SOURCE: Rattley, Sandra. “The Impact of Roots: Real or Imagined?” Africa Report 22, no. 3 (May/June 1977): 12-6.

[In the following essay, Rattley questions the premise that Haley's book and widely-acclaimed mini-series will have a significant impact on civil rights and issues of equality in the United States.]

Time magazine of February 14, 1977 said, and we quote:

In Chicago, they were talking about “Haley's comet.” … In New York, Executive Director Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League called it “the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America.”

Again in the words of Time:

What they were talking about was ABC's epic dramatization of Alex Haley's book Roots. For eight consecutive nights, tens of millions of Americans were riveted by Haley's story of his family's passage from an ancestral home in Africa to slavery in America, and, finally to freedom. Along the way, Americans of both races discovered that they share a common heritage, however brutal; that the ties that link them to their ancestors also bind them to each other. Thus, with the final episode [when 80 million Americans or nearly half of all America's families watched] Roots was no longer just a bestselling book and a boffo TV production but a social phenomenon, a potentially important bench mark in U.S. race relations.

And so goes the legend of Roots, according to another of America's most read magazines—the most important civil rights event since the 1965 march on Selma, Alabama.

To analyze the real impact of Roots, one must analyze the book and the television adaptation admitting they are different and must be considered separately.

Roots author Alex Haley says he used “a fictional technique based on fact” for his 688-page book which he describes as deeply and thoroughly researched; he spent 9 years studying the literally unchanged 200-year-old lifestyle of the Gambia, the seeding point of his family's roots. Haley himself has stated that Roots has had tremendous cultural and social effect on this country, causing “a whole nation to respond spontaneously, galvanically.” And that for African-Americans in particular, “Roots connected on the other side of the ocean on the continent symbolically for all of us who happen to be descendants from Africa.” Why? Again in Haley's words, because African-Americans as a people probably have the greatest single common denominator in ancestral background of any people on the face of the earth. Sown from the same ancestral pattern, all Africans in the diaspora, scattered places other than the continent all are descendants from “some African in an old African village; captured in some way; put in some slave ship, traveled across the ocean to some succession of plantations up to the Civil War, the Emancipation and from that day to this, struggle for freedom.” For Haley, his 12-year work was to be a contributory catalyst to pan-Africanism, to African-Americans rediscovering their source, and as a symbol of achievement for Black youth.

Haley's book is indeed an example of writing excellence, investigative fervor, and singleminded tenacity. But for the millions of Americans who haven't read the book but watched its television adaptation, their perception of the history of that struggle for freedom based on what they saw may be somewhat distorted.

Said one writer of the Roots TV audience, having the highest number of viewers in the 27 years of tabulating ratings undeniably demonstrated that the subject matter had mass appeal. The TV version delivered two of the staples of television programming—sex and violence. The controversial review of Time magazine's Richard Schickel called the entire TV dramatization “trash melodrama, … degrading what should have been a seriously taken historical and psychological study.” Schickel described the TV programming as a fifth-rate piece of work, full of concentrated doses of sadism and rape. Schickel further charged ABC-TV with getting away with violating normal television taboos like introducing scenes of white on black rape, “under the guise of this being an educational thing.”

Adaptations of an original text to commerciality for a movie or television audience are not unusual. As one Black arts critic described them, books that have reached “classic status” in the literary world are generally given careful and sensitive consideration in adaptations. Therefore the bad adaptations do not usually come from autobiographical works or autobiographically based fiction. She adds that in the case of Roots for television, the nature of the changes were disturbing. Alex Haley was consulted by ABC's William Blinn, script supervisor; George Simms, researcher; and writers Ernest Kinoy, James Lee, and M. Charles Cohen. Black psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing pointedly asks whether Jews would have acted as consultants and allowed Nazis to do a representation of the holocaust? She says that the ABC-TV version not only produced a steady diet of callous and dramatically stated violence, Black on Black crime, and sex that did not exist in the book, but reinforced the stereotypes of misstated history—with the sweet ole mammies, dancin', music-makin', droolin', wide-eyed darkies.

