Loopholes, resurrected characters, plot resets, ever-branching arcs: time travel is an infinitely flexible conceit, limited only to its own pseudoscientific rules of causality. The new Netflix movie “See You Yesterday” makes an unusual contribution to the time-travel canon while highlighting one of its most prominent flaws: the racial privilege baked into these stories, or the dangers of time-travelling while black.

From Marty McFly to James Cole and even Wolverine, time travellers are almost always white and frequently male. It’s a practical choice on the part of writers. Post-Reconstruction? Not a problem. Colonial times? Let’s make it a three-day weekend. Time-travel shows and movies tend to fall into one of two categories: quaint personal journeys and heroic quests. In stories like “Back to the Future,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” and “The Butterfly Effect,” the scale is that of a personal narrative, with a white protagonist comfortably insulated from a larger racial history. On the other hand, in stories like “12 Monkeys,” “The Terminator,” and “Timecop,” the central conflict is so large—apocalypse, dystopias, national or global disasters—that the narrative can easily sweep past issues of race. (As for forward time-travelling, the future tends to be surprisingly post-racial, as evinced in “Star Trek” and “Doctor Who.”)

“See You Yesterday,” which was produced by Spike Lee, takes a different approach. Its protagonists, C.J. and Sebastian, are black teen-age geniuses who figure out the secret to time travel for a science expo at school. When C.J.’s older brother is shot dead by police, she decides to go back in time to prevent his murder. Though the movie encounters some of the usual pitfalls of time-travel plots (predictability, muddled rules) and sports some hokey, eighties-style special effects, what it offers in terms of diversity and messaging is a treasure. As C.J. and Sebastian work out the fantastical science of time travel in a garage, it feels practical, grounded in the reality of black American life. The two don’t set out to change the world or alter their own lives, nor do they jump far into the past or future for an excellent Bill and Ted–style adventure. They’re not thrilled to have one-upped Einstein; they just want to get scholarships to college so they can leave their neighborhood. And C.J. just wants her brother back. Their actions and motivations are contained to this one very real instance of police brutality, so the plot never loses its footing in the real world.

Other shows have tried to address time-travelling while black, to different degrees of success. In the painfully juvenile, short-lived Fox comedy “Making History,” a black character who travels to 1775 is mistaken for a slave, but it’s played like a one-off joke. In the NBC series “Timeless,” which ended last year, a black programmer, a white historian, and a white soldier form a team of time-hoppers pursuing a “time terrorist” who’s out to hijack history. In the first episode, the programmer, Rufus, protests, “I am black. There’s literally no place in American history that will be awesome for me.” His discomfort is always apparent. At one point, he delivers a triumphant speech about future black American leaders, including Barack Obama, to a racist cop—but all it does is incite the cop to pounce on him, creating a distraction so that his white colleague can break out of prison. In “Timeless,” the woe of time-travelling while black is a detail, a hiccup, sometimes a plot exigency, but never a big theme unto itself, and so Rufus always exists in a secondary position to the show’s two white protagonists.

The British sci-fi show “Doctor Who” has also recently made strides in addressing race in its narrative. For decades, one white man after another starred as the titular alien who travels in time and space. Of the Doctor’s travel companions, too, there have only been a couple of people of color, and the show has handled the issue awkwardly. In Season 3 of the rebooted series, Martha Jones, the Doctor’s black companion, asks him how her race will be addressed in seventeenth-century England; he brushes her concerns off easily, saying that she should do as he does and walk around like she owns the place. Race, he suggests, is an inconsequential construct, except when it isn’t—when they meet Shakespeare, the bard fetishizes her blackness by way of hitting on her.

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It was an episode of the most recent season of the series, starring the actress Jodie Whittaker as the first female Doctor, that signalled a more fearless approach to race. In the episode “Rosa,” the Doctor and her three companions, Graham, a white man, Yasmin, a Pakistani woman, and Ryan, a black man, have to insure that Rosa Parks incites the civil-rights movement as planned. The episode poignantly addresses each character’s specific experience during this moment in history: Yasmin and Ryan encounter people who are either confounded by or openly hostile toward them, and they trade stories about how they still face racism in the present day. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Graham are forced to act complicit in the practice of segregation. The episode’s climactic scene, right before Parks refuses to give up her seat, is so affecting because Graham must confront the racial privilege he was born with and a history of injustice that precedes him.

When “See You Yesterday” opens, in C.J. and Sebastian’s classroom, their teacher—played by Marty McFly himself, Michael J. Fox—is reading Octavia E. Butler’s novel “Kindred” at his desk. In Butler’s book, a black woman living in Los Angeles in 1976 is repeatedly transported back to pre–Civil War Maryland, to a plantation where her ancestors lived. She tries to protect her lineage while also trying to stay alive, in a time when she’s deemed a slave. She’s literally beaten down by the past—whipped and nearly raped—and, after she time-travels for the last time, one of her arms is left behind, in the past. History has taken a part of her, and she will never be whole in the present. In “Kindred,” as in “See You Yesterday,” history is never just relegated to the past for black people. It’s living.

