On Monday, I came back from a trip and watched a movie called Blindspotting. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s a comedy-drama starring Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal. Honestly, I didn’t read that many reviews about this movie before watching it. I just saw the trailer a couple of years ago and thought it looked pretty good. I also really love Daveed Diggs in Hamilton (the version on Disney +. I still have yet to see the original live Broadway version) and blackish. In Hamilton he plays Thomas Jefferson, and his performance (along with of course Lin-Manuel Miranda’s performance as Alexander Hamilton) blew me away. And in the popular TV show Blackish, he played Rainbow Johnson’s brother, Johan. To be honest, I only knew a couple of the actors in the movie, one being Daveed and the other being Utkarsh Ambudkar, who plays a character named Donald in the first Pitch Perfect movie.
The film Blindspotting is an important film to watch because it tackles a lot of uncomfortable subject matter, namely police brutality. At the beginning of the movie, Collin is driving a movers’ truck for his job at night, and he stops when he sees a young Black man running across the street. Collin sees a white police officer yelling at the young Black man to freeze and watches in horror as the officer shoots and kills the young Black man. He looks in horror at the atrocity this officer committed, and the office turns to look at him. Of course, Collin is fearing for his life at this point because he is a Black man living in America, and even though the place he grew up in, Oakland, is predominantly Black, it’s not isolated from the rest of America, which has a long history of racism that is very much still alive. The last scene was pretty powerful, when Collin and Miles go into the empty house to help people move, and they find a picture of the white officer who killed the Black man earlier in the film. Collin goes upstairs and finds the officer in his room, and he gets out his pistol and holds it up to the officer, reciting a freestyle rap about how white American society often views Black men like him (Collin) as threatening and menacing, but that in the moment that Collin saw the officer kill that young Black man that one evening, he realized that the officer was a monster for killing another human being simply because he was Black. It is a really powerful scene, and after Collin recites the spoken word, the officer starts crying and has to reflect on what he did to the young black man. At first, the officer is only focused on not getting shot and killed by Collin, but Collin gets this man to reflect on his actions and realize that the young Black man that the officer killed was a human being just like he was and that he had no right whatsoever to rob another human being of life simply because of the color of his skin.
As a Black person, this scene brought up a lot of feelings for me because I thought about the killing of a Black man named George Floyd in 2020, and how confused, hurt, angry, and hopeless I felt about being Black in America. Like, why are my people getting killed?!? Why?!? I think chanting about my grief really helped because when I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (it’s a Buddhist mantra , I am affirming and reaffirming over and over that my life has inherent dignity, and that no one can take it away from me, no matter how people treat me. After chanting about how I could take action in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, I remembered how writing, and especially writing poetry, was a medium for me to express myself. When I was going through a dark time in high school, I wrote poetry about my depression and my struggles with self-hatred, and writing helped me get out all the pain I had bottled up and couldn’t communicate with people. I was unsure and lost when trying to process my grief in the wake of the killings of so many Black people in America, so I wrote a poem after reading an article about the murder of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT living in Louisville, Kentucky. After reading the article, I was shaken to my core, especially since I was the same age as Breonna when she was killed. I wrote a poem called “Breonna Taylor is 26” and it was a space for me to honor the inherent dignity of Breonna Taylor’s life and speak out against police brutality. After writing the poem, it made me realize that I could use art not just for my personal enjoyment, but to also speak about issues that I was passionate about.
The movie also makes some subtle commentaries, such as who gets to use the N-word or not. Each day that Collin and Miles go into the office, they are greeted by Val, who is Collin’s ex-girlfriend. Val broke up with Collin after he started a fire outside of a bar, but up until that point, I didn’t know the full story of what went down. There is a scene where a South Asian guy named Rin (who is played by Utkarsh Ambudkar) is going to the office with Tin, a Black friend of his, and when Rin sees Collin walking into the office, he recounts the whole story about how a drunk white guy ordered a scorpion bowl that was on fire, and he took it outside to show everyone. While recounting the story, Rin refers to Collin as the N-word (the version with an “a” at the end. I don’t feel comfortable saying the actual word) and he stops and has to correct himself when Tin reminds him that he can only use the N-word around him. Rin calls Collin a “dude” instead of the N-word. It made me think of the movie Dope, which takes place in Inglewood, California. The main character, Malcolm, is African American, and his two friends, Jib and Diggy, are respectively Latino and Black. In the film, there is a scene in which Malcolm, Jib and Diggy argue with this white guy named Will over whether white people get to say the n-word. Will thinks he should be able to use it, but Diggy slaps him for saying it, and then Jib, who is Latino, says the word. Will asks why Jib can use the word since he doesn’t look Black, and Jib says that he gets to use the word because he found out on an ancestry site that he is 14 percent African. Honestly, I don’t know where I personally stand on the use of the N-word, but I personally don’t like using the word because of its long history as a pejorative