The very opening lines of Roots on television bothered some sophisticated African-American psyches with the statement that the Haley family history was being traced from “primitive Africa” to the Old South, implying a lifestyle less than desirable or acceptable. Alex Haley took great pains in the first 33 chapters of his book to paint a picture of an African lifestyle, though considered idealistic by some, so that in the horror, fear, and dread of being snatched to slavery, one had a sense of what Kunta Kinte, the young Mandinka warrior, was being taken from. Haley indicated through concrete examples how relationships, interactions were set up; how values were ingrained; what traditional African upbringing or “home training” was like; and how the important manhood structuring took place. Says one Black poet, the impact that builds up in Haley's book never hits in the TV adaptation. The TV relationships are flagrantly disected and “redone”; he charges the writers with purposely highlighting, cutting out, diminishing, and intentionally creating certain images. Kunta's grandmother's request for a drum on TV, her direct wish, led to his captivity; unlike in the book where Kunta's desire for a drum was his own. Haley was particularly graphic and historically accurate in his description of the “middle passage,” the months of stench, filth, fleas, body lice, and torture. Some say the TV interpretation was made palatable. Washington Post writer Dorothy Gilliam, however, registered strong reaction; she described that: “In Washington, Harvard educated Blacks crept away to vomit during the passage scene and a psychiatrist's young son wanted to knife every white he met by the time the series had reached midpassage, a difficult feat since he attended private school in Virginia.” Plantation life saw Black and mulatto slaves living in comfort. On TV, Kunta, depicted as anxious to learn, only ran into a conflict when he would not accept his “toubob” name of Toby. In Haley's book, Kunta and other slaves were tortured and tormented incessantly for their resistance and attempted escapes. All slave relationships as depicted on TV were of house slaves, not field hands, giving little indication that house slaves were indeed rare in the history of American slavery. Kunta and his wife Belle, in the book the first woman he had held in 39 rains, were characterized as living well, eating groundnut stew, chicken and dumplings, living in housing good even by today's standards, and dressed far better than normal. Said one exasperated TV viewer, those Blacks who live close to the Spotsylvania, Virginia plantation which housed Kunta Kinte 200 years ago would love to live in the same sort of lifestyle today in 1977 that ABC depicted as slave living. Also in Haley's book, the impact of history's so-called revolutionary slaves like Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner was clearly felt and absorbed by slaves, while in the TV version, slaves begrudingly indicated life was harder because of the irrational activities of certain unwilling slaves. The TV version left the baby-naming ceremony intact, but other rituals, grieving for example, were reserved for the death of the stillborn child of white sharecropper George, and for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

But one of the major historical distortions in the TV treatment was ABC creating the image that slavery wasn't bad; that freedom was in fact worse than slavery. Slaves were cared for, had roofs over their heads, and were well fed; therefore with the end of slavery came the end of security. The other ethnocentric misrepresentation concerned class. On the TV slave ship, the captain was benevolent and in principle opposed to slavery. In the middle-passage scene, the anguish of Kunta Kinte and the some 400 other slaves “tight-packed” sardine style in the big canoe was somehow minimized by the guilt suffering slave captain, with whom viewers were apparently intended to empathize. The plantation masters were generally depicted as humane. They didn't want slavery but accepted it due to peer pressure. The well-to-do, high-class plantation owners were do-gooders. It was the poor white master who was made to be hateful. Any collective fault of slave owning was skirted by examples of whites with very individual and perceptible imperfections. Belle tells Masta Waller, “cheap white folks break up families … you ain't that kind.” Similarly, Kizzy's son, Chicken George on TV was given his freedom by his white “trash” master. Night riders called Moore, Masta Lea in the book, “trash.” Moore reneged on his promise and sold Chicken George's family. Haley himself said of the TV adaptation: “Purposeful flaws and imperfections prepetuated the same old impressions of TV.”

The truth of the matter is that of all Black art (possibly competing only with the treasures of King Tut) in movies or on stage, Roots was the most watched by white folks in all history, and the most written and talked about. Why would a depiction of white slave owners pushing around and brutalizing Blacks become the top-rated television feature of all time? Some say American whites suddenly became aware of something that had existed in this country nearly as long as they; which had been documented in millions of cases—the cruelties committed against Blacks under a white heel. And although many TV critics agreed that the ABC adaptation was not an accurate recounting, just a dramatization, an oversimplified clichéing of mounds of information, for many millions Roots was both real and true, not isolated from reality.

The impact on white viewers was very dramatic in some instances because they had no real prior understanding, historical or otherwise, of the slave experience and its aftermath. Said one prominent newspaper writer, “Our shared memory has been abruptly altered, broadened to incorporate long denied realities”; a testimony to the fact that “orthodox” history is devoid of many truths, particularly regarding the slave experience. For that reason more than any other, TV's conclusion of achieving freedom was not logical and created a lulling effect.

