Slavery, a cruel practice of forcing someone to do heavy labor for little or no money. For many years wealthy white landowners profited from slavery, making several slaves work on farms their entire lives under the control of their owners. Blacks were servants that did not have a say in their own lives. If they did not do as asked, consequences would occur. Servant slaves in history would sometimes question and talk back to their owners and that would cost them their lives. The 2013 film, “12 years a slave” directed by Steve McQueen, captures a true story about a free man that was sold unjustly. 12 years a slave is an award winning documentary that shows the main idea of social injustices of African Americans and can be seen through the acting, …show more content…
Acting was an important part of 12 years a slave because it portrayed the feelings and attitudes of being a slave back in the 1800’s. You can see the theme of social injustice represented through the acting of Ejiofor many times in the movie. Ejiofor gave you a sense of understanding through his acting of what it was like to be a slave in the South.
The setting of 12 years a slave takes place in New York, which is a free slave state in the North where he lives with his family and kids. New York was filled with people everywhere you looked, it was a happy place that made you feel at home. The setting then changes from him being in New York to being transferred on a boat to ultimately end up in Georgia (a slave state located in the south). Unlike New York, Georgia was a rural state that was unpopulated and made up of plantations. All that Georgia consisted of was owners, slaves and land. Living in Georgia as a Black person would made you feel uncomfortable because they were treated differently than they were treated up in the North. The movie showed Solomon eating a sandwich outside and you get a perspective of how little his living conditions were. Susan Wloszczyna says “It 's scenes like these in the film, surely, that lead critic Susan Wloszczyna to state that watching 12 Years a Slave makes you feel you have "actually witnessed American slavery in all its appalling
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You see the lives of many slaves that suffered and were tortured for standing up and having something to say. With that being said, social injustice is a problem that we see in the movie and in today’s society. In the world today we have a movement called “Black Lives Matter” in which people protest against the violence and the racism towards black people. There has been racism all around the world and that is why people come together and try to make a change in the world. We have to realize that even though slavery in the United States is gone, the stereotypes and attitudes still influence our culture to this day. We experience several racist people throughout our lives and we must change that. We do not want to go back to the way things used to be. We could start by encouraging others to treat each other equally, and not judge just because the color of their skin is different. We need to start looking for resolution to the problems of social injustice, the only question is what the resolution is going to
In the novel, ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ by Harper Lee some characters suffer in the hands of justice and fairness more than others. Many characters in the novel are discriminated against such as Calpurnia, Dolphus Raymond, Helen Robinson, Burris Ewell and more. However I will be focusing on the discrimination against Tom Robinson for his race, Walter Cunningham for his low socioeconomic status and Boo Radley for the rumors and supposed mental instability he holds. I chose those three because they are the most prominent and I will discuss how the discrimination against the characters therefore leads to their injustice or unfairness.
Twelve Years a Slave is a narrative written by Solomon Northup. After conducting research, the story was told to, written, and edited by David Wilson, a white lawyer and legislator from New York. The book is based on Solomon Northup who was a citizen of New York and a freeman. He was kidnapped in Washington City in 1841 and the book tells the tale of his years as a slave from the time of his kidnapping to when he was rescued in 1853. The first two chapters, Northup tells about his family. Little is known about his mother and he does not identify her by name, but his father, Mintus, was enslaved in Rhode Island by the Northup family. Mintus was freed after the family moved to New York. Solomon, as a young man, helped his father with chores around the farm and worked as a raftsman as told by in his narrative. Solomon tells about his marriage to Anne Hampton, a mixed woman, who he identifies as being of several different ethnicities (white, black, and Native American). He married Anne Hampton on Christmas Day in 1829 and has had three children with her.
The film 12 Years a Slave takes us into a twelve-year window of Solomon Northup’s life. Its origin comes from Solomon Northup’s book, with the same title, that recounts one fragment of America’s most embarrassing exploits. The film was directed by Steve McQueen and was released in the year 2013. The director chose 12 Years a Slave to work with after much searching for non-fictional story that featured a man who was ripped from his family and forced into slavery. Solomon’s story was just that. Many critics have been praised the film and particularly single out Chiwetel Ekiofor’s performance as the best acting of the year (Solomon Northup).
