Special Edition: Black Lives Matter Starter Pack
What movies taught me about race that I never learned in school
Cheat sheet: Get Out, Selma, Malcolm X, BlacKkKlansman, and Just Mercy
So, things this past couple of weeks in America have exploded. Some people have expressed shock or surprise at how “fast” this wave of outrage and protest over police brutality and racism has taken over all our lives. It seems that many well- and not so well-meaning white people have been unaware of just how long this has been simmering.
It should not surprise any of us.
One aspect of the problem is that people have been taught to approach racism as a problem that is 95% in the past. Some people think most of it died with slavery ending in 1865. Some think it may have lasted about 100 years more, until Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s. But now we’re all basically equal, right?
No. Prejudice and racism and institutional corruption that allowed slavery to happen, that allowed Jim Crow laws to happen, that allowed police violence against non-violent civil rights protestors to happen, that allowed illegal FBI spying and assassinations of civil rights leaders to happen, that allowed Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination to happen — those things don’t just up and vanish. They’re baked into the structures that maintain our society, into the thought patterns passed through generations. They don’t just go away. Not any more than anti-semitism magically disappeared after the Holocaust ended in 1945, or sexism just died a quick and painless death after (white) women finally won the right to vote in 1920.
This is not a problem of the past, although we cannot understand its place in the present without being aware of its roots. And while Black history and Black stories are still woefully undertold, we do live in a time of great Black filmmakers, actors, and actresses, and they have given us a lot of material with which to educate ourselves.
So for this edition of my newsletter, instead of 5 random movies from my DVR, I’ve picked 5 movies that explore race in America, some of which I watched this week for the first time, and some that I’d seen previously and rewatched. This is, of course, just a microscopic sample of Black cinema, and I don’t know nearly enough about the entire catalog to be able to give a comprehensive list. Consider this a small starter pack.
These films range in their time periods, but they all provide context for what is happening today, and why none of us should be surprised.
THE MOVIES
Movie #1: Get Out (2017) | R
Written and Directed by Jordan Peele
I’m starting with this one because it is set the most recently. It’s a contemporary movie and the only fictional one on this list, depicting commonplace upper-middle-class racism in America as it exists today.
It’s also a horror movie, but it doesn’t really get very classically horror-y until very late in the movie. The majority of the tension and discomfort in the movie is produced merely by the mundane situation — a young Black man, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), coming to meet the white parents and family friends of his white girlfriend.
It is so uncomfortable. The writing is brilliant in its depiction of white people saying white people things without being aware that they are inappropriate things to say to a Black person. If you don’t know what that means — take, for example, attempting to reassure Chris by saying, apropos of nothing, “I voted for Obama. Both times,” or comparing him to Black celebrities, like Tiger Woods.
If you are a white person, chances are you can imagine people you know behaving this way, if you haven’t already witnessed it yourself. It may be a subtle kind of racism, but these kinds of comments say pretty clearly, I have no idea how to treat this Black person as a human being and not as “A Black.” And Chris is trapped there by the fact that they are his hosts, that he is their guest and one of only two Black people in the area, so he doesn’t have the freedom to walk away or to speak up for himself in the way that he would like to. Plus, the other Black person seems to be behaving oddly and validating everything the white people do.
At various points, Chris is deprived of his cell phone and his ability to photograph or document what is happening around him. When I first watched the movie, it seemed creepy, of course, but in hindsight, this strikes me as incredibly pointed — one of the major weapons Black people have against their oppressors nowadays is the ability to take cell phone video, to document, to expose. Taking that away is definitely no accident.
Then the movie takes a turn, and I won’t go into detail, but it gets SIGNIFICANTLY less subtle and more violent and perhaps almost cartoonish in its extreme depiction of white people preying on a Black person.
When I first saw it, I thought that perhaps this cartoonish choice undercut the realism and message of the everyday, subtle, casual racism depicted in the earlier part of the movie, taking away some of its credibility. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like Peele’s message is really that there is no such thing as subtle or benign racism; all racism, all inability by people in power to see other people as fully human, if allowed to thrive, ultimately has destructive and often violent consequences.
There is simply too much history, and too much precedent, to believe otherwise.
Movie #2: Selma (2014) | PG-13 (available to rent for free here)
Directed by Ava DuVernay | Written by Paul Webb (although according to Wikipedia, DuVernay rewrote 90% of the original script - without credit due to a stipulation in Webb’s contract)
And here we get into some of the history. Three months during the Civil Rights Movement, 1965. A story of Martin Luther King Jr. (played spectacularly by Daniel Oyelowo) fighting for Black voting rights, told in a way that I, personally, was never taught in school.
I read somewhere recently that it’s deeply misleading to call the Civil Rights Movement “non-violent,” because it was, in fact, incredibly violent — as this movie demonstrates, horrific levels of violence were unleashed by police (and to a lesser but no less horrifying extent, by white civilians) onto the non-violent protestors.
When I learned about the Civil Rights Movement in school, we basically just hit the high notes. Strategy, organization, unity behind Dr. King’s philosophy. Boycotts. Sit-ins. Marches. Speeches. And POOF! Things changed. The assassination of Dr. King in 1968 was basically the one sour note in the whole story. Everything else was just pictures of hundreds of people standing arm-in-arm, and reassurance that non-violence works when applied the right way.
And I think now that that’s nothing short of educational malpractice, whitewashing (pun intended) the atrocities committed by white people in defense of their need to continue oppressing Black people. And others who hid behind bureaucracy and red tape to avoid doing anything about it, or who gave or followed FBI orders to spy on civil rights leaders in order to sabotage them. These people were overcome, but scrubbing their actions out of history curricula makes the original problem seem so small, and the victory so complete, when in actuality, there was no possible way to uproot all that hate and institutional corruption in one go.
With a whitewashed curriculum, children grow up believing that everything was solved because it really wasn’t that bad in the first place, instead of learning the reality that no, people and government were that ferociously cruel, and that cowardly, and cruelty and cowardice that deep cannot help but persist far beyond a change to the official law of the land, and get passed from generation to generation.
Although I’m happy to note that the fact that this is not simply of the past has positive carryover into the present as well — one of the young men portrayed leading the march from Selma with Dr. King is John Lewis, who is still alive and in fact has been serving as a member of Congress since 1987, having been re-elected 17 times. These victories should not be discounted, but they should not be presented as the whole story, either.
Another important thing that this movie hammers home is that none of this progress was inevitable. That’s another feeling you get from history and from being taught only quotes from Dr. King like “The arc of history is long but it bends toward justice.” That it was just a matter of time for these changes to come about.
No. These changes required people to make crucial decisions at crucial times, hard and strategic decisions, self-sacrificing and dangerous decisions that were never guaranteed to work. It’s a disservice to their memory to treat their accomplishments as historical inevitabilities.
One final note: I was astonished to see that this movie did not skirt around the fact that Dr. King cheated on his wife. That never gets mentioned in school. I was in my 20s before I heard anything about that. Dr. King is often elevated as an ideal, as essentially a saint, never as a human being. (They never mentioned that he was thrown in jail repeatedly, either.) Even though this movie only focuses on 3 months of his life, it presents a fuller picture of him than I’ve ever seen or read about before, a man who doubts himself, a man whose marriage was far from perfect, but a man whose cause is no less righteous and whose accomplishments no less heroic.
Movie #3: Malcolm X (1992) | R
Directed by Spike Lee | Written by Spike Lee and Arnold Perl | Based on “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
This is a very long movie — 3 hours and 22 minutes — because Malcolm X (played here by a young Denzel Washington) lived a very full and complicated life, even though he, like Dr. King, was assassinated at age 39. He started off as a criminal, wound up in jail, was approached by the Nation of Islam, converted and became one of the Nation’s biggest advocates and public faces, became disillusioned by the corruption he ultimately found in the leadership of NOI, left the Nation of Islam but stayed true to his Muslim faith and started a new organization, made a pilgrimage to Mecca that changed his mind about major elements of his previous philosophy, and shortly thereafter, was murdered by disgruntled NOI members, possibly with FBI assistance.
My history curriculum, from what I can recall, never once really discussed Malcolm X, which is of course another glaring problem. I just got the vague impression from cultural osmosis that he was the flipside of Dr. King — he was violence whereas Dr. King was non-violence.
But from this movie, it doesn’t seem like that’s the main difference, to me. Yes, Malcolm doesn’t shy away from the possibility of violence, but he’s not, as I was led to believe, advocating for attacks on white people; he’s primarily advocating self-defense. The one protest that you see him lead is non-violent. The real difference I see in his philosophy vs. Dr. King’s is that Dr. King was for integration, unity, white allyship, whereas — for the vast majority of his life, anyway — Malcolm X was for separatism, isolation, and insulation from white people.
It’s similar to the logic of every oppressed people who want to have a homeland — somewhere safe and away from enemies, with freedom to self-govern and self-determine. He just wasn’t aiming for land in his equation. (You can absolutely see why Magneto in the X-Men comics was inspired by him, and Professor Xavier inspired by King. PS: comics were always political kthxbai)
That’s not to say certain parts of his philosophy and therefore, certain parts of this movie, are not deeply uncomfortable and extreme. He is taken in by the cult mentality of Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, and for many years, swallows and regurgitates his teachings wholesale, which include ideas like women as property (although his own marriage is shown to be one of deep mutual respect; another contrast with Dr. King that I was not taught), and, probably most controversially aside from his willingness to use violence, that all white people are the devil and therefore cannot ever be allies.
There is also a moment where Jews are singled out as the only other group aside from white people who need to be held to account, and that is disturbing and sadly in line with the rhetoric of current leader of the NOI, Louis Farrakhan, who takes it further into really explicit anti-semitic territory. However, anti-semitism within the movement does not somehow exempt us white-skinned Jews from our complicity in white supremacy and the need to right historical and current wrongs committed against Black people, and using some Black people’s anti-semitism as a “Get Out Of Helping Free” card is unacceptable.
But the movie does not frame Malcolm’s more extreme positions as necessarily correct. It notes them, and shows why they are appealing to many, but is slowly building distrust for the viewer toward the NOI leadership, thereby planting doubt about the absolute validity of certain ideas. And eventually, Malcolm himself discovers the corruption and hypocrisy of the leadership, and breaks away, keeping his Muslim faith but reevaluating and retooling his way of thinking — including opening up his movement to potential white allies and apologizing for his harsh critiques of leaders like Dr. King.
And shortly thereafter, he was murdered. Unlike Dr. King, he was killed by Black men, who may or may not have been acting on orders from NOI leadership, and may or may not have had assistance or encouragement from the FBI team that was illegally monitoring Malcolm X.
This story needed to be told by a Black director, for so many reasons, not least because if it had been told by an outsider, a white person, there’s no way it wouldn’t have come across as condescendingly lecturing Black people on how to behave, and putting their communal pain on display for entertainment. In this telling, the movie serves as a fascinating portrait of a passionate idealist, celebrating his integrity, his dedication to his cause, his thirst for answers and solutions, and his capacity for growth — and mourning the tragedy that he was murdered without being allowed to continue or complete his evolution.
Spike Lee, who wrote, directed, and acted in this movie, is a visionary — he consistently tackles difficult and challenging topics with amazing skill — and it’s a serious shame that we don’t have a Spike Lee-directed documentary or docudrama about Spike Lee’s career. And of course, we know why his name rarely comes up in “Best Director of All Time” conversations.
A sampling of the directors who pop up when you google “best directors of all time”:
The next slide:
Seriously, still no black people:
Not a single one:
FOUND HIM:
One day, we will have Black directors (and women directors) on these lists. But it is not this day.
Movie #4: BlacKkKlansman (2018) | R
Directed by Spike Lee | Written by Spike Lee, Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, & Kevin Willmott | Based on the memoir “Black Klansman” by Ron Stallworth
And here we come to a story that takes place after Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. A world where the Voting Rights Act has been passed, equality has finally been achieved, and racism has gone out of style.
Haha just kidding.
The context of Malcolm X and Dr. King is very helpful to have here, though — because progress has been made; the world and the workplace are not as segregated, but inequality and racist attitudes are still pervasive, and the Black Power movement that arose from Malcolm X, asserting that Black people have the right to stand up for themselves and don’t need to be at the mercy of white allies or work politely within the system to accomplish what they need, is therefore still very much a compelling stance for many.
