by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
There is a famous anecdote from the very end of the Civil War when a former slave is claimed to have told a bunch of white people that, “bottom rail is on top now.”
Ok, here’s my movie pitch.
The movie opens with a montage about a virus that wiped out much — but not all — of humanity. After a lot of chaos, death and destruction, humanity manages to bounce back. But here’s the twist — white people are now in the minority and pretty much the entire globe is run by black and brown people.
You would have to be very careful how you approached this story, but in general, the point would be to confront white people in the audience with how systemic racism is real TODAY. The movie would be an excuse to highlight the macro social injustice that POC have to endure in our modern world.
You might suggest that white people in this future world are blamed for the the destruction of the old world and that only adds to the prejudice that they face. Now there are obvious risks to this move in the sense that Right wing nutjobs might completely miss the point of the story and latch on to it as a parable about the perils of illegal immigration.
Ugh.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Anyway, it’s an interesting idea. It’s a more realistic end-of-the-word scenario than is in most fiction these days.
