The White Privilege of Time Travel

 Week 14 Response:

In the New Yorker article "'See You Yesterday' And the Perils and Promise of Time-Traveling While Black," Maya Phillips discusses the new Netflix film See You Yesterday and its exploration of the dangers and challenges of time traveling as a black person, explaining how their is racial privilege ingrained into the stories and ideas of time travel. Phillips points out how time travelers have always almost always been white men, and this makes sense because they can travel to any time in history, while staying at the top of the societal food chain with issues of race actually always being a nonissue for them personally. In contrast, C.J. and Sebatian, the protagonists of See You Yesterday, are two black boys who go back in time to prevent the murder of C.J.'s older brother who was shot dead by white police. While their time travelling pursuits could have wildly dangerous consequences, they only go back in time to carefully alter the future of their own Black American lives, finding ways to grant themselves scholarships to get out of their neighborhood or prevent C.J.'s brother from finding himself in the scenario where he was shot. While they could have gone back in time to try and terminate police brutality as a whole, the boys are very practical about their endeavors and do not go far back into history or try to change the world in any drastic way. 

Phillips compares See You Yesterday to other films that depict black time travel to highlight how travelling back in history is almost never the exciting exploration of the world for black people that it is for white people. In fact, and sadly, it is almost always dangerous, devastating, and racism almost always seems like too large and complex of a construct to truly reverse with time travel. Phillips sums up her article by exposing the white privilege behind stories of time travel and pointing out how See You Yesterday ultimately asserts the idea that the future is a privilege for black people in a society with a continual history of prejudice and oppression.