WARNING: This post contains multiple spoilers.
Every time Jamie Foxx’s character Django rides into town in Quentin Tarantino’s new spaghetti Western Django Unchained, set against the backdrop of American chattel slavery, someone asks some variation of the question, “What is that nigger doing on a horse?”
This is as much a threat as an inquiry. (Read more…) Almost every character who asks it is involved in trying to tear Django off the horse, because a black man on a horse is a threat to a strict racial hierarchy that even those who cannot afford a horse hold dear. It’s a question that Tarantino might even assume his own audience members are asking, since the iconic American gunslinger is nearly always white. It’s also a question that might well have been asked by the protagonists of America’s classic Westerns, from Rooster Cogburn to Ethan Edwards to Josey Wales—all former Confederate soldiers who committed treason in defense of slavery.
[VIA MoJo Blogs and Articles | Mother Jones]