Slave owners rarely doubted the moral right of one man holding another in subjection. They were degrading human beings and making them suffer awful torments in order to make a profit. This is why 12 Years a Slave is such a compelling story. It describes tragic tales of slaves by giving the full truth and depicting everyday life as a slave in the Antebellum South. Northup describes his journey with his many slave masters and educates his audience on what tasks and treatment slaves had to deal with on a daily basis. He does this by detailing the abuses he endured as well as the abuses he was forced to inflict on others. He also captured the various master’s personalities and used them to showcase the different tactics that were used to keep slaves in submission. Thirdly, Northup shared other slaves’ stories to show how they differ from his own and to discuss the negative physical, emotional, and spiritual effects. The book describes what different characters experienced under varied circumstances. Some slaves had kind masters, whereas others had cruel dictators. In short, the slave owner’s disposition and personality did determine how their slaves would be treated. Comparatively, the type of jobs that slaves did depended on their environment as well as their skill set. Therefore, 12 Years a Slave is a gripping memoir that addresses the diversity of slavery in full color and provides a clear warning of the moral consequences slavery disregards. The slaves were not the only ones that were affected. Slave owners were desensitized and stripped of their morals. They forgot that blacks were humans too. The natural human interactions of love, justice, and respect were lost at the time this work was written. In spite of this, Northup’s testimony is proof that faith and hope can overcome any
I firmly believe that there is no such thing as justice. What might be justice for one person, could be injustice for the other. For instance, in the 1950’s film 12 Angry Men directed by Sidney Lumet, a 18 year old boy was accused of stabbing his father with a switch blade knife. 12 “angry” jurors had to decide the fate of a young boys life. Each man wrote down there votes, either guilty or non guilty.
This novel was a very long and strenuous read. Solomon included many details about the process of planting and harvesting cotton or the appearance of a man from head to foot, for example. This painted an extremely accurate picture in the reader’s head, however it made the story boring and slow. There were also a lot of old-fashioned words that I had to look up before I understood sentences. Although the novel was slow and old-fashioned, I would recommend this book to students who wished to learn more about this time period because it certainly helps certain aspects easier to comprehend. Twelve Years a Slave gave me a different perspective to slavery, and a different way of viewing it.
Slavery was a practice throughout the American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries, and through slavery, African-American slaves helped build the economic foundation of which America stands upon today, but this development only occurred with the sacrifice of the blood, sweat, and tears from the slaves that had been pushed into exhaustion by the slave masters. A narrative noting a lifetime of this history was the book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African written by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano was a prominent African involved in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade. He was captured and enslaved as a child in his home town of Essaka in what is now known as south eastern Nigeria, later he was shipped to the West Indies, he then moved to England, and eventually purchased his freedom (Equiano). Olaudah Equiano, with many other millions of slaves, faced many hardships and was treated with inconceivable injustices by white slave masters and because of the severity of these cruel and barbarous occurrences, history will never forget these events.
The number of slaves in the southern states increased on a daily basis and would continue until the abolishment of slavery. Picking cotton injured slaves; therefore, it was not a task that could be enjoyed because of the nature of the cotton. Cotton is a flower that has sharp bolls it was a tedious process that often times left slaves with scratched and sore hands. The picking of cotton along with a lack of good sleep and poor nourishment led to slave uprisings. In the movie, Twelve Years a Slave, the slaves are whipped every day if they do not beat the amount of cotton picked the day before or because of any disobedience. Whipping left slaves bloody and skin ripped to shreds; often the next day slaves were expected to continue working regardless of their condition. In the 19th century, there was not a wide availability of medicine to help treat infections and so the slaves were left to suffer. There was no concern for the overall well being of the slave’s lives and this was an issue that needed to be addressed. There were multiple routes that could have been taken to address the
For this paper I have watched the movies 12 Years a Slave and Secrets and Lies. The first film I mentioned is about slavery in the 19th century in America starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as Northup Solomon. It’s actually based on the novel of Northup Solomon, a citizen of the middle class. He has written this novel after years of slavery. He was a black man who was kidnapped and afterwards got sold as a slave. Northup has already got a wife and two children when he gets kidnapped. Before he gets into slavery, he has been working as a violinist and lives in New York with his small family. One day, two men want him to travel with them to Washington and promise him to offer him a job as a musician when they return. He accepts their request and the three men go to Washington. What Northup did not know was that these two men weren’t to offer him a job in return but were to kidnap him. At dinner in Washington, they drug him and then lock him up in a cellar where he also gets chained. A white man first tortures him and calls him Platt, a slave that ran away from Georgia. He asks him about his name and starts beating him because he replies that he’s called Northup and not Platt and that he’s a actually a free man. This white man then takes him to New Orleans by ship where they sell him to William Ford as a slave. He starts working for him but one day an over-seer called John Tibeats attacks him and Northup fights back. After this incident, his owner Ford has to sell him to Edwin Epps because if not, Tibeats will kill him. After working for several years at Epps’ plantation, one day the sheriff comes over to see Northup. He starts asking him questions about his earlier life and as soon as he notices that the given answers are the same with wh...
