Adepero Oduye movie reviews & film summaries
Gabriel Cooper
Updated on March 09, 2026
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Acting right around White folks: on "12 Years a Slave" and "respectability politics"
ReBecca Theodore-Vachon | 2013-10-18
"12 Years a Slave" and "The Butler" are part of a valuable subgenre of American film that dramatizes the fallacy of "Black respectability"—the notion that if African-Americans will only speak, dress and behave in a certain way, discrimination won't affect them, and they'll reap the American dream.
