To complete my trilogy about Chadwick Boseman movies I watched "42" about the Jackie Robinson story. The movie itself is fairly standard in its telling of the events that transpired 70 years ago now from 1947 about the first black MLB player. The NFL and NBA integrated their sports leagues a few years later. Even thinking about the times I grew up in the early 1980s, the 1940s even at that point seemed distant history, at least in the shell of fairly tranquil race relations I lived in. It is remarkable that in the 30 years from 1950 to 1980 black athletes went from unknowns to superstars.
And as much as our entertainment culture has changed, in daily civil society we still face the same challenges of relations, integration, and communication between majority and minority cultures. Yet, when one thinks of how long it has taken to get past Jim Crow laws and into just the most basic and preliminary forms of integration and acceptance, it is not surprising there are still so many issues. It doesn't take much thought to realize the role of racism in our dealings with crisis and terrorism in the Middle East, our history of paternalistic policies towards Latin America, and current antagonisms with the rising power of China. It's impossible really to know the true extent, but our stereotyped ways of interpreting the world persist. The process of truly equitable multiculturalism is one of the longest projects and challenges of civilized earth.
