Although Django Unchained received an overwhelmingly positive critical reception at the time of its release, sitting at an 87% positive rating on the review aggregation website RottenTomatoes, some critics felt that Quentin Tarantino's seemingly flippant and unserious approach to the historical topic of slavery was inappropriate at best. In a 2013 article for Buzzfeed entitled "Surviving Django," Roxane Gay expressed outrage that the film uses the N-word 110 times, and registered her shock that during her viewing of the film, "the audience around me laughed quite heartily. What was disconcerting was how often they laughed at the wrong times."
In a 2012 interview with Vibe magazine, Spike Lee commented, "It's disrespectful to my ancestors... American slavery was not a Sergio Leone Western. It was a Holocaust." Gay, Lee, and other critics have pointed out that Tarantino, Samuel L. Jackson, and others have defended the film's violence and gratuitous use of the N-word by pointing to its fundamental historical accuracy, despite the fact that the film is in fact historically inaccurate in plenty of other ways.
Many have pointed out that there is, for example, no definitive historical evidence that "Mandingo fighting" ever existed in the way that it is portrayed in the film. David Blight, a historian at Yale, has argued that slaveowners would have had no incentive to engage slaves, which they perceived as their property, in a bloodsport that would result in their deaths. "Mandingo" itself is an anachronistic term that Tarantino selected in order to allude to Richard Fleischer's 1975 exploitation film Mandingo.
Still others have argued that Tarantino's film is finally a work intended to be a piece of entertainment consumed by twenty first-century audiences, rather than a definitive historical account or objective record. Tarantino, to be sure, delights in littering the film with anachronisms, such as when he scores various scenes of violence to songs by Rick Ross and 2Pac. Certain academics and critics have also defended the film, such as Adam Serwer in Mother Jones, who wrote that "The violence against slaves is always appropriately terrifying," or Wesley Morris in The Boston Globe, who likened the character Stephen to having "the same moral compass as Clarence Thomas." The film remains a flashpoint of controversy and discussion among African American critics and scholars.
