Issue Of Morality In 12 Years A Slave

12 years a slave is a movie produced by Steve McQueen that treats the topic of slavery in the United States during the nineteenth century. The movie is the story of an African American man named Solomon Northup that lived happily as a free man with his children and wife in the city of New York until he makes the acquaintance of two white men that offer him a job to play violin in Washington D.C. There he gets kidnapped and sold as a slave.12 Years a Slave can be seen as a story showing the reality of slavery. Going from a happy life, our main character can be compared to the people that were living on the African continent before the ‘white men” came.      

We can observe that this movie shows different aspects of slavery in these times but also shows that there is still a shadow on our society nowadays. Even though slavery was abolished being a person born with dark skin can decide your place and role in this society.       

This movie takes place in a time where non-white people were treated differently and discriminated against. Slavery has always been known to be one of the most shocking things that the human race has done. Slaves were the private property of the slave owners and were even considered as livestock that can be used until useless.       

After being kidnapped Solomon tries to make his kidnappers understand that he is a free man and that it was a mistake, but they didn’t want to hear him. Later in the movie learns that being an educated slave wouldn’t be at his advantage and that it would be better for him to play the card of ignorance to survive in this new world. I believe that this part emphasizes the fact that the slave traders and slave owners were trying to take off all possible humanity from the slave to justify this act that was considered as an important part of the United States economic institutions. By convincing themselves that black people were savages, were not able to have the same intellectual abilities, they reduced them to the level of ape-like humans only useful in cotton and sugar cane plantations. Indeed, slavery was perceived differently by the “master”. They did not consider black people humans worthy of anything white people have the right to.       

12 years a slave raises a lot of questions about the morality of the people practicing it and the time they were in. The question of sexism, the difference between men and women is taken to another level during slavery. Nowadays, it is said that African women make $0.61 for every dollar paid to white. Since black people were not even considered human, we can say that being a female slave could be the worst thing you could have been perceived as. In the movie, we can observe this phenomenon when our main character got to the plantation of his first master. There, was an African American woman slave that was being abused by the master and his wife. The movie not only shows the struggle and suffering of one man as a slave but also shows the pain other slaves were going through.