"moonlight, trayvon, the oscars, and america’s fear of black boys"

"Indeed, when you step back and look at the films about the Black experience and made by Black filmmakers—Moonlight, Fences, Hidden Figures, 13th, OJ, I Am Not Your Negro—it is a most beautiful spectrum of our range. The need for “diversity” doesn’t mean just having a Black person here or there, it means having a diversity of stories told. The OJ doc means more because it isn’t standing in for “the” story of Black America, but alongside Oscar winning stories of a Black mother married to her complicated sanitation working husband and of a young queer boy growing up in Florida trying to relate to the world.

It occurs to me, too, that Fences, OJ, and Moonlight’s protagonist all go to prison at some point, and we get to see them as fully human, not simply as “convicts,” and in the full diversity of humanity which people who have been incarcerated possess. Indeed, combined with seeing women space mathematicians in Hidden Figures and a literary genius in I Am Not Your Negro, Hollywood has given us the widest representation of Black characters in any single year."

https://contexts.org/blog/moonlight-trayvon-the-oscars-and-americas-fear-of-black-boys/