I begin with this truth to discuss Django Unchained because it informs my reluctance to discuss this film. I recognize that my ambivalence belongs to me and that many folks are happy to investigate,  interrogate, segment and contextualize the film to determine if the film is harmful or not or plumb interviews given by writer/director Quentin Tarantino to locate his intent in producing such a film. Excellent pieces by wonderful thinkers have emerged and I would do no service to them to repeat what they’ve already written. Instead, I want to offer a few points about how Django actually makes sense in our Post-Race world and why its “good” fit only cements the confusion about how to understand race contemporarily.

1. A friend told me about a girlfriend of hers who shared her confusion around how Black folks are supposed to feel about Django. Based on all the reviews as well as the interviews Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington gave I can see how this confusion emerges. When Foxx and Oprah Winfrey discuss the film as a tribute of sorts to our enslaved ancestors and posit that it offers the opportunity to have conversations about the “evolution of freedom” from slavery to present day, it does make me question if I’ve misjudged the film’s mission. The burden of representation is so great for people of color that any reason to support a film with “strong” Black lead characters should be reason enough. That there is the possibility of a revisionist redemptive slave narrative is all the better. However, while Django centers around a newly freed slave and while the horrors of slavery are on display in graphic detail, I would not say it was a commentary on the evolution of freedom because the story uses slavery—its most culturally specific factor—as a conceit while the story of Django rescuing his lady love is the main story—the one that is universal and familiar. While there is nothing wrong with a story people can connect to, making it is easy for the average moviegoer to relate to Django does align with the goals of Post-Race logic where finding “common ground” supersedes the specific historical differences that actually marginalize groups.

2. One of the patterns in the film that struck me was Django’s sole goal of freeing his wife Broomhilda from the Candie Plantation. It struck me because it was such an individualistic objective. One free former slave rescuing one enslaved woman from the horrors of slavery is a lofty goal to be sure; however, it seems antithetical to the ways that slaves functioned as a community system. The conscious choice, for example, to have Django never look back at his brethren–even after he has killed all their captors–and leave them in cages so they can watch him him ride back to the plantation to free his wife seems off. Why not arm them so they can all get their revenge on the evil slave owners? Perhaps it is because he was trained by his mentor Dr. King (ha) Schultz to treat being a bounty hunter as a solo gig. However, I can neither imagine the process of becoming free nor the  disconnecting of emotional ties to other slaves as occurring overnight. Thus I contend that the emphasis on the individual  achieving his aims rather than on the collective is a product of Post-Race logic that is not necessarily interested in slavery as anything other than an elaborate and terrible backdrop. Besides, a gang of enslaved men taking on slave owners in a raid seems far more menacing for a 21^st century mainstream audience than one man in a velvet suit.

3. My last point of illustrating that Django is a product of the Post-Race lies in the supporting character of Steven. Played by Samuel L. Jackson, is a conflation of types: Uncle Tom, Boondocks-famous Uncle Ruckus, as well as a well-versed code-switcher. For me, Steven’s intraracial hatred in concert with being the smartest character of them all made him the most evil. A brilliant performance to be sure; however, I could not help but think that for many moviegoers in the film, the black-on-black violence diminished the impact of the fact that both men were enslaved psychologically and physically, instead placed the burden of evil on them hating each other with this subtle shift.

In conclusion, I would suggest that this racial moment produced Django. This is the moment where a horrible past is so far removed that it can be redeemed through a fantastical story that if set in modern day would scare its moviegoers. That is indeed the gift of a Post-Race era.

On September 21, our screens were filled with images and stories of Troy Davis’ execution and the protests against it. The same day, there was another execution in Texas. Russell Brewer, one of the three white men convicted of brutally dragging James Byrd Jr. to death in 1998, was executed just hours before Davis was.

