Introduction
Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, an innovated theory of society as a hyper-site for ridicule and conformity is nothing short of fascinating. A product of magical realism, the film employs protagonist Cassius Green— a melanated black body who attempts to negotiate the western subject by way of capitalistic ambitions as resulting in a literal black dehumanization that turns the black body into a human/animal hybrid exploited for labor. A societal object, running towards capital, casts the black body into a fatal predictability that ultimately seizes black humanity. 
The quest for visibility and purpose gradually moves from the background to the forefront throughout the film. In the film’s background is reality show “I got the Sh*t kicked knocked out of me” — a popular show where guests volunteer to various forms of public humiliation. The show is reminiscent of the show “Fear Factor,” a popular series in the early 2000s where contestants performed a myriad of acts from eating cow testicles to having rats crawl all over their bodies for two minutes. The show in its fact and fictive representations illustrates the allure of ridicule to those with a self and esteem seized by a ruthless culture that thrives on such baseness. In hindsight, the show appears a physical representation of the great lengths one will endure for their place amongst the white lights that veil the red venom of white supremacy.
Cassius Clay or Cassius Green
The film provides cause to question whether protagonist Cassius Green is named after the late Cassius Clay who preceded the body it was initially assigned to in death. While watching the film, I could not help but wonder whether Cassius Green was who Muhammad Ali would have been had he not experienced a cultural awakening? Nevertheless, it seems an oversimplification to render this film a cautionary tale of black assimilation. Rather, the film functions as a meditation of the fatality of the black follower. To follow whiteness as a black man or woman is to be lead off a cliff. To follow whiteness as a being of black form, is to imbue a predictability that makes you everything and everyone that you should not be. Cassius predictably though is one that leaves the reader questioning. His acquiescence to white supremacist culture, comes after he has already taken a step over a cliff. He is so far gone though, that he sees his step of a cliff as the step off the elevator that issues an allusive upward mobility. Cassuis’ 
desire to win at the white man’s game by any means necessary, attracts the negative attention from his oppressors that truss in his trust in them. Cassius exudes this trust in snorting a line of coke that will ultimately transform him. Cassius invests this white powder off a plate with s horse on it, foreshadowing the transformation that is yet to come.
The film provides further contemplation that many of us have had over the years but a query that not enough have asked themselves let alone the world. What force lies behind those who have made a prodigious contribution to our collective? Why are some of our leaders killed but not others? Cassius, after climbing the ranks of predictability, is offered an opportunity to lead the inevitable revolution of the oppressed man/animal hybrid. He is presented with an opportunity to be “A Man Amongst Horses,” an opportunity he has already accepted by walking through the door. This depiction illustrates the “black leader” as often the prediction of the white oppressors designed to pacify the masses with illustration not liberation.
Cassius Green, A Lost Boy in a Man’s body
Viewers meet Cassius Green (LaKeith Stanfield) as his morning thoughts reveal a common quest of trying to turn life into meaning. Green desires to make something of himself. He desires purpose—to make a mark on the world. Sorry To Bother You illustrates that attempting to make a mark on that which you do not understand, is setting the world up to brand you with its brutality.
Essentially, Cassius Greene is the quintessential “lost” melanated body who is not on a quest for blackness, but whiteness— a quest guised as conventional success. His desire is best manifested in the starry gaze he affords the elevator that takes employees up to the “higher” level. These employees, who are essentially his co-workers, dress flashier and hold themselves with a pseudo confidence. Greene forges credentials that prove superfluous for an entry-level telemarketing job that will change his life forever. The job initially confirms his feelings of inadequacy, but once senior employee, Langston gives him the key—Greene opens the door to opportunity, or what he eventually learns is slavery. This key is a “white voice.” Greene’s adaptation of “the white voice” is the selling point of the movie, a point that coincides with the now cliche phrase that “anything is possible when you sound white on the phone.” The viral status of the phrase reflects the societal predilection for ideologies that articulate or maintain white as central—an ideology performed in the white voice overs that persist throughout the film. Riley challenges the ideology of the white voice by posing query as to whether it exists at all. 
Through Langston, Sorry to Bother You presents whiteness as an ideology, as a wish rather than a reality. Whiteness is something that needs bodies to believe in it, to reinforce and thereby prove its existence. Every body in the film functions as a tool of whiteness, even those who seem most vested in its abolishment. All desire a piece of a white pie, they desire it in different manifestations, depicting whiteness as a pervasive disease that has affected all. Though mastering the white voice, Langston does not gain upward mobility. This lack of upward mobility is easily attributed to choice afforded by Langston’s knowledge of what lies on the other side.
