As you saw if you follow me on Twitter or Identi.ca, I just finished watching Roots. It's phenomenal, of course, though it's disappointing that so much of it is fictionalized (for instance, the conscience-torn captain of a slave ship is fakeity-fake-fake).

When you're watching a variety of atrocities play out onscreen, your quirks and idiosyncrasies come out and you see what viscerally disturbs you. Evidently I absolutely detest:

• Taking away other people's choices
• Destruction and waste
• Breaking promises
• Teaching kind people to be mean
• Arbitrary power, both the exercise of it and having to live in fear of it
• Slurs
• Sexual assault
• Threats
• Privileged people disregarding or not noticing the effects of our words and actions on oppressed people
• Ignoring or insulting the merit of intelligent, competent people
• Self-serving ideologies of oppression
• Torture
• Letting "but but but family!" get in the way of escaping a terrible situation

I came into Roots expecting to see slaves and slavemasters, and yup, they're there. And the reluctant slave-ship captain, though on-the-nose about the danger of the slippery slope, was not hella surprising. I absolutely did not expect Old George, the white small farmer turned incredibly reluctant overseer. His lessons in oppression and solidarity got at me, because the nature of modern life is complicity, that's the background and context of everything we do.

On a lighter note, yes, there are moments in Roots when it would be entirely plausible for Kunta Kinte to say "I'll see ya next time!" or "You don't have to take my word for it!"