Thread by @EveKeneinan

I have something on my mind. Two things which are connected, one from years ago and one recently.

Many of us are old enough to first have heard the term “diversity” applied to things like movies and TV. No matter what it was, you *had* to have one black character in it, in some minor role at least. This was the TOKEN black character. This happened sometime in the 80s or 90s.

All of us are familiar with the token black character. One of my friends at the time called this the “Unnecessary Negro” trope. Like a song I don’t like that nevertheless gets stuck in my head, that name has stuck with me.

Partly because my friend always used to note it when we were watching movies/tv: “Boom! There’s the Unnecessary Negro.” He always kept an eye out for the Unnecessary Negro, which annoyed my race-blind movie/tv-watching. I wouldn’t *notice* race unless someone pointed it out.

After college, I no longer watched tv/movies with my friend, and contentedly fell back into my default of not noticing race in my entertainment—unless it was thrust in my face. So the "Unnecessary Negro” fell out of my consciousness for decades.

I had a talk with another old friend the other day, and one of the things he brought up was that he’d seen a movie WITH NO BLACK PEOPLE IN IT. He’s a left-leaning centrist politically. But “It felt good. It was refreshing,” he told me. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

The other day, I found myself watching a movie (low-budget, psychological, weird — not bad) called Cube²: Hypercube. The whole *point* of the movie is that it is small group of people who are trapped somewhere. And none of them were black—not all white, just no black people.

And at some point, my unconscious, thanks to my one friend’s recently relief at getting through a whole movie with no black people, threw up the old term “Unnecessary Negro.” Would *this* movie have an “Unnecessary Negro”? The question started to disrupt my immersion in the film.

It didn’t seem likely, since there were no blacks among the trapped people, and it seemed they were all going to die. I won’t spoil IF they all died, but the final scene took us outside their extradimensional prison—a military experiment. And the General in charge was black.

I instantly heard the voice of my friend from college (only in my mind; he’s dead now; he was the first of my college friends to die):

“Boom! There’s the Unnecessary Negro!”

This is bothering me because I have successfully lived my life according to the idea and ideal of race-indifference (so-called “color blindness”, which is a bad term because it is misused by the Woke who pretend to take it literally).

MANY times in my life, people who today would be called “of color” by today’s progressives, both personally and professionally, have told me how much they appreciate the way I don’t treat anyone differently on the basis of race. That’s IMPORTANT in a classroom.

I remember one time I was visiting my friend Ben (Jew; white?) and his girlfriend Gina (Asian) and I were talking and she remarked how glad she was that I had related to her simply as a person since meeting her, and not “an Asian”.

As always, that caught me off guard. It really hadn’t occurred to me to do anything else. I mean, yes, she was Asian, but so what? It just never occurred to me that was a RELEVANT, DEEPLY IMPORTANT fact about WHO SHE WAS.

Because it wasn’t and it isn’t.

But the Left is trying to bring about a “racial awakening” where everyone has to “see race” always and everywhere.

And it may be working. If my lifelong color-blindness has been unconsciously disrupted … that’s not good.

My psyche has been affected to the point where, like my former college friend, I’ve started to notice the “Unnecessary Negro” trope in movies and tv. It bothers me. The fact I’ve been FORCED to NOTICE it bothers me. I don’t like it.

I doubt there would be any danger of RL bleed-over into, say, my classroom, because that isn’t about “casting” (well, at the University level, it kind of is, but that’s another story)—any student in my class ISN’T unnecessary, so there can’t be an “Unnecessary Negro” there.

I suppose I’ll end with a question:

Have any of you, or How many of you, have found the relentless neo-Racism of the Woke starting to *affect* how you see/think about race—in spite of yourself?

I *hate* Critical Race Theory. I oppose it. I think it is false and pernicious.

And yet, it’s had subtle effects on me, which I also hate.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The Master warned me: