I recently watched the newest X-Men movie: X-Men: Days of
Future Past.
To Set the Scene
We recently moved across the country from Indiana to Oregon.
We’re closer to family than we were, but still sixteen hours away. We were in
Indiana for seven years. It didn’t feel like home right away, and it continued
to feel different and midwesterny, but we’d made many good friends and found
many connections and familiarities. It had become home. Now everything is new
again. Though we’ve met good people, in many ways, we’re strangers in a strange
land.
Not only that, the night that I watched the movie was in the
midst of a week in which I was alone at home. My wife had taken our sons to
visit family for the week of Thanksgiving, but I was on call for work so I
stayed home. I live on campus at a university. There’s usually plenty of noise
and activity, but most students had left for Thanksgiving break so it was a bit
of a Ghost Town.
This is the context in which I watched the latest X-Men
movie.
My Realization: Cerebro is about Tribalism
If you’re familiar at all with the X-Men mythos, then you
know of Cerebro. Professor X, the leader and founder of the X-Men, is a
telepath and Cerebro is a machine that magnifies his mutant powers.
In Days of Future Past, Cerebro is used to locate
one particular mutant. Perhaps because of my current life circumstances, the
scene hit me in a particularly interesting way.
As I watched Cerebro being utilized in this movie, and
thought back to similar scenes in the past movies, I thought,
“On the surface Cerebro fulfills a political, or social, or
strategic function, in these stories, but at it’s core, Cerebro is about
tribalism.”
I’ve been thinking about how people interact with each other
and how we can understand where others are coming from and what their
circumstances are specifically in the area of race. I have read White Like Me by Tim Wise and I
have had several conversations with people of different races than me. I recently stated reading Why Are All theBlack Kids Sitting Together In the Cafeteria? by Beverly Tatum. Lately I have
read about this issue in articles and opinion pieces in adoption
magazines. 
