Movies
Confederate America
By Esther Iverem - SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic
Apr 9, 2006, 08:56

While reviewing films, I find myself unconsciously searching for the next gem, some production, polished or in the rough, which proves that this process of making new “Black” films is still advancing and is not stuck in the mire of “Soul Plane” foolishness or “Hustle and Flow” White imagination.

I am thankful to report that the new movie, “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America,” is such a gem. Written and directed by Kevin Wilmott in conjunction with Spike Lee, “C.S.A.” asks us to consider what the United States would be had the South won the Civil War.

It unfolds in the form of a faux BBC documentary, which is, in turns, ticklishly funny, sobering and surprising in the way that it meshes fiction and fact, absurdity and reality, the horrific with the hilarious. Perhaps it might be considered a meditation on the comedic mind of Lee, who thinks Black movie-goers prefer to laugh too much, rather than to think too much. “CSA” allows the thinking movie-goer, Black or White, to laugh at America’s chief mental illness: its obsession with race.

Organized around the obligatory talking head narrator and history experts, the faux doc begins with the Civil War and winds its way to the present. When the North loses the Civil War, we see General Ulysses S. Grant surrender to General Robert E. Lee. Then, over the course of the following years, the North is annexed by the South and Northerners are convinced of the advantages of adopting the Southern “way of life,” which means the re-introduction of slavery to the North (and the exodus to Canada of many abolitionists and other people of conscience).

In this changed world order, poor President Abraham Lincoln is considered to be an enemy of the state and, in one of the more wickedly funny sequences in the film, winds up donning blackface and following Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad in an attempt to flee to Canada. Years later, he is interviewed as an old man who wishes that he had “really cared for the Negro” rather than just use Black soldiers to try and win the war.

Advertising sponsors for this documentary, which is warned to be possibly unacceptable for “children and servants,” include all manner of products and consumer services. Some, such as “Coon Chicken” and “Darky Toothpaste” feature caricatures of a big-lipped, smiling sambo as a mascot. Other products, such as the high-tech wrist band that keeps a slave from running away, don’t need such stereotypes to be potent symbols and accessories of White supremacy. The government public service announcement for the Office of Questionable Racial Identity takes the cake.

As the narrative winds its way through the 20th Century, more than the history of African Americans is impacted. An American slave state is sympathetic to Adolph Hitler (and winds up creating a reservation for Jews on Long Island). The C.S.A. also has the ultimate goal of conquering and annexing all of the dark people of Central and South America, creating an entire hemisphere of plantations with White masters. Finally, in a country so sick with race, a White son of the South who runs for president must defend himself against charges that, thanks to the liaison between one of his ancestors and a Black woman, that he has Black blood, or “jungle blood” running in his veins.

There are strong hints here about the ease with which such twisted fundamentalism morphs into fascism, especially with underpinnings as religion to substantiate itself. In this gem of moviemaking, Wilmott proves that truth, indeed, is often stranger than fiction.


Information about screenings for “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” is available at http://www.csathemovie.com/
Esther Iverem’s book of poems, Living in Babylon, is available through this site at www.Amazon.com.


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