[Discussion] On Television, Cinema and the Under Represented

Thread for race issues in media.

Birth Of a Nation
This movie isn't do so good. I think this is because black people are tired of slave type movies, white people don't want the white guilt, and everybody else is turned off by the rape case. I mean this in general. This is just a perfect storm for the downfall of the movie.

Surviving Compton
Straight out of compton left out the ladies. This lifetime show means to correct that. I believe all of the production was done by women.

Mulan live.
All Chinese cast. Maybe the dumb choices of Gods of Egypt are over.

Just watching the latest episode of Shadowhunters where we have two black werewolves talking about how a white vampire is being unfairly treated. Very common trope to have vampires and werewolves not get along. In this case they go pretty hard with the racism analogy. This kind of reminded me how I have never seen human racism in a show or movie with vampires and werewolves.

How would racist vampires and werewolves treat other vampires and werewolves of different races. What happens when racist humans attack vampires and werewolves of other races or vis versa. I never seen anything like that in movies or tv.

So minimally, but this is kind of parodied in Venture Bros which has Jefferson Twilight. A Blade parody that only hunts blackulas. He explicitly states he cannot detect Caucasian vampires.

Been hearing about colorism as of late and wasn't sure why. I wasn't exactly sure what the term meant. Not really a new thing but it looks like the actress that Mary Jane on the new spiderman said something like she is the type of black person hollywood wants. Meaning dark skinned women don't have much of a chance of getting acting jobs. I wouldn't have thought she was a big enough actress to bring more awareness to this.

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye

TA-NEHISI COATES
That was almost 20 years ago. It is easy to forget just how long West has been at this, that he’s been excellent for so long, that there are adults out there, now, who have never seen the sun set on the empire of Kanye West. And he made music for them, for the young and futuristic, not for the old and conservative like me, and so avoided the tempting rut of nostalgia, of soul samples and visions of what hip-hop had been. And so to those who had been toddlers in the era of The Blueprint, he became a god, by pulling from that generation raised in hip-hop’s golden age, and yet never being shackled by it. (Even after the events of the week, it would shock no one if West’s impending was the best of the year.)

West is 40 years old, a product of the Crack era and Reaganomic Years, a man who remembers the Challenger crash and The Cosby Show before syndication. But he never fell into the bitterness of his peers. He could not be found chasing ghosts, barking at Soulja Boy, hectoring Lil Yachty, and otherwise yelling at clouds. To his credit, West seemed to remember rappers having to defend their music as music against the withering fire of their elders. And so while, today, you find some of these same artists, once targets, adopting the sanctimonious pose of the arthritic jazz-men whom they vanquished, you will not find Yeezy among them, because Yeezy never got old.

Maybe that was the problem.

I like this fellow! But... are we ever going to see Reggie Watts or Michael B. Jordan again after they were put into the recombinanator?

H.P. Lovesauce wrote:

I like this fellow! But... are we ever going to see Reggie Watts or Michael B. Jordan again after they were put into the recombinanator?

This is really fun:

Damn, how many people did Donald Glover just simultaneously burn?

My crush on Don Glover is tempered only by my jealousy of how incredibly talented and prolific he is.

ruhk wrote:

My crush on Don Glover is tempered only by my jealousy of how incredibly talented and prolific he is.

Him playing Lando is like 75% of the reason I want to see Solo at this point.

Demosthenes wrote:
ruhk wrote:

My crush on Don Glover is tempered only by my jealousy of how incredibly talented and prolific he is.

Him playing Lando is like 75% of the reason I want to see Solo at this point.

I mean, the guy playing Solo I only know from kind of forgettable appearances in Hail Caesar and Beautiful Creatures.

IMAGE(https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2018-05/7/19/asset/buzzfeed-prod-web-02/sub-buzz-29301-1525736242-2.jpg)

I've now watched this video like a dozen times and KEEP finding new things in it.

Death is riding a white horse from the police car.

The guns are both placed on cloth and taken away delicately while the victims of their violence are left to lay where they fell.

The kids are mimicking Glover the whole way, pretty oblivious to the chaos around them. The kids on the balcony are just recording him with their phones while a fire seemingly rages behind them.

