Usual White supremacist nonsense about how abolishing racial slavery was an act of godliness, yet which never explains why the institution - and the racism supporting it - was established in the first place.
An incomplete history that leaves White culture unexamined, as if racial slavery were somehow a foreign imposition or disease that simply had to be cured, rather than an endemic part of the culture that helped fund the Industrial Revolution and the British Empire.
Inevitably, those who benefit from White supremacy today (Whites) are hardly likely to fully investigate the basis of their culture nor the present-day benefits that accrue to them from such supremacy (Institutional Racism).
The lowest estimates for the number of slaves forcibly migrated to the Americas are used in a vain attempt to minimize the scale of the Black Holocaust. As if this somehow minimizes guilt - guilt being seen as somehow a quantity rather than a quality. This is similar to Holocaust deniers disputing that six millions Jews were murdered.
The claim is made that racial slavery was accepted by most people as if even the slaves thought the same. But then White films like this never consider the victims as truly human - only the victimizers - the latter of whom are seen as misguided rather than volitionally evil. Compare this with the treatment of the Jewish holocaust, where the victimizers are always seen as willfully bad.
Whites here see Blacks as essentially passive; hence, the fact that slave rebellions are barely mentioned nor actively supported. Whites see Whites who speak out against slavery as brave, but not the Blacks who risk their lives to fight it. The present-day legacy of slavery (White supremacy) is still with us and is likely to remain so since old habits die hard - as movies like this attest.
There is no consideration of the short-lived economic benefits of racial slavery and that its abolition was a long-term economic advantage to Whites, since it rendered Whites more employable. Beforehand Whites experienced more unemployment because slaves do not need to be paid and are thus, in the long run, cheaper. There is also no mention of the economic fact that Prime Minister Pitt wanted slavery abolished because it was becoming less economically beneficial to the British Empire and because it would hurt the French Empire, whose slave colonies were far more productive. With Whites, the only constancy is hypocrisy.
There is no talk of why supposedly-loving Christians approved of such an unloving trade.
There is little recognition of the fact that Whites treat the White poor as little better than slaves. Wilberforce himself was a member of a secret committee investigating and repressing lower-class discontent in 1817; while opposing feminine anti-slavery associations; making this movie something of a hagiography, to say the least.
Whites discussing human rights is always nothing more than a parlor game in which human suffering is viewed only in the abstract - as here. The schadenfreude is self-evident and suggests racial slavery and abolitionism are two sides of the same coin. The brutality of slavery is simply a recognition of its economic fragility as a practice since it requires the use of expensive force to maintain it.
There is no consideration of the fact that any majoritarian democratic system will always legalize evil so long as a majority supports it; resulting in the moral compromise of gradual abolition in order to avoid slave as well as slave-master revolt - even though revolution is the only way to avoid such ethical compromise.
There is no consideration of the fact that the racism justifying slavery was not being abolished since it was also used to justify the British Empire. After so-called Emancipation in 1833, slaves could not own land nor vote, so the word Emancipation is clearly a misnomer.
Unsurprisingly, the film makes no comparison between the White Abolitionist horror of racial slavery with their fear of Blacks as people. The former is celebrated while the latter is resolutely ignored.
A perfect example of the narcissism pervading all White anti-racism; perfectly mirroring the self-regard of the White supremacist. Impossible to imagine any White more committed to the abolition of racial slavery than a Black yet, again, Blacks feature here mostly as passive victims - as if Whites believe the sufferings of Whites to abolish slavery were in any way comparable to the sufferings of slaves. As if Helen Suzman were the architect of the fall of Apartheid and not Nelson Mandela. As if the execution of Colonel Von Stauffenberg was somehow more important than the deaths of six millions Jews.
Somehow Whites believe only they can change the world for the better - saviors made in their own image - in a world they have made bad by their own actions; eg, Apartheid, Jim Crow, the Third Reich, the British Empire, etc. The mental conflict inside Whites as to the inconsistency between thought, word and deed on show here reveals a love of unearned privilege at permanent war with feelings of guilt and shame. As eerie a critique of White supremacy as one could possibly imagine; that ends up supporting it by supporting the abolition of racial slavery but not the racist British Empire: Abolishing the effect but not the cause.
As weak a critique of racial slavery as the film Amistad despite the exceptional quality of the acting talent and the high technical quality of the production
A film about John Newton (the composer of the eponymous song) would have made for a far more satisfying work, but that would have confronted a White audience with a crisis of conscience, regarding Negrophobia being the basis of their culture, that they still grapple with today. But this film evades all of this by pretending racial slavery has nothing to do with racism; thereby avoiding White blushes. Whites today still clearly have their moral priorities reversed and their ethical compass pointing in the wrong direction. A movie as White supremacist as the historical figures it denounces.