“See You Yesterday” ends uncertainly, on a long shot of C.J. Her determined expression, as she runs toward the past again, could promise hope or folly. But in every version of the story, there’s injustice and a black person inevitably hurt or dead. This cyclical sorrow, the movie seems to say, is the state and cost of institutional racism in America. Though time-travel narratives so often allow white protagonists to freely jump the time line, there’s an open field of possibilities for the genre to look at history through the eyes of the oppressed, forgotten, and marginalized. What “See You Yesterday” asserts is that, for a people hindered by prejudice and police brutality, the future is a privilege. “See you yesterday,” C.J.’s brother tells her solemnly, near the end of the film. For these black travellers, there are only yesterdays to contend with; tomorrow is just out of reach.

In “Canvas” the narrator, a graduate student, is renting an apartment from an older woman, an artist named Agnes. The artist has arranged to use her studio there whenever she visits the city, yet while the two women sometimes share the same space, they barely know each other. What does that type of relationship—one of both intimacy and distance—offer a writer?

In many ways, such a relationship resembles writing and reading fiction: observing characters at a distance as well as from close up, trying to glimpse at something essential in their routines and actions.

In “Canvas,” this double perspective—of remoteness and intimacy—is amplified in both directions. This allows Agnes to present herself to the narrator in a way that might not have been possible with a complete stranger or a very close friend. I think that the story she tells arises from this unusual setup.

We initially think that this is going to be the narrator’s story, but once she and Agnes start talking, it becomes clear that this is Agnes’s. Did you know from the outset that “Canvas” would make this shift?

I knew from the start that the narrator would simply be listening to Agnes’s story without playing a role in it. What I didn’t know was how the narrator’s presence in the apartment, and her role as an observer, might complement the story of Agnes and her cousin. That emerged after I settled on the narrator’s research topic—the representation of the soul in Gothic nude sculptures. Telling a story with honesty is also a way of being naked, like the sculptures lined up for the Day of Judgment.

I also wanted the narrator to play a silent part in Agnes’s loneliness and guilt, simply by listening to her story. She becomes a witness.

W. G. Sebald is a writer who often used conversation in this way, where the narrator becomes a listener. Were you thinking about his work at all when you were writing this?

Sebald’s work has had a tremendous influence on my writing. A few years ago, I attempted a novel that strung together many stories through a passive narrator who “absorbed” others’ narratives. That novel primarily took place in city streets and among other challenges, I couldn’t believably make the characters tell long stories in public spaces! Sebald does this seamlessly, expanding conversations, merging locations and speakers, and patching them together with layers of history.

The interior setting was a more organic way for me to try this style again. The intimacy of the studio, bordering on claustrophobia, facilitates the strange story that Agnes shares with the narrator.

Over the course of an evening, Agnes tells the narrator about her cousin, someone to whom she was very close in childhood and whose life she wanted to emulate. At one point she says, “We form ourselves through our doubles. We make ghostly twins to carry the weight of our desires.” When you first started imagining the trajectories of Agnes and her cousin, did you know how their lives would converge and diverge?

I had ghost stories in mind while writing “Canvas”—ghosts as suppressed sources of grief or resentment. I knew from the start that the cousin would haunt Agnes’s life in some way and that Agnes’s interactions with her would be roundabout. I didn’t want the cousin to become too real but remain a projection of Agnes’s desires and her guilt. Even when the two meet years later, Agnes only describes the cousin’s striking appearance but not her interiority. I also wondered how this projection or “ghost” might reëmerge in Agnes’s life after so many years. It happens with Agnes’s separation from her husband; their lives intersect in moments of difficulty.

Agnes takes on the mantle of her cousin’s identity when her cousin’s apparently charmed life changes quite radically. Is this, as she believes, monstrous in some form?

I think that we all form our identities by imitation to some extent—by mimicking the gestures, mannerisms, or personas of people we admire. Of course, it’s easier to do this when the person we’re imitating is not there to see us. Agnes considers this a form of theft, especially since her cousin’s life is struck by tragedy and what remains of her charismatic self is Agnes’s imitation of it. I actually find Agnes’s repulsion to be a sign of her humanity and compassion.

But there are other instances when the characters withhold their sympathy or support. The narrator subtly avoids Agnes around the apartment even though she probably realizes that Agnes is very lonely. Similarly, Agnes says that her avoidance of her cousin was not overt but that she still wanted to keep herself clean of the ungainly suffering. And then there is Agnes’s very slight avoidance of her own parents—her distance toward them after her marriage. All these instances of coldness, or lack of engagement, are very understated and without direct consequence, but it’s nevertheless carried out despite knowledge of another’s vulnerabilities. This, perhaps, is monstrous.

