Race is in a story whether the writer addresses it or not. This tag collects reviews and essays on films and books where race is the subject, and what the handling reveals about the era that produced them.
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Do the Right Thing (1989) rates 10 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. One block in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the hottest day of the year, a pizzeria, a wall of photographs, and a film that refuses to tell the audience…
1950sSeptember 11, 2026
Giant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
The Blind Side (2009) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A competently made film in which a wealthy white family takes in a homeless Black teenager, told almost entirely from the family's position, and Sandra Bullock won…
1980sSeptember 11, 2026
Driving Miss Daisy (1989) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two superb performances inside a film that covers twenty-five years of the American South and declines to examine any of it, in the year Do the Right…
2000sSeptember 11, 2026
Crash (2005) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Paul Haggis assembled a multi-strand Los Angeles film in which every character holds one racial attitude the plot then corrects, won Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain, and has spent…
1990sSeptember 11, 2026
Dances with Wolves (1990) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Costner directed a three-hour Western largely in Lakota with subtitles, which nobody wanted financed, and it made four hundred million dollars and beat Goodfellas. The film is…
2010sSeptember 11, 2026
Green Book (2018) rates 5 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Two excellent performances inside a road film about a Black concert pianist and his white driver on a 1962 southern tour, which beat Roma for Best Picture and…
2000sSeptember 10, 2026
District 9 (2009) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. A first-time director shot an alien occupation film in a real Soweto township for thirty million dollars, cast his friend who had never acted, and got a Best…
1970sSeptember 10, 2026
Blazing Saddles (1974) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Mel Brooks made an anti-racist film by putting the ugliest language available in the mouths of idiots and letting the sheriff outthink them. Made for two point six…
BiasAugust 8, 2026
Most people think prejudice is something other people have. This book takes that apart. Richard Lowe puts his own biases on the table first, then shows that t
Book ReviewsJune 3, 2026
The story of Celie, a poor Black woman in the early-twentieth-century South, told through her own letters as she moves from abuse and silence toward self-possession and love. Searing, tender, and formally bold, it broke the silence around domestic and…
Book ReviewsJune 3, 2026
A beloved classic of childhood, conscience, and racial injustice in the Depression-era South, narrated by young Scout Finch and anchored by her father Atticus, one of literature's great moral figures. A masterpiece of empathy and storytelling that has shaped generations.…
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