In the wake of Ferguson, in the wake of Trayvon Martin and Oscar Grant and the 12-year-old boy with a pellet gun who was recently shot by a police officer in Cleveland and all the other young Black men killed because a White man found them threatening, it’s hard to know what to say. It’s hard to know what to say to my Black teenage daughter as we take the long way home from downtown Oakland to avoid protests that have started to turn violent. It’s hard to know what to say to Black friends who are grieving publicly on Facebook, who feel assaulted once again by a system which has betrayed them over and over. And it’s hard to know what to say to a good, kind-hearted White friend who feels that her police officer son is being defamed by complaints against the police, and says that we all experience racism, and that we should just all be nice to one another.

It’s hard to know what to say, and it’s hard not be impatient with people who seem hopelessly out of touch. I have to start by remembering that we all speak from what we know, what we experience, what we see. We speak as eye-witnesses to our own lives. Which means that for a lot of White people, racism doesn’t really exist, or exists only as a few isolated instances. After all, what most of us who are White see in our daily lives is that the police are there to keep us safe. What we see is that our walking down the street or driving a car is not a subject for police investigation. What we see is that the folks who turn to look at us in stores are wondering if we need help. That’s reality.

And if that’s your reality then rage against the police seems misplaced, unreasonable, unjustified. If the justice system has always looked to you like, well, justice, then protesters on the streets are threats to the public safety, not advocates pushing for public safety. We know what we see. Who we imagine the public to be are the people who look or dress or talk like us.

I suspect that everyone who drives has been in the position of wanting to tell off the idiot who has come to a complete stop in the middle of the street in front of us. Maybe we honk our horn, or just sit there grumbling about the rude, clueless twit blocking our way for no reason—until we finally see the pedestrian crossing past the vehicle that was blocking our view. It turns out that the driver in front of us could see something that we couldn’t, was acting on information that we didn’t have.

It isn’t easy. The folks with the privilege have every habit of assuming what they see is the “real world,” and every incentive to stay in that comfortable world. The tricky part is that it’s really the job of the White people to help other White people see around the corner. There are many terrific books and blog posts and articles by people of color about their experiences, and White folks would do well to read them. But ultimately it is the responsibility of the White people who’ve caught a glimpse of the pedestrian in the road to help other White people see what is beyond their field of vision. Even when it’s uncomfortable. Even when you don’t quite know how to do it. Even when you’re pointing toward something that’s not altogether clear to you.

Maybe it’s enough to just ask everyone to enter the conversation aware that the fact that you don’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.

My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.

I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.

Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.

Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:

“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”

“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”

It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.

Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.

I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:

“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”

When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.

I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.

Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”

Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.