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You recently published your first novel, “Walking on the Ceiling.” This traces another relationship, one between a young Turkish woman, Nunu, and an older British writer, M, who met when they were both living in Paris. Nunu tells M stories, entrusts him with her observations, and she comes to resent him for that. Is that kind of regret common, do you think? Do people have a desire to be heard and then a desire to regain ownership of the stories they’ve just given away?

At the beginning of their friendship, Nunu tells M idyllic stories about her family, but as the relationship deepens, she feels guilty about manipulating the truth and concealing the troubling aspects of her past. She begins to resent M’s attention and his enthusiasm, because it reminds her of her deception.

Another reason for her resentment is that her stories solidify particular aspects of her memories while disregarding others. While Nunu creates one version of her mother in the stories, she also leaves behind other versions; she can’t manage to offer a truthful picture. It’s paradoxical—we tell stories in order to preserve and yet we lose so much in the telling.

In John Updike’s story “Gesturing,” first published in 1980, the newly separated Richard Maple finds himself in a Boston apartment with a view of a startling new skyscraper. “The skyscraper, for years suspended in a famous state of incompletion, was a beautiful disaster,” Updike writes, “famous because it was a disaster (glass kept falling from it) and disastrous because it was beautiful.” The architect had imagined that a sheer glass skin would “reflect the sky and the old low brick skyline of Boston” and would “melt into the sky.” “Instead,” Updike continues, “the windows of mirroring glass kept falling to the street and were replaced by ugly opacities of black plywood.” Still, enough of the reflective surface remains “to give an impression, through the wavery old window of this sudden apartment, of huge blueness, a vertical cousin to the horizontal huge blueness of the sea that Richard awoke to each morning, in the now bone-deep morning chill of his unheated shack.” Not too surprisingly, the distressed tower becomes an oblique symbol for the state of Richard’s life, soul, and dissolved marriage, slicing in and out of the story, much as its counterpart slices in and out of the Boston skyline.

The skyscraper in “Gesturing” is unmistakably the John Hancock Tower (officially renamed 200 Clarendon in 2015), designed by I. M. Pei and finished in 1976. Modernists had dreamed for decades of a pure glass architecture, and it does not take much to see John Hancock as the complicated fulfillment of these hopes. It did, as in the Updike story, suffer from engineering failures. Its glass panes were unable to withstand the city’s intense winds. Additional study revealed that the building had deeper issues of structural integrity and might, under heavy wind, collapse. But sustained attention and repair have kept the building intact, and it remains the single most beautiful object in one of the world’s most tedious, stuffy cities—on one of Boston’s handful of pleasant blue days, it reflects and multiplies the scudding clouds.

Pei, who was born in China (his initials stand for Ieoh Ming, but he is almost invariably referred to by his British-style abbreviation), died this month in New York at the extraordinary age of a hundred and two. For the better part of a half century, Pei received major commissions all over the United States, and several beyond it, that are essential to the fabric of our cities, though we may not always recognize how his work is woven into them. He was a modernist who, unlike others, largely avoided lapel-grabbing gestures. The John Hancock Tower draws modest attention to itself, but no one would go out of the way to see it. His most famous work, the glass pyramid outside the Louvre, is still an adjunct—albeit an iconic one—to the world’s most famous museum of art. Glowing and light-filled, the pyramid is the paradoxical iconic work that has become inextricable from its surroundings; it is now impossible to imagine the museum’s fronting plaza without it.

In other words, Pei carried out the tradition of architectural modernism more thoroughly than most other architects. Trained at M.I.T., he was impressed by Le Corbusier in his youth, but he appears to have imbibed none of Corbu’s megalomania and world-making ambition. Pei was, instead, a consummate professional, one of the people who made modernism feel conservative and traditional. The East Building of the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., married a sharp, trapezoidal construction with a monumental marble veneer. Here was a modern project that accommodated itself to the neoclassical ethos of the self-embalming American capital. It is emblematic of a figure who put up buildings everywhere that one often doesn’t know are his while at the same time becoming a figure of significant international renown, the winner of virtually every prize and form of recognition available in the field. The fact is doubly amazing because he was Asian-American in a field hostile to minorities (and to women). Though he admired masters like Louis Kahn, his work is as far from Kahn’s gnomic expressions of mystery as can be. “I worry that ideas and professional practice do not intersect enough,” he told the critic Paul Goldberger. “Maybe my early training set me back. Maybe it made me too much of a pragmatist.”

