Birth of a Nation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US

"Nat Turner" -- Kyle Baker (2006)Birth of a Nation: What Nate Parker’s Controversial Nat Turner History & His Own Offer US by Stephane Dunn | @DrStephaneDunn | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
This is not the review of Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation that I was planning to offer right after seeing the Sundance Festival history making film, several months ago.  That was before the Birth of a Nation good news had a competing storyline in its director’s past coming back to haunt. The documented account of Parker's Penn State College rape case is readily accessible with a click along with the headlines about Birth now being a “tainted” product.
However, the rush to forecast the death of a promisingly successful film, a deserving one, should provoke a question for deeper pondering: How can we receive this Nate Parker dramatization of the Nat Turner’s history and at the same time grapple with Parker’s?
The night I saw the film amid an emotionally moved, intimate crowd in an Atlanta theatre, I sat in my seat, bursting with something like pride and relief as the credits rolled. Like a lot of folk for whom Nat Turner is a sacred, famous yet under treated figure, I had hoped for a major motion picture about him with anticipation tinged with trepidation. White supremacist American society in 1831 of course deemed Turner a crazy ‘nigger’, a vicious killer of the worst kind who terrorized the white Southampton Virginia community when he and around seventy-five other enslaved comrades killed about fifty white people. Mainstream American culture to follow, including a good many historians, hardly deviated from that view at worst or at best settled on an uneasy portraiture of Turner, on the one hand, discussing the reality of slavery motivating Turner while careful to read his actions as still unjustifiable murder.
Yet, Nat Turner had never been that crazy ‘nigger’ murderer of August, 1831 to me, my family, and a great many of the black women and men I grew up and played with and studied with in college and graduate school. Instead, he was legend, inspirer of John Brown, a warrior for black liberation and shining black manhood long before Malcolm X.
In the fall of 2014, I asked Parker what he was working on next when he visited campus with director Gina Prince-Bythewood to discuss the film Beyond the Lights. He revealed that he was devoting himself to a passion project, a film about Nat Turner. Making the movie happen was a mission worth sacrificing time, money, and his acting career. It seemed kind of fitting. His name “Nate” carried Nat’s within it; he was from the same area where Nat Turner was enslaved and carried out his crusade.
Parker's Birth of a Nation – smartly titled to signify on the racist history D.W Griffith spins in the 1915 Birth of a Nation - made history at Sundance, becoming the highest selling film ever previewed there and winning the grand jury prize and audience award.
Now the twelve-year old case involving Parker and his college roommate when they were wrestling students at Penn, is taking center stage overshadow Parker’s directorial debut. It hasn’t been a secret so much as Parker’s measured fame as an actor had not yet brought him under such intense public scrutiny. The film’s distributor Fox Searchlight reportedly already knew.
Neither Parker nor any director should be beyond interrogation regardless of racial, gender, and cultural privilege. Yet, famous film directors with “tainted” histories due to their behavior with women are not new, and they include Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. How would the legendary Charlie Chaplin, with his headlining propensity for turbulent affairs and marriages with sixteen-year old girls, have fared had a faster, mass social communication network existed in the 1920s through 1930s?
Parker’s treatment of the Nat Turner history and his own offer opportunity to wade into difficult, ugly, real psychically disturbing, double taboo territory. Birth of a Nation is a brave, beautiful effort. It honors the Turner that I and so many have dared to claim as the real Turner, real, that is, in the meaning of his fight against the inhumanity of slavery to us. Parker manages several layers that make the film a worthy starting with the point of view.
The subjectivity that dominates Hollywood films about American slavery or which are set in slavery have too often centered and been driven by the perspective and voices of white characters with directors not privileging the gaze and point of view of black characters. Parker privileges that gaze and Turner’s point of view. He shows the careful sensitivity of a director who not only gets the weight of the sacred history he’s retelling but who personally regards it as perhaps the most important one he’ll ever tell.
Birth treats seriously, legitimizes really, what has come down as Turner’s version of his actions - that he was divinely led, God called to free his people through attempting to visualize Turner’s visions, showing them as a progression of Turner’s innate moral sensitivity, authentic religious faith, and growing critical insight into the evil and moral wrongness of slavery. The revolt is not a mad spree or mindless blood thirsty quest in Birth.
