The Living Consequences

A film student at NYU, Aislinn Dewey, has created a wonderful, moving three-minute animated short, entitled simply “Privilege,” based on the work of Peggy McIntosh on “white privilege.”

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Yesterday, the U.S. Senate passed H.R. 3432, the bill to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade, by unanimous consent.

However, before the bill was passed, Sen.Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) objected to funding the commission, and so the bill’s authorization for funding was stripped out. Therefore, if the amended version is passed by the House, which passed the original legislation in October, the commission and the activities established by the bill cannot be funded.

Update: On January 22, the House agreed to the amended version of the bill, without the authorization of funds, after passionate remarks in favor of the bill by Reps. Payne, Poe, and Jackson-Lee.

The House Judiciary Committee has released the witness list for tomorrow’s hearing, by the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.

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Traces of the Trade will have its world premiere on Martin Luther King Day, Monday, January 21, 2008, at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Members of the film cast and crew will be on hand for the premiere, and there will be a panel discussion earlier in the day with noted experts on slavery and race.

The House Judiciary Committee has just scheduled a hearing for next Tuesday, December 18, on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.

This hearing is expected to cover H.R. 40, the bill proposed each year by the committee chair, Rep. John Conyers, to establish a commission to study reparations for slavery; H.Res. 194, a resolution calling for the House to apologize for slavery; and perhaps H.R. 3432, legislation to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the U.S. slave trade.

The hearing will be held by the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, in Room 2141 of the Rayburn House Office Building at 10:00am. Witnesses will be announced later.

The bicentennial of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade will be commemorated at a service of liberation at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City on Sunday, January 13.

Traces of the Trade, which is being released in conjunction with the bicentennial, will be represented at the service through resource materials prepared by the Diocese of New York, and Tom DeWolf, the author of Inheriting the Trade, will attend the service.

The service is being sponsored by the Episcopal dioceses of New York, Newark, Long Island, and New Jersey, as well as various Episcopal church offices and organizations.

I’ll refrain from posting too much about the flood of press coverage generated for Traces of the Trade by its acceptance for competition at Sundance.

By far the best coverage, from our perspective, was David Halbfinger’s New York Times article about the Sundance lineup. The story, which emphasized the trend towards films from an individual perspective (“political subjects dealt with in human terms”), led the Arts section that morning. Halbfinger mentioned Traces before any other film — and prominently ran one of our favorite photos, the cover shot on Tom’s book, as the first of three photos from the films.

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One issue which came up frequently while filming Traces of the Trade was the importance of gender in our society, and the parallels between gender and race.

While there are, of course, many ways in which gender and race are not parallel, it was often instructive, in a group consisting solely of white people, to point to ways in which the men in the group shared privileges in our society which the women did not.

I plan to write more on this subject another time, but for now I want to point out a strikingly different post on the film’s acceptance into competition at Sundance. Melissa Silverstein writes, over at Women & Hollywood, about the women represented among the films in the Sundance lineup, including in Traces of the Trade.

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The news is now public:

Traces of the Trade has been selected for competition at the Sundance Film Festival!

We’re very pleased by this recognition for the film and its director, and we can’t wait to share our story.

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Traces of the Trade is debuting a new web site design later today, courtesy of the talented team at Groundswell Collective.