The Birth of a Nation is lackluster. The life of Nat Turner, who infamously led a violent slave uprising, is a compelling story. But Nate Parker's retelling is so wrapped up in lectures and dogma that its rendering of Turner isn't interesting enough to sustain an entire feature film. However, the movie's release does reveal something pretty interesting about Hollywood, and how it's created and maintained a particular genre of slave narratives.When the TV remake of Roots debuted at the beginning of the summer, Snoop Dogg gave the series a hard pass . With his hair wrapped in a satin scarf, he posted a video on Instagram denouncing the series. He didn’t need more media focusing on the trauma of what it meant to be Black in the 1800s, he reasoned, when he could turn on the news and watch live updates of the trauma inflicted on people of color today. “They just want to keep showing the abuse that we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago. But guess what? We're taking the same abuse,” he said.Snoop was wrong about Roots' quality and substance . But he was right about one thing: We've had enough of slavery being treated as an overarching genre of brutalization, rather than a varied series intimately rendered individual narratives.Slavery is America’s origin story, and the movies, TV shows, and books that document its horrors serve a few necessary functions. Slave narratives can give Black people a way to make sense of our personal histories through art, and work through the effects of a system that divided our families and stole our ancestors’ biographies. It’s useful for some to see how the fault lines of color and class have persisted longer than our country's system of physical enslavement. Even blockbusters like Django Unchained — which is definitely a slavery-as-genre movie — give us something to point to in conversations with people who can’t understand how the events of centuries ago still affect our lives today.The Birth of a Nation is the latest title to be added to this debate. Outside of the controversy surrounding Nate Parker , one big question lingers: Should we continue seeing movies about slavery? It’s harrowing to witness that history on screen, leave a dark theater, reemerge into the world, and see the effects of the racism it engendered still playing out today.