This is, for me at least, the most striking moment in Interstellar, a long and mostly boring and mostly ideological film by one of the most conservative directors in Hollywood, Christopher Nolan.
After realizing that the first planet in NASA’s search for a replacement for Earth is unsuitable for humans, the two explorers, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and Amelia (Anne Hathaway), return to their mother ship, Endurance, and discover the crew member they left, Romilly (David Gyasi), has aged considerably. Because of gravitational warping, every two seconds the astronauts spent on the bad planet was equal to 20 hours on Endurance. But here is the thing that really got me: The crew member who says, “You have been gone for 23 years,” is a black man. And he has on his face an expression you would expect from a man who has been wrongfully imprisoned, who has done the hardest time for a crime he did not commit. Endurance was not an adventure to the great unknown but just another prison cell for a black man. Damn.
Which brings me to the point of this post, which relates to a recent guest post on Forbes, a publication that does occasionally and almost weirdly publish something useful.
The writer Stephen Bronars, an economist, explains that not only does Ferguson—a St. Louis suburb that last August exploded into riots and demonstrations and military-like repression after a young black man, Michael Brown, was shot by a white police officer—have general problems with its justice system as a whole, but also, and more critically, nearly 50 percent of its black males between the ages of 25 and 34 are missing.
In that age group, there are two women for every male. And where have these young men gone? Some to the military, some died, some ended on the streets, and the rest were sent to prison.
