Why you should see ’12 Years a Slave’

Slavery is the most abhorrent chapter in America’s history. Everyone knows it happened, but few people know much about it or want to think about it. Which means that it’s not exactly something that pops up with regularity in popular entertainment–even though slavery’s legacy, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, is still very much with us.

This makes the release of “12 Years A Slave” something of a major historical-cultural event. The film, which opens Friday with an A-list cast–Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt–is based on the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free black man kidnapped in 1841 in Washington and sold into slavery in New Orleans. Uncompromising and extremely violent, “12 Years” refuses to downplay the racism, brutality and crude Darwinian mindset that typified the “peculiar institution.”

This is not “Django Unchained,” which was a blend of spaghetti Western, Blaxploitation flick and whatever else popped into Quentin Tarantino’s genre-fevered brain.

“12 Years a Slave” is easily the most hard-hitting portrayal of slavery since the 1977 TV blockbuster “Roots.”

It’s also a movie that Americans need to see, if they are to better understand their country. It’s an uncomfortable reminder that the legacy of this once deeply rooted institution continues to resonate in our society, whether it is the current fight over voter ID laws in states like Texas and North Carolina that disproportionately affect minorities; the fact that the African-American incarceration rate, fueled by years of poverty and racism, is six times the national average, and the unemployment rate for blacks is double that of whites; or the continued high rate of out-of-wedlock births among contemporary black women.

“12 Years A Slave” tells us how we got to where we are today racially. It is not a story that Confederate flag wavers, states’ rights advocates, talk radio stalwarts and all too many other Americans want to entertain. I can just hear them saying “Slavery ended 150 years ago. Get over it.”

It did, and it didn’t. And that’s the point.

More From CNN: