Bending toward justice

About a year and a half ago, my cousin and I went to see a local production of Rap on Race. We erroneously thought it was a rap, as in hip-hop performance, about race in America. Turns out, it was a short play based on an actual recorded conversation between James Baldwin and Margaret Mead. Oops! It was still very thought-provoking and highly relevant, just not what we were expecting.

But I've thought a lot about both our misunderstanding about the nature of the event and the Baldwin/Mead conversation itself (fraught with its own misunderstandings), especially in light of all the recent BLM actions, NFL national anthem protests, and Confederate statue debates.

Today being MLK Day, I figured it was a good time to catch up on some of my media endeavors.

Though I dislike horror movies, I wanted to see Get Out. I read all the spoilers so I already knew the "surprises" ... because I can't overstate how much I really, really, really hate horror movies. But this wasn't so much a horror film in the now-traditional slasher sense as it was a fantasy-commentary on the treatment of black bodies in white America. Having read all the reviews and analyses, I also appreciated the role of the one Asian character in the film, who is actively complicit in racism ... specifically taking part in the stand-in for a slave auction. A stark reminder about the "Model Minority" trope as yet another embodiment of anti-Blackness, indeed. There's a lot to unpack in Get Out; I feel like watching it a second time would need a film club-level discussion, because it's not something you watch for funsies on your own.

As a mixed kid (as well as a former ACLU employee and current board member), I've long known about and pseudo-revered the Loving v Virginia Supreme Court case. So I had to watch Loving. Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton were amazing as the titular couple whose illegal marriage paved the way for future interracial couples to tie the knot -- like my aunt and uncle one year after their landmark case, another aunt and uncle the year after that, my own parents a decade later, and so on. Some of the most poignant parts of the film were quiet scenes of the Virginia landscape, where two poor individuals could easily fade into the chasm of time and tradition. I loved that the film underscored how the Lovings weren't political at all, weren't trying to make a radical statement about race relations, weren't looking for publicity. They really just wanted to stay under the radar and have their marriage recognized by the state they both loved and considered home. The whole film was a moving reminder that history is frequently shaped not by big names, but by ordinary people who just want to live their lives in their own way, in private.

Lastly, Hidden Figures was amazing. I knew bits of the story of NASA's Katherine Johnson, since President Obama honored her a few years back and she made the news. The movie was great: kick-ass nerd women fighting both racism and sexism in the '60s. (The film mainly focused on the sexism, though: mentions of the era's Civil Rights struggles were always in the background but rarely directly mentioned, except in relation to segregated facilities.) It was the perfect movie to get for my 9-year-old niece, who was so gung-ho-girl-power for Hillary in the election and who was devastated in the aftermath. (I also read somewhere that 4th or 5th grade is when girls start to lose interested in STEM classes, partly due to social cues about what girls "should" be good at. So I figured this could potentially encourage a love of science as well.) La Sobrina came up with the idea of boycotting the Pledge of Allegiance at school until the Muslim ban was overturned; it didn't pan out, but for a while Mi Hermana had to have an unexpected civil disobedience discussion with her elementary-school kids, about how there could be social consequences from other kids that didn't agree with them, but that she'd support them if they truly wanted to do this to stand by their Muslim classmates. They didn't, in the end, but their righteous anger gives me hope.

Today, of all days, I think of my nieces and nephew growing up Scottish-German-Filipino-Mexican in a largely Arab suburb of a majority-Black Detroit... and I think that maybe --just maybe-- that arc of the moral universe can be bent a little more toward justice in my lifetime after all.