Ta-Nehisi's first column for the NYT, on the new X-Men flick, is well worth a read. The thesis:
“First Class” proves itself not merely an incredible film, but an incredible work of American historical fiction. Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes.
TNC follows up at this blog:
I'm not arguing that X-Men should have been "about" the Civil Rights Movement, or that black characters should be immortal. The appropriate comparison for me is Mad Men. The show is about an exclusively white world, but it is never blind to race. I can't think of only one "racial" story-line, and I am fine with that. But race is always there, in the subtext, in the side comments, in the jobs which black people work. I'm struggling to say this because I think these debates often devolve into a call for tokenism. But tokenism isn't awareness and I would hate for anyone to think I'm arguing for that.
Adam Serwer seconds TNC:
[S]o much of our conversation on race is motivated less by a search for justice than by a desire to exonerate ourselves from our own history, and creating our own alternate realities in which we are better than we actually were helps us do that.
Yglesias reads the film differently and sees Magneto as the hero. Ezra Klein differs.
The Dish 