The story follows Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington), a Black man in Colorado Springs, who became the first Black person on the city’s police force in the 1970s. He is someone who believes in working within the system. He witnesses and experiences firsthand the racism within the department, and the chief’s indifference to doing anything about it beyond hiring him in the first place.
It makes sense, of course, that progress is glacially slow and that ingrained attitudes don’t change with a shift in the law. But this is never emphasized enough in school, so I’m gonna keep repeating it.
Fed up with the police department’s racism and excessive focus on undermining the Black Power movement, Ron finds a number for the local Ku Klux Klan chapter, and calls them up to pose as a racist who wants to become a member.
The KKK buys it, and thus begins an absurd and harrowing undercover project whereby Ron and his white Jewish coworker, Flip Zimmerman, work to infiltrate the virulently racist, anti-semitic, homophobic, misogynistic Klan and find out what their plans are. It is tense, hilarious, uncomfortable, disturbing, and plenty of other adjectives — Spike Lee is masterful here at shifting between tones and keeping the momentum high throughout.
There is a ton to unpack in this movie, but I want to emphasize my top 5 takeaways, in no particular order:
Even if you are an ally, you can learn to be a better one. Racist and not-racist are not categories; they are degrees on a spectrum. Flip (played by Adam Driver, who is not Jewish but non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters is a topic for another time) is clearly portrayed as a good guy, who is willing to put his life on the line to infiltrate the heavily armed Klan. But he still has moments of “not getting it” where Ron calls him out, and ultimately he listens — there’s a conversation where he confronts his own white-passing privilege as a white, secular Jew, and makes a choice to approach things differently.
Speaking to my fellow white Jews: There is a whole other can of worms around the subject of white-skinned Jews and race — are we white? white-passing? conditionally white? something else? — but that’s not the point here. The point is that it’s important to be honest with ourselves about how the world sees and treats us on a day-to-day basis, and recognize the privileges we have, of being able to avoid skin color-based discrimination, and not minimize those struggles just because we don’t experience them the same way. But the movie also seems to be saying, to me, that it’s important to recognize that this is our fight too, that we can’t hide forever behind our skin from racist anti-semites, and the sooner we realize that, the better.
It’s not the same battle (because Black people don’t have the option to hide like some of us can, and our history in America has not been nearly as oppressive as theirs), but it is the same war.
Regarding racism in policing as a systemic problem — the movie shows that, again, racism is a spectrum, but that the culture of “having each other’s backs” and “we’re family” in police departments means that even the most vicious racist officers go unpunished by the least personally racist officers. And even at the end, when the department finally bands together to boot the blatant racist officer, the department discontinues the KKK investigation, showing that its directives remain generally unconcerned about stopping hate crimes against Black people. Ron remains determined to work within the system to continue doing what he can, but it’s not an easy choice.
White Pride & White Power are not remotely the same things as Black Pride & Black Power. There is a particularly striking sequence that cross-cuts between a Klan gathering and Black Liberation gathering, and the contrast is stark — Black Power is about fighting to overcome brutally horrific oppression and achieve equality; White Power is about fighting to maintain the right to oppress anyone who isn’t white.
The Klan, like racism in general, is not a problem of the past. In this movie, we see how they are starting to learn to cloak themselves in respectability, calling themselves “The Organization” rather than the Klan, keeping their identities secret, maintaining positions in high-ranking places, aspiring to run for office and to promote candidates whose views are congruent with their own — such as “America First.” Sure, some of them are buffoonish idiots we can laugh at, but others are certainly not.
And we see, in the end, the law enforcement indifference to keeping an eye on them to mitigate any of this. The idea that it would just go away on its own seems willfully naive, and Lee ends the film by drawing a direct line from the past to the recent neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville where hundreds of racists gathered in public, were validated by the President, and killed Heather Heyer by driving a car into a crowd of counterprotestors. What was a dream for the Klan back then has become today’s reality.
Movie #5: Just Mercy (2019) | PG-13 (available to rent for free here)
Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton | Written by Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham | Based on the memoir “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson
I want to end on a slightly more positive note, so I’ve saved this one for last. Though considering that a movie highlighting the pervasive racism in our policing and criminal justice system is the “positive note” of this bunch...well.
