"Green Book"

This has to be the most white movie about black struggles I have ever seen.  Written and directed by white men the lead character is ... a white man.  This is not to say that white people can't create material covering the black plight but this film ain't it.  Called a comedy, the premise is pretty simple.  Black music prodigy Dr. Don Shirley has chosen to do a tour in the deep south in the early 1960s.  He needs a driver and selects the loutish Tony "Lip", who is conveniently a club bouncer, as well.  Tony is not a fan of black people and his opinion of them stands only one step to the left of stereotype images of fried-chicken eating black-face entertainers.  In a kind of twisted Pygmalion the well-educated Shirley attempts to refine the borderline gangster.  We are supposed to laugh.  Dr. Shirley experiences some gross kind of racism, Tony observes it and feels badly, then does something loutish.  Cue the laughter.  But I couldn't.  I'm thinking the reality of this film is just too close.  It would be one thing if it was truly history, but less than a month ago I watched a video of a man kicked out of his hotel for ... wait for it ... daring to call his mother from the lobby.  Security was called.  The video shows a man devastated by what occurred.  He is shocked, angry, sad.  The tears are clearly there under the surface.  It's hard to watch and, I imagine, impossible to experience.  Before that I watched a video of a woman waiting with a friend for a car repairman.  They were verbally assaulted by a drunken white woman who insisted, in every racist way possible, that she was better than these two black women.  It made me embarrassed for my entire race.  So no, I wasn't able to laugh at the dumb white guy in this film.  It was just too real.  And it makes me sick.