Filmmaker Craig Bodeker to Participate in Discussion on Race
Special to AR News, December 18, 2009
Craig Bodeker, producer of the controversial documentary film, A Conversation About Race, will participate in a panel discussion on race on January 21, 2010, at Fayetteville State University.
FSU is a historically black college in North Carolina. Mr. Bodeker’s film, A Conversation About Race, has received high praise from critics, many calling it brilliant. (The Wall Street Journal’ s James Taranto called the interviews in the film “fascinating.”) The Southern Poverty Law Center, on the other hand, claims Mr. Bodeker is a “racist.”
[Editor’s Note: Click here [For a review of Mr. Bodeker’s film by AR Assistant Editor Stephen Webster, click here.
(Posted on December 18, 2009)
Comments
“FSU is a historically black college in North Carolina. Mr. Bodeker’s film, A Conversation About Race, has received high praise from critics, many calling it brilliant. (The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto called the interviews in the film ‘fascinating.’) The Southern Poverty Law Center, on the other hand, claims Mr. Bodeker is a ‘racist.’”
Very interesting and I wish Mr. Bodeker all the best!
How odd that even The Wall Street Journal can see the truth to be found in this film, but the SPLC continues to make its absurd claims of “racism.” Perhaps, Mr. Bodeker should make his next documentary focusing on that “enlightened” organizations consistently “legitimate” fundraising methods and the amounts of money its racially “violated” clients receive, in the cases that it takes so “unprofitably.”
He might title it: “Morris the Fat Cat and the Three Bling Mice.”
As always, God help us all!
WHY is it Never Mentioned that black slaves did not rise up and revolt to obtain freedom, but that over 600,000 whites died in the Civil War to give it to them as a gift. They should be down on their knees kissing the feet of their liberators not trying to bleed them for their gift of freedom.
Nick:
I think the main reason why American blacks never openly revolted against slavery and their owners is because the Southern slave-owning class knew what to do to prevent a similar uprising in Haiti just decades earlier. They did everything they can to preclude it, including prohibiting literacy lessons for blacks, which would have inevitably led to blacks “reading” John Brown style insurrectionist hate propaganda, fanatical enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws, to preclude a mulatto/quadroon/octroon class of “blacks” from coming about, and therefore being able to be the middle management in such a “revolution,” and a Federal fugitive slave law, to keep as many escaped slaves (and some other blacks who were freed/were never slaves) from being able to coagulate within northern anti-slavery movements, and therefore become foot soldiers for said insurrection.
Southern blacks knew that the whites there couldn’t be had. Therefore, they didn’t even try.
From the FSU website it looks like the panel will also include a black professor, a black doctor and a white (or is that antiwhite?) civil rights lawyer. And a “historically black college” is unlikely to be a friendly environment. With odds like that Bodeker had better have his act together. Even so he’s in for a long night.
#1 that is a great idea, Mr. Mr. Bodeker or other professional filmaker should seriously consider making a documantary exposing the SPLC.
#3 I agree. I don’t believe it is right to blame blacks for slavery, just as it is not right to blame whites (especially whites living today) for slavery. Slavery was accepted all over the world, and when you are born into a situation, or conditioned to it, you assume it is normal. Slavery was legal and considered normal all over the world.
A history book I was reading answered the question “why did the South defend practice of slavery?” by reminding us that no other country or territory had to defend it because it was legal and considered normal at the time of the American Civil War.
Nick also remember that slaves were a lot like the legal illegal alien immigrants are today.
One, very few people owned slaves as very few people employ the cheap legal and illegal alien labor today. The wealthy plantation farmers’ immoral act was not owning slaves, but importing such an alien element into American culture. They were the environmental polluters of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Two, the life style of slaves was not necessarily worse than living in Africa. Likewise alien laborers’ lives are better than they would be back home.
Three, black slaves and today’s alien workers do have free time. A limited time in a limited area, but how is that so different than your average American today. Many middle class white Americans work six months a year to pay the government. They are slaves for half the year, but they don’t rise up and revolt.
