Slumdogs in the Post-racial World

First off, I will admit that I think too much. Now that we have that out of the way...

Last night I went to see Slumdog Millionaire (I recognize I may have been one of the last people to see the movie, which won eight Academy Awards and has already been out on DVD for a good long while). I thought it was a really good movie and really thought-provoking. What I was especially struck by was how the movie was set up as a "feel good" love story. One would think this would be hard to pull off, given such plot elements as religious violence, police violence (including a torture scene--there's your "enhanced interrogation techniques," people), and exploitation of children. And yet by its end, this movie has the star-crossed young lovers finally reunited and performing a Bollywood dance number with hundreds of people in the train station. *blink* So, we are to understand that this movie had a triumphant ending.

Towards the end of the movie, there's a scene after Jamal has been released from police custody. He has convinced them that somehow it is possible that a "mere slumdog" could have really answered the first day's quiz show questions and has been released to return for his second day on the show, after seemingly being tortured and kept awake all night. As he returns to the show, there is a groundswell of support for him, as people yell they love him and one woman says something like "go with my blessings, child." This is one of the few overt acknowledgements in the film that Jamal is not alone, that he belongs to a social context, that his struggles are not the lone cowboy kind of struggles which are unique to him, but struggles of the people who live where he lives, who are from where he is from.

What this made me think of is this (false, I'd say) idea that the triumph of one (or a few) means that the group has transcended traditional barriers so everything is all good now. A reversal of that famous phrase whereby the political is made personal and can be overcome on an individual basis. Hmm. So I started considering what "post-racial" means and how some people can believe it is reality signaled by the election of the first African American president. This is hard for me to accept as a fact, given the vast discrepancies that still exist between Americans of different ethnicities in terms of education, wealth, income, life expectancies, unemployment, child mortality rates, etc. Hmmm.