These two men’s stories and executions were in many ways very different. Davis was a black man accused of killing a white man. Brewer was a white man accused of killing a black man. There were doubts about Davis’ guilt: there was no physical evidence, and key witnesses later recanted their stories. There was little doubt about Brewer’s guilt. Despite these differences, the two cases both demonstrate inequalities in the way individuals are able to appear as victims (or perpetrators) within legal procedure and decisions.

In Davis’ case, the lack of physical evidence and the fact that several key witnesses changed their testimony since the trial was, surprisingly, not enough to stay his execution. Quite simply, the justices reviewing the case failed to see him as a potential victim of procedural error or injustice. This failure, in light of very real problems of evidence and testimony suggests one of the key problems of practices of justice: the unequal distribution of sympathy. It would be nice to think that the justices who reviewed the case did so “neutrally” and “objectively,” but the data on death penalty suggests otherwise. Amnesty International reports that 77% of all executions for homicide involve a white victim. In contrast, 15% of executions involve a black victim, and 6 % a Hispanic victim (2% of victims were “other”) in the last 30 years.

One of the factors that explain these statistics and the lack of doubt in Troy Davis’ case is sympathy, or lack thereof. The ability to feel sympathy or not pervades many aspects of judgment. An ability to imagine a defendant or victim as like oneself or one’s family will impact the judgments we make about that person – our ability to see him or her as a victim or a perpetrator.  This ability is influenced by, among other things, media representations. Images of victimization, for good or bad, ask for sympathy.

We feel sympathy for those we are close to and can imagine ourselves as close to. For distant others, victimization is a common reason for feeling sympathy. However, the ability to appear a victim is not equally available to all. We have culturally defined ideas of what victims look like that make us more ready to see some people as victims than others (as the intense scrutiny of the dress, manner, and morals of female defendants in rape trials attests). These ideas are embedded in, among other things, race and gender. In particular, news representations provide the public with largely criminal images of black men, in which black men appear as perpetrators much more than as victims. For example, Entman and Rojecki’s study of black and white portrayals of crime in local Chicago news during the late 1990s found that while only 26% of black suspects were given names in the news, 46% of white suspects were identified by name; that while 38% of black suspects were shown in physical custody, only 15% of white suspects were shown in custody; and that stories about black suspects were four times more likely to use mug shots as illustration than were stories about white suspects.

When James Byrd Jr. was murdered by three white men, journalists devoted considerable space to emphasize his status as an innocent victim, as if anything beyond the brutality of the murder were needed to communicate his victimization. When his killers were tried, much was made of the fact that two of them, Brewer and John King, were sentenced to death. They were among the first white men to be sentenced to death for killing an African-American in Texas history. The fact that the two men were highly unsympathetic helped them become part of this statistic. They did not show remorse for the murder, had prior convictions, and were admitted white supremacists with multiple tattoos of white supremacist and Nazi symbols. They were easy to see as purely monstrous, certainly not men that the majority wanted to find commonality with. The third assailant, Shawn Berry, on the other hand, was a much more sympathetic figure. He was not a convict, did not have the sensational tattoos. He did not look and seem like a future threat to society, and so was sentenced to life. In the trail’s coverage, the reasons given for clemency for Berry were not about what he did or did not do that night, but about who he was: a “regular kid.” The point is not that Berry should have gotten a harsher penalty. The point is that the decision to give him a life sentence and the others a death sentence hinged in large part on the sympathy judge and jury felt for him, not on any sure knowledge that he was a lesser participant in the beating and dragging of Byrd. The distribution of sympathy is not equal; this is as true inside the courtroom as outside of it.

The individuals involved in deciding and carrying out capital punishment do not sit outside the influences of sympathy, nor of the influence of media texts in inculcating it. Most of those who comment upon Davis and Brewer have only “met” these men through media texts. These texts do an important job in locating the men in relation to viewers/readers and in dictating their location along the scale of the sympathetic. When we consider how much the distribution of sympathy is shaped by our own social locations and media contexts, it becomes difficult to imagine the death penalty being applied equitably, no matter how fine-tuned the procedures.