12 Years of Racism, Cruelty, and Ethnographic Voyeurism

In the frankly disturbing yet almost necessary movie, 12 Years A Slave, Solomon Northup, a free African American man gets kidnapped and sold in the slave trade despite him sharing that he is indeed free. Once he gets to the plantation, he is met with extremely cruel treatment from his slave owner, Edwin Epps. However, his cruel treatment is overshadowed by the violence and assault that the woman on the plantation Patsey experiences. At the end of the movie, Solomon Northup makes a deal with Samuel Bass, a white man who opposes slavery, to make a deal with a slave trader to set him free. Once he does so he is able to go home to his family, leaving Patsey and the other slaves behind. However, the issues that this movie brings up is extremely relevant to not only the slave empire, but still present in a different manner in today’s society.

Solomon Northup’s story firstly relates to Coates’ account on the harsh realities of the slave trade. The white brutality, the loss of hope, and the theme of surviving but not living both shows itself prominently in both the movie and Coates’ excerpt. Solomon Northup’s account talks about how awfully the enslaved people were treated when they are forced to be on a plantation. Many of them were brutally beaten for no reason, Northup was almost once stabbed by his drunken slave owner, and food was so scarce, and disgusting, that Solomon did not know which was better, to starve to death, or to eat. All of this has been placed upon African people by whites. This relates to some of the themes that we are discussing in Humanities Core such as racism and racecraft. Essentially, the white person, in this case the white slave owner placed this idea of race, and assumption of “biological differences” on the black person. Similar to what we learned in class, race is not biological. Yet a part of what this movie deals with is that there are inherent differences between the black and white body, and that this inherent biological difference places black people below them. There are many scenes where the white slave owner essentially uses Solomon Northup as a pathway to release his anger and frustration on, or to blow off some steam after a fight with his wife. In this way, Epps, Solomon’s slave owner, is assuming that Northup is more like a punching bag rather than a person, which support Dr. Block’s idea of a white people inferring that there is a biological difference, when race really has nothing to do with biology.

Furthermore, the treatment of women in this movie definitely relates to Dr. Block’s lecture on the Gender Frontier, as this idea of ethnographic voyeurism can be related to the way many slave owners saw the slaves who worked for them, particularly the women slaves. This is demonstrated through the lens in which Edwin Epps interpreted Patsey played by Lupita Nyong’o. He gives her somewhat revealing clothing to wear, and rapes her constantly. The first time when she tried to protest, he beats her, and the next few times when she was to weak and limp to protest, he took that as a sign of him being welcome to assault her. In this view, the European colonizer is looking at the woman and placing these identities and assumptions on her from his own lens. He sees her from his perspective without any consideration of her beliefs and what she wants. Furthermore, this idea of savagery vs. civilization is seen in the treatment and beliefs of the slave owner. He sees himself as apart of this group of “civilized” people, and apart of why he took advantage of Patsey was because he saw her as apart of this “savage” world that needed to be civilized, when in reality this was not needed at all.

In many ways, the idea of ethnographic voyeurism can be adapted to today as well. In my own life, there have been many times where ethnographic voyeurism has been used against me and my culture as well. Growing up, whenever people would pass judgements on me in relation to my culture, it would more often than not be about things such as how we “worship statues” or how in world history, we would be taught that Indian people “wore a red dot on their forehead”, without understanding the cultural sensitivity and understanding the perspective of my own people. While the severity of how Edwin Epps interpreted what Patsey wanted is exponentially larger, this concept is still there. This movie, and the experiences these individual characters remind us that nobody else can be in our shoes understanding our own struggles, white cruelty left so many people at the time so hopeless. But the implications of this kind of hierarchy has led to ideas such as ethnographic voyeurism, and has caused many people to be blind to the harshness of people’s realities.