Viola Davis Says 'The Woman King' Offered 'Ownership, Agency' (Woke HollyWood)

[Valin]

VOA

Sep. 22 2022

Viola Davis served as both an actor and producer on a new historical film called The Woman King. She says the Sony Pictures’ movie – which tells the story of heroic Black women – was unlike any other project she has worked on.

The movie was first shown at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month. It is based on the true story of the Agojie, a real-life group of female warriors. The group protected the African Kingdom of Dahomey in the 1800s.

Academy Award winner Davis told Reuters, “What felt different was ownership, agency, controlling my voice.” The actor plays a general who trains the next generation of fighters.

Davis added, “It's our story. There is no white savior in the movie. There's none. We save ourselves.”

(Snip)

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Absolute Total 100% USDA Grade BS.

Reality Alert

Did the Kingdom of Dahomey participate in slavery and slave trading?[

In answering the question, "How accurate is The Woman King?" we learned that in real life, the Dahomey are much more the villains than the heroes. The Kingdom of Dahomey was a bloodthirsty society bent on conquest. It was customary for the Dahomey to return home with the rotting heads and genitals of those they killed in battle. They conquered neighboring African states and took their citizens as slaves, selling many in the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for items like rifles, tobacco, and alcohol. Many of the slaves they sold ended up in America. They also kept some slaves for themselves to work on royal plantations. The business of slavery is what brought Dahomey most of its wealth. For them, it very much came down to either enslave others or become enslaved yourself.

The Agojie (women warriors) fought in slave raids along with the male fighters.  There are accounts of Dahomey warriors conducting slave raids on villages where they cut the heads off of the elderly and rip the bottom jaw bones off others. During the raids, they'd burn the villages to the ground. Those who they let live, including the children, were taken captive and sold as slaves. The movie strategically downplays this part of Dahomey's history, so as to not complicate the story with the truth.

Each year in Dahomey, roughly 500 slaves and criminals were mass executed in large-scale human sacrifices during the religious ceremonies of a festival known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Most were sacrificed by way of decapitation, a method of killing widely used by the Dahomean kings. The 1727 Annual Customs of the Dahomey ceremony reportedly saw as many as 4,000 people sacrificed.

(Snip)

The Kingdom of Dahomey had attained most of its wealth through the slave trade and King Ghezo was a strong proponent of slavery. He had risen to power though a coup with the help of Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa. Dahomey took the people of neighboring African regions it conquered and sold them in the overseas slave trade. They also kept slaves for themselves to work on the royal plantations. King Ghezo reportedly told the British, "The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery" (The Fortunes of Africa).

In reality, the main conflict with white Europeans during King Ghezo's reign came through the efforts of the British to bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade, in which the Kingdom of Dahomey was a major player. The British had to blockade the ports of Dahomey in order to put a stop to the Atlantic slave trade. Even after promising to end the slave trade in 1852, the year after the British imposed the blockade, King Ghezo resumed trading slaves in 1857. To this end, King Ghezo and the Kingdom of Dahomey are the villains of the true story.

(Snip)

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Oh those Evil White Britons! Oppressing and  puting an end to the Peaceful Indigenous Culture. How Dare They!

[Valin]

Hollywood version o fHistory.

 

[Draggingtree]

Race Erased

NOVEMBER 1, 2022 BY ALAN J. LEVINE

Racism, Not Race: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
by Joseph L. Graves, Jr. and Alan H. Goodman
Columbia University Press
312 pp., $27.95

 There is an old stereotype to the effect that scientists who may be capable, even brilliant, in their own field can be helpless, even illogical, in dealing with matters outside it. I have always doubted that this is common, although there are certainly some isolated cases. Racism, Not Race is a good example.

 This is a remarkable book—in a bad way—a landmark in the decline of academic publishing; a work largely, if not entirely, composed of woke propaganda aimed at warding off a danger that doesn’t exist. The authors, Joseph Graves and Alan Goodman, a biologist and an anthropologist, respectively, complain about the logical fallacies often used in discussions of race—then exhibit those fallacies, and others, themselves.

 The thesis—or dogma—of the book is that races are purely social constructs. “The science of human genetic variation shows with certainty that there are no biological races,” the authors announce. “Without this knowledge, it is difficult to confront biases that are based on biological and genetic myths about race.” https://chroniclesmagazine.org/recent-features/race-erased/

[Valin]

How long before they are on The Young Turks, Democracy Now?