. With Haley winning a special Pulitzer Prize recently, Roots is continuing to capture headlines and provide the topic of widespread discussion among the masses.
Our series of articles on Roots have examined it in an all-sided way. We have pointed out its positive features, the most important of which is that it raised the question of slavery and national oppression on the screen.
It was the first extensive prime-time treatment of the Afro-American struggle that was not simply a capitalist comedy and an insult to the intelligence of the people. For these reasons, the largest television audience on record viewed Roots with keen interest, trying to learn something about the history of the freedom struggle in this country.
But, as our first article in the series pointed out, “to really understand Roots, we must look at its class viewpoint. Which class does it serve and from what point of view does it look at this history? We must ask, does it portray history as it really took place? What does it include and what does it skip over? Finally, what are the lessons that it offers to the viewers? Do these lessons serve to further the struggle or cripple it?”
In answering these questions, The Call articles showed how Roots fundamentally served the bourgeoisie. Despite all its anti-slavery drama, Roots was a “sugar bullet” – a tool of the ruling class that uses an appealing exterior to conceal a deadly poison inside.
That poison is the poison of liberalism and reformism. Roots tried to rob the Afro-American struggle of its true revolutionary experiences. It gave a pro-capitalist interpretation of history, and consequently offered a pro-capitalist message for the struggle today.
The Call articles exposed many of the techniques used by Haley and ABC to put forward this reformist view. Three of these key points can be summarized in the following way:
1. The basic class question. In every way possible, Roots tried to cover up the fundamental class forces at work under slavery. From the very first episode, the slave traders were presented as evil men, and the question that was focused on was the psyche of the slave owners. This was done to obscure the real material basis for slavery and the role it played in amassing the wealth of the earliest U.S. capitalists.
This same attempt to diffuse the class question can be seen in Haley’s treatment of the slave population itself. Haley’s story focused almost entirely on what Malcolm X called “the house Negroes.” The characters in Roots worked in the master’s house, rather than in the cotton and tobacco fields where 90% of the slaves worked. Thus, there was no hint of the fundamental characteristic of slavery – its plunder of Black labor in the fields from sun-up to sun-down for more than two centuries.
It is no wonder that Haley can speak about “the triumph of an American family.” His family includes land owners and college professors. He himself has “made it” and become a millionaire, although not without suffering various forms of discrimination. It is this class viewpoint which ran through Roots, not the viewpoint of the millions of working-class Blacks whose families escaped slavery only to be condemned to wage slavery and brutal national oppression.
2. Resistance and rebellion. The main thing Roots portrayed on the screen was the repression of the slaves. But this is only one aspect of history. On the other side stands the heroic struggle against these conditions. As several Call articles showed, the history of slavery was one of continual resistance and rebellion.
The few acts of resistance seen in Roots were highly personal, individualized, and most of them were of the passive variety. The real heroes of the Afro-American liberation struggle, like Nat Turner, whose rebellion was supported by thousands of slaves, were presented in Roots as “crazy” men, lacking influence among the masses.
Along this line, Roots up-holds the bourgeoisie’s “great man“ theory of history. Freedom is something which comes in a telegram from Abraham Lincoln, not something the masses of Blacks and poor whites took up arms and fought to obtain.
3. Selective history. Roots entirely omitted the history of the Reconstruction period which immediately followed the Civil War. Haley thus omitted its profound lessons and its bearing on today’s struggle.
On the one hand, Reconstruction was a brilliant chapter in Black history. It was a time when Afro-Americans wielded genuine political power in many places and forged multi-national unity with poor whites. But ultimately, the betrayal of Reconstruction through the reactionary alliance of the Northern capitalists and the Southern plantation owners set the stage for the continued national oppression of Black people.
In the 1880s, when the TV version of Roots ends, Haley’s family walks off into the Tennessee sunset to the farm they have bought. But for the masses of Black people, the I880s meant walking into a new period of Klan terror and brutal exploitation and discrimination.
Haley’s vision is one where the stench of the slave market is laid to rest in the clean Tennessee air. But for the masses of Black people, that stench has continued right up to 1977.
For all these reasons and more, Roots is a “sugar bullet.” Beneath the trappings of being a story about the fight against oppression, it defends oppression. It preaches to its audience that the worst is over, that Black people can “make it” under capitalism if they try, and that militant, collective struggle is not a viable road for the oppressed people to take.
In other words, Haley and ABC are telling us that the capitalist system, which is the source of all oppression and discrimination, can be made to work. They offer us this instead of the real lesson of Black history, which is the need to overthrow this monster once and for all. This is why the capitalists are falling all over themselves to give awards to Haley. They are using these sugar bullets in conjunction with real police bullets to steer the working class and minority struggles away from the revolutionary path.
In spreading this liberal ideology, the capitalists are getting some help from the likes of the revisionist Communist Party and the so-called Revolutionary Communist Party. These opportunists outdid the bourgeois media in praising Roots, even calling it “revolutionary” and “liberating.” Like Haley, these revisionists and chauvinists believe that Black Americans have “triumphed” and become integrated into the mainstream of society, thus denying the continued oppression of the Afro-American nation and the fight for self-determination.
The owners of Xerox and the rest, who put up the money to film and market Roots, would like us to believe that they are genuinely interested in popularizing Black history. Of course this claim is totally fraudulent. They are only interested in Black history as told from the capitalist point of view.
This is why no bourgeois publisher would touch Black Bolshevik, the autobiography of Harry Haywood, who for more than 50 years has been a leading communist theoretician and revolutionary fighter among the Afro-American people. Despite the book’s obvious historical significance, not a single publisher would dare to handle it, owing to the fact that Haywood draws revolutionary conclusions from the examination of his own “roots.”
However, Liberator Press, a revolutionary publishing house, has now taken, on the publication of Black Bolshevik. It will be available later this year. Along with the great writings of DuBois, William Z. Foster and other revolutionary students of Black history, Haywood’s book will be a great contribution in strengthening the political and cultural arsenal of the proletariat.
Armed with revolutionary materials that teach the true history of the struggle for freedom, we can combat the liberal myths spread by Roots and other capitalist creations. In this way, the experiences of the past will not be used to justify today’s oppression, but will instead be used to point the way forward in the fight for liberation.