The film has frequently been criticized as
racist, despite directors Jacopetti and Prosperi's claims to the contrary. In
Roger Ebert's 1972 review of the shorter American version, he asserts that the directors have, "Made the most disgusting, contemptuous insult to decency ever to masquerade as a documentary."
[2] He goes on to call the film "Cruel
exploitation," suggesting that the directors degraded the black actors playing slaves by having them enact the extremely dehumanizing situations the film depicts. Critic
Pauline Kael called the film “the most specific and rabid incitement to race war,”
[3] a view shared by
white nationalist and former
Ku Klux Klan leader
David Duke, who claimed the film was a
Jewish conspiracy to incite blacks to violence against whites.
[4]