2 — Nick wrote at 11:56 AM on December 19: “WHY is it Never Mentioned that black slaves did not rise up and revolt to obtain freedom, but that over 600,000 whites died in the Civil War to give it to them as a gift.”
The civil war was fought over states rights and not to free the slaves. Whites would have never left their homes, livelihoods, families and loved ones to risk death or dismemberment to free an alien race from slavery.
At the end of the civil war a young liberal reporter asked General Grant how he felt about having freed the slaves and Grant replied that if he had believed for one moment that the war was fought to free the slaves that he would have given his sword and his men in service to General Lee…
The posters who stated that Black slaves didn’t openly revolt need a history lesson. There were 250 KNOWN slave revolts including the revolts led by Nat Turner, Denmark Vessey, and Gabriel Prosser. These are the most well-known attempts. There were also Maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia/North Carolina and in Florida.
This is from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_rebellion#North_America
Numerous black slave rebellions and insurrections took place in North America during the 17th and 18th centuries. There is documentary evidence of more than 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving ten or more slaves. Three of the best known in the United States are the revolts by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831.
The largest slave revolt in American history, however, took place outside of New Orleans in 1811. The 1811 German Coast Uprising was suppressed by volunteer militias and a detachment of the United States Army, and the heads of over sixty slaves were put on pikes along the levee.
Slave resistance in the antebellum South finally became the focus of historical scholarship in the 1940s, when historian Herbert Aptheker started publishing the first serious scholarly work on the subject. Aptheker stressed how the rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern slave system. He traversed libraries and archives throughout the South, managing to uncover roughly 250 similar instances, though none of them reached the scale of the Nat Turner uprising.
John Brown had already fought against pro-slavery forces in Kansas for several years when he decided to lead a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (West Virginia was not yet a state). This raid was a joint attack by former slaves, freed blacks, and white men who had corresponded with slaves on plantations in order to form a general uprising amongst slaves. It almost succeeded, had it not been for Brown’s delay, and hundreds of slaves left their plantations to join Brown’s force - and others left their plantations to join Brown in an escape to the mountains. Eventually, due to a tactical error by Brown, their force was quelled. But directly following this, slave disobedience and runaways sky-rocketed in Virginia.[11]
Part of a series of articles on…
“8 — Anonymous wrote at 7:06 AM on December 20:
Slavery was wrong and should never have been allowed to spread
As wrong as slavery was, not returning blacks to Africa was even worse, which is more than obvious today. They have not been able to compete in a first world nation, and, because of it, they have been the source of crime, murder and mayhem, to say nothing of the strain they have placed on our society by having to care for them and soothe their many complaints like children.
In Africa, they could have had a chance of building a society on their level, if we had assured that they were aided and funded adequately. If they failed after that, as most nations are now doing in Africa, it would be solely on their own shoulders.
I hope that the organizers of our upcoming conference will allow Mr. Bodeker extra time to tell us about this latest appearance of his. Also, I hope Mr. Bodeker has some sort of security at that college; he’s walking into a hornet’s nest and the violent tendencies of both blacks and leftists are well known. I’d be surprised if he’s not assaulted or at least shouted down and heckled.
Should have sent all the blacks to Liberia as Lincoln wanted to do as they would be racially welcome among their own race and maybe create their own homeland. We would not have this problem with them demanding this and yelling racist that, every 5 minutes as it is now. We could have saved at least a TRILLION dollars and probably 10 times that amount or more, cut way down on crime (at least 70% of it), welfare, education/medical costs, cleaning up their ghettos just to build even more, and the list goes on and on.
Blacks probably never revolted because blacks very likely never knew what freedom was. Slavery was always an accepted part of African culture.
There is a new movie coming out called “The Liberator” slated for 2010 about Arminius and the battle of Teutoberg Forest at
Anonymous 8:
Good post. There were indeed a fair number of slave rebellions throughout the south from our founding days to well into the 19th Century.
