The movies Sleight (2016), directed by J. D. Dillard, and Us (2019), directed by Jordan Peele, were released in the United States during a political moment heavily influenced by the Trump presidency (since January 2017) and the post-9/11 era (since September 2001). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to lay out how the Trump presidency logically extends, rather than ruptures, the US landscape since the events of 11 September 2001, I nonetheless take this idea as a point of departure and backdrop here. In the main, Americans, during the past twenty years, have been positioned to fear, be anxious about, and show heightened concern for ‘foreigners’ and ‘enemy others’. This posture has not fundamentally changed during the last several years and actually appears to have strengthened (Norman 2016). As a simultaneous phenomenon, the categories of perceived threat(s) to American citizens and the United States as a nation have undergone stark expansion. Presidential or state discourse has marked a primary mechanism for propelling and bolstering these conceptions (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo 2010).

The last several years have also witnessed a number of films released by black directors, including but not limited to Dillard and Peele, that have featured black actors. Such films as Get Out (Peele 2017) and Black Panther (Coogler 2018), along with BlacKkKlansman (Lee 2018), The Equalizer 2 (Fuqua 2018), and Creed II (Caple 2018) offer examples of these box office and critical successes. Brian Welk notes that ‘Black filmmakers had a record year at the box office in 2018, earning $1.5 billion at the domestic box office from 16 films’ (2019). And Trey Williams adds, ‘while it wasn't so long ago that Hollywood studios and producers argued that a star like [Denzel] Washington couldn't open a movie abroad because he's black, Equalizer 2 grossed nearly half of its $190.4 million in ticket sales from theaters overseas’ (2019).

I have suggested elsewhere (Bloodsworth-Lugo 2019) that philosophers of film are well-served to consider lessons contained in recent films directed by black filmmakers, especially as these lessons are situated against a backdrop of lived (racial) realities within the contemporary United States and its particular political dimensions.