I was in grade school when the television show Roots, based on Alex Haley’s famous book, first aired. It was a big deal, at least among adults, and my parents insisted that my sister and I watch it. We dutifully sat down in the front the walnut-veneered TV cabinet as my father adjusted the rabbit ear antennas to get a good signal. For an eight-year-old, Roots was disorienting, often boring, and occasionally very disturbing. The images of LeVar Burton’s Kunta Kinte enduring the brutal Middle Passage and of the slavers throwing the sick Africans overboard are still with me today. Sitting in an air-conditioned living room in a California track house, I didn’t quite grasp what it had to do with me. This all happened a long time ago, I thought. It seemed like another one of the period costume dramas that my mother watched on PBS, but with many more examples of vicious behavior, a lot more black people, and much better production values. I identified with the black slaves as the protagonists of the story, but I felt little connection with any of the people depicted. The landscapes, accents, clothing, and architecture were all unfamiliar. Most of the white people were inexplicably cruel and heartless. The black people were as unlike me and my family as the slaves in Spartacus (and I kept waiting for what I naively assumed would be the inevitable slave uprising that would provide the story with its cathartic ending). When I went to school, where I was one of three or four other black students, some of the kids started calling me Kunta Kinte. I was annoyed but brushed it off, until I was cornered by a group of older white kids. Kunta Kinte! Kunta Kinte! Go back to Africa where you belong! I ran away, cursing the bullies — and silently cursing Alex Haley for writing that damn book. When I told my father, he offered the advice that was typical of his generation: “They’ll never leave you alone if they think you’re scared of them.” He had taken me and my sister to karate lessons, seemingly in preparation for just such a problem. The next day, when the same kids cornered me, I picked the smallest of them and tried to do as much damage as I could. I still got the worst of it, of course, but the one unlucky kid I targeted left the scene with his face bloodied and his wrist sprained. In the principal’s office I said that I didn’t start the fight, and I promised to stay away from the other boys. But if they hassled me again, I added, I would make sure that at least one of them left bloody every single time and I didn’t care what happened to me in the process. They stopped calling me Kunta Kinte and started whispering behind my back. It would have to do. Those grade school bullies showed me exactly what I had in common with the characters in Roots. A straight and unbroken line connected me to my despised and exploited ancestors who had made the brutal Middle Passage from Africa. Or at least that’s how it felt at the time. 
Before Roots, the archetypical slavery story was probably Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. Indeed, Roots was a late-twentieth-century century answer to Up from Slavery: more radical in its politics, more ambitious in its scope, more scholarly in its historical research, more dramatic and novelistic in style. For me, and I expect for many other Americans of a certain age, Roots is still the archetypical representation of slavery. Although there have been many others since, Haley’s account established the genre. Ever since, all decent slavery narratives have shared some common elements. Most obviously, a respectable slavery narrative must unflinchingly depict the horrors and cruelties of slavery: the unspeakably hellish passage across the ocean, the dehumanizing slave auctions, the grueling, thankless, and unremunerated toil, the capricious rule of the master, the separation of mothers from their children, the whippings, the rapes, the lynchings. It must also establish the experience of slavery as the foundation of the black experience. A slavery narrative cannot simply be the story of an individual; it must carry the symbolic weight of slavery for black people as a group. Either overtly or indirectly, it must depict slavery as a sort of pedigree, a shared ancestral experience that joins black people to each other. Quentin Tarrantino’s film Django Unchained is not a respectable slavery narrative, but it is instructive because it successfully treats the slavery narrative as a stylized genre. It is a cross between a slavery narrative and a spaghetti Western. The film operates, as many Tarrantino films do, by quoting familiar elements of a well-established genre and slyly but convincingly tweaking or inverting them. Django Unchained, in what has become a signature Tarrantino flourish, offers a cathartic alternative to the classic archetype, wherein the downtrodden gets even with the oppressor in a highly stylized orgy of righteous violent retribution. It does for the slavery narrative what Inglorious Bastards (wherein a team of Jewish-American military officers outwit and fight Nazi soldiers in occupied France) does for the Holocaust narrative and what Kill Bill (in which a woman gets bloody revenge on a host of sexually predatory and exploitative men, the worst of whom had killed her bridegroom and her unborn child on her wedding day) does for the story of the sexually victimized woman. Django suffers all the classic injuries of enslavement: grueling toil, routine humiliation, regular beatings. His wife is raped by a sadistic plantation owner. Instead of staging an unsuccessful rebellion or making an unsatisfying escape as would be historically plausible, Django becomes an expert gunslinger and returns to slaughter every white person on the plantation before he rescues his wife and burns the plantation house to the ground, while the stereotypical “House Negro” looks on in horror. Django Unchained makes sense as a film only because
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