12 years a slave representation of people of color

The USA has a well know history of slavery; especially the whites are enslaving the black Americans. As one of its purposes, literature affects the stereotypes, mentalities, and ideologies of the audience and society at large; the movie as part of literature has played an important role of bringing out the aspects of slavery that were experienced then and therefore has great impact on the stereotypes and identity when it comes to people of color in the USA. The audience, in this case, is the contemporary individuals, especially youths, who are obviously interested in knowing the very tiny details of whatever led to the racist stereotypes that are greatly affecting the USA even to date. This document is an editorial presenting a review of the movie’s representation of the people of color and an explanation of how the representations affect identity and stereotypes.

Word count: 204 12 years a slave The movie begins with a free black man (Solomon) being kidnapped and eventually sold to a rich white man owning Louisiana plantation; this finds even him by surprise because he is a “free man” as he claims, yet he is captured and enslaved. The discrimination in schools, for instance, is real. The big question would be how the teenagers do adopt such mentalities; I am tempted to guess that most white parents in the present society are sober enough to have realized that discriminating the blacks does not make sense, and so I would not put much blame on them as pertains to influencing their children concerning racism and other related stereotypes. Just a point to note, I mentioned most parents; not all.

Some of the contributors to racism and other related stereotypes are such literature as this movie “12 years a slave” as well as peer pressure, which still traces its way to such literature (Nelson, 2009); they feed such ideas as racial discrimination into the teenagers’ minds. Additionally, the movie tends to give all the reasons as to why the blacks used to be enslaved and discriminated by the whites, justifying racial discrimination. Are they true? Well, they are just stereotypes assumed to be true. It is true that “12 years a slave” as literature, has a great effect on such stereotypes. One might have heard of such assumptions, and probably even tempted to believe them. This movie shows a contrary scenario; that not all whites are racist, and even that not all blacks are intellectually poor and incapable.