The actor:	Danny Glover
The character:	Langston
The film:	Sorry to Bother You
The line:	“Hey, young blood. Let me give you a tip: use your white voice.“

Not the Will Smith white voice, Langston goes on to say. It needs to be whiter than that.

Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, befitting the work of an intersectional communist, is as much about the confluence of racism and classism in America as it is about either one on its own. Whiteness is a way up the ladder, even whiteness that is hilariously feigned. For Black men, white voices mean the voices of chubby nerd comedians. Cash’s white voice is David Cross; the power caller, Mr. _____, is Patton Oswalt. (For women, the preferred white voice isn’t Rachel Dratch or Rhea Perlman. It’s Lily James, whose English accent is intriguing because it’s just a little too unpolished.) In the telemarketing gig, Black men using the white voice is a perfect ruse. Convince the sucker you’re calling up who doesn’t want to talk to you that you’re a non-threatening white guy and you have a shot. Have a voice that’s coded Black at all (and as Cash says, he doesn’t exactly have a stereotypical Black voice) and it’s the sound that plays right before the dial tone. Anyone who has seen the back half of this movie, maybe the only movie that I won’t freely spoil, knows that being a Black man who can wear a white voice ultimately cannot save Cash from what’s waiting in his future.

One of the reasons that so many Americans, regardless of race, believe that racism is basically over is because the movies tell them that it’s been solved. Movies about racism against Black people in America are set, over and over again, in the past. To Kill a Mockingbird, which argued in 1962 that racism is in the process of being killed if only enough white people will ennoble themselves, sets its story before World War II. Selma, the much-liked 2014 film, became a major point of contention in the media because it supposedly did not laud Lyndon B. Johnson enough; it’s a Martin Luther King story. There are vanishingly few directors in Hollywood who are making serious, intelligent movies about racism and doing so in their own present. (The number of white directors who are doing this is…I’ll get back to you, Gene.) This is Spike Lee, who makes forays into the past with some frequency but who is also prolific enough that there’s still a long track record on this point. To name three pictures from three different decades: Do the Right Thing, Bamboozled, Chi-Raq. Think also of Spike Lee’s sometimes derided (though not by me!) practice of demanding that we consider the connection between past racism and present racism. Has anyone else put Charlottesville in a major feature besides Spike Lee? Is it wrong, somehow, that he needed BlacKkKlansman to do it?

Jordan Peele made an enormous hit with Get Out. Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, a film that it’s starting to feel like he’s assiduously avoiding, was about the contemporary moment. Boots Riley has joined them. This isn’t meant as a shot at someone like Barry Jenkins, whose Moonlight has far, far more to do with Black community as opposed to white racism. Likewise John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, or the first two features of Charles Burnett.

The point is not that there is an imperative for Black filmmakers to make movies about racist white people. The point is that while there has been a swelling of stories about Black communities since the 1970s, and that there hasn’t been a serious consideration of racism within those moments from the 1970s on in American cinema as a whole. I’m grateful for Sorry to Bother You for a whole mess of ideas that it drops on the viewer like a shit from heaven. I’m grateful for its appreciation of what Amazon’s ultimate goal is for its employees. I’m grateful for its understanding that there is nothing that even a normally sociopathic billionaire won’t do in order to turn a greater profit. And I’m grateful for it making the white voice funny and indelible at the same time.