To Sleep With Anger is a film you have never heard of because its a black film thats not about racism.
To Sleep With Anger is a film you have never heard of because it's a black film that's not about racism or blackness. The Samuel Goldwyn Company

Though it's good news that the black-directed The Birth of a Nation was a big deal at Sundance 2016, and is likely to make a big splash at the Oscars in 2017, the fact of the matter is that it is still a film about white racism, and so continues the idea that white racism is all that being black is about. Being black for the most part, however, is about not being black at all. It's about aunts, uncles, cousins, dogs, cats, birds, clouds, snowflakes, dinner tables, walks in the park, being dumped, being desired, and just plain being around. Award-worthy films about black people who just happen to be black rarely receive notice or awards.

White directors, on the other hand, are always making films that have white characters who are essentially colorless. They have no idea what a privilege that is. You will not find one film in this year's Oscars that's about white people dealing with, thinking about, relating to their whiteness. There are other things for them to worry about.

But let's take a film like To Sleep with Anger. No one has heard of it. Why? Not because it was directed by a black man, the great Charles Burnett. Nor because it stars Danny Glover, who was at his peak, fame-wise (thanks to the Lethal Weapon series), when the feature was released in 1990. It is unknown, and was completely ignored by the Oscars, because it's an intelligent film about black people, and yet has almost nothing to say or to do with white racism (it is mentioned only once, and at the very end of the movie, and comically concerns the slowness of the coroner's office when it comes to dealing with black corpses).

If the Oscars notice blacks, it's because they are fighting racism or angry at white people or getting flogged by white people. This, however, is not what blackness is essentially about. It's really, again, all about white people, the inventors, imposers, maintainers of blackness. Blackness is nothing but a white construction, which is why it is so easily recognized by the white voters at the Oscars, it they bother to recognize humans with beige, brown, and black skin at all.

To Sleep with Anger recently received some kind words from the New Yorker's Richard Brody.