Black History Month, day 16 (sigh . . . I am not cut out for daily blogging)
I have no interest in seeing yet another movie whose chief interest in racism is how it affects white people. That’s okay now and then–racism does, after all, affect white people–but it is so, so overdone. So I’ll skip Green Book, which last night joined Driving Miss Daisy and (so I’m told–haven’t seen it) Crash on the list of Oscar-bait movies that successfully hooked the big fish by using the most irresistible bait of all: making white people feel as if racism can be resolved without any real sacrifice on our part.
Instead, I’m going to watch the documentary The Green Book: Guide to Freedom, released today. I know a bit about the Green Book, thanks to an exhibit in San Francisco several years ago (I wrote very briefly about it here) and a passage in The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson’s fascinating book about the Great Migration, in which one of the Southern African-Americans whose stories she tells was driving across the country to California and couldn’t find places to stop. Unable to rent a room, and at risk of being arrested, not to mention attacked, if they pull over and sleep in the car: it’s a system designed to tell black people that they have no worth or dignity.
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March 1, 2019 at 9:45 am
David Zucker
I have a different view of the movie, probably because in the fiftiest I had no friends or contacts witb blacks Although the film was made mosly by whites—except for Ali—it captured the essence of segregation, but that’s only my emotional connection.
March 3, 2019 at 4:27 pm
sorrygnat
I feel there is a great deal of white denial, and i found the film to be educative, and think we need as many voices out in the world, expressing a pernicious condition that has gone on far too long. I have been active in race work for 50 years; as a white, it’s not over until i draw my last breath;