...ther by our common human experiences. 12 Years a Slave depicts our country’s history and its roots slavery and how that gave way to the racial disparities that are present today. Although minorities today do not experience the legalized physical abuse slavery once allow, they experience the mental abuse, for they are constantly be stereotyped and profiled where ever they go. This is shown in Frozen River, which depicts the race relations in a poor town and Indian reservation near the US-Canadian border. However, through Frozen River, audiences learn that despite the various cultural backgrounds, members of all race face common experiences that can bond us as a united people. Hollywood’s influence on the American culture is incredibly powerful, and through film, it has the ability to change how generations perceive race and the course of race relations altogether.
Twelve Years A Slave is commonly recognized as a very truthful representation of slavery. However, there are a few different scenes that are historically incorrect. The slaves are very valuable pieces of property that are not exactly easy to replace. Slave owners treat their slaves in a very careful way. They treat them with care as though they are a valuable piece of property. At the same time they discipline them enough to make sure they know who is in charge of them, but they are still able to work after their punishment. This is where a few historically incorrect errors come into the movie.
After watching “12 Years a Slave”, I was so shocked at what the black man experienced. During that years, that kinds of life condition, the movie presents the slave suffered unequal treatment and no one are willing to believe and help him to regain freedom after clarifying his identity. These kinds of sadness and pain are our young people, who living in the relatively equal periods, never experienced. In fact, even though black slave period has passed, however, does similar situation still exist in our life?
But the film actually made me recall a question that I always had: to what extent can we, as somewhere who are not involved in the events, criticize people, especially the wrongdoers, who did partake in the history? As people from the 21st century, we know that slavery is unjust and horrible because we were raised in a society where love and peace were honored. When I questioned myself what would I do if I were Edwin Epps, Marry Epps, or William Ford, I began to question myself how much can I criticize them people when the cruelty was norm, and all those people did really was to follow the norm. Although it would be righteous and courageous to stand up for the blacks, not everyone is all courageous and willing to challenge the society. The film reminded me to have my own judgment and not to blindly follow what everyone else consider to be the norm. This film also made me wonder: when it is many years from now, how much of the social norm today would be considered to be cruel and
The topic of slavery in the United States has always been controversial, as many people living in the South were supportive of it and many people living in the North were against it. Even though it was abolished by the Civil War before the start of the 20th century, there are still different views on the subject today. Written in 1853, the book Twelve Years a Slave is a first person account of what it was like for Solomon Northup to be taken captive from his free life in the North and sold to a plantation as a slave in the South, and his struggle to regain his freedom. Through writing about themes of namelessness, inhumanity, suffering, distrust, defiance, and the desire for freedom, Northup was able to expose the experiences and realities of slavery.
12 Years a Slave is a very iconic movie about Solomon Northrup and his being kidnapped into slavery. Northrup was a free man, a professional violinist, and a farmer. After being drugged, he was shipped away from his family and forced to work in New Orleans. During his slavery, he was forced to pick cotton and endure many hardships for 12 years. Eventually, he was freed and returned to his family. The people who captured and enslaved him served no punishment for their crimes since blacks were not allowed to sue white people at that time. Solomon was stripped of all his rights not only as a human, but also as an American and was illegally put into slavery for 12 years.