Response to Othershipwrecks

Rating: 8/10 (1 January 2020)

Othershipwrecks, I greatly appreciate your accurate and educated thesis on our culture and general lack of awareness. However, many writers, filmmakers and other artists have tried your logical and direct approach in laying bare the institutional and structural racism all of us European descendants both benefit from and purposefully or complacently further; an activity we suspend or deny when emotions are charged. I commend such efforts to clarify the brutality that Green Book only hints of.
But we also need artistic half-measures, like Green Book, which are, indeed, a passive reminder of our racism, to provide a gentle prodding to place our racism top of mind for awhile without alienating us.
Those more profoundly disturbing and accurate films haven't accomplished much more, though we both may wish they would. And they only draw a much more receptive audience. You see, most of us will avoid a direct assault on our lack of moral outrage and action. A combination of many influences must be used to alter the structural racism, if even possible.
And, as we witness, will likely never succeed so long as the white minority controls most of the nations' wealth.
I do not believe humans will ever trade our tribalism for homogenization; our need for visual familiarity is in our animal nature and only evolution may alter that characteristic. So, in the meantime, we must recognize our racism, promote awareness, protect each other, and strive to be better than we are.
Green Book is well-written, superbly acted, and tries to provide something more than stereotypes, not well enough to get the last two stars. It is what it is.