There are so many films where white women harm black men and we all understand it's an examination of their white privilege so why can't the inverse be about male privilege? Clark has male privilege over his wife (who he abused!) and his therapist
Okay? So name one movie. Go on. You said there were "so many" films, so name one! I'll wait :)
Surely though you're not arguing that a feminist read on Backrooms (2026) excuses its racism??? Surely you understand that portraying a Black man as dangerous to the white women around him is the most tired, worn out, racist trope ever done. We're talking since the Radical Reconstruction. 1897. And acting like you're some enlightened paragon of objectivity and reasonableness while you're at it. 1 Oooh you're such a feminist. Do you want us to throw a party? Should we invite Amy Cooper? 2 Or Nikki Yovino? 3 Or Carolyn Bryant? 4
Anyway, I don't give a shit about what Clark, the fictional character did. He's not a real person. I care that Kane Parsons wrote and directed a movie that depicts a Black man as an alcoholic 5 6 7 who is inherently violent to the white women around him 8 and doesn't want to change 9. Whatever intention he, the other writers, and A24 had are irrelevant. They created a character drenched in racial stereotypes, and then at every opportunity used the story and its other characters to explicitly reinforce those stereotypes. Racist movie. End of sentence.
(This isn't even bringing up other issues, such as The Pirate bordering on minstrelsy and even an exacerbated brute stereotype. The issues with blackface and the white actor that played The Pirate. Or the demonization of addicts and people with mental disorders, both of which are more likely to be prescribed to you when you're Black. OR that the movie itself pulled a bait-and-switch by pretending to have a Black protagonist, and then making him a villain for a white woman to fight and conquer instead.)
You and everybody else trying to obfuscate the disgusting choices made by this film by bringing up, again and again, that, um acshually, this film can't possibly be racist because it's about a woman breaking free from a man, need to shut the fuck up and educate yourselves about intersectionality and why we can't keep treating race and gender as separate issues. Here are a few resources.
Holden-Smith, Barbara. "Lynching, Federalism, and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era."
The Gilder Leherman Institute of American History. "Black Feminism: A History of Theory and Activism (2025)."
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics."
"Race and Suffrage." The New York Historical, 2026.
Fields-White, Monee. "The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage."
Other Works Cited:
