Erasure

At the fictional Ivy League Winchester University, a student named Sam White hosts a campus radio show called Dear White People, and a blackface party blows the campus open. The film follows four Black students working out who they are in a place that wants them to be one thing. A campus satire played straight, with sharp jokes and no easy heroes.

Why it’s here: The film takes the 'post-racial' campus story and shows how every Black student is asked to perform one version of themselves. What's punk is that the satire turns on its own heroes too. What's pedagogical is the vocabulary it gives you: code-switching, respectability, who gets to define blackness. It sits next to Sorry to Bother You in the catalog.

A documentary built from James Baldwin's own words, drawn from letters, interviews and the thirty pages of an unfinished manuscript about his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Samuel L. Jackson reads Baldwin's text over archival footage, old Hollywood films and newsreels, and contemporary images of the same fights still being fought.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the structure: Peck refuses the usual documentary apparatus of talking-head experts and lets one voice, a writer who was long ignored and long right, carry the whole film, cutting it against the images that prove his point. The pedagogy is in how it teaches a way of seeing. Baldwin takes apart the stories America tells about itself and shows how film and popular culture manufacture them, which makes this as much a lesson in media literacy as in history. It is dense and unsparing, so it suits older teens and adults who are ready to sit with it.