This post is part of a year-long series. If my work is helpful for you, consider a contribution through Venmo to support this crucial work of unlearning racial bias.
Last week, I asked you how you could balance humanizing the victims of police violence while leaving space for the wholeness of their lived experiences. This isn’t an easy or even necessarily a natural thing for me to do. But one thing that helps me is not to call these people whom I never knew in life by their familiar first names. If I refer to them in writing or in conversations, I use their first and last names, as if they are people I don’t know. Because even though stories like theirs are all too familiar, and even though I feel a kinship with them in that my skin color and presumptions about it could be weaponized against me at any given moment, I do not in reality know them no matter how personally I may feel devastated by the manner of their death.
When I took my babies to see A Wrinkle in Time in theaters, I carried several emotions with me: nostalgia for a favorite childhood book I had enjoyed and shared with my boys, recently rejuvenated curiosity since my older child had gotten me interested in reading the graphic novel adaptation, and excited anticipation at the prospect of Ava DuVernay’s black-protagonist- focused adaptation.
I was very excited.
While some audience members – L’Engle purists, no doubt – were scrutinizing the movie’s liberal interpretation of the book, its altered plot points, and its outsized Oprah role, I was puzzling in my mind – trying to remember the last time I saw a young black or biracial girl on the screen who was insecure about her hair and reassured of its beauty by her crush. I was marveling at the multiracial representation of Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit. I was crying at the beauty of this depiction of a girl so connected to her father that she was determined that he was able to be found and set out to bring him home. I was swept away by the costumes, the cast, and the dazzling beauty that DuVernay and Oprah bring to everything they touch with their gifted hands. I was validated and seen and grateful.
My children didn’t have the same reaction I did. They are 21st century biracial boys who do not share their mother’s experience of being a young black girl insecure about her identity and sorely lacking big-screen representations of people who look like her. Nevertheless, our whole family enjoyed the movie. And we left the theater determined to purchase the movie, which in time, we did.
Considering the election week we’ve had in this country, I somewhat wish time would wrinkle. If it were possible to pass through a real-life wrinkle, suspended in/hurtling through time and space, I might just want time to stop long enough to experience the worlds to which that wrinkle would take me. Away from the mess that 2020 has dished out: mysterious seeds, murder hornets, a tiger king, a global pandemic, and now, a mere few days away from Friday the 13th, an election hullabaloo.
I want to pause and breathe and watch a lovely movie about an awkward teenage girl who misses her dad. I want to sit in a theater with my family and eat popcorn from the refillable bucket we buy each year. I want to sneak my children the dollar store snacks and drinks I usually purchase on our way to the movies. I want to lose track of time just long enough to watch a 90-minute reimagined stroll down memory lane – into an allegorical world of wonder.
This week, I invite you to do just that: watch the 2018 A Wrinkle in Time. Try to picture yourself as a child, seeing someone who looks like you, in a sparkling, colorful, big-screen adaptation of a book beloved by young and old alike. Try to feel the excitement and anticipation of knowing that behind the movie is a black female director who received an almost unheard-of budget to bring this movie to the screen – where her cinematic vision became the first movie directed by a black woman to gross $100 million at the box office. Particularly if you saw the movie before and found yourself let down that it didn’t strictly follow the book or fit with prior film iterations of the story, try to imagine how it feels to see yourself in this beloved tale for the very first time.
As you watch and pay attention to how your body and mind react to the film, I hope you will consider these questions:
- How many other movies and shows have you seen that center a black girl finding her identity? Strong relationship with her father? Embracing her beauty and uniqueness? Adapted from popular books?
- When you bristle at modern, inclusive versions of old stories, why are you bothered that a present-day adaptation doesn’t stick to a traditional interpretation? Is it because even if characters’ skin color is never explicitly stated in the text, that whiteness is the norm in your mind’s eye as you read?
- If as an adult, you are affected by not being represented by characters who look like you on a movie screen, how much more important and meaningful do you think it is for children of color, who have so seldom seen themselves represented, to have the opportunity to do so?
Time won’t wrinkle for us, or even pause briefly. And since we must keep putting one foot in front of the other as time marches on, then we’d may as well keep working toward a more unified, harmonious, and peaceful way of living amongst each other – one piece at a time.