WEEKLY COMMUNITY DISCUSSION: Help me choose this year's movie series
Last summer we did a fun thing and we're going to do it again
Friends!
It’s almost summer (! … and also ?).
Last summer, I did a new thing: a movie series. Ten movies, ten stories of Whiteness. What fun, right? As it turns out, sometimes we do things around here other than read books by White women with differing takes on puppy execution but the same take on wokeness. Who knew!
How’d the series work? I mean, it was mostly what you’d expect. I wrote some of the essays, a few talented guest writers wrote some of the others. There was a mix between free and paywalled posts and the whole thing was a delight. We explored so many themes! Race, of course, but also gender and class and religion and place. We wrote about the South and the West, about Jewish resorts in the Catskills and the cool neighborhoods in Chicago that would draw in disaffected youth from the suburbs. I wrote about my hair color and an embarrassing stint where I considered myself a resident “rebel” in the nonprofit education reform world. Here’s the whole list of movies we considered:
-The Blind Side (I was going to do Hoosiers, but the real life characters from The Blind Side were in the news, so I pivoted)
And guess what! We’re going to do it again. As it turns out, there are more than ten movies with White people in them. But more than that, there are more than ten movies where the themes that interest us over here— broadly, Whiteness and the stories it tells itself; the role of identity and group identification in both enabling and eroding social change; culture and its role in shaping those identities; American politics and how we got to our particular current morass— tend to pop up.
So here we go… let’s nominate movies for this year’s list.