I couldn’t help myself. I had to write a follow-up post in response to “How To Say Lupita Nyong’o” by Africa Is a Country’s Zachary Rosen. While I think the post is interesting, and I liked that all the clips are available to see the repeated mispronunciation of Lupita Nyong’o’s surname, these clips got me riled up for many other reasons.

Most people (in the videos, at least) who pronounce Nyong’o have given it a go before. However, the bungling of her name is not half as offensive as the problematic nature of the conversations that followed the post. Why even have a ridiculous conversation about her name on these shows? So what. She was born in Mexico, grew up in Kenya, and then went to school elsewhere. So what? Migration is now a fact of life. And many people like her are in most North American and Western European cities, though they’re not actresses and up for an Oscar.

Jimmy Fallon, the late-night talk show host who gets her name right, spent most of his interview with Lupita discussing her family and their achievements and connections. He mentions (seemingly with great surprise) that her father is a senator in Kenya, that her cousin is on some list of the “20 most powerful women in Africa,” and finally, Fallon completes the family tree by showing an Instagram clip of her younger student brother celebrating his sister’s Oscar nomination in song. He avoided talking about why she is on the show in the first place: her fierce portrayal of Patsy in Steve McQueen’s “12 Years A Slave.”

What young white up-and-coming actress gets her family tree put on national and international television night after night because she did an outstanding job in a film?

ABC’s “The View” did a slightly better job but failed. Whoopi Goldberg asked Lupita and lead actor Chiwetel Ejiofor whether they knew about slavery since neither of them are African American. “We are steeped in it,” she added for good effect.

We, meaning Americans.

What an outrageous question. More explicitly, the question came from an African American to two black actors who are themselves part of a diaspora in which slavery and forms of forced labor played central roles. Whether Lupita and Chiwetel know the exact traces of their genealogical roots is irrelevant, as is whether they are African American. Unlike more recent historical racial horrors (such as Apartheid South Africa), slavery is precisely that–a deep historical excavation of a Black past that went by and continues to go by as “the bad past.”  Whether you are an African American, Black British, or from the continent, the legacy of slavery touches you because, in some way, your ancestors were part of a dehumanizing project that contributed to where you are today. Whoopi Goldberg’s question is also an odd one since she starred in the 1992 film “Sarafina” about apartheid South Africa and must have learned about that country’s deep slave legacy from the mostly South African cast.

In every article about or interview with Nyong’o to promote the film or the Oscars, Lupita is made an exemplar of a “beautiful,”  articulate, and “special” kind of young black actress. This is by no means new. But what is specific about the way Lupita is being handled by interviewers is how this fascination with her is coupled with how many white viewers of the film just now discover that slavery was a horrifyingly violent system. These two tropes have also become the mainstay in how “12 Years a Slave” is being discussed more recently.

“12 Years A Slave” deserves critical acclaim and commendation. However, most coverage of “12 Years a Slave” focuses not on the film itself but on the lives of the actors who play them in the film. This dismissal of both the complexities that the film deals with and the complicated work of representing and (on-set) reliving the period of slavery is both deeply troubling and insulting.

Further, the kind of engagement with the film that we have evidenced so far speaks to a dismissal of work about slavery that has been done on various platforms, such as literature about Black slave narratives, visual art, scholarship or music. And these artists and scholars (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Kara Walker, Yvette Christianse, Mos Def, and Talib Kweli, et al) have been working in the field of slave memory, across genres, borders and oceans.

Most of the leads are not African American, and neither is Steve McQueen. The fact that this film has a different kind of gaze is uncomfortable from a tentative but predominantly nationalist (North American) position. In this context, many Americans are used to talking about issues that are or have been historically framed as only that of the “nation,” and so there seems to be (in American popular media) the sentiment that “this is only our story to tell.” And because of this discomfort that nobody dares to speak about, the greater emphasis is placed on how and why the leads chose the script, how they felt about playing these roles, and whether they knew about slavery or how to pronounce Lupita Nyong’o’s surname.

Then, there’s the emphasis on Nyong’o’s beauty. Words like ‘stunning,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘gorgeous’ are used repeatedly in introductions and descriptions of Lupita. Her PR team is doing well to promote the new star in these terms. While it must be exciting to be nominated for the big awards after your first big Hollywood role and in something as path-breaking as this film, the media has focused on her image and skin in particular.

So let me conclude this piece by asking: How do we re-memory? Taking cues from the ever-compelling memory of slavery in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, I prefer to think of “12 Years A Slave” as a beautifully dignified and artistically moving and provocative work of re-memory of a slave past that continues to be dismissed, as it has been for centuries past. Solomon Northup’s story may be ‘new’ in the details of his journey that we see in the film, but the narrative of slavery is not new. We should not forget that. The more we celebrate the topic and not the film as an intervention, the less we are part of remembering Blackness and more part of the cogs of oppressive racism that confront us daily, even if we are not picking cotton anymore.