A professor friend recently taught Spike Lee and Jordan Peele's BlacKkKlansman to a college class and we’ve been discussing (generally) the approach and some student reactions.
They also shared this Time magazine interview with Spike Lee about the movie, the okey-doke, and the realities of this country’s establishment and the pervasiveness of structural racism.
It’s a needful reminder to me to re-watch the movie and keep learning, listening, reading, and working on myself.
A friend of a friend recently co-wrote a book titled, What's Up with White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice. I watched the Town Hall event where Karena Smith interviewed the authors, Ilsa Govan and Tilman Smith. It's a lively and incisive discussion. I felt uncomfortable for most of it, because I had to interrogate myself.
I've been that Karen, enforcing "the rules" set up by some white guy somewhere.
Two days I go I was re-watching an old season of "Top Chef" and during the Restaurant Wars episode, the white guy chef who works front of the house is lauded (and is declared the week's winner) for his charm, the way he interacts with diners, smiling and laughing and managing, while the Black woman chef is scolded and sneered at for the way she interacts with diners, smiling and laughing and managing.
Huh. The franchise is trying to do better but it's taken too long and these old episodes are hard to watch.
Watch, read, ask, learn.
