RC: You know, now I'm like, oh man. I need to get out of here. And last year, I saw a movie that I loved. These are the two best friends at the center of this movie.
Colin is the one who just bought the juice. Miles is the one with the attitude. MA: The way in which races and people, culture, really naturally mixes and melds together in the Bay Area.
This is Rafael Casal. He plays Miles—the white guy—in Blindspotting , and he co-wrote the movie too. Like me, he was also born and raised in the Bay Area. RC: I think there, we've developed this muscle to sort of really like take how somebody has given themselves to you. RC: So everyone really guards their authenticity with everything, which means it's out front, which also means that that authenticity out front maybe is not packaged for easy consumption.
RC: So we're all so good at going, "Oh, you're a white dude. But you got that kind of southern drawl and that hard R, and you're like holding your jeans and you've got, you know, and you're tatted up,. Rafael knows firsthand about that particular cultural meld. The actor, writer, poet and rapper grew up in Berkeley in the '80s and '90s, in a working-class neighborhood with parents of Irish and Spanish-Cuban heritage. He drew on that childhood of growing up white in a diverse neighborhood when writing his character, Miles, in Blindspotting.
RC: We always described him as a minority among minorities. Like that's, that's how he feels. He feels like he's the minority. RC: You know, which is, which is at times how I felt growing up around my friends was like,. You described yourself as, as this sort of rebellious kind of knucklehead to some degree, like growing up who was sort of inclined to, to a certain type of trouble. So you had - have that aspect to you. But then on the other side, you're this poet, lyricist, thinker with a real activist vein to you.
