For all its moving, tender, and grisly historic vividness, Roots remains what psychologists call an "ambiguous stimulus," one which is selectively restructured by the observer who is participant. This is not to despair in solipsism, but to emphasize the omnipresence of subjectivity in the never-detached observer; and to stress equally that that subjectivity can be a tool either for un-self-conscious indulgence, or for disciplined engagement. (p. 12)

For me, what is refreshing about Haley's Roots is that reality is not … cavalierly held in contempt. While there is much absolutistic either-or in the tale, Haley's world of human bondage does more than outrageously simplify into good guys and bad guys. I would go further: his is an American epic that Black and White men and women of good will might read and watch and discuss together. For while Haley does lamentably indulge in stereotyping, which I shall consider later, the over-all effect of Roots is, for me, a transcendent one, not a one-sided victory. In a sense, Roots taps the core of the American experience with its focus on the journey from whence we come, where we are now, where we aspire to, and the ever-new and constantly renewing pioneer settling of a new-found-land in freedom. "We" becomes everyone, not a single race. Haley is not fixated on the past: the past is simply, and starkly, and dramatically, the Proud Beginning. Haley does not rest complacently with an origin myth: for roots is process, not place. Roots lie not only in the past—but in the present and future as well.

Those who view Haley's message as exclusively a look backward have missed the dramatic unfolding toward the future. A sinking and spreading of roots takes place throughout the odyssey. (pp. 11-12)

The American dream became a new image of rootedness. The American cultural value on "Don't give up hope," that "If I can't attain it, I will help my children to get it," these values, in Haley's script, become transformed into Afro-American values, making for convergence, congruence, synthesis in cultural aspirations. (p. 13)

The new rootedness is not without anguish and sacrifice and risk. Kunta Kinte must choose among divided loyalties: his choice reveals what sort of man he is, his values, his priorities. He must decide between acting upon his vow to be a free man at any cost, and remaining with his new family…. Ultimately, it required greater courage for Kunta Kinte to choose to remain behind, to establish new roots, than it would have been to make a daring escape. To the maturing Kunta Kinte, the freedom of dogged ideological adherence to the individualism of the past became less attractive than commitment to those who were by love and promise of the future committed to him. He found new reward in meeting the new demands and opportunities of family life. There were other ways of fighting slavery than fleeing it.

Kunta Kinte chooses the limits and different freedoms of responsibility, mutuality, and devotion. Like his future descendant Alex Haley, he is more self-disciplined than self-indulgent. Selfhood is deepened, not suffocated, in relation and commitment—all the more dramatically poignant when the imminence of the master's whim renders impermanent any human relationship. (pp. 13-14)

Haley does frequently indulge himself oversimplifying and overdrawing racial differences to the point of caricature. This results in a reversal of White stereotypes, popular and sociological, and obscures much of the interpersonal complexity and internal anguish in those both Black and White caught together in the "American Dilemma." Thus Africans and Afro-Americans are portrayed as strong, courageous, loving, alive, patient, compassionate, determined, proud, moral, having integrity, knowing who they are, resorting to deception and obsequious cunning only out of the necessity of survival. Whites, excepting Old George, are cruel, inhuman, immoral, pretentiously mannered, innured to human suffering, calloused in their emotions, obsessed with property and propriety and order. Freedom in Africa is contrasted with Slavery in America, as though African slavery not only did not antedate White slavers but did not exist. Neither Kunta Kinte, nor Chicken George, nor others in the later succession of Black males, were weak, passive, docile, fatalistic, resigned. For survival they may have feigned what submission the credulous master and mistress needed for their own dehumanizing entertainment. But everything was a finely rehearsed outward act…. Defiance was the underlying flame that made brokenness and despair impossible. Rootedness endured….

If in some ways, Haley simplifies history, in other ways, his dramatic autobiographic odyssey of personal lineage is congruent with the findings of current historians of the antebellum South. (p. 14)

With insight and grace, Haley is able to articulate contradictions and ambivalences that less self-aware writers would make a matter of either-or. With empathic historical relativism, he successfully (for me) tries to imagine himself and his audience back in the eras he depicts…. There is no denying the human holocaust of American slavery. Yet even in the constraints of such degradation, there was some mutuality, some warmth, some caring, some commitment, some sense of reciprocal obligation. All was not feigned. Haley conveys much of this, even as he exaggerates the virtues and frailties and failings of his characters.

I find and identify with in Roots a struggle and process that is incomplete, one which I suspect cannot be finalized without foreclosing or violating the life-long development of identity. Here is where Roots parts company with most personal histories, self-disclosures, and autobiographic-ethnic confessionals of the contemporary genre. For if I hear Haley correctly, Roots does not denote exclusively African origins. Kunta Kinte is not his protagonist, but a vehicle for the dramatic unfolding which is the true protagonist, one of a search for wholeness. I do not find in Haley's agonized itinerary a tale of primeval innocence, despite frequent lapse in characterization. I do not hear an apologia for ethno-racial separatism, since Haley's and Roots' odyssey is inextricably Black and White. I do not find Black pride purchased exclusively at the expense of White shame and guilt. Haley is not altogether clear here, but the direction of his resolution is what compels my identification. He is, after all, the biographer of Malcolm X who just before his assassination, transcended the hate-ridden phase of "White Devils" hortatory rhetoric in his pilgrimage to Mecca, discovering that all men could be brothers irrespective of race. Roots serves as a reminder that not only is Black history bound up with White, but that White history is inseparable from Black. In a word, Haley's integrity and authenticity outweigh his sins of omission and commission. He has held a mirror before us, one in which we have chosen to peer attentively. Haley has chosen not the deceptive luxury of cozening himself and us into a fixation on the past, but has with sensitivity and self-discipline documented and embellished a continuum of culture and history that is common to the American experience.

Roots concludes with homage to the past and hope for the future, a future founded on a fresh start—something peculiarly American. (pp. 15-16)

[This] fairy tale in historical form is designed to make a point. And the degree to which it has touched us, made us more whole, is the extent to which Haley's odyssey is ours also, his hope, ours. In the end, there remains the unanswered question: Quo vadimus? Is it still possible to overcome together? (p. 16)