Vanity Fair | What Hollywood Could Learn from Frederick Douglass

This weekend, tens of millions of Americans, in Chicago, in Corpus Christi, in Columbus (Ohio and Georgia), and elsewhere will step into a room filled with strangers.

The lights will go down, and they’ll watch a movie.

It might be about aliens or robots, or robot aliens, or regular old Homo sapiens. Watching it, these tens of millions of Americans will feel awe and fear. They’ll laugh. They’ll cry. And without realizing it, they’ll spend a few hours contemplating what it means to be human.

Then the lights will come up. They will leave the room and return to their lives, changed—imperceptibly, dramatically, or somewhere in between—by what they just witnessed.

The world, meanwhile, will be much as they left it: a mess.

A warming climate. Escalating nuclear tensions with North Korea. The Trump administration. Those are big problems. But they reasonably recede in the face of more immediate concerns: Who will we be? Whom will we love? How will we protect them? How will we mourn? How will we survive in the face of it all?

If nothing else, the political rise of Donald Trump—in its full Obama-is-foreign-born, Mexicans-are-thugs-and-rapists, and pussy-grabbing shitholery (this is a highly abbreviated list)—has laid bare that, for at least two-thirds of Americans, the answers to those questions are far more complicated than generally acknowledged, even by members of other marginalized groups.