One result of Pei’s longevity is that in some sense he embodied the entire drift of the modern movement—he worked throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and was implicated in its achievements and its catastrophes. The work by Pei that is geographically closest to me rises in the towers of Society Hill, just north of where I live in Philadelphia. A suite of three Miesian towers, perforated with windows like little alcoves in a sandy concrete frame, they are best seen in the morning from the Ben Franklin Bridge, as they catch the rising light over the Delaware River. The deep windows create deep shadows, enhancing a general sense of volume and presence. Compared with so much other glass-and-metal waterfront development, the towers are unassuming and light: an incredible achievement that repays continuous reacquaintance. To approach them from my neighborhood, you walk through one of the oldest districts in the city, filled with early nineteenth-century brick row houses, and ascend a cobblestoned street to a flattened plaza. As with so many modernist housing developments, there are broad expanses of useless lawn, as well as the usual array of simultaneously bizarre and anodyne public sculptures. What is unusual, in addition to the towers, is the surrounding set of modernist brick town homes, also designed by Pei, which are intended to make the transition from the historic streetscape less abrupt. Unmistakably mid-century, and with a darker brick pattern than the Federal-style homes they face, they nonetheless are of the scale of the buildings they graciously imitate.

But Pei’s formal gestures to the past mask the fact that he helped engineer a violent break with it. The Society Hill Towers are the result of one of the more aggressive urban-renewal efforts in Philadelphia history, in which the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa partnered with the New York-based real-estate company Webb and Knapp to build a luxury development intended to bring wealthier residents back to the city center. The city’s Planning Commission anticipated displacing thirty-four per cent of the residents and the razing of the neighborhood’s Victorian buildings. An entire era and style of Philadelphia architecture disappeared; so, too, did a historically black neighborhood. A four-bedroom apartment in Pei’s towers rented for a thousand and fifty dollars in 1978—near the top of the city’s rental market at the time. One aspect of Pei’s professionalism was his disinterest in the consequences of his residential and commercial work, a fact that merely made him more like most architects.

Another Pei landmark, the University Village towers, run by N.Y.U., also resulted from urban renewal, bringing to mind the old question about good architecture and its longstanding relationship with bad history. How does one admire a beautiful development, as I do with Society Hill, and not think of the immense cost incurred in producing it? Perhaps more than any other twentieth-century architect, Pei’s work invites this sort of rumination. Unfailingly intelligent in executing his projects, and moved to modern design by conviction, he nonetheless wanted his work to slip into the everyday. It is fitting that among his most impressive buildings was a tower whose function was to mirror its surroundings.

When Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote “The Case for Reparations” for The Atlantic, in 2014, he didn’t expect the government to make reparations anytime soon. He told David Remnick that he had a more modest goal. “My notion,” Coates says, “was you could get people to stop laughing.” For Coates, to treat reparations as a punch line is to misunderstand their purpose. He argues that reparations weren’t only meant to atone for the horror of chattel slavery but to address racial inequities and the economic impact that has persisted since emancipation, more than a century ago. “The case I’m trying to make is, within the lifetime of a large number of Americans in this country, there was theft.”

“The Case for Reparations” was an intellectual sensation, and Coates did change the conversation; of the more than twenty candidates in the 2020 Democratic Presidential race, eight have said they’re in favor of at least establishing a commission to study the subject. He points to Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sought out Coates to discuss his article years before she was considered a candidate. But Coates’s own hopes for America truly making amends remain modest. “It may be true that this is something folks rally around,” he says, “but that’s never been my sense.”

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Late in the Civil War, the Union general William T. Sherman confiscated four hundred thousand acres of land from Confederate planters and ordered it redistributed, in forty-acre lots, to formerly enslaved people—a promise revoked by President Andrew Johnson almost as soon as it was made. More than a hundred and fifty years later, the debate on what America owes to the descendants of slaves, or to people robbed by the legal discrimination that followed, still rages. David Remnick talks with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Susan B. Glasser about how reparations has become a major focus in the 2020 Democratic primary contest. And we’ll visit Georgetown University, where students have chosen to take reparations upon themselves.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations

The writer set out to make America stop laughing at jokes about reparations. Five years later, Presidential candidates are taking his research very seriously.

“Come on and Bring on the Reparations”

Sekou Sundiata’s poem, read for us by Carl Hancock Rux, addresses the debts that white culture and society owe to African-Americans.

Reparations and the #Resistance

After decades on the fringes, the debate around reparations has moved into the political mainstream, with eight Presidential candidates interested. Why now? And is there a future for reparations?

At Georgetown, Students Vote to Pay Reparations for the University’s History with Slavery

In 1838, Georgetown administrators sold nearly three hundred enslaved people to sugarcane plantations to help fund the college. In 2019, students voted to pay reparations to their descendants.

Who Should Receive Reparations for Slavery and Discrimination?

Three prominent scholars discuss how reparations would work, and address a controversy over who would be eligible.