The Last Black Man in San Franciscois one of the best films I’ve seen recently. [SPOILERS BELOW!] It was my favorite from this year’s Sundance, where it won the best director award for Joe Talbot and a special jury award for creative collaboration. It deserves to be seen nationwide, not just by people in San Francisco who care about the future of a city that was once one of the country’s most diverse. The scenes of skateboarding around San Francisco are magical, and the offhand remark “you’re not allowed to hate a city you don’t love” perfectly captures the sensibilities of someone who deeply loves his city even as it is changing.

除了它的视觉美感和对友谊的描绘，我无法忘记的是它如何在历史背景下塑造身份。吉米·法尔斯(Jimmie Fails)是影片的主角之一，他的身份是围绕菲尔莫尔区的一座维多利亚式建筑形成的，他相信这座建筑是他祖父在20世纪40年代建造的。在未经业主许可的情况下，Fails仔细地重新油漆了房子的装饰，当房子在一场地产争议中被出售时，他感到震惊。失败和他的朋友蒙哥马利一起试图阻止房子被卖掉。两人甚至搬来住了一段时间，还带来了吉米的家人从祖父住在这里时就保留下来的家具。吉米认为自己是这个家的道德主人，即使不是法律上的主人。吉米相信，他的祖父建造了这座房子，这构成了他对自己是谁、来自哪里以及为什么他仍然属于旧金山的认识。建筑是创造，是贡献一个美丽的家，而不仅仅是存在或居住。

但吉米的身份建立在半真半假的基础上。是的，他祖父在20世纪40年代曾有一段时间拥有这栋房子。那时，菲尔莫尔成为了美国黑人文化的中心，因为黑人从南方来到造船厂和军工行业寻找工作。当时菲尔莫尔的房子非常便宜，很大程度上是因为住在该地区部分地区的日本家庭已经搬迁到《排华法案》的营地。在第二次世界大战结束后的几十年里，菲尔莫黑人社区也成为搬迁的受害者——这一次是以城市更新的形式。种族主义也发挥了作用——因为红线，该地区的房主无法获得翻新破旧建筑所需的贷款。种族主义以排外法案的形式可能在吉米的祖父有能力购买这所房子和他们的家庭最终没有能力保留它方面发挥了作用。2022世界杯小组赛分组但这个家并不是吉米祖父的可爱创造，他为这座城市增添了美丽。

So how should we think about identities fashioned from historical half-truths? What does it mean to respect Jimmie in this context? Should we take Jimmie as he understands himself, a wrongly dispossessed descendent of the home’s original creator? Or as a lovable fool, living harmlessly on a myth, at least until he squats on property owned by others? Should we try to disabuse him of his beliefs about his grandfather? Do any obligations we have to Jimmie rest on his identity as he understands it, or may we ignore claims about who he is that rely on mythical understandings? And how should the entangled racial histories of the Fillmore affect our attitudes towards Jimmie’s identity conception?

Although rooted in histories of injustice, Jimmie’s identity has nothing pernicious about it. His subjective sense of who he is does not relate to harm to others. His sense of self does pose difficult ethical questions for his friends about how to respond supportively when the difficult world of property rights and evictions closes in. But it does not implicate anyone in furthering racial injustice: just the converse, it involves working out responses to one strand of how these injustices may play out.

因此，尊重吉米的主观认同感与尊重否认他人身份的身份主张是截然不同的。把不信教的人贬入地狱的宗教身份主张，声称异性恋身份是正常的，或认为残疾是可怕的或次等人的观点都是例子。In arecent episode of中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播, Ken and Ray raised questions about respect for identities such as these in exploring the limits of tolerance. Their guest, Regina Rini, maintained that respect for persons obligates us to consider seriously the reasons of others with whom we have deep moral disagreements. But she placed the outer limits of this respect at asserting views that deny the other’s very identity.

Some of the most poignant and compelling scenes inLast Black Manoccur when others challenge the claims about his grandfather on which Jimmie’s conception of his identity rests. The film handles Jimmie’s friends’ responses with exquisite gentleness. As a viewer, I was left with a sense of urgency about finding ways for Jimmie to continue to hold his identity as a black man deeply rooted in San Francisco’s history, once his beliefs about his grandfather’s contributions were severed and he was evicted from the home he cherished. The film explores critical questions about whether and how respect for persons requires addressing erosion of the conditions on which identity claims rest—erosion that so clearly has been and is continuing to occur for some communities in San Francisco.

这些关于尊重身份的难题很重要，不仅仅是因为我们生活在一个身份政治的时代。尊重身份的主张对里尼这样的观点具有道德力量，因为它们反映了一个人最深刻的方面。在她看来，只有当他们建立在相互尊重的失败上时，身份认同才会受到侵蚀。关于白人身份的主张，以及它们是否反映了这种失败，大量的文献正在形成。To take one of the most recent examples, inWhite Identity Politics(Cambridge University Press 2019), Ashley Jardina argues that white identity and racial resentment are different phenomena and have been conflated. One of her conclusions is that understanding the current situation of U.S. democracy will fail without recognizing that approximately 30-40% of people in the U.S. strongly identify with other whites and believe in the importance of white solidarity against perceived threats of unfair treatment. Yet Jardina and many other writers about white identity are clearly aware of the historical injustices from which this identity emerged and which continue to support it.

Last Black Mandepicts the importance of taking identity seriously while detaching it from myth and recognizing the injustices it may foster.