Foreshadow: The Path Less Taken
Greene’s fate is eerily alluded to by a senior co-worker played by veteran actor Danny Glover. In a conversation about what it means to be a “power-caller,” Glover compartmentalizes the sales of these superstar employees as “holocaust,” words that should foreshadow the misfortune that awaits a lost Cassius, but escapes rather than admonishes him.
Langston’s words are not all that escape the film. Angst as a character, despite appearing in number of scene, remains vastly under developed. Like the man that appears in the background via photograph with a variety of expressions who appears to be Cassuis Green’s father, Glover’s character appears almost phantasmal. The black man and the Cadillac, the Cadillac a symbol of the black man’s dream—the black man’s desire to culminate what was outlined for him by his oppressors. This black male figure appears in the background of the film to personify his place in the background of society, in the backdrop of the world, in the back of the minds of their sons and daughters, their lives long forgotten by a world who rendered their birth and burial with the same indifference. Though Green finds community with his boss, a nameless black man dressed to mirror the caricature he embodies, their connection is one of sell outs. They connect as hollow shells of what could of been, but instead what was and is a white supremacy. In their quest for fictive power, they became predictable. Their predictability results in their profitable praise a profit the enslaved are paid for their subjugation.
Squeeze, the Non-Black Person of Color As Head Activist
A relationship that does carry throughout the entire movie, is the relationship between 
Cassius and his pseudo activist associate Squeeze. Cassius meets Squeeze shortly after starting his position, and is quickly recruited to the movement. At first Cassius is excited, excited to be a part of something, but when he is given a chance to move up the ranks, he does so. This process, though initially portrayed as positive, sets off the downward spiral in which Cassuis is unable to remove himself. Cassuis’ severance from the movement is depicted with a sort of implied scrutiny, a scrutiny undercut with the reality that Cassuis battle is unlike that of his non-black person of color coworker.
So though Squeeze both articulates and seems to act as if his struggle mirrors that of his black colleagues. Squeeze’s struggle is a single struggle, an oversimplification he extends to his followers in his protest against his boss. As a person of color without color, Squeeze can negotiate what the black body must take. His solutions therefore, are self-serving, and a means for the black body to escape the battle only they can and must take in order to ensure liberation.
Like Mike?
What’s interesting about the dynamics portrayed in the film, is that Cassius Green represents the contemporary black men who possesses more freedom in his unemployment than his climb up the corporate ladder. The film depicts Green as seduced to want to be something else while those around him desire to be like him. This point speaks directly to Squeeze, the organizer for the employee strike. His request is for a means to live similarly to those for whom he works. Squeeze desires a seat at the table, and perceives his desires as commiserate to his black and white coworkers. A willing migrant, Squeeze wants to make good on the promise of the American Dream, a promise 
never made to those whose bodies afforded the commerce of western wealth. A seat at the table will not garner freedom for the black man or woman, as the very table is held up by the dismembered legs of their ancestors. Squeeze illustrates the non-black person of color as seizing black allies when convenient, and perhaps most importantly, the non-black person of color’s not so secret envy of blackness. Squeeze’s desire to be like the black man manifests in his desire for Cassuis’ romantic partner, Detroit. This desire is seen in the company who employs Detroit for her labor and Squeeze who despite seeing Detroit and Cassuis’s love for one another first hand, desires to replace Cassius. Squeeze conceals this desire from Cassius, but is quite forthcoming of his intentions with Detroit. The black female body has habitually been a form of conquest, a means for oppressors to mark their objectification of the black man.
Detroit, The Black Female Lead
Detroit, played by Tessa Thompson in her recurring role as love interest to a significantly darker skinned man, narrates what appears to be the black female experience. Detroit, intelligent and outspoke, speaks loudest in her accessories–seemingly a commentary of 
black female fashion as a narrative of its own. This ambiguity angers me, as my medication on Detroit appears once again to be a black woman searching for herself in a world that flourishes in this obscurity.
Though Detroit speaks of Africa’s exploitation as the muse for her her art exhibition, she does so without overt attachment. She is far more her tie-dyed hair and burnout persona, perhaps to intentionally depict the displaced African as viewed intersectionally. I personally find the racially ambiguous black woman as largely played out. In an industry with only a handful of brown skinned black men, the continual omitting of a black woman of the same hue suggests what the media perpetuates daily—the myth that blacks of a sun-kissed hue do not love one another.
