An African American man kidnapped a woman in Iowa, United States and forced her to watch “Roots”, a 1970s television miniseries about slavery.

Police arrested the man after he allegedly kidnapped a woman and forced her to watch the miniseries “Roots” to get her to “better understand her racism,” police said.

According to the Gazette, Robert Lee Noye, 52, of Cedar Rapids, was arrested Monday on harassment and false imprisonment charges after police said he made the woman “remain seated” in a Second Avenue home and watch the 1977 series about slavery.

The woman also alleged that Noye threatened to “kill her and spread her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago” if she didn’t watch the show, police said.

Noye has been charged with first-degree harassment and false imprisonment. His mugshot shows him with a smug grin as if he thinks the situation is funny, or has no remorse.

Robert Lee Noye, 52

“Roots”, released in 1977, was a nine-hour miniseries based on author Alex Haley’s 1976 novel titled “Roots: The Saga of an African Family”.

It tells the story of how Haley’s ancestor, 18th century African Kunta Kinte, was abducted from his village and sold into slavery in the U.S. The story goes all the way down to how the bloodline reached the author himself.

Roots was presented as factual, claiming to be based on actual events, and even shown in schools across America. Yet later on, it was revealed the story based on the history of slavery had several inconsistencies and some misleading information.

It was not that “Roots” merely got some details wrong. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened — false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.

“Roots” has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage.

The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there — and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.

Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.

Because of the false picture of history presented by “Roots” and by other sources, the president of Nigeria tried to make demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world.