This is also generally the first movie I recommend to people who want to understand the immediate nature of the current George Floyd protests — why this movement is so much bigger than just one man, and why this one man was ripe to become a symbol of everything wrong with policing and justice in our country.
The events of this movie took place in 1989, the year I was born. Not the present, but certainly not a very distant past.
It follows Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan), a young Black Harvard-educated lawyer, who founds the Equal Justice Initiative right out of school. He is determined to provide pro bono legal assistance to those who need it most -- death row prisoners in Alabama who never got decent legal representation in court and are condemned to pay for it with their lives.
We see how fresh-faced and idealistic Bryan is at first, certain that if he can follow the correct procedures and file the right motions, he will be able to overturn many of these flimsy convictions. We hear a bunch of examples from prisoners about how little evidence there was against them, how incompetent their court-appointed lawyers were, how short their trials were — and Bryan is confident that he can make a difference by just doing things right this time.
And then we see just how stacked the deck is. How corrupt the police are, how complicit the courts are, and how complacent the white community is once they have a scapegoat, regardless of how weak a case was.
The movie coalesces around the case of Walter “Johnny D.” McMillan (played by Jamie Foxx), a death row inmate convicted of murdering a young white woman, even though he has an alibi and the testimony against him is circumstantial and contradictory.
None of that matters to the court, to the DA, to the sheriff, or to the white community; they’re just happy to have someone locked up so they can say they solved the crime. The obstacles thrown up in Bryan’s face as he fights for Johnny D’s retrial are relentless -- but so is Bryan.
And here I just want to zero in on one thing that this movie illustrates that was touched on briefly in Malcolm X but not fully explored there: the myth of respectability.
There is a common attitude, sometimes explicit, sometimes implied, that if Black people just behaved better, dressed better, were better educated, then they would close the gap of inequality and achieve success, financial and otherwise, equal to that of white people, and thereby end racism. Because with equal education and equal income comes equal opportunity — or so the conventional wisdom believes.
There was a line in Malcolm X where he ridicules this, and points out that no matter how fancy your suit is, to white people, you’re still just a “n***** in a suit.” And this movie throws that into sharp relief. Bryan is impeccably educated, and always impeccably dressed, and this doesn’t stop prison guards from forcing him into an utterly humiliating strip search before he can see his clients. It doesn’t stop landlords from kicking his office out because they don’t want to be associated with freeing convicted criminals (even if they’re only freed because they were innocent). It doesn’t stop police from pulling him over on an empty road without cause, doesn’t stop them from manhandling him, shoving a gun in his face, and calling him “boy.”
His respectability doesn’t matter to them. His Blackness does.
So while education may provide Black people with more tools with which to fight injustice, it does not magically eliminate the injustice they need to fight.
In the end, the movie is a story of triumph, of hope. While Bryan isn’t able to help all his clients (a PTSD-ridden Black veteran is executed in a truly gut-wrenching sequence), he is ultimately, despite all the outrageous obstacles and continued efforts to frame Johnny D, able to successfully exonerate him and reunite him with his family and community. And the credits roll with notes that Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative are still fighting today, and have won “relief, reversals, or release for over 140 death row prisoners.” One of those, Ray Hinton, was exonerated before the Supreme Court in 2015 and finally released after 30 years on death row.
That is truly incredible and worthy of celebration, but it forces us to reckon with the fact that we have a law enforcement and justice system so broken that its most excessive punishments, the ones that ought to be treated with the utmost care and certainty, are so casually and mistakenly doled out. If the death penalty is so often misapplied, how much more so must lesser punishments -- excessive force, rubber bullets, chokeholds, years in prison, life sentences -- be mistaken. And we must face up to how much power our law enforcement and justice systems hold, and how little accountability they have for their mistakes. And how often those mistakes destroy Black lives.
That is what George Floyd’s murder symbolized. That is what Black Lives Matter is fighting for.
Rest in Power, George.
This newsletter is where I review all the movies I’m cramming before they’re gone from my YouTubeTV DVR. Most editions aren’t as heavy or detailed as this, but if you’d like to hear more of my movie-related thoughts, feel free to subscribe.