Dear Reader, Hello.
I wrote this entry first in a notebook, with a pencil. This is how I start everything I write. In my journal, I worry less about what others will think and just write about what I’m thinking and feeling without self-censorship.
The hard part is typing it up after that happens. The audience changes. You engage.
Last night, me and some friends (none of us Black) watched If Beale Street Could Talk on Hulu. Don’t worry, we weren’t together—We chatted via Facetime before the movie, over dinner and drinks, and then started the movie at exactly the same time in our separate houses.
Before we started watching, someone mentioned that they thought this movie was going to be sad. I’m thinking about this now because I’m not sure if they had heard much about the movie, except that it was based on a novel by James Baldwin. None of us had read the book before. Where were our assumptions about sadness coming from? Was the assumption that Black life isn’t joyful?
As a white person who grew up in a mostly white neighborhood, most of the stories I learned about Black people came from TV and movies. In the entertainment industries, Black people haven’t often gotten to tell their own stories. Movies with Black characters haven’t historically been directed by Black people, aren’t usually written by Black people, and often play into racist tropes. The racist power structure of the movie industry has mostly shown me Black pain, not Black joy, so that narrative is deep in my brain. I’m thinking about this because it’s important to think about the systems that create racism. It’s also important to think about how I, as an individual, perpetuate it. How can I root it out? By confronting it. By admitting.
I admit that at one point, when Tish was announcing to her family that she was pregnant (very early in the movie so this isn’t a spoiler), during a long pause that showed her father staring at her, I thought he was about to get violent. I noticed immediately after, upon feeling relief when he celebrated with her instead. Black men are portrayed as violent in so many movies and TV shows that I had come to expect it—a racist assumption. Sometimes racism feels like relief. I think I grow the most in these moments. When I can notice that relief and see, in real time, that I have made a racist assumption and correct it on the spot. When I turn away from that relief and back toward discomfort.
Prompt: What was the last movie you watched with Black characters in it? What did you expect to happen in the movie before you watched it? Were there any moments that surprised you? How were your expectations shaped by the fact that you are white? What do you need to admit? How can you move toward discomfort?
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