Tarantino Claims That “Roots” Is An Oversimplification Of Slavery And Calls It “Bullsh**”

By Jerry L. Barrow of UrbanDaily

In another example of White Privilege run amuck, Director Quentin Tarantino put the 1977  TV film “Roots” in his crosshairs for not being an accurate depiction of slavery.

“Hollywood didn’t want to deal with it because it was too ugly and too messy,” Tarantino recently told The Daily Beast.  He is making the claim to underline how “real” his upcoming film “Django Unchained,” will be in comparison. “But how can you ignore such a huge part of American history when telling a story in that time period? It made no sense. When you look at ‘Roots,’ nothing about it rings true in the storytelling, and none of the performances ring true for me either…I couldn’t get over how oversimplified they made everything about that time. It didn’t move me because it claimed to be something it wasn’t.”

“Roots” was based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Alex Haley, “Roots: The Sage Of An American Family,” which has been both praised as a landmark piece of American literature and derided for inconsistencies in the narrative.  Harvard Professor Dr. Henry Louise Gates, Jr. has acknowledged the doubts surrounding Haley’s ancestral claims telling The Boston Globe, ”Most of us feel it’s highly unlikely that Alex actually found the village whence his ancestors sprang. Roots is a work of the imagination rather than strict historical scholarship.”

The 12-hour, eight-episode miniseries  based on the book was seen by an estimated 130 million viewers when it was broadcast on ABC television in 1977. Tarantino, along with producer Reginald Hudlin, is claiming that it didn’t scratch the surface of the realities of slavery by calling it “Bullsh–.”

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