Glover's facial expressions and demeanor shift into black caricatures from the last dozen decades or so.

Like, even just VISUALLY the video is staggering in its scope... and that's not even getting into the lyrics (and how those lyrics interact with what's happening on screen at the time).

Also, the only time anyone reacts to the violence is when he mimics firing a gun and the song fades out for a moment.

Demosthenes wrote:

The guns are both placed on cloth and taken away delicately while the victims of their violence are left to lay where they fell.

The first one shot is dragged away by his arms. But yeah, more care towards the guns than the victims.

ruhk wrote:

Also, the only time anyone reacts to the violence is when he mimics firing a gun and the song fades out for a moment.

Which is itself showing how people react to black men holding... anything, really.

bnpederson wrote:
ruhk wrote:

Also, the only time anyone reacts to the violence is when he mimics firing a gun and the song fades out for a moment.

Which is itself showing how people react to black men holding... anything, really.

True, but I read it more as satirizing how people are often more concerned with representations of violence than actual violence. Ironically most of the criticisms I’ve seen of the video are about the violence in it, even many articles that otherwise praise the video caution people about it’s depictions of violence.

I'll drop this one in this thread, for simplicity.

I’ve Written About Cultural Appropriation For 10 Years. Here’s What I Got Wrong.

FWIW, I fall on the side of "Cultural appropriation is absolutely a thing, but the dress thing was spectacularly dumb and some of the kerfluffles around it have been absurd."

Despite how fervently and ubiquitously the topic is discussed, no one actually likes to discuss cultural appropriation. Those on the receiving end of criticism don’t like it for obvious reason. But trust me when I say that those writing about it are over it, too.

I have written about cultural appropriation so often, for so long, that I think about my entire writing career as segmented by certain waves: There were the feathered headdresses at music festivals (2009), the “tribal” prints at Forever21 (2012), the Indian-raver bindis-and-naths on Instagram (2014), and the “Bo Derek” cornrows on various Kardashian/Jenners (2016). Today, we’re deep within the era of the ‘90s “Asian” comeback in the form of embroidered silk and Tang dynasty hair buns.

The tone of the pieces were initially finger-wavey and pedantic — about as subtle as the bedazzled war bonnets at Coachella I was deriding. When I started writing about cultural appropriation 10 years ago, it felt important to stress how these small annoyances laddered up to a pervasive grievance. The phrase was still relatively unknown (the word “appropriation” still showed up as a squiggly red underline in my word processors), and the concepts weren’t commonly discussed outside of academia. The articles that I and legions of other fed-up writers of color were producing felt something like a new way to address an old sin. I was committed to explaining how invisible legacies of colonialism show up in our lives and what we wear. In my heart of hearts, I felt that cultural appropriation happened because people didn’t know better.

But instance after instance, these articles began to feel copied-and-pasted, from the explanations provided to the exasperated tone I put on. Opportunities to dress down cultural appropropriation seemed to propagate as quickly as weeds. Address one, and there’d be five more to write next week. Intended clapbacks began to feel more like like forehead slaps.

After nearly a decade, it was clear that playing whack-a-mole with casual racism did not mean that we’d someday get to retire our hammers. The sort of pipe-dream world I had envisioned, where cultural differences would be celebrated and shared in full, not just in caricature, and definitely not as a tool to demean or discriminate...I don’t have to tell you that that did not happen. Instead, cultural appropriation seemed to expand in definition to the point of absurdity; in turn, these instances became platforms that exacerbated racial tensions. A Caucasian high schooler choosing to wear a qipao at prom somehow turned into thousands of adults bullying a teenager, which led to an opportunity for a former Bush speechwriter to talk about the cultural upside of the French occupation of Vietnam (a sandwich!) — and The New York Times to justify hurtful Asian-American stereotypes by pointing out that Chinese people outside of the United States are not offended by a caricature that has never been used to personally denigrate them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s partnership with The Vatican on a fashion exhibit and celebrity-studded party inspired dozens of articles claiming that the most powerful institution in the world should not be disrespected; to suggest that the Catholic church could be criticized was, some argued, a form of bigotry on par with blackface.

