Nate Parker is an African-American film-maker whose new film Birth of a Nation — out later this week — tells the dramatized story of the slave and Christian minister Nat Turner. Turner – who claimed to have been inspired by a vision from God — led an unsuccessful slave and free black rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Several dozen whites and several hundred blacks were eventually killed as the rebellion was put down. Virginia subsequently passed numerous laws to reduce the chances for subsequent insurrections.
Parker’s film debuted at Sundance Film Festival and was purchased by FoxSearchlight for a record amount. The film tells the story of Turner — a story that Parker says he never learned as a child. Whether Parker’s lack of knowledge regarding Turner was the result of a lack of attention on his part or an exclusion of this story at his Virginia Beach public high school remains unknown. However, as a grammar school student in an Alexandria Virginia parochial school in the early 1960’s, I distinctly remember being taught the story of Nat Turner’s rebellion.
Nate Parker is an unsympathetic character, at least to me. He and a friend were charged with raping a woman while all were students at Penn State. Parker was acquitted; his buddy was convicted of a lesser charge. Parker is recently prone to posit that he was “proven innocent” by the trial — a clear misrepresentation of what acquittal means, namely that evidence considered didn’t finger him “beyond a reasonable doubt”.
Here’s where the irony begins: No one in Hollywood knew of Parker’s alleged rape until recently. Now some among Hollywood’s big shots fear that Parker’s past is problematical with regard to his new film. Instead of satisfying the (reverse-racist) outcry for more black Oscar nominees, some in Hollywood are now turning their backs on the film. Too risky I guess. Money gets in the way of doing what’s right.
Meanwhile and quite foolishly, Parker has taken it on himself to somehow link Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion to today’s racial unrest, as if police are the biggest threat to urban blacks and the thousands of black-on-black killings in Barack Obama’s old community organizing grounds are relatively trivial.
Justice demands that Parker should not be perpetually painted as a criminal as a result of an incident that occurred nearly twenty years ago. Furthermore, Parker was arrested, stood trial and was acquitted – which is a lot more than one can say for a clear Hollywood favorite, namely Bill Clinton. Clinton was accused of rape by a number of women, including Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick and was impeached for lying under oath about his repeated sexual liaisons with a young White House intern. (Sidebar: It’s increasingly more widely known that Hillary herself once represented and gained an acquittal [for Thomas Alfred Taylor, a 41-year old man who raped an eleven-year old girl] based on the theory that the girl wanted to be raped? And that Hillary later laughed about it in an interview for Esquire?)
Hollywood should chew on the hypocrisy that their big shots now fret about a film done by a black man acquitted of rape while at the same time filling the campaign coffers of “enabler-in-chief” Hillary Clinton. Hillary has always tried to destroy the reputations what she has called “Bill’s rodeo queens” — even those who clearly told Bill NO. Her people trashed them publicly as “bimbos”.
So what’s the deal with today’s Hollywood bigwigs? Here’s it is: Either the Hollywood nomenklatura is copacetic with the Clintons’ trashing of the women Bill raped — or key Hollywood players are racist. Perhaps both.
Tags: Clinton Hollywood
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