Detroit, like the systemized City, is sullied by the forces of white supremacy. She appears a “free spirit” but she isn’t free at all. Her situation appears perhaps most devastating because unlike her male counterparts, she seems to understand her oppression. Her art exhibit is anchored in the systemic rape of Africa, a mutilation she emulates in her presentation of the work. During her exhibit Detroit wears a costume that depicts hands grabbing her breasts and genitals, recites a poem, and allows the audience to toss items from batteries to sheep blood at her as she recites a monologue. As bizarre as the scenario sounds, its depiction is reminiscent to the dynamic many black female superstars offer at their concerts. The sight is hard to watch, as a nearly nude black Woman stands on a platform reminiscent of an auction block, where she is ridiculed, 
mentally defiled, and utterly broken before monetarily consumed by her oppressors.
Detroit festers the bounds of her defilement in a reckless sexual encounter with Squeeze, the Asian activist who functions in the same circle as Cassius and those from her Oakland community, hours after her breakup with Cassius. This depiction cheapens Detroit, countering what previously functioned as intellect as a devotion to diversifying the ways in which she is exploited and mutilated. The sexual merging of black and Asian bodies could also represent the Asian conquest and exploitation of African bodies and goods.
Perhaps one of the most poignant moments of the film is a horrified Cassius jumping in to save his beloved in her humiliating demonstration. Confronted with the physical manifestation of what he also does for a living, this scene is especially significant because it illustrates that it is often far easier to acknowledge the problematic behavior of others, than to acknowledge your own—which is a common side affect of post traumatic slave syndrome.
Green with Envy or Naivety?
It is a point of wonder whether the Greene in the protagonist’s “sir” name is representative of naivety or envy. My argument would be that his character represents a medley of the two, a naive jealousy that cripples him in fomenting a meditation on what he does not have, rather than making due with all that he does. Greene’s quest for freedom, as something handed to him by his oppressors, is not freedom at all but what the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy needs marginalized bodies to believe is freedom to ensure the black collective is never freed. Greene, like all bodies within the black collective, was born with the tools necessary to engender his liberation. It is only in the contemporary enslavement of the black body, the labor force that tells individuals that they are nothing without a job, a 401K, an expensive car, and other worthless material items, that the marginalized body displaces the purpose of their oppressors in place of their collective purpose.
Closing Thoughts
Though named after an apologist phrase, the film is anything but apologetic in its critique of conformity and the poisonous attributes of a society that are largely normalized. The film diverges from the usual depiction of conformity as the road to success manifested in the Ivy League, 1percent, and the countries’ most revered professions. The film suggests that what the world projects as the light, is a darkness for dark people— a dark hole to which the melanated body loses sense of self and never emerges as human. The film is the contemplative exercise missing from contemporary pop culture, the admonishment needed to steer our kids towards self and away from the demons of conformity.
Perhaps the most resonant depiction of the film is the nameless character played by Omari Hardwick. Green meets this character in his rise from entry-level to higher-level executive, a character whose voice and name is oppressed in the system to which he has sold his soul. We hear Hardwick’s actual voice moments before Green takes the substance that ultimately turns his body into what his mind has already become—an animal. Hardwick’s character represents what becomes of the assimilatory black body, it becomes dismembered, erased in a violent consummation of anti blackness where the once black body is not only not black, but completely void. Hardwick’s character is a necessary character as he embodies what so many within the black collective see far too often in those who are presumed to have made it— at the expense of exchanging self for status.
In short, the film illustrates that the essential component to freeing black bodies from capitalism is acknowledgement that the black body is in fact capital. Green was capital the minute he measured himself by the white man’s measuring tape—long before he even considered a telemarketing job. May this be a lesson to all of us, the dangers of merging our double sight into the single vision of white supremacy.
Black Power ❤
blacks to “be with their own.” As conveyed, this ideology suggests a similarity between the black and white power groups. Duke’s words however do not convey the truth, but rather what white supremacists tell themselves. The infiltration of Ron Stallworth into Kwame Ture’s attendance at the black student union, is an imperative depiction. On one hand, it illustrates the intention of black entry into white spaces. Black entry into white spaces has absolutely nothing to do with anti-racist ideologies, but everything to do with diversifying the ways in which racism is practiced. In recruiting blacks desperate for visibility and the white man’s commerce, comes the Step’n Fetchit’s and Clarence Thomas’s of the world, seen commonly in black officers and police chiefs used to convey racist messages or even execute racist behavior. It is also seen in schools where black bodies are employed to instruct the next generation of students to acquiesce to the subjugation designed for them. In short, black inclusion does not illustrate whites as allies in post-racial America, but blacks as allies in a wound worsened by infection veiled as infiltration.
