The Sleeping Negro
**Seen at the 2021 Atlanta Film Festival.
I’m fascinated by how this film would have played with an audience not in a drive-in setting. Even as I begin writing this review, I’m still working through my emotions about the film, which is 73 minutes of Black rage and discomfort. Skinner Myers has not made an easy film, but he has made a thoroughly intriguing one.
“The Sleeping Negro” is a concept brought up twice in the film. It’s the idea that a Black man who thinks a certain way is sleeping on the reality of what his Black life is in America. For some, it means that you follow the conservative philosophies of Black history and modern discrimination; for others, it means you’ve lapped up the liberal idea of continuing to be oppressed despite things like Obama being President. Each moment it is brought up, the film finds its protagonist (played by Myers himself) in moments of being challenged about what he experiences on a day-to-day basis. The entire film puts him through moments of racial tension that make him confront what he’s truly responsible for in life.
The important part of Myers’s film is that it’s not to be taken as a logical narrative- the film feels a lot like a 73-minute collection of nightmare scenarios for the character, which includes thinly-veiled racism from his fiancée’s white cousin at his job, blackmailing him into doing shady things just for an eviction; he and his “liberal” white fiancée getting into an argument about white privilege, culminating in her using the n-word against him; and a reunion with a relative becoming a political argument where their differing views on Black experience open the rift further. There’s a through-line as the film culminates in the eviction mentioned in the opening scene, and it becomes an awkward moment for not just the protagonist, but the characters themselves.
Myers appears to be working through the ways Black people have to navigate the white world, and the agitation and hidden resentment that causes, and it’s an uncomfortable, painful sit. That’s how it probably should be for a white viewer, right? One thing is certain- I’m not sure if I’m going to stop thinking about it anytime soon.
