There's a scene in Bamako that captures what director Abderrahmane Sissako hopes to convey better than any other moment in the film. It's when Mamadou Kanoté, a poor, elderly Malian man, belts out an impromptu song in front of a courtyard full of stone-faced lawyers and judges holding a mock trial in a middle-class couple's backyard. It's the film's powerful scene, and it's shown without a translation -- a commentary, perhaps, on what it means to say something that no one will ever care enough to take the time to understand.

Though it perhaps plays a more positive role than ever before in American popular culture, race has played an unmistakably divisive role this election season. The Republican leadership showed its true colors with the instantly infamous ad it funded in Tennessee playing into the lingering aversion among Southern voters to interracial sex. Americans shouldn't quickly forget that though the ad attacking black congressman and Senate candidate Harold Ford was pulled by many Tennessee TV stations late last month, it wasn't pulled everywhere.