I had my doubts about the column format doing Ta-Nehisi Coates' writing justice, but he knocks it out of the park today with his first New York Times column on the historical amnesia of the latest X-Men film:
But as “First Class” roars to its final climatic scene, it appeals to an insidious suspension of disbelief; the heroic mutants of America, bravely opposing bigotry and fear, are revealed as not so much a spectrum of humankind, but as Eagle Scouts from Mayfield. Thus, “First Class” proves itself not merely an incredible film, but an incredible work of American historical fiction. Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.
[...]
I am reminded of the House Republicans, opening the 112th Congress by reciting the Constitution, minus the slavery parts. I am reminded of the English professor last year who, responding to Huckleberry Finn's widespread banishment from public schools, was compelled to offer the Mark Twain classic, minus the nigger parts. I think of the Pentagon official, who this year justified the war in Afghanistan to soldiers by invoking the words of Dr. King, minus the “ultimate weakness of violence” parts. I am reminded of whole swaths of this country where historical fiction compels Americans to claim the Civil War was about states' rights, minus the “right to own people” part.
I haven't seen the film yet, but this is another example of the way the quest for racial innocence so permeates American culture that it's almost unrecognizable. It's wallpaper; you just don't notice it. It's no coincidence that Avatar, the highest grossing film of all time, is essentially an alternate history of the genocide of Native Americans in which a white dude shows up to prevent it all from happening and in the process, literally becomes "one of them." It's one of the odd features of race in American culture that we're talking about it all the time in ways we don't even realize, even as an obsession with "colorblindness" dominates the conversation over what an equitable, diverse society would look like. And that's because so much of our conversation on race is motivated less by a search for justice than by a desire to exonerate ourselves from our own history, and creating our own alternate realities in which we are better than we actually were helps us do that.
