For Steven Spielberg, who once shocked Alice Walker, the black author of The Color Purple, by breezing that Gone with the Wind was his ‘favourite movie of all time’, slavery may seem an odd choice as the subject of his first film for the new Dreamworks studio. But December is the start of the Academy Award season, and Spielberg—recently ranked Hollywood's number one most powerful ‘director-partner-godhead’ by Entertainment Weekly in its annual Power List—is eager for another taste of Oscar's golden chalice, adding to his trophy haul for Schindler's List.

Amistad is a ＄70 million epic about a black slave rebellion aboard a Spanish ship in 1839, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Morgan Freeman. But, as an LA court heard earlier this week, Spielberg's Oscar quest this year is facing an embarrassing snag. In a saga that Time is calling ‘Stealberg’, the black author Barbara Chase-Riboud is accusing Spielberg of ＄10 million-worth of brazen ‘literary piracy’ from her own bestselling fiction account of the slave mutiny, called Echo of Lions.

Still, this scuffle has done nothing to stop the American media boarding the Amistad ship and crowning Steven Spielberg the official patron saint of oppressed racial victimhood. Newsweek, in a superlative-packed cover story, has led the way by zealously stating that Spielberg attempts to ‘do for slavery what he did for the Holocaust in Schindler's List—to bring a vast audience face to face with both the horror and the subtlety of the crimes of history’.

All week, United States newspapers and television shows have been cranking out the Schindler parallel, with much footage and meaningful comparisons between Nazi concentration camps and the slave horrors of the Middle Passage. But, as James Baldwin observed in a famous 1967 essay on race in America, published in the New York Times Magazine, any attempt to draw a parallel between the tragedy of black slavery and the Jewish Holocaust is loaded with political landmines. ‘One does not wish, in short, to be told by an American Jew that his suffering is as great as the American Negro's suffering. It isn't, and one knows that it isn't from the very tone in which he assures you it is.’

Whilst the American Jewish community has long been determined to remind itself and the public of the atrocities of Nazi genocide, many African-Americans resent the subject of slavery being brought up at all. The culture of denial is comprehensive. In the South, where I have been recently, you only have to be the most cursory tourist to see how it has become sanitised for the visitor. In Charleston, capital of American slavery, the visitor strolls through the cobbled old slave market on Chalmers Street, happily signposted and now a chic residential downtown neighbourhood.

‘There is a collective amnesia about slavery in the American mind, both black and white, which has afflicted the country since the day slavery was abolished in 1865,’ says Henry Louis Gates Jnr, chairman of African-American studies at Harvard University. Significantly, there still remains no memorial to slavery in Washington. According to Mr Gates, the first book written by a black historian about slavery wasn't published until 1972.

Enter Spielberg, waving his Schindler card, invited to the Washington premiere of Amistad attended by Bill Clinton, to teach a politically correct history lesson about the injustice of slavery. He insisted that only African-American crew members were allowed to shackle the chain-wearing black actors who played slaves in Amistad. This is not unlike the inverted, condescending racism that infuriates many blacks when, say, the New York Times often manages to ask a black reviewer to write about an African-American book, assuming it is for a black audience. Yet elsewhere Spielberg is quoted as stressing that Amistad is not about black history but ‘American history’. He wants to have it both ways—on the one hand to make a film about man's universal struggle for freedom, yet also condescendingly to remind his black cast that they need ‘special handling’.

Despite being a generously paid script consultant on Amistad, and welcoming the film, Mr Gates admitted to me, ‘This is not the ultimate movie about the black experience. I don't think there is a good comparison between Schindler's List and Amistad, whoever is making it. They are not comparable historical events.’

Well, it turns out—surprise, surprise—that it is Spielberg's own Dreamworks public relations people who have been encouraging the media comparison between the tragic suffering of blacks and Jews from the start. When I asked a Dreamworks marketing executive what consumer tie-ins there were—licensed toys, T-shirts etc.—she said, ‘It's like a Schindler's List type of film—it's not appropriate for merchandise.’

Nevertheless, with Amistad different sympathies seem to apply. Not wanting what he called ‘blood money’, Spielberg refused to take any salary for directing Schindler's List. All the money he earned from the film was donated to Jewish organisations and his own non-profit Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (enabling survivors of the Holocaust to record their tales on film for posterity). When I repeatedly tried to discover from Dreamworks executives if similar Amistad profits were being donated to African-American foundations, nobody rang back.

Which raises the question of the modern commercialisation of the slave trade. Last month, there was a public outcry when it was revealed that Christie's in New York were auctioning off some 19th-century slave memorabilia. After a syndicated radio talk show raised the issue, angry black listeners flooded Christie's with protest calls, accusing the venerable auction house of a double standard, since it had an existing policy of not selling items related to the Holocaust, but not one relating to slavery.

Although it's an absurd argument to pursue—next, forensic tests on all antique armour for 15th-century bloodstains?—it touches a sensitive nerve. The difference is well illustrated by a tour I remember a few years ago of the bleak concentration camp and gas chambers of Auschwitz (Spielberg himself was not allowed to film inside the camp because of fears of turning it into an ‘entertainment’). No commercialism, restaurants or kitsch souvenir shops, such as you find near the old slave market in Charleston—just starkly eerie exhibits, barbed wire, cold, pale-green walls and a grim, unsanitised silence.

By contrast, the slave castles on the palm-tree-lined Ghana coast, which have been renovated for holiday tourist dollars after being named ‘world heritage’ sites by Unesco, have shocked many African American tourists, not because of their inhuman record of brutality, but, again, because of their denial of it—amounting to a ‘whitewash’ of the black holocaust. An American journalist who recently toured Ghana's Cape Coast slave fortresses reported that American blacks wrote in the visitors' book that they were incensed that these ‘dungeons, where their ancestors wore manacles and starved, now smell Disney-clean and sport tacky gift shops’.

Meanwhile, perhaps the best example of hypocrisy is the paradox that the filmmaker who produced and directed The Color Purple is now accused of denying a prominent black woman of arts and letters her ‘rightful recognition’ for raising ‘public consciousness’ about the slavery of her ancestors. It's not difficult to see why Barbara Chase-Riboud is upset. In 1988, at the request of her friend, Jackie Onassis, Spielberg's executives in LA invited Chase-Riboud over to discuss a film adaptation of Echo of Lions. Before the meeting, the production head faxed Mrs Onassis to say that she found the book ‘a fascinating treatment of an important but terribly neglected episode in American history’.

Next year, at least, Dreamworks will have no such problems. Spielberg has already decided his Oscar effort will probably be Eldorado: City of Gold, and this time he has taken the precaution of getting out his chequebook in advance of going to court. As the back flap of Hugh Thomas's recent 900-page book, The Slave Trade boasts, ‘His latest book was The Conquest of Mexico, recently bought by Steven Spielberg to act as the basis for a planned film in 1998.’