BY:LEON KWASI KUNTUO-ASARE

Black people stop complaining about the movie “Exodus: Gods and Kings” being racist, with its all white lead casts playing egyptains, in a time before the arab/muslim invasion, military conquest and eventual Arabization/ethnic cleansing of Egypt and the rest of North and parts of East Africa.

Yes my black people our complaints maybe valid, the film seems to be no more than cinematic bigotry, that would make a Nazi propaganda officer jealous. The whites in the film play Gods and royals, while the black supporting cast members, are limited to playing roles of lower class civilians, criminals and servants.

But what are we the African-American community going to do about? That is the issue! Yes historically whenever we as a community have gotten on the same page and started to think progressively and attempted to move forward, we were either destroyed like the blacks in Black wallstreet ( the successful black part of Tulsa, Oklahoma) in the 1920s or sabotaged like the black power movement of the 1960s was by the FBI’s counter intelligence program (cointelpro) , under the supervision of white supremacist J. Edgar Hoover.

Yes times have changed, yet the government is still spying on we the people , today with the NSA spying program, the same way they did with the counter intelligence program of yesterday, and not to mention the way the Ferguson protestors were originally treated, looked like a vintage film of the racist police force in Birmingham, Alabama treated Martin luther King and his followers in 1963.

Even though the things just previously mentioned are historic facts, a lot has improved for the African-American community as a people, and I am not talking about the election of the first African-american president Barack Obama, who has done a lot to improve the situation of huge banks, and the lives of the white LGBT community and illegal immigrants of Latin America, and has literally done nothing for the disenfranchised blacks of this country, but that’s another essay for another day.

What we have today is what previous generations lacked, and that is direct access to media. Like the young revolutionaries of the Arab spring movement, that was organized on social media, that began in 2010 and topled several middle eastern and North African regimes.

No longer do we have to be beholden to mega corporations like Fox media, Viacom and Time Warner, if we want our stories to be told. with the technology of today, each of us can create our own radio stations with podcasts, we can make our own news media with our own news blog sites that can be easily created using WordPress or Squarespace, we can publish our own history in our own words with ebooks. We can organize mass protests with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Meetup. We can also produce our own movies with crowd funding from websites like indiegogo or Kickstarter.

Summary: instead of complaining to the white supremacist entertainment industry to make factual movies about our history, we need to make our own films and we have to put an end to that slave crab in a barrel mentality and support our own people, the same way every other group does. Don’t expect a person or group of people (white people) to do something, you’re not willing to do yourself, especially if they’re the one that put you in the situation in the first place.