White Woman is a singular entity, a single entity the film depicts in excess. A small man with penis envy, Felix’s plus side wife symbolizes the excess that he seeks. Felix speaks and treats his wife like a child, an action that functions deliberately to display Felix’s constructed masculinity. Connie, wife of KKK member Felix, has all the bearings of a southern mistress. Her accent is deep, her home quintessential American middle class. She makes the home, but she also makes the deadly ambitions of her prejudice husband a reality. When Felix decides to target the black female leaders of the Black student union, it is the white woman who executes his plan. As she journeys to plant a bomb at Patrice’s home, Connie sees Patrice as not a “Woman” but as black– reflective of how the black women is seen throughout the global paradigm of white supremaycy. This depiction of white femininity as merely executing the ambitions of white male patriarchs, and inevitably anchored in race not gender, is an imperative lesson to the black viewer.
Actress Lauren Harriet plays Patrice, her portrayal yet another embodiment of the fair-skinned love interest. This depiction is also another representation of the biracial female body as the face of the black female narrative. This reoccurring action makes this casting neither coincidence or circumstantial, but custom. Though the paper bag test is commonly referred to as an occurrence of the past, the paper bag remains a standard for black female beauty. Specifically, as depicted in the acceptable beauty of Patrice’s thick features paired with her lighter skin, the paper bag test remains the determining force in whether full lips and African bone structure is attractive enough to warrant visibility.
all.”
sexuality, a common theme in Spike Lee’s depictions of black bodies. To put things bluntly, Lee seems a prisoner of the caricatured male gaze in many of his projects. This project is a tad different, as the solely sexualized body is Phillip, a Jewish man who in his infiltration of the KKK, is asked to show his genitals as a means to prove his Arian lineage. It is interesting and an oversimplification of the black male experience, in a narrative that is supposed to be of a black man, that it is a Jewish man whose penis functions as “other.” Yes, in the same film where the horror story of a tortured, castrated and murdered Jesse Washington is revisited, it is Jewish genital practices that are actively bothered under the gaze of a black direction. This insulting portrayal is perhaps a warm up for the image Lee leaves readers with—the face of Heather Heyer, a white woman killed in the Charlotteville Riots last year. As a being of black form, it hurts to see this image as the final unspoken words of a film supposedly of melanin creation. The pain stems from the illustration of yet another black body as a bridge in which the white collective crosses to a fictive superiority, a fictive superiority made real through black sacrifice of self.
The motifs of this film correspond directly to Caitlin Flanagan’s article 
film, there are a number of black bodies occupying the background in a film dominated by white bodies. Rihanna’s role is supplementary, as she is merely the “eyes.” Rihanna plays “Leslie” or “Nine ball” a talented hacker. Nine ball coerces entry into spaces that fail to see her. As a hacker she sees, but is not seen—reserving a power similar to her oppressors. This positioning could very well be revolutionary, but Nine Ball uses her positionality to aid rather than overcome these oppressive forces.
the blaxploitation era.
the black female form displays a heightened sexuality intertwined with an underscored masculinity mirroring the perception of the enslaved black Woman.
throughout the global perception of the black female form. Proud Mary, the strong black woman that anchors the film, is literally a super woman. Yet, true to the treatment of the black female form, she is underestimated. Proud Mary as an underestimated entity is depicted in Benny’s inability to conceive Mary as going against his commands. Her loyalty is also taken for granted—illustrated in Benny and Tom’s assumption that there is nothing Mary would rather do with her life than fulfill their personal and professionals needs. The black female form as an underestimated being whose loyalty is taken for granted, gives way for a central component of Proud Mary’s embodiment of the strong black woman caricature–the elimination and/or emasculation of the black man.