Roots television producer David Wolper was one who suggested that in one week, whites' views of Blacks were turned around. Wolper admits that relative to the historical time and the realities of slavery, the white slavers could have been much more negative; but that an absolute attempt was made to temper the white characters. He said, “We analyzed every white part with possible negative white reaction in mind.” Haley reflecting on producer Wolper's comments drops: “Nobody with good conscience could tell the epic of slavery without some veneer [of the cruelty].” It was Haley's feeling, however, that it wasn't necessary to show the horror in all its gore. In his words, “If we can't accept this ‘tinseled version’ then it says an awful lot about us as a society now.” As for the theme of freedom won and fought for, Wolper is the first to say that this twentieth century period is not one of racial harmony; that despite pronouncements to the contrary, the races are not getting along better. A Black magazine columnist says that Americans are more race, sex, ethnic, and class conscious than ever, especially due to media's categorizing labels. Black claims for equality under the American way, he adds, are still considered “reverse discrimination” by some.

Another Black author says for him the essence of the TV adaptation of Roots was summed up in one scene: when white sharecropper George's wife talked Tom's son out of his revolutionary spirit. After watching his father whipped by white night riders, the young boy indicated he would begin to attack everyone white. George's wife immediately declared her innocence stating the boy couldn't hold all white people accountable for the social ills surrounding slavery. The author asks whether Roots was aired on TV to hang out dirty laundry, to purge once and for all and admit guilt, but guilt locked in a time frame of the past? Did Roots create a retreat from the evils of the present, from the realization that racism is a living world dynamic?

Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have indicated that Roots could not change unemployment or take people out of the ghetto. New York Congressman Charles Rangle said as far as long-term effects go, Roots would be a stimulant to television executives and genealogists, or others who can manipulate one people's cultural and emotional past. Detroit's Congressman John Conyers lamented that Roots did not construct a self-evident link between yesterday's slavery and today's ghettos.

As for cultural and emotional manipulation, America has already seen production of Roots memorabilia. Some say the commercialization of Roots was to be expected. Anytime something is that huge a hit with the television audiences of America, it is normal to expect a rash of products immediately made available for a public willing to buy anything remotely connected to it. In a Sunday paper recently, there was an advertisement for T-shirts and cheap wooden plaques that will allegedly put Black Americans closer to their Roots. The T-shirts and plaques are inscribed “Kunta Kinte Lives,” “Mandinka Maiden,” or “Mandinka Warrior.” There are also slave collars being worn by the models in the ads, although those collars were not for sale. Selling cheap junk, to try to force these items off on Blacks in the name of Black awareness, is saying that African-Americans are of inferior mentality and stupid enough to purchase such trash, in the words of one editorial writer. He adds, to many “diasporic” Blacks, the story of Kunta Kinte is their own, a chronicle of their history down through slavery; and to reduce Kunta Kinte to the level of Geraldine and the Hoola-Hoop is blasphemy and sacrilegious. Those sentiments have not curtailed development of mail-order “Root Tracing Kits” complete with fake parchment generation chart, of “Root Tracing History Classes,” or increased advertisement for “Dark Country” Park; the inference there being that now you've seen Africa on television, bring the kids and wife to see our recreated jungle in the Florida everglades.

Others are just as fearful of political manipulation as a result of Roots, and encourage Black citizens to be leery of arguments like: “Long live Kunta Kinte; you are his ancestors; save Kunta Kinte from ‘communists’.” Says one international relations Ph.D. candidate, most African-Americans know no Africans personally, and little about political circumstances in the Gambia or any other part of Africa. He says Roots should have been a stimulation for Blacks in America to take a more active stance in the formation of U.S.-Africa policy and in increasing concrete ties with Africans on the continent.

Another political reality, says another college student studying the media, is that Roots, according to its billings, was supposed to change television programming to make the medium more what it should be. She comments that what TV can do to human character and about human circumstances has not been used positively because the subtle racisms of a former slave-owning society have been institutionalized in other far-reaching forms with the aid of technology.

