Author: Eliza Cullen

Earlier this year I read Benito Cereno, a story write by Herman Melville. It is based off a true story about Captain Delano, a ship captain from Massachusetts that see a boat floating off in the distance and sees if it needs help. It was a slave ship. When he gets on the ship, he learns that they had no food or water and they had been stuck out at sea after getting caught in a storm and lots of their crew died. There are some things that surprise him when he is observing the ship. The first is that the slaves on the ship walk around with no chains or anything and are free to basically do what they want. He found this to be weird but he rationalized it by thinking that the captain of this ship was just easy on his slaves. Another thing that Captain Delano was strange about the boat was that the slave Baba was so close to the captain of the ship all the time.  He found it weird that Babo would never leave the captains side, even when Captain Delano was making it clear that he wanted to speak to the other captain privately. He took this as Babo just being a loyal and attentive servant. In the end of the story though, it is revealed that the slaves had overpowered the slave traders and taken control of the ship.

In the story Captain Delano is a good example of Northern racism at the time. Although he doesn’t have slaves, he definitely doesn’t think that enslaved people were the same a white people. There are many things that looking back at in the book should make it clear to Captain Delano that the slaves had taken over the ship. Because of his internalized racism though, he is not able to to conceive of the idea that the slaves were capable of taking over the ship. He knows that something weird is going on but doesn’t know what it is. He even thinks for a bit that the people on the ship are pirates but after he learns that they slaves had taken over ship he is more scared of that idea then he was when he thought they were pirates. There as a few different ways that the book Benito Cereno could be interpreted and there are counts details that add to the books interesting commentary on slavery and racism.

With playoff hockey season in full affect, I started supporting my home team and watching some of the Bruins games again. It would be hard not to notice the lack of diversity in the NHL. There is very little diversity in both the fans of the sport, and the players. The first black hockey player in the NHL was Willie O’Ree, a Canadian that joined the Boston Bruins in 1958. That is almost 10 years after Jackie Robinson joined the MLB. Out of the over 700 roaster spots in the NHL in 2018, only around 30 were filled by players of African descent making it around 4 percent. If we were just talking about African Americans, the number would be less than 1 percent. There are a lot of different theories on why hockey lacks diversity. While it is true that many players in the NHL come from northern European countries like Finland, Sweden, and Russia, 26 percent are American and 45 percent are Canada. Some say that part of it is regional. The places with the biggest emphasis on hockey in America is the north, states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. These states tend to have less black people living there in general. Other people think that there just isn’t a strong enough black culture in hockey yet. Black children don’t see people that look like them playing hokey so they don’t play hockey and then the same thing will happen to the next generation.
Right now P.K. Subban is the best and most famous black hockey player. He is a Canadian who signed a 72 million dollar 8 year deal with Montreal in 2014 but is now playing for the Nashville predators. He has played 9 seasons of major league hockey so far, has over 400 points as a defender, and played in the NHL all star game in 2016, 2017 and 2018. He has been vocal about not having many black hockey players to look up to when he was a kid and wanting to make sure that he is a good role. He says that he wants to show kids, especially black kids, that they can play whatever sport they want, regardless of race.

Jordan Peele is changing the way we think of horror movies. The first movie that he directed, Get Out, had a budget of 4.5 million dollars and has made over 255 million in the box office. Get Out is the story of a black man going to meet his girlfriend’s white family for the first time. The movie shines a light on the subtle racism that happens all the time when white people are trying to show that they are not racist. The movie had great reviews, won an academy award for best original screenplay and was one of the first mainstream horror movies that stared a black protagonist.
Jordan Peele has recently come out with a new horror movie titled Us. This movie is about a Black family that is on vacation. Us made a shocking 70 million dollars in the box office in its opening weekend. That’s the most money that an original horror film has ever made on opening weekend. The movie watchers of the world showed Jordan Peele and the entertainment industry as a whole that there is a huge market for horror movies with black people staring in them, not just being extras that die in the first seen. Jordan Peele has directed two of the most successful horror films ever and it doesn’t seem like he is slowing down any time soon. In an interview asking him if he is going to stop casting black people as the leads in his movies his response was “I don’t see myself casting a white dude as the lead in my movie. Not that I don’t like white dudes—but I’ve seen that movie.”

A few summers ago, I read a book titled Just Mercy, written by a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson. The New York Times best seller tells of Bryan Stevenson’s work representing people that been victims of an unjust, justice system. The book shows the grueling task that Stevenson, the young, black, Harvard Law graduate had to go through to insure that his clients have a fair trial in the South. The book tells the stories of several different of his client ranging from people that are mentally ill, to abused children that were sentenced to life in jail for their crimes.

The person that the book focuses on, is a black man named Walter McMillian who was on death row for the murder of a young white women in Alabama that was killed in an armed robbery at a gas station. The only evidence that the prosecution had against him was a statement from a man that was also in jail awaiting his trial where it was likely that he would face the death penalty too. After he agreed to testify that it was McMillian that killed the women the system cut a deal with him that gave him 30 years plus parole instead of being executed because of his testimony against McMillian. After the trial, in an interview with 60 minutes, the man said that the story he told under oath was completely untrue and that an Alabama Bureau of Investigations agent pressured him to go along with their story to escape getting the death penalty himself.

On top of there being no evidence that he did this, there was lots of evidence that he truly did not kill that women and that he was nowhere near where it had happened. He was arrested 7 months after the murder. There were over 12 people that gave statements saying they were with McMillian all day at a church fish fry.  McMillian says that he has never even been to the town that the murder happened. Bryan Stevenson says that the reason that McMillan was accused of this was because he was having an affair with a white woman which was brought up many times during his trial. The trial only lasted a day and a half. It had a jury with 11 white people and one black man and after the jury sentenced him to life in prison, the Judge overruled it and gave him the death penalty. Bryan Stevenson took McMillian as a client after he was already on the death row and after appeal after appeal, all charges were dismissed because of lack of evidence and McMillian was a free man after 6 long years on death row. It was 1993 when McMillian was freed. One of the things that has grabbed the attention of people in this story was that if the judges didn’t overrule the jury’s life in prison sentence and make it the death penalty, the case would not have got the attention of Bryan Stevenson and McMillan would likely never been freed.

Last week, I went to a talk by Professor Shakes, titled African Futures/ American Legacies: an Africana Perspective on Marvel’s Black Panther and Luke Cage. One of the things that stood out to me during the talk was when she spoke about the differences between the protagonist T’Challa and the antagonist Killmonger.  Throughout the movie, T’Challa is a king with diplomatic responsibilities and gives the political perspectives on what they should be doing and how to run Wakanda. On the other hand, Killmonger is giving the more aggressive military perspective on how they should be handling the world from Wakandas point of view. Killmonger and T’Challa have very different ideas on how Wakanda should be run an that is one of the main sources of conflict in the movie.

Throughout the movie, the audience sees that Killmonger wants to start a race war and wants Wakanda to provide the weapons for the war. Professor Shakes talked about how a lot of people were upset that we did not get to see any part of the race war because the plan was never successful in the movie. In a lot of other Marvel movies, the villains plans start to succeed before the hero comes in and saves the day but it Black Panther, we didn’t see any of the race war. Professor Shakes was saying that Marvel has to be aware of their audience. It would be too  intense and political for them to put a race war in a superhero movie. Even though many people would love to see it, there are also many people that would be upset by seeing it. I think that it was a tough call whether or not Marvel should have included a brief scene of a race war. It definitely would upset some people but sometimes it is okay to upset people and push the boundaries in movies like Black Panther.