Danny and taking him in after he collapses on a Boston street, the two organically fall into a mother and son role. It is this maternal role that seemingly is the cherry on Mary’s attempt to emerge as woman, simultaneously evoking the central maternal image in the Christian Bible. Specifically, the name Mary evokes the biblical mother of Christ who conceives the savior of humanity immaculately. Mary, (Henson) performs a similar function in emerging as mother to a child she did not conventionally conceive. The placement of “proud” in front of “mary” functions to depict the black mother Mary as possessing one of the seven sins–pride. This evokes a similar image to eve and the apple, the black woman depicted as possessing the pride that sullies humanity with her sin and thwarts her journey to “woman.”
Before I conclude this piece, I wish to share that this film had me at the edge of my seat for an unlikely reason. I spent the bulk of the film hoping that Danny (Jahi Di’allo Winston) did not get shot. Danny is easily comparable to Trayvon Martin, or even a Tamir Rice who were murdered at or around Danny’s age in the film—their transitions induced by gunshot wounds. Though “saved” by black mother Mary, Danny’s spared life almost suckers viewers into enjoying a mediocre movie more because although inundated with death–the movie spares the child. The spared black male child is especially resonant given the inhumane amount of young black bodies the black collective has had to bury over the last four hundred years. This bothered me as it seems a ploy of the non-black writer and directors to exploit the contemporary gaze fixated on the fiction that racism is an isolated ideology–whereas if there was no racism this movie and the caricatures that cloud it, would not exist. Furthermore, the spared black child makes viewers more inclined to develop an underserving predilection for the non-black movie producers and writers for not disrupting a route to escapism with reality–unveiling the film as a means of escapism, not a means to exhale. 
History has shown the conscious gaze this behavior before—the black body at an illusive crossroads where they are indirectly presented with the decision of cowardice or courage, enslavement or freedom, silence or sound, leader or follower, life, and death. We saw this James Baldwin’s “Sonny Blues,” where Sonny chooses music and his brother chooses education as a mode of escaping the inescapable. Despite their varied paths, they meet in the middle bruised by the same burdens and cruelty, pushed to the same edge viewers watch Israel dangle from. Whether compartmentalized by the phrase “dangling from the edge” or “snapping” the climax of black masculinity is a recurring theme of the black male narrative that either produces what functions as a hyper-masculinity or an emasculation.
the man. Particularly, the name “Roman Israel” represents colorblind casting, or color being implementing into the film as an attempt to seem more relevant than it actually was during conception. Casting a black man as the film’s protagonist both exposes the racist perception of the producers writers and directors, and aids the white supremacist agenda of implementing white supremacy any and everywhere possible. Namely, the film is a different take of the controlling image where the black male emasculation is evident in his donning of female clothing, appropriating femininity not as an act of resistance or nuanced approach to personhood, but as an effort to dissolve masculinity as it relates to the black male body. Although not assuming an overt femininity, Roman too distances himself from a black masculinity when his “aha” moment breeds an “oh no” reaction. In what should have been a moment of strength, Israel emerges as weak— a depiction that is not accidental in a white supremacist culture. Ironically, named for the land given to a people subject to the inhumane cruelty of a Holocaust, the allusion evoked in Israel’s name symbolizes the danger in waiting for what is given. Israel of course came to the Jewish community as the bow on a gift—a token or acknowledgment of wrongdoing gifted to those no longer in a state of abjection— a tokenizing of a powerlessness transformed into privilege. Israel a seeks an Israel- like token, but as a black man, his desires simply do not manifest.
Despite initially shutting the door on Israel’s fight for the underdog, once these interests of the oppressed converge with his interests as a white man, George (Colin Farrell) expresses interest in Israel’s life work. By then it is too late. Israel had hung up his cape, a cape that proved a carpet to George’s assuming of Israel’s work after his death. Up until the shift that would cost him his life, Israel was building a case to expose the justice system as unjust. To an extent, every black body builds a case throughout his or her lifetime—some cases acknowledged far more than others. Far too often, these cases become the legacy of whites, who tie the ribbon on an already created black contribution. For example, prior to his death, Ralph Ellison wrote over one-thousand pages in an attempt to rewrite a novel destroyed in a house fire. After his death, a white man assembled these pages into the novel Juneteenth. This is similar to Georges Cuvier placing Saartje Baartman in jar, using the black body, or extensions of this body, as a means to exteriorize the interiority of the black collective–or, to put it simply, a means for whites to assume a legacy through black life. .