Though not achieved without some narrative roughness Parker also invokes ancestral linkages to the enslaved black community, and, more pointedly, as the roots of Turner’s worldview and spirituality in a Daughters-of-the-Dust reminiscent reclamation of African ancestral ties to the present. Parker thus risks a bit of that symbolism and abstraction that popular Hollywood filmmaking does not favor to treat seriously Nat’s visions and suggest the evolution of his calling. Another essential layer of Birth lies in Parker’s attempted treatment of the black women in Turner’s life, most notably his grandmother, mother, and wife. No, black enslaved women do not altogether escape marginalization in the actual development, and execution of the revolt; their abuses by whites stir up and strike at the indignity and manhood of their men making them activators of the rebellion, a common role in black male oriented stories about the black freedom struggle.
Nevertheless, Birth makes an effort to humanize these women as not merely passive emotional anchors and protective caretakers in Turner’s life but as resisting women who want their liberation too and support his calling as part of their resistance.
The narrative falters a bit as it moves towards resolution. The ending [no spoilers here] seems to be a little in search of itself before settling into a direction. Turner’s incredible survival out in the wilderness for weeks alone before his capture is regrettably neglected and Parker shied away some from the brutality of Turner’s death and body after and settles on reassuring us that despite Turner and his comrades’ resistance meant something and will birth a new generation of others. Birth of a Nation is timely, always has been, particularly so now when this Black Lives Matter time highlights just how much the country has not dealt progressively enough with the legacy of racism and slavery.
The film can stand on it’s own. It is not “another” Twelve Years a Slave as some may lump these couple of cinematic slave narratives together as. They are two entirely different films though they both underline that we need to stop running from American slavery, from the truth of our lightweight confrontation of it, including Hollywood’s absurdly restrained, marginal, and simplistic representation of slavery overall.   
The merits of the film and the value of Turner’s story in American history does not mean we need be torn about scrutinizing the story of Parker’s College case twelve years ago. It is timely too and offers opportunity for confronting something else that has not been comfortably or successfully engaged though it has defined American culture too –gender and power. Parker was acquitted of the rape charges. He is responding to the coverage of the case thus far by pointing out that he had consensual sex and was acquitted. It was a painful episode in his life, which he regrets. His life since then has been about conducting himself well, being a good husband, father of five daughters, and good professional.
Emphasizing that he had consensual sex, was acquitted, and has striven since to be a good man, is understandable but inadequate. This is a time of heightened public attention on campus rape thankfully though the problem continues in epidemic proportions. Parker is now apart of that attention and because he is an actor-turned-director of this significant Nat Turner film, his involvement carries a heavier weight and expectation. There is a lot of space between rape and consensual sex certainly, but a lot of times it's fraught with problematic gendered social codes that sanction degrees of problematic and harmful behavior by men. Consensual sex does not relieve one of responsibility, excuse irresponsibility or harmful actions and poor decisions.
There are different types of pressure that one can impose upon someone, emotional and social included. Parker should use his magnified voice and past to help dispel the cultural thinking that sexual conquest at any opportunity and under almost any circumstance is some kind of normal part of the college years for young adults or the right of “naturally” horny young men just being “boys” and that they get a pass on making bad choices or taking advantage of situations and women [or anyone] if they can. He should remind young men that they may later forge successful careers and family lives, but these don't erase any abuse of power that demeans someone else as well as themselves.
Turner was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Parker was accused of rape and acquitted. We need not ignore either the scandal or the film. We should embrace the discomfort and grapple with Turner's and Parker's histories as part of the complicated, ongoing national narratives about race and gender, neither sanitizing or demonizing either to the extreme as primary responses nor abandoning the value of the 2016 Birth of a Nation. After all, we have not done so with its predecessor, The Birth of a Nation (1915), the most racist but arguably most important early motion picture.
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S​tephane Dunn is a writer and professor at Morehouse College and the director of its Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies Program​. Her ​publications include the 2008 book Baad Bitches & Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films (U of Illinois) and a number of articles in mediums such as Ebony.com, The Atlantic, The Root.com, the AJC, and others.