Certain movies are difficult for me to watch in the vicinity of white people—Rosewood and Glory, for example, and more recently, The Help and now, Django Unchained. Given how fraught black history has been, it’s hard to look at the ancestors of those who made that history, sitting quietly alongside them in a theater, watching a depiction of the injustices of the past. Suffice it to say, I was as tense about seeing Django Unchained as I was seeing The Help.

I live in a rural town, predominantly white. Some people here still refer to black people as “colored.” More than once, I’ve been told that the lot I park in at work is the faculty lot. I am a faculty member. Whenever I see a driver pulled over, for a hundred miles in any direction, it’s a young black man. This town is like most rural towns. Attending a screening of The Help, I sensed a gleeful nostalgia in the air as if all the elderly white folks around me couldn’t help but think, “Those were the days.” The people around me applauded as the movie began and while it ended. They were visibly moved. At several points throughout the movie, I heard sighs and sniffles. They clearly didn’t see what I saw in the movie, which I’ve written about elsewhere—a travesty.

As expected, I was the only black person in the audience when I attended of Django Unchained. The movie opens with five male slaves being herded, on foot, almost naked, their backs bearing the evidence of their torment. Braids of scar reach from their shoulders to their lower backs, revealing the director’s fetish for the broken bodies of slaves; as if only through such explicit visual evidence can a viewer understand the horrors of human bondage. Things only grow darker from there.

From the start the audience around me laughed, quite heartily. What was disconcerting was how often they laughed at the wrong times. Some of the laughter was nervous tittering during the first instances when the N-word was bandied about. They laughed when Stephen asked Calvin Candie if he was going to let “that nigger,” Django, sleep in the master’s house. They laughed when Django told King Schultz people were staring because, “they ain’t never seen a nigger on no horse.” The more the word was used, the funnier it seemed to become for the audience.