The Birth of a Nation: My Reckoning with D.W. Griffith???s Grand, Racist Cinematic Spectacle

Former US president, Barack Obama, remarked in a June 2023 interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that “race has always been the fault line of life and politics in the United States.” His comments were made in the context of a recharged sense of division and lack of unity in the American body politic. A time recognised in 2015 by Prof Robert Lang, of the University of Hartford, as being the most divisive time for the United States of America since the Civil War. It was also a reflection on the way that portions of American society can be sucked into silos through which they get told narrow stories that reinforce narrow forms of prejudice and prevent a sense of wider common national mission.

Tags: Grand Griffiths