‘Blindspotting’: An Operatic Cat’s Cradle
Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal Take Up the Strands of Ongoing Dialogues About Racial Justice
Movies about friendships between black people and white people have a hard time not being full of platitudes, but Blindspotting is no The Blind Side. The movie centers on Collin, who is black, and Miles, who is white, longtime friends living in their hometown of Oakland. Played by cowriters Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, respectively, the two men are waiting out Collin’s last three days of felony probation amid a city transforming with an influx of young white professionals. Diggs and Casal take up the strands of ongoing popular dialogues about racial justice and its relationship to spatial struggles and render them in freestyle verse to craft an operatic cat’s cradle. There’s tragedy, there’s farce, and there’s a moral to the story: In Blindspotting, true racial solidarity finds its limits in friendship and its economy of gratitude, and it’s made apparent that only white people win in the politics of respectability.
