"Like an antelope in headlights."

America, we have a problem: We have issues with race in America. We have a race problem, for sure. It's part of our fabric, and although we strive to improve, we clearly have this problem, still, and have since our beginnings. We have "racists," and people who are "race-conscious," and people who try to be "race blind;" we have folks who are ignorant and behave in a way that projects that ignorance in ways that create conflict, and we have folks who are just driven by a much more base values/beliefs that promote hate, and anger, and fear, and, and, and...

Am I allowed to draw attention to how we should pay less attention?: While I cannot profess to know how to fix our four-hundred year problem, I do know that sometimes when we try to fix a thing, in all our good intentions, we over focus on that thing and it spawns its own new set of problems. Part of what I suspect will help us deal with some of our race issues, and I am hesitant to even weigh on of this subject, is to merely be more mindful of what we take for granted as "normal"...

Q. What color is Marge Simpson? A. Yellow: A student who was watching a Japanese anime film in my classroom asked why most of the characters looked white if it was a movie about Japan. I had not thought they looked particularly one thing or another, but understood where the question came from. I had heard it before and not had, nor looked for, a good answer. So I googled it. I came across a blog that I found well written that mentioned an anecdotal study where Japanese students were asked what ethnicity these same "Western" looking characters were. The Japanese students replied that the anime characters looked Japanese. BB chat rooms are filled with similar discussions, many of concluding with statements that they just look "anime," neither white nor Asian. The premise is that we often attribute what our "normal" is to a neutral subject. The thing that is normal is not focused on too much, nor is it ignored. It just is. Allow me to offer a different analogy that might transfer...

Like big eyed children attending their first circus: How do you identify a "country mouse" visiting the city for the first time? They are always looking up. We city mice (rats if you will), do not forget the buildings are there, and we even look at them from time to time, but it is not the gawking, staring-up-while-walking-into-things type of looking. I still appreciate awesome rooflines and architectures, but the height of buildings does not amaze me, nor freak me out. I like them as part of a normal "landscape" of cities. The country mouse often feels overwhelmed by the pressing skyline, or is enthalwed by it such that it becomes a distraction of just expeicneing the city in a free-flow way. Only after spending some meaningful time in a city does that person become more open to cities as just one more type of space where people live. In fact, over time it's the individual city cultures and towns', and villages' that take on unique identities, rather than being "types" to be separated and categorized...

I grew up on TV from the 70s and the 80s. It's only just now starting to get better: So part of the solution for our "race" problems is for the normalization of "race" (what a bonehead misnomer  "race" is by the way). I remember watching Friends, a story about six white kids who worked (did they actually work?) and lived in New York City. They owned lots of nice things in their large apartments, and hung out in a coffee shop all day. They were pretty funny to watch, but I was always distracted by how everyone was white. It didn't seem normal. And then there was Martin, same problem. Or All in the Family, or Different Strokes... So many shows seemed to either loudly ignore race or trumpet its presence in stereotypical ways, each in their own way exasperating the problem of normalization. (Or was that never a goal?) Survivor was a show I enjoyed watching until they chose tribes by skin color. How messed up is that, unless the sensationalism was the whole point... oh yeah, ratings and controversy makes for great television (sarcasm implied)...

Hollywood and their ideas about what will sell: And then there are our superheroes movies. Overwhelmingly white despite 100s of characters of color over the last seven decades of comic book writing.

John Stewart debuted in Green Lantern vol. 2 #87 (December 1971/January 1972) when artist Neal Adams came up with the idea of a substitute Green Lantern. The decision to make the character black resulted from a conversation between Adams and editor Julius Schwartz, in which Adams recounts saying that given the racial makeup of the world's population, "we ought to have a black Green Lantern, not because we’re liberals, but because it just makes sense."^[1] The character was DC's first black superhero.^[1]

There were screams of "Green Lantern cannot be black!" by folks who felt a character that had been white since 1940 could not somehow be different. Why not! It seems so stupid that it makes my head hurt. Enter Black Panther...

Black Panther 2018: The less said by me at this point the better. I need more time to properly review this film that has defied Hollywood conventional wisdom about race. In has become a phenomenon. It has cleared a billion dollars at the box office in under 3 weeks (3/4 billion in the US alone).  It is flooding entertainment and financial news and my social media feeds have been touting its awesomeness since day one. It is a movie with a predominately black cast, set predominately in Africa (with side trips to the US and South Korea), and written by black screenwriters. It could have been a racially polarizing film; in fact polarizing race features in much of the plot line, yet I did not feel the film polarizes at all. It is exactly the sort of normalizing I could have hoped for in anticipation of its release. I have yet to fully digest it, but for a guy who is maxed out on superhero movies this one is a Ten, ranking with the Batman trilogy as my favorite in the genre. But somehow I spent much of the film recognizing the skyline so to speak, but not gawking, head turned upward to the sky. Despite being an action superhero movie, it was refreshingly not as formulaic as some much from Marvel and DC in recent years, and I cannot wait to see it again...