February 20, 2019 The Skanner Portland & Seattle Page 5
Arts & Entertainment
Kam’ Kapsules: Movies
Opening This Friday, Feb. 22
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Deep Roots’
Deep Roots
How Slavery Still Shapes
Southern Politics
by Avidit Acharya,
Matthew Blackwell and
Maya Sen
Princeton University
Press
Hardcover, $29.95
296 pages, Illustrated
ISBN: 978-0-691-17674-1
by Kam Williams
For The Skanner News
‘How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
Kam
Williams
Kam’s
Kapsules
Movie
Reviews
WIDE RELEASES
How to Train Your
Dragon: The Hidden
World (PG for action
and mild rude humor)
Final installment in the
animated fantasy tril-
ogy finds Hiccup (Jay
Baruchel) and Toothless
embarking on an epic
journey to protect their
peaceful village from
the darkest threat it has
ever faced. Voice cast
includes America Fer-
rara, Cate Blanchett, Jo-
nah Hill, Kristen Wiig,
Gerard Butler and Craig
Ferguson.
INDEPENDENT &
FOREIGN FILMS
The Changeover (Un-
rated) Adaptation of
Margaret Mahy’s young
adult novel, set in Christ-
church, New Zealand,
about a 16 year-old girl
(Erana James) drawn
into a battle with the evil
spirit draining the life
out of her little brother
(Benji Purchase). Sup-
porting cast includes
Timothy Spall, Melanie
Lynskey and Lucy Law-
less.
The Iron Orchard
(R for profanity and
some sexuality) Depres-
sion-era drama chron-
icling a young man’s
(Lane Garrison) effort
to work his way up the
ranks from laborer to
wildcatter in the oil-
fields of West Texas.
With Ali Cobrin, Austin
Nichols and Lew Temple.
Prosecuting Evil (Un-
rated) Reverential retro-
spective about Ben Fer-
encz, the sole surviving
prosecutor of Nazi war
criminals at the Nurem-
berg trials. Featuring
commentary by Alan
Dershowitz,
Wesley
Clark and Fatou Bensou-
da.
Run the Race (PG for
teen partying and ma-
ture themes) Sports saga
about two teenaged sib-
lings’ (Tanner Stine and
Evan Hofer) struggle
to survive in the wake
of their mother’s death
and being abandoned by
their father (Kristoffer
Poloaha). With Mykelti
Williamson,
Frances
Farmer, Mario Van Pee-
bles, Tim Tebow and Ed-
die George.
Total Dhamaal (Un-
rated) Third installment
in the zany action se-
ries revolving around
a small time crook’s
(Ajay Devgn) attempt to
recoup his losses after
being
double-crossed
by his partner in crime
(Manoj Pahwa). Cast in-
cludes Arshad Warsi,
Javed Jaffrey and Anil
Kapoor. (In Hindi with
subtitles)
“Despite dramatic so-
cial transformations in
the United States during
the last 150 years, the
South has remained
staunchly conservative.
Southerners are more
likely to support Repub-
lican candidates, gun
rights, and the death
penalty, and southern
whites harbor higher
levels of racial resent-
ment than whites in oth-
er parts of the country.
Why haven’t these
sentiments evolved or
changed? “Deep Roots”
shows that the en-
trenched political and
racial views of contem-
porary white southern-
ers are a direct conse-
quence of the region’s
slaveholding
history,
which continues to shape
economic, political, and
social spheres. Today,
southern whites who
live in areas once reliant
on slavery—compared to
areas that were not—are
more racially hostile and
less amenable to policies
that could promote black
progress.”
Excerpted from the
dust jacket
William
Faulk-
ner is the only Nobel
prize-winner born in
Mississippi, which is
where most of his sto-
ries are set. One of this
preeminent Southern
writer’s most memora-
ble lines is, “The past is
never dead. It’s not even
past.”
That quote comes to
mind while reading
“Deep Roots: How Slav-
ery Still Shapes South-
ern Politics.” That’s be-
cause, after conducting
painstaking research,
authors Avidit Acharya,
Matthew Blackwell and
Maya Sen arrived at a
conclusion
(“History
shapes
contemporary
political culture.”) which
sounds like a paraphrase
of Faulkner’s famous
saying.
Over the course of the
150+ years since Emanci-
pation, the descendants
of slave owners have
continuously operated
to prevent blacks from
pursuing the American
Dream. In the face of
the 13th, 14th and 15th
Amendments, southern
municipalities,
cities
and states passed Jim
Crow laws denying Afri-
can-Americans the right
to vote, travel, buy land,
possess a gun, get an ed-
ucation, and so forth.
The punishment for
even the slightest of in-
fractions ranged from
whipping to lynching in
order to strictly main-
tain the region’s col-
or-coded caste system.
“Racial violence was an
important component of
the development of an-
ti-black attitudes, even
among poor whites.”
Furthermore,
“White
children were often
present... and, in some
striking cases, they were
also active participants.”
So, is it any surprise
that, “As of the 2016 elec-
tion, all of the former
states of the Confeder-
acy had implemented
some voter identifica-
tion law” in an effort to
deny as many black cit-
izens as possible access
to the ballot box? Ad-
vocates of Confederate
monuments and memo-
rials continue to claim
the Civil War was waged
over states’ rights, con-
veniently ignoring the
assertion of the design-
er of the rebel battle flag
that, “As a people, we
are fighting to maintain
the
heaven-ordained
supremacy of the white
man over the inferior or
colored race.”
A timely tome which
explains why, when it
comes to the South, the
more things change, the
more they remain in-
sane.