A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

by Hanif Abdurraqib

Green Book won a whole lotta awards too. And, like clockwork, people wrote about how the movie winning awards was a signifier for what was possible if America could just piece together some kind of bridge for its tricky and persistent divisions. Whenever these films triumph, the bill of goods that gets sold is that the country triumphs. It isn’t that America loves films like these because they think the films themselves will fix racism. It seems, instead, that there is a love for these films because they make Americans believe that racism being fixed is something that can happen with a journey through some idyllic half-retelling of history. That it is a matter of proximity, or the shared need to solve some problem on the periphery of racism. Movies like these never approach the simplest and most honest idea: that racism is about power, and the solving of it relies—in part—on people being willing to give up power. But that doesn’t make for as much of an interesting film as having a white person joke with a Black person about chicken.