Furthermore, the film functions as a means to emasculate the black male body in showcasing both courage and cowardice as leading to fatality. It is worth mentioning that the featured image of the film’s poster, mirrors the perspective of Israel’s murderer and George, the film’s white savior. This angle prompts me to think of Malcolm X’s vow in his autobiography not to have his back to the door, after being rudely awakened to its positional vulverability. Here, Israel seemingly places his back to the world and is ejected from it, by someone, who in the faceless representation, shares the same hue as Israel– a depiction that also alludes to the orchestrated assassination of the late and great Malcolm X.
maintain an image of pseudo perfection.
interchangeability between white women. Given Margaret’s murderous rage when she learns she will not obtain the funds to start her new life, the film implies that if placed in a similar position, a deceased Rose would behave like her sister—or possibly did so to secure her temperate place in Suburb-icon.
Nicky, Garner’s pre-adolescent son, is easily the film’s protagonist and hero, that as seen in The Dark Tower, Suburbicon implies that white youth, in their willingness to befriend black males, are the hope for an anti-racist future. This suggestion is as narcissistic and laughable as it is self-serving to the white savior image pervasive throughout every avenue of American life. Like The Dark Tower, Suburbicon implements a black male body to fictively diversify an otherwise all white case. Suburbicon, slightly advances the pursuit of pseudo diversity in casting a black family who integrates a white middle class neighborhood as figures in a utopian backdrop. As seen in countless instances prior, the black body becomes the canvass to which all whites cast their sins. After Rose, a well-to-do white woman is murdered in her own home, the Mayers, a respectable black family, incurs the blame. When neighbors seek to disrupt the sanctity of this family by building a fence, singing loudly on their lawn, vandalizing their car, and breaking their front window to drape the confederate flag— the black family endures blame for the animalistic actions of whites. 
The film ends with Nicky—the son of the murderous father and husband who left a trail of blood in his desperate attempt for sex and money, playing with his black friend Andy (Tony Espinosa). The two boys toss a ball to one another over a fence that separates them. While noticeably more peaceful than any other scene in the film, the image suggests an ability of black and whites to harmoniously co-exist via an informal segregation. While I do not disagree with blacks and whites having designated spaces were interaction is optional not mandatory, this implicit idea also implies that this informal segregation is what allows for utopia–subtly suggesting that the black family’s failure to exercise this ideology proves a catalyst for the dystopia depicted in the film. An implication that acquiesces rather than challenges notions of white supremacy.
white supremacist agenda because of its obvious attempt to demonize and humanize whites in the same chord.
Black love is an understated revolutionary act dismissed in the contemporary world’s colorblind initiative guised as the antidote to contemporary conflict. This initiative not only inevitably imbues black erasure, but reflects the mental bludgeoning of the black mind that proves a platform for systemic abuse of the black body.
Although conventionally successful at the time of their initial meeting, Meagan Good and Devon Franklin illustrate the significance of stepping outside of your comfort zone as both had sworn off attributes that defined their future spouse.
He also goes on to say that many men feel as though they must conquer the world prior to marriage, but dispels this idea by saying that men can conquer the world with the right woman. For black men this “right” woman is a black woman.
Nevertheless, the docu-series elevates black love from obscurity to a seat at the the table of contemporary conversation, educating an eager audience to the value of black love. The series also prompts a discourse for determining what exactly black love is.
detriment of wrongful incarceration, ignoring the troubling reality that incarcerations as imposed onto the black collective are inherently wrong. White male writer and director Matt Ruskin, takes a slither of the black experience and attempts to pass a skinny slice off as the entire pie. The result is of course an insult, with a few moments of redeeming footage.
Colin Warner. Their relationship and familial bond illustrates that humans need not share blood to be family. In fact, Warner receives the most support from non-familial members of his community, one of which eventually becomes his wife. Moreover, while failing to issue depth to these portrayals,, the film does display multiple facets of black love despite omitting the word “black”–but we will get to this later. Thus, the resounding image displayed in the film is that it takes a village to free a black man, but 
not even this village is enough to free blacks from the imprisonment of the white gaze.
t is imperative that films depicting the migrant journey encompass the fantasy the prompts their migration to a land they believed could transform them into a millionaire or at least a thousand-aire, but instead only wished to transform them into a nigger in the same manner they did the abducted Africans centuries prior. Thus, the enslavement does not begin in a judicial conviction, but the conviction that leads blacks beyond America to believe that life as a black person is “better” here. It is the systemic coercion that urges migrant blacks to flee towards what they conceive to be change, rather than foment change where they are–this too is an indirect5 facet of oppression rarely acknowledged or even considered in the discussion of migrant blacks.
implies that every black dream needs white wings to fly.