The Happy to be a Slave Slaves

Rating: 7/10 (13 January 2013)

This was a great movie from an action standpoint and Mel Gibsons performance was outstanding, however in the movie the main character was a slave holder or in the very least a and I can't say I would view an active slaveholder as a true Patriot. Unless the African American characters in this movie were freed Americans being paid good salaries to be house servants and field hands, which I doubt highly, this character was not a patriot of freedom but rather a patriot of the freedom to enslave and oppress others.
Whoever wrote this movie must have anticipated some criticism about how the African Americans would be portrayed because in one part the British soldiers offered the slave freedom and the African American replied that they are not slaves but they are freedmen "happily working the white mans property" and happily helping him with no concern for themselves. To me that part was the single biggest insult to my intelligence as an African American because we at no time in history were happily working any white mans property without some level of resentment which this movie fail to portray.
The movie patronizes and pacifies the African American community by portraying happy slaves and the typical token black "saving the white man to prove your worth" scenarios as their token attempt to include blacks but only in the contexts of yet still another form of servitude of having to save a white person in order to prove our worth. Frankly, I'm tired of the idea that we as African Americans are only worthy if we save and serve white people instead of each other. The movie basically treats African Americans as passive props in the fight for independence when modern history tells us that there were more than one black man fighting for freedom and slaves were far more involved than the happy passive clueless slaves and sharecropers that this movie portrays us as. I for one wish that the British had won the war because independence day for American was a death sentence for millions of my ancestors. The British owned slaves to as we know but I believe that the American form of slavery was much more harsh and inhumane. I'm a U.S. Veteran now but had I been alive then I would have fought for the British as they had provided freedom to slaves that fought. I would have preferred the uncertain future rather than fight on the side of a Hypocrisy/Democracy. As a person who has experienced racism I would most definitely have fought for the British. The movies shows a few blacks being shot by the British and leaves out the fact that the British freed many blacks for their service I guess in order to make it seem as if blacks and whites were fighting for the same things which we were not. Americans were for their rights for racial superiority and freedom for themselves to exclude, enslave and create a permanent underclass of blacks.
I'm sorry I was by no means impressed with the token black man character (not the actor himself) earning his worth by saving a white man. I do get the point of the white man that was racist being saved by a black man and then is attitude changes but I'm tired of us being brainwashed to save white people all the time