Twelve years a slave provide a riveting cinematic view of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s.  The film opens with a shot of a violin bow dancing on strings.  An accomplished musician and free man, Solomon Northrup plays the fiddle at a dance in his hometown of Saratoga Springs, NY.  After Northrup is kidnapped and jailed, the camera moves from the basement dungeon where he is shackled and beaten, to the outside and bottom of that building to slowly reveal a broad panoramic view of 1841 Washington, DC.  Northrup is taken on a riverboat to a New Orleans slave market, again the camera pauses to allow the audience to peer up at the rear paddle wheel whirring through Mississippi waters.  Scenes of beatings and whippings are shot with long lingering views to look up at the slave victimized with a sadistic brutality.  The perspective of the film is Northrup’s as he lives a dozen years of horror in the hell of slavery.  As a white person, I watched; horrified, scandalized and convicted as one who lives in a racist nation and benefits today from institutional racism.  Lord, have mercy!

The view of the film is Jesus’ view.  The power that Jesus offers always sees humanity from the underside.  We often picture God looking down on us from heaven.  But Jesus, a human who suffered violence in the hands of those in power, was one who looked up at the most downtrodden.  He saw the blind and lame, the lepers and demoniacs, the widows and orphans, the ones in his time who were invisible to the powers that be.  In his crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus suffered with the oppressed knowing that divine love triumphs over suffering and resurrection defeats death.  Jesus himself was beaten and brutalized.  Crucifixion was a first century Roman kind of lynching, even down to the hate-filled mob screaming with blood-lust.

American slavery institutionalized a sick social system condoning rape, incest and abuse (physical, sexual and emotional abuse).  American slavery institutionalized a power imbalance based on the social construct of racial difference.  We could not be further from the kingdom of God than in the institution of slavery.  Our prison system today has echoes of slavery providing a similar kind of hell for too many men of color who suffer daily violence within its walls.

Lord, have mercy.  If we claim Jesus as Lord, we must work for racial justice; we are compelled to dismantle our contemporary institution of racism.  May those of us who are white, open our eyes to see the way we benefit from white privilege and power.  May those of us who are white begin by expanding our circles of friends and colleagues to include more neighbors of other racial and ethnic groups to realize the multi-cultural world which is the kingdom of God.