12 Years A Slave: A Reevaluation

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the release of 12 Years a Slave, the “triumphant” Steve McQueen film that swept the Oscars with both critical and public acclaim. Yet 2023 also marks another decennial—the approximate moment CRT first escaped the fringes of far-left academia and began to permeate all facets of mainstream American society. Coming out of President Obama’s coalition of the ascendant re-election strategy, Americans’ views on race relations began to plummet consistently after 2013 and have still yet to recover. Looking back at the film today, its exploitative nature is more apparent than it was to the American public of ten years ago, earnestly naive in its desire for racial healing and a truly colorblind society. It is an early precursor to tactics left-wing activists used over the past decade to force all of American society to genuflect on the altar of racial grievance politics.