Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 1099	4 November 2016

Black Filmmaker Under Fire

Down With Witchhunt Against Nate Parker!

Before the much-anticipated Nat Turner biopic The Birth of a Nation even hit the theaters, Nate Parker, the writer, director and star of the film, became engulfed in a racist witchhunt. Parker and the film’s co-writer Jean Celestin have been pilloried as “rapists” over sexual assault charges leveled against them 17 years ago when they were students at Penn State University. The media frenzy led to boycotts of the film and a chorus of denunciations by many feminists and black commentators. The public condemnation of Nate Parker has been conveniently timed to contain the potential impact of a story where black slaves are depicted not as mere victims, but in violent rebellion.

After a trial in 2001, Parker was found not guilty of raping a white fellow college student by a nearly all-white jury in a conservative Pennsylvania county. Celestin received a guilty conviction that was later overturned on the basis of ineffective legal representation. This is hardly insignificant in a country where accusations of rape have long been used as the pretext for barbaric lynchings of black men or to railroad them to prison—from the Scottsboro Boys to the Central Park Five. Parker is just one of many black men accused of rape who have been deemed guilty not only before a conviction, but even after an acquittal.

The firestorm of controversy over Nate Parker partakes of centuries of engrained hysteria about black male sexuality and the supposed purity of white womanhood. A statement of support by four of Parker’s former Penn State classmates notes the “violently hostile racial climate” at the university during the time. Believing Parker and Celestin were wrongfully accused, they point to the “gross and blatant mis-information campaign” around the case, adding that “the media has cherry picked the most salacious elements while ignoring the actual record.”

The incident moreover took place at the height of the 1990s “date rape” scare which, far from combating the brutal reality of violence against women, whipped up anti-sex panic and strengthened the powers of the cops and the university administration. Since then, the campus morality police have increasingly sought to redefine the drinking and screwing that young people have always engaged in as rape. We do not claim to know what happened on the night in question, nor can those dragging Parker through the mud. Ambiguities about consent do and must occur, particularly when the people know each other. But the assumption that any woman under the influence cannot possibly consent to sex is both demeaning and dangerous to women. Rape is a heinous crime of degradation and terror; it should not be equated to any experience of unpleasant or drunken sex.

Two months before the film’s release, the media mob latched on to the 2012 suicide of the alleged victim in order to vilify Parker for not taking enough responsibility or expressing the right amount of remorse—for an offense that he has steadfastly maintained his innocence of! In a smear piece in the New York Times (19 August), black feminist professor Roxane Gay stated she would refuse to see the movie because she could not “separate the art from the artist.” She lambasted Parker for his “inadequate act of contrition,” a branding reminiscent of Puritan punishment. Those deemed to be “sex offenders” today face a similar fate—a lifetime of humiliation and repression.

The reviews of The Birth of a Nation have overwhelmingly been dominated by the dredged-up rape allegations, burying the movie’s depiction of the brutal history of chattel slavery. In a statement to the New York Times, some family members of Parker’s accuser noted, “We are dubious of the underlying motivations that bring this to present light after 17 years, and we will not take part in stoking its coals.” The witchhunt against Parker feeds into the misogyny, anti-sex hysteria and insidious racism that have long been used as a means of social control and a weapon against the oppressed in capitalist America.