The problem is that Sarah is blocked by her own racist attitudes. In a startling 20-minute monologue, she wryly reveals to a teacher (who happens to be an ex-lover) the history of her desire to help minorities. In graduate school she was taught that her ambitions along these lines were self-serving and naive. To make amends, she took course after course in black studies “to appreciate black people the way you might appreciate a painting.” But when she graduated and took an administrative job at an all-black college, reality hit. “When you come face-to-face with a lot of just regular black people, you can’t aestheticize them anymore,” she says, “They’re too damn scary.” Disillusioned, she manages to escape to snowy Vermont—where she is able to avoid her negative feelings until the incident forces her to confront them all over again.
In its aim to examine racism from a white person’s point of view, “Spinning Into Butter” provokes some fresh intellectual arguments about race and guilt. But its characters lack both depth and complexity. The two other deans appear as cardboard cutouts, and Sarah’s underlying motivations, despite her ramblings, are never made clear. What makes her so fiercely determined to help minorities in the first place? She’s likable, but when she reaches out to the black student who was targeted by the notes, her tentative, teary approach is exasperating. “Spinning Into Butter” may make audiences think, but it’s unlikely to move them.
