I recently saw “12 Years a Slave,” which won this year’s Academy Award for best film, and deservedly so because it is well acted and deals with an important subject.  It tells the true story of a free black in the North who, in the 1840s, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South, where he spent more than  a decade enduring the brutality of slavery until he was able to escape and regain his freedom. 

It occurred to me that, while there have been dozens of films about the Holocaust, there have been surprisingly few depicting the evils of slavery. One recalls “Roots,” the television miniseries of the 1970s, but otherwise one is hard-pressed to think of many other major treatments of slavery on the big or small screens. 

Perhaps the pure evil that was slavery is so obvious that a kindergartener can understand that fact, and thus it has been felt unnecessary to capture that history on film. Or perhaps the horrors of slavery were such that no film could do justice to the reality. However, the same could be said about the Holocaust. 

In any event, the Oscar winner arguably filled a gap, appropriately recognized at the Oscar ceremonies March 2, immediately after Black History Month.  

Black History Month was officially established in 1976 to remind us of the African-American struggle for freedom and dignity, and to promote the advancement of civil rights.  Since then, almost every school has devoted the month of February to educating children about slavery and the African-American experience.

One would hope that at some point, enough racial progress will have been made that we will no longer need to designate a special month for that purpose. For now, though, it is generally accepted that we have not fully fulfilled the dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.  – that the day will come when “people will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” – and so it remains relevant to set aside some time to celebrate King’s vision.   

However, alongside the many positive celebrations that occur each February, others may cause more harm than good to race relations. I want to focus on one such event here, as an example of how not to discuss race.  

On Feb. 19, Marc Lamont Hill, an African-American associate professor of education at Columbia University, gave the keynote address for a Black History Month event held by the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Hill, is host of the syndicated TV show “Our World with Black Enterprise” and has appeared frequently in various national media outlets. The TV show’s website characterizes Hill as “one of the leading hip-hop generation intellectuals in the country.” UM-St. Louis’ Office of Student Life paid Hill $10,000 for his appearance.

After discussing inequality and social justice, he ended his lecture with the words, “Speak the truth even when it’s difficult and unpopular.” Well, let me take his advice and, as they say, speak truth to power, uttering some comments that challenge the PC police and the speech codes that dominate discourse on and off campus today. 

Hill talks about “white privilege,” even though his appearance fees hint that he may be a good deal more privileged than many impoverished whites living in the Ozarks and Appalachia. He comments about “white oppression,” never mind that our current president,  who happens to be African American, was elected to the highest office in the land in 2008 in a country where whites (according to the U.S. Census Bureau) are a substantial majority, and where he won the largest share of white support of any Democrat in a two-man contest since 1976. 

Hill has written about “overrated white people,” including William Shakespeare, while praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.Hill engages in constant black-white distinctions, disparaging whites as not only privileged but guilty of victimizing African-Americans, when I thought we were not supposed to engage in stereotyping entire groups. 

Is there still racism in America?  Of course. Look at the recent comments of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling. Slavery and Jim Crow will forever remain a stain on our history and, in teaching about our past, we should never whitewash that legacy. But we should also not brainwash people with victimization ideology. If the right often has been guilty of McCarthyism in suspecting a communist under every cover, many on the left have been similarly guilty of Sharptonism — finding a racist under every cover. 

We have made extraordinary strides in overcoming racial discrimination, not as much as some would like to think but more than Hill and others will acknowledge. 

Race conversations should not live in the past but point to the future, and should be conducted not by leaders who would divide us but rather bridge our differences and bring us together.