The Boycott The Woman King Movement
A couple of days ago, #BoycottTheWomanKing was trending on Twitter. The discourse was that The Woman King’s portrayal of the Dahomey Kingdom was inaccurate, that the kingdom continued to sell and profit off of slaves rather than stopping as the movie implies. The propose solution that is given, however, is to avoid the movie altogether rather than treating it as fiction. Now, this argument is strange to me because there have been many historical movies that have been wildly inaccurate that are still enjoyed nonetheless. No one argues that we should boycott 300 or Braveheart or Gladiator or other movies like it because they’re historical inaccurate, that they downplay or outright ignore the atrocities committed by the movies’ subject. They’re rightfully accepted as historical fiction, emphasis on fiction. So why can’t The Woman King, a movie with an almost exclusively Black cast and a Black director, be given the same grace? Why can’t the argument be to use the movie as a stepping stone to researching the actual history?
