The History Channel’s Unhistorical 'Roots'

The lie that won’t die.

Jack Kerwick 
  

Wow.  White folks really are wicked.   At any rate, this is the only judgment for a viewer to make upon watching the History Channel’s recent remake of Alex Haley’s Roots.  A mini-series coming in at over eight hours and airing over four nights, the newest Roots features numerous white characters: men, women, and children; Union and Confederate soldiers; British Red Coats and colonial American troops.

 

With a single exception—a white female Union spy—they are all portrayed as evil.  

Granted, some white characters are more sadistic than others, but virtually all—including the children—are indistinguishable from one another with respect to their unrelenting obsession with subjecting blacks to every conceivable kind of torture........One year after the original Roots aired, Haley agreed to pay Harry Courlander, a white writer, a settlement of $650,000 (2 million dollars today) after Haley admitted in court to having plagiarized Courlander’s 1967 work, The African.  “I was just trying to give my people a myth to live by,” Haley was quoted as saying. ......Of course, Haley doesn’t shoulder the sole blame for all of this, for those portions of the book that he didn’t plagiarize were ghost written by “the very white, and Jewish, Murray Fisher.” 

 

In February of 1993, Philip Nobile, writing in The Village Voice, described Roots as “one of the great literary hoaxes of modern times.”  The late distinguished Harvard historian Oscar Handlin, a pioneer of ethnic history, declared of Haley: “A fraud’s a fraud.”......To Read More.....