What began as a discussion of a phenomenon — the use of another culture’s symbols without permission, which is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just a thing that happens — has revealed a fundamental misunderstanding of why racism persists. The most vitriolic on the left suggest that any cultural swapping is tantamount to acts of visual racism; that using symbols without permission is always bad, and those that do it should be condemned without mercy. The most sanctimonious on the right believe that cultural appropriation is a meaningless phrase that willfully ignores intent; that people should have the right to celebrate what they find beautiful without criticism or abuse. In its proliferation, the term cultural appropriation has become charged. Conversations about it are radioactive.

More people today “know” about cultural appropriation than when I started writing about it ten years ago. Ignorance is clearly not the issue; boiling down a complicated phenomenon into a string of Tweetable hot takes has not made it easier for people to transform a passing interest in an aspect of another culture to seeking out a deeper understanding of it. In fact, talking about cultural appropriation the way that we have seems to have made us more callous and closed-off on all sides. It has simplified our differences instead of shining a light on our complexities.

In our fight against caricatures, we’ve somehow reinforced them.

‘Roseanne’ Canceled at ABC

Variety wrote:

ABC has pulled the plug on the revival “Roseanne.”

The move comes after series star Roseanne Barr made a comment on Twitter Tuesday morning referring to former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.”

“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Barr deleted her tweet about Jarrett not long after posting it. She followed it up with an apology which read, “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me-my joke was in bad taste. I am now leaving Twitter.”

Just prior to the cancellation, Wanda Sykes, who worked as a consulting producer on the first revival season, announced she would not be returning for the show’s next season.

All she had to do was keep it on the QT. Now everybody on that show's out of a gig.

Prederick wrote:

All she had to do was keep it on the QT. Now everybody on that show's out of a gig.

I dipped into her Twitter feed and, holy sh*t, that girl has gone cray cray. She's retweeted every QAnon/Pizzagate/crazy right-wing conspiracy there is.

Once again Hollywood shows that racists & bigots "conservatives" cannot get ahead in the entertainment industry.


lunchbox12682 wrote:

Once again Hollywood shows that racists & bigots "conservatives" cannot get ahead in the entertainment industry.


Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.

lunchbox12682 wrote:


lunchbox12682 wrote:

Once again Hollywood shows that racists & bigots "conservatives" cannot get ahead in the entertainment industry.


Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.
Quote is not edit.

It's 2018. Quote has always been edit. #maga.

Prederick wrote:

All she had to do was keep it on the QT. Now everybody on that show's out of a gig.

Yeah but now she's got a certain cable news network special correspondent gig for life.

Couldn't they have just fired her, killed off the character, and have the rest of the characters reappear in a limited season where they slowly realize how much happier they are now that she's dead?

Rat Boy wrote:

Couldn't they have just fired her, killed off the character, and have the rest of the characters reappear in a limited season where they slowly realize how much happier they are now that she's dead?

I would have retweeted the sh*t out of that. I want that show now.

Rat Boy wrote:

Couldn't they have just fired her, killed off the character, and have the rest of the characters reappear in a limited season where they slowly realize how much happier they are now that she's dead?

I would've watched that. Mostly because of my undying love of John Goodman.

Rat Boy wrote:

Couldn't they have just fired her, killed off the character, and have the rest of the characters reappear in a limited season where they slowly realize how much happier they are now that she's dead?

They could even just replace the actor and act like nothing happened (there is precedent). The problem lies in that I think Rosanne Barr actually owns the IP.

Atras wrote:

They could even just replace the actor and act like nothing happened (there is precedent).

Paging Don Cheadle.

Atras wrote:
Rat Boy wrote:

Couldn't they have just fired her, killed off the character, and have the rest of the characters reappear in a limited season where they slowly realize how much happier they are now that she's dead?

They could even just replace the actor and act like nothing happened (there is precedent). The problem lies in that I think Rosanne Barr actually owns the IP.

EDIT: Aw! My Poochie gif didn't work!

I don't think they could've though. Unlike the hilarious nonsense that CBS pulled with Kevin Can Wait, I think Roseanne cannot exist without Roseanne.

Rat Boy wrote:
Atras wrote:

They could even just replace the actor and act like nothing happened (there is precedent).

Paging Don Cheadle.

I would watch the sh*t out of Don Cheadle portraying Roseanne.