Close But No Cigar: Race

There is undoubtedly a great movie to be made about the modern-day political conflicts between American Latinos and African-Americans back in the 1990s -- but the 1998 movie Race is not it. It gets credit for at least trying to acknowledge some of the issues involved in such conflicts, but I all too often got the feeling while watching it that the movie was deliberately pulling its punches in regard to the main plot.

Perhaps most symbolic of the movie's problems was a scene in which a black political candidate (played by CCH Pounder) asked a group of white senior citizens to tell her their concerns -- only to receive a lot of trivial complaints about black basketball players. I don't doubt that such a scene might have happened in real life but I also can't help but wonder whether all complaints from white voters about various ethnic groups should be presumed to be that trivial. After all, mainstream op-ed writers frequently trivialized the complaints of blacks and Hispanics back in the 1990s -- and even today, when white Americans are presumably more "woke", there's a tendency to blow off any concerns expressed by minority voters any time such concerns conflict with the concerns of white people. So why is it in the interest of blacks and Hispanics to encourage such trivialization when the shoe is on the other foot?

In any event, the movie Race started out promisingly, then threatened to turn into a Mexican soap opera till finally settling for an ending that seemed all too believable yet also wrapped things up in way too convenient a package. As much as I wanted to love the ending, I could not help wondering how realistic it was for the screenwriters to conveniently blame a white non-Hispanic villain for the conflicts between the two lead characters (a black political candidate and a Hispanic political candidate) when real life has shown over and over again that the origin of such conflicts is not that simple. Anyway, I don't doubt that there are a lot of white non-Hispanics who get a kick out of playing the divide and conquer game in regard to blacks and Hispanics. But I also believe that a lot of black and Hispanic candidates who have issues with each other often have their own motives for such conflicts. To pretend otherwise is to pretend they're not human. And quite frankly, there are already enough people in this country who think that way without encouraging it.