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If you have not seen the film, Twelve Years A Slave, put it on your To-Do list.

Even better, read the book that is Solomon Northup’s journal on which the movie was based. It is beautifully written, an example of literature at its best. Northup’s ability to write was simply stunning.

What the book and the film capture is the sheer madness of slavery made possible by ignorance, apathy, greed, and inhumane meanness.

The overwhelming feeling I had when reading the former and seeing the latter is that I will never be able to understand what being black in a predominantly white America has been like. What I can do is to accept the truth that slavery and its aftermath still play a major role in the personal, social, educational, and economic problems African Americans today experience.

I don’t mean to excuse inexcusable behavior. I am sure many young blacks who choose the wrong path in life could choose a different one. So this is not an apology for bad attitudes and bad behavior within the black community.

Yet I know without a doubt that I don’t have a clue about what it feels like deep inside for a black man or woman to read a book like Northup’s or see the film based on it, especially when racism is still a major player in our society whether people want to admit it or not.

How could they not be overwhelmed with sadness, anger, despair, frustration, bitterness?

And yet, they can rightly feel pride in being heirs to people like Solomon Northup for what they lived through.

They looked hatred in the eye and did not blink. They saw what all of us should see…that hatred is a terrible thing because it does such awful things to the mind and spirit of people infected by it. It also begets many children whose names are meanness, apathy, blind criticism, self-righteousness, arrogance, moral numbness.

These offspring may be more pernicious than hatred itself because they seem less dangerous or harmful. They are not. They will do a person in just as hatred itself does. They will destroy a person’s soul without missing a step.

It took me a while, but I have finally gotten to a different place than where I was after I read the book and saw the movie.

What I now see is this: Solomon Northup was a great American.

That means something wonderful. As Americans we, and I mean all of us, are his heirs.

We can take pride in the fact that he helped to write American history that exposed one of the worst periods in our history, that his prose was so stunningly beautiful that it has endured for over a hundred and fifty years.

Solomon Northup stands as one of the great people of our nation’s past.

He may have been twelve years a slave, but before and after those awful years he was an outstanding American.

You don’t have to be black to be proud of that fact.