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This is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, here with a spoiler special on 42, the new biopic of the baseball player Jackie Robinson.

And joining me in the slate studio is Tanner Colby.

Hey, Tanner.

Hey, Dana, how's it going?

Pretty well.

Will you identify yourself for us?

My name is Tanner Colby, and I'm the author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black,

The Strange Story of Integration in America,

due out in paperback this summer, and that's why I'm here with you today talking about integration in baseball.

Yeah, you requested to come see this movie with me as well.

I did. I did. I really wanted to see it, and I was interested in commenting on it and now.

And more because of the history of race relations than because of baseball? You're not a big baseball.

Yeah, I'm not so much of a baseball guy. More about, I actually studied a lot about Robinson in his later years and the role he played in racial politics in the 1970s. And you wrote about him a bit. Yeah. I wrote he's involved in the book a little bit. And so I was interesting, interested to see in how cartoonishly they portrayed this sort of fight to overcome in baseball

in the early years. And as it turned out, it was quite cartoonish.

Pretty cartoonish. Yeah. I mean, the trailers already make this look like a sappy,

inspirational sports movie. You know that it's not going to be anything really raw and edgy,

but I was surprised the degree to which I just, I thought it was really, really sanitized.

I mean, we usually start these spoilers off with just some general thumbs up, thumbs

down kind of thing.

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