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June 27, 2021 Addendum

Today, we took the 2½ hours long bus ride from Mérida to Campeche.  For not quite the whole time, they played an American, Spike Lee movie called Blackkklansman.  I knew of the movie and it was on my list of movies I wanted to watch, but aside from knowing that it was a Spike Lee movie and probably dealt with racism, I really didn't know much about the movie or its story at all.

The timing of this movie was interesting as it came immediately after a week of my faith's General Assembly, which focused on anti-racism, multiculturalism and anti-oppression.

I decided while watching the movie that I wanted to watch it in English one day soon.  I didn't feel like I had the bandwidth for Spike Lee in a second language.  (Instead, I read my biography of Warren Zevon, which isn't exactly light reading, but it was at least in English.)  I did follow the movie lightly from behind my book.  Toward its end, the movie featured quotes and from the disaster that occurred in Charlottesville in 2017, including quotes from our then-President and KKK leaders that were not flattering.

I suddenly became keenly aware of my surroundings.  Keenly aware that for the forty or so people on the bus, the "normalness" that I felt toward the presence of historical racial tension maybe wasn't at all normal.  I found myself wondering what they thought of us, having watched this movie and heard those quotes at the end.  I wondered; did they have the same struggles, but with different players where they called home?  Was there a dominant and a suppressed culture, just like in the United States, or were they watching that movie and thinking us crazy?

Sitting there, watching bits and pieces of this movie in a very different context, I became very wierded out.  I am assuming that based on my experiences watching similar movies (such as Selma), had I been watching this at home in the United States, I would have felt something akin to anger.  Watching it there, on that bus, I felt shame.  I felt very small, very fragile, very helpless.  Honestly, I don't even know if people like those on that bus were judging United States culture that way; they probably weren't even watching.  I wondered how they felt about us, those who did watch that movie.  Mostly, I wondered - if they were sitting there thinking us crazy - what could we learn from them?  What wisdom could they who live in a world where Blackklansman is so foreign teach those of us for whom Blackklansman came really as no surprise?

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