NUANCES & COMPLEXITIES
What Blindspotting gets right about intricate interracial friendships
In the climactic scene of Blindspotting, Collin, portrayed by Daveed Diggs, delivers an excoriating rap about navigating social space while being black, over-policed and chronically misread. As his spoken-word performance gains force, it becomes a scorching aria of long-repressed rage and trauma.
In terms of staging, the soliloquy is being directed at a pivotal supporting character in the film, while Collin’s best friend, Miles, who is white, observes from the back of the room. Much of Blindspotting chronicles how Collin and Miles, who have grown up together in Oakland, Calif., are forced by various circumstances to renegotiate the terms of their friendship. Rafael Casal, who plays Miles, noted recently, “so much of that poetic verse that Collin does (is intended) for Miles behind him. And Miles’s job entirely at that moment is just to listen.”
On the surface, there’s nothing remarkable about a depiction of interracial friendship on screen — especially in a movie set in Oakland, where Diggs and Casal really did grow up alongside one another in a racially mixed community. When pluralism and integration are the norm, monocultural friend groups on screen no longer ring true.
Too often, diverse families and friendships are presented simplistically — at worst as mere tokenism or at best as an aspirational ideal, with little or no depiction of the candour, self-examination and often painful confrontation it takes for people of different races to understand and support one another. From Hannibal Buress popping up in an otherwise all-white clique of friends in Tag, to wholesome images of interracial families in commercials advertising breakfast cereal, it’s as if, in a rush toward the mythical bliss of “post-racial” harmony, we’ve skipped over truth and jumped straight to reconciliation.
Blindspotting, which Diggs and Casal wrote, presents viewers with the rare sight of friends of different races grappling with the disparities of lives and experiences that, for the most part, have much more in common than not. Indeed, Collin and Miles’ deepest differences aren’t racial but temperamental, with Collin consistently demonstrating a soft-spoken thoughtfulness that is completely at odds with Miles’ motor-mouthed, hairtrigger machismo.
But, as Blindspotting brilliantly demonstrates, even something as personal as temperament is conditioned by racial expectations. As the film opens, Collin is trying to complete the last few days of probation for a felony offence by sticking to his curfew and keeping his head down. His channels for navigating the city are far narrower than Miles’s. Collin’s anxieties finally come to a head, not just in the climactic rap scene, but in a heated argument with Miles regarding his own obliviousness to Collins’s new circumstances.
“Miles has been (Collin’s) best friend his whole life,” Casal says, observing that Collin “has been fine with the way Miles has acted his whole life. Suddenly his best friend, who’s been there for him every step of his life, is also a magnet for everything that he’s afraid of.”
The fact that Blindspotting makes these dilemmas explicit, that it dramatizes Collin’s and Miles’s efforts to listen to one another and be transformed by those encounters, is just one animating strain of a film that also happens to be hysterically funny and ingeniously structured to resemble a street-level musical. Unlike mid20th century “problem pictures” wherein black-white relationships themselves were the subject (think In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) the “issue” is no longer that people of different ethnic identities can get along with or even fall in love. The issue is what they need to know about each other’s realities to make genuine trust and intimacy possible.
In her 1978 poem, For the White Person Who Wants to Know How to Be My Friend, Pat Parker wrote, “The first thing you do is to forget that I’m black. Second, you must never forget that I’m black.”