Requires ‘The Girl King’ to Be Boycotted Amid Slave Commerce Criticism

Viola Davis‘ new film has sparked a fierce debate about Hollywood overlaying onerous truths via a lens — together with slavery … leading to some calling for a boycott of this one.

“The Girl King” hit theaters this weekend, however nearly as shortly because the hype for the flick began hovering … the pushback additionally started — with some calling for an outright shunning due to what they understand as whitewashing the historical past of the themes depicted.

The criticism … the African tribe proven on display screen, the Dahomey, in addition to their all-female navy regiment, the Agodjie, are introduced as righteous, empowering liberators in all of the advertising and marketing up to now … when in actuality, they had been knee-deep within the Atlantic slave commerce.

The document is not fairly … Dahomey was considered one of a handful of tribes within the seventeenth/18th/nineteenth centuries that captured and bought off Black slaves to Europeans — a way of commerce they continued for whereas … till the Brits truly pressured them to cease within the mid-1800s.

The trailer does not allude to any of this in any respect … it simply reveals Viola coaching a brand new wave of recruits for the Agodjie and battling towards what seem like white colonizers in a showdown. Due to this, it appears, handful of parents are crying foul — alleging the studio, Sony, is making an attempt to rewrite historical past and downplay the Dahomey’s half in all this.

Whereas some have made it clear they’re towards glorifying anybody who facilitated the slave commerce, white or Black, and seem useless set on boycotting … others are arguing individuals ought to see the movie for themselves, saying it DOES in reality deal with the difficulty with nuance.

Nevertheless, there’ve been some historians weighing in — who’re each educated on this topic and have seen the film — they usually say … yeah, ‘TWK’ does blur the strains a bit by making the Dahomey look extra like victims of circumstance than prepared contributors.

We have not seen it but, so we won’t say for certain what’s or is not proven. What we do know is that the opinions are glowing — however many critics aren’t displaying their playing cards on this particular challenge of the slave commerce and the way the Dahomey’s relationship to it’s dealt with within the film.

With that mentioned, it appears cheap to have people go see it with their very own two eyes and make up their very own minds. Whereas it is inside everybody’s proper to boycott/name for a boycott — it appears sorta foolish with out having absorbed the fabric and debating it after the actual fact.