In commenting on the commercial success of Roots, some mention must be made of Haley's sharecropper relationship gone sour with his publisher, Doubleday. Haley is suing Doubleday for ＄5 million in punitive damages. In a 35-page complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Haley contends that Doubleday undercut hardcover book sales in order to profit from more sales of the paperback. He says Doubleday sold paperback rights of Roots to Dell in 1967 but then bought the Dell Company out in 1976. Under Doubleday's original contract with Dell, Haley says that he and Doubleday would have split 10 percent of the paperback profits and appearance of the paperback edition was to be held until 18 months after the publication date of October 1, 1976. Now according to Haley, his publisher renegotiated to advance the combined Dell-Doubleday company interest to its current 95 percent share of paperback sales. Author Haley says that Doubleday plans for a ＄6.95 class paperback and a ＄2.95 mass edition to be issued January 1978 have affected hardcover sales, because instead of distributing sufficient hardcover copies, Doubleday spread the word about forthcoming paperback editions (Haley gets 15 percent or ＄1.87 for each ＄12.50 hardcover copy). Haley hastens to add that his book was not properly promoted, that he arranged speaking engagements himself, and that copies of Roots were often not available in bookstores. Doubleday editor-in-chief Stewart Richardson claims his company spent a “ton of money” on Roots advertising and promotion but says for the first time in Doubleday history, it was unable to supply its printing demand and had to go to an outside printer.

Roots has been the biggest printing in Doubleday history. Doubleday publishers apparently thought they were ready for demand with a 200,000 copy first run as opposed to a usual first printing of 10,000 copies of a book. In the first three weeks, 250,000 copies of Roots disappeared from bookstore shelves; and the Doubleday publicity office says Roots sales figures are confidential. According to Haley, Roots is being used at 276 colleges and universities for course work; and many high schools are setting up courses around the book. In addition, publishers in 18 countries have bought translation rights. Haley has also recorded how the Roots story came to be on a long-playing album which he calls an “heirloom of this particular work and search.” It has been estimated that Haley has made well over ＄1 million in royalties. Haley says he was unprepared for Roots' monumental commercial success. In his words, “It seems to me the most obvious thing in the world that no single individual nor any committee of people with whatever expertise could sit down with whatever period of time allowed or budget and predictably create [an instant success as] in the case of Roots, the book and the film which followed.”

As for confronting social hierarchies that still exist, despite the fact that those hierarchies are supposedly in the process of being torn down, Haley admits that he had his own ideas about the impact of his work. Rather than direct attack on the vestiges of slavery and racism still evident in American society today, Haley has indicated that Roots could help to legitimize and promote university programs that would record the traditions and oral history of Africa's griots or walking-talking history books. Haley says, “It has been very deeply impressed upon me that what we as a people need to do is reclaim all possible of our heritage …” Already U.S. Census Department searches for family beginnings have increased fourfold.

Haley observes that today's urban youth are untrained, intransitory, defiant of family and authority, and (in the words of Malcolm X) are conning themselves with hipness. To counteract the possible negative effects on society, Haley suggests an African-American cultural foundation and judicial system based, as in Africa, on the counsel of elders. Haley states previously he had no idea such institutions existed in Africa; that before his personal exposure, his African impressions were shaped by television or movie interpretations such as “Tarzan” or “Jungle Jim.” Haley calls television an electronic “griot” only to the extent that it has replaced grandparents, older aunts, or uncles who in their story tellings and anecdotes were the form of entertainment in the pre-TV era. Haley says TV has alienated youth from their elders with whom they no longer have proximity. As a result children are denied the uniquely magical grandparent relationship. Older Blacks, because of this isolation and lack of understanding, are pegged “Uncle Toms” by youth and the impact, according to Haley, on society is devastating as a result, complicated by urban alienation. He says in the South (Henning, Tennessee) when he was growing up, everyone lived by the extended family concept and as a result everyone survived. That's to be contrasted with “up North” where one could starve or freeze to death in the streets. Haley's suggestions to counteract these social ills is to go to the eldest people in families and unlock the treasure troves of information in their heads; to go through attics, closets, and trunks to save and study family records; and to have family reunions.

The conclusions you might draw about the impact of Roots will no doubt be very individual. Said one public school teacher, the whole point that can't be escaped is that for all America's advances and technological progress, there is little difference between the era when white slave owners made Black America's ancestors unwilling American immigrants, and what is happening right now. The salaries of Blacks are incrementally increasing but the income gaps between Blacks and whites are still proportionately wide. She adds Blacks once considered experts at plantin' taters and pickin' cotton are still relegated today to “Black jobs” where, on the highest professional levels, Blacks are considered specialists on themselves.

Alex Haley himself readily admits that social and economic realignment is necessary because “in diverse ways, across generations, the abilities, the potentials of a whole people have been stunted, repressed, limited; the talents of minorities have been poured right down the drain at a great loss to American society.”