term. The debate about who gets to use the N-word or not is a long discourse that has spanned for many years, mostly in debates about cultural appropriation. In Blindspotting, there is a scene in which Collin and Miles go to a party in a gentrified neighborhood of Oakland, and Collin is one of a handful of Black people at the party. Most of the party guests are white, and while the host of the party is white, he tries to act cool by dropping in some African American Vernacular English (AAVE) to communicate with people at the party. Miles is at this party thinking, What is going on?!? Miles is wearing a T-shirt that jokes about killing hipsters, poking fun at the gentrification of Oakland. One of the Black guests at the party thinks that Miles, who is white, is pretending to act Black, not knowing that Miles grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood and was never pretending to be Black. Miles gets angry at the guy and beats him up, and then shoots a gun when the guest tells him to leave. Collin is embarrassed by Miles’s behavior, and he shouts at Miles that because Miles is white, he wasn’t going to get arrested, but because Collin is Black, he wouldn’t have been able to shoot a gun like that without repercussions. It made me think of when, in the fall of 2014, this 12-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun and a white police officer shot and killed him. I remember being in college when I heard about this, and in a class, I was taking on African American history, I and many other students, as well as the professor, were grieving. However, I was studying with a classmate in my Spanish class in our dorm, and she made a comment about Tamir Rice’s murder. She laughed nervously and said something along the lines of “Well, the kid had a gun, so of course he was going to get shot.” I really didn’t know how to feel about what she said and felt pretty confused and frustrated after the conversation. Collin calls Miles the N-word (with an “a” at the end, not a hard “r” version) and asks Miles angrily why he let Collin call him that epithet, but Miles never called him the N-word. Miles gets exasperated and tells Collin “Fuck you,” and refuses to call Collin the N-word even after Collin goads him into saying it. When Ashley, Miles’s partner, bandages up Miles after the fight, she says that Collin and Miles were acting like [N words] and Miles asks her to stop calling him the N-word because he realizes that even though he grew up in a low-income Black neighborhood for his entire life, he is still white and can get away with a lot of the things that his Black friend, Collin, can’t do, like keeping a gun on himself for protection.
There is a pretty intense scene in which Sean, who is Ashley and Miles’s son, finds Miles’s handgun and plays around with it out of curiosity. Ashley, Miles and Collin are afraid that Sean is going to accidentally shoot himself, and after they take the gun from Sean, Ashley yells at Miles and Collin to leave her house because of the harm they put Sean in by keeping a handgun around the house. Even though Miles thought he was using it to protect his family from crime, he didn’t realize that his son could find the gun. It made me think of this commercial I saw about gun safety that the Ad Council did as part of their End Family Fire campaign. The campaign launched in order to encourage safe gun storage and prevent “family fire,” which, according to the Ad Council, is defined as “a shooting caused by someone having access to a gun from the home when they shouldn’t have it.” Honestly, the ads are all pretty terrifying, but that’s because the misuse of firearms by family members is a terrifying reality. One ad that stuck with me was one in which a little boy asks his father if he can play with the firearm that he found in their household, and the father thinks his son is joking about wanting to play with the firearm. It shows the little boy sneaking into his dad’s drawer and finding his firearm, and then the next shot shows that the boy is no longer there, and the father is reflecting on what could have gone differently if he had locked up the gun so that his son wouldn’t find it. It was a pretty chilling ad, and it gave me nightmares, but honestly, I needed to know about this issue because I didn’t really know much about gun safety before. I think that’s why the scene in Blindspotting with Sean handling Miles’s handgun out of curiosity was such a chilling and painful scene because it showed that even though Miles got the gun for protection, no one probably told him that his child could potentially get his hands on it even if Miles thought that he kept the handgun in a place where his son couldn’t find it. His partner, Ashley, didn’t even know that Miles had a handgun, so when she finds Sean seated on the floor, playing with the gun, it is heartbreaking and makes Ashley feel that Miles betrayed her trust because she wasn’t honest with him about having a gun around the house.
Even though Blindspotting is a serious drama, it also has some tender lighthearted moments. There is a hilarious scene in which Miles, who is white, tries to sell a bunch of flatirons to a Black hair salon owner. He does so in a very convincing and hilarious way and speaks about the flatirons in a free verse spoken word form. I love the look that Miles gives the hairdresser when she tells him that she won’t take the flatirons off his hands unless she knows the price he is selling them for. I don’t know how to describe the look he gives her, it’s just that he seems so determined to convince this woman how good quality these flatirons are, like he’s saying to her “Oh woman, it is ON. Bring it.” He continues to rap about how incredible the flatirons are (he got them from Collin’s mom, Nancy) and he is trying to sell them for money so he can send his son, Sean, to a better school and so that he can get his friend, Collin, out of probation. The whole scene is funny because this Black female hairdresser isn’t expecting this white guy to come up in her shop and talk to her about flatirons with such boldness, so Miles coming up and so confidently trying to sell her curling irons in front of a bunch of Black women getting their hair done. He literally gets on a soapbox to freestyle about flatirons and natural hair, and I was ALL FOR IT.
The Arts Are Life 