A photo from the movie The Butler that shows Mariah Carey as a slave working in a cotton field has caused a stir online.
The conversation revolves around the fact that Carey's character, if she existed during the slavery era, would have been a "house" slave due to her skin color and mixed race heritage.
But that may not be so, according to pioneering women's history scholar Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who says female slaves were not usually exclusively house slaves.
"On the largest plantations, especially the more pretentious ones, a woman was more likely to be sent from the house to help out in the fields than the reverse," wrote Fox-Genovese in Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South.
Lee Daniels's The Butler, based on the life of legendary White House service worker Eugene Allen, who served eight presidents from 1952 to 1986, stars Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. It's due in theaters August 16.
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