Though the number of such attempted revolts was relatively small, as was the number of slaves involved in active revolt, they were sufficient to keep southern planters in a state of some anxiety and always on the lookout for northern agitators trying to stir up black insurrection.
Obviously, the circumstances of the slaves, whatever they thought of their condition, made it extremely difficult for them to revolt successfully. They found themselves thousands of miles from their native continent, and even if they managed to escape from their local plantation, they were instantly identifiable as runaways, unless they held the papers of freedmen, which of course they would not. In addition, the only source of security they knew, however badly they were treated, was their home plantation.
All in all, it was a hand not many of us would want to play.
At the risk of seeming insensitive to the policy initiatives of one segment of the white activist movement, why would any of the diverse white American peoples engage in a discussion of race or racism? Our opponents are deeply studied in this subject, they agree whole-heartedly in the existence of race, and they discuss race with a profoundly emotional and child-like style.
Deniers of the reality of race do not attend Fayetteville State University. Whom will this panel discussion persuade or dissuade?
Why not conversations about white aspirations & needs?
I boldly predict Mr. Bodeker will be shouted down and need an escort out of the building.
Herman wrote at 11:50 AM
I completely agree.
Im not one to try and be a naysayer or insinuate we shouldn’t debate with the opposition, however this is quite obviously a fluke.
They want him at a predominantly black college to do this at?
Now what would be the point? Dont tell me we’re foolish enough to believe any progress will be made. Hes entering a campus over run by blacks. Being shouted down at is guaranteed, its the possible violence im fretting. I do not foresee any conclusion where both parties leave satisfied.
I suggest he be allowed to film it as one precondition of his appearance. Then and there he can ask his famous question, “what is racism?”
Poster #8, so eager to assert that 250 slave revolts occurred, might do better than cite the communist Herbert Aptheker as his source. However, this troll goes on to say that Aptheker’s thrust was to emphasize the exploitation of slaves, a logical extenuation of the general communist argument that evil capitalists exploit the working class the world over. Did Aptheker go on to acknowledge the superior life that American blacks enjoy today because their ancestors got onto those boats to America? Does the troll in question acknowledge this?
Dear Craig Bodker,
During the struggle for racial integrity in the South, segregationists would pay for bus tickets to send indigent afro americans up north and have them dropped of at the homes of integretationist northern politicians.
For your next documentary, considering identifying those media elites who most complain about too many whites gathering at Tea Parties or Palin rallies, i.e. Chris Matthews and his ilk, Maureen Dowd, etc.
Take a busload of inner city “troubled but promising” afro american to their homes, give each hip hop natural a poster reading “confess your unearned white privilege to me”, drop them off about suppertime, and let the cameras roll.
Help these white liberals get to know those of the other tribe whom they love more than their own tribe.
Rosy Fulbloom
Yes, there were slave rebellions but they were generally small localized affairs. When you consider that there were millions of black slaves, the number of revolts were proportionally very small. I don’t recall any revolt involving thousands of slaves. Was slavery wrong—of course it was. Would slavery have been abolished without the Civil War? It was abolished in every other Western Country without bloodshed.
jewamongyou wrote at 1:29 PM on December 20: I hope Mr. Bodeker has some sort of security at that college; he’s walking into a hornet’s nest and the violent tendencies of both blacks and leftists are well known. I’d be surprised if he’s not assaulted or at least shouted down and heckled.
Not necessarily. Jared Taylor once wrote that he expected that kind of reaction when he spoke to his first largely black audience, and was surprised to find them quite receptive. The reason was that it was so rare for them to hear a white man actually speak honestly about race that they found it quite fascinating. A lot depends on the buildup Mr. Bodeker gets and how fairly he is treated by the event organizers. However, I believe Mr. Taylor spoke to a black audience at a white college, not to black audience at a “historically black college.”
