The Official Racism Thread Social • Page 52

Ideally, characters should reflect diversity at the point of creation. I agree with Nathan however, this is better than nothing. Regardless, both of these examples are flawed even in this context, because of the following:

- Although some people like to dig up an obscure quote from the books (which referred to Hermione having a white face, as in drained of color by her reaction to something), Hermione was never described as white or black. Even if you want to believe that quote refers to her race though, the example is still flawed, because theater casting is color blind (or at least that is the idea in theater) and occasionally even gender blind.

- Mary Jane was created at a point in time in which it was basically socially unacceptable (and in some places forbidden) for a white guy, like Spiderman, to date a black girl. When adapting the source material for a movie in the year 2016 it is therefore perfectly reasonable and frankly necessary to make corrections, for example by casting a black woman as Mary Jane.

EDIT: I see Nathan also made the point I made about the times in which characters like Spiderman were created. So yeah, you can ignore that part, haha.

 

So, Western European countries should give back all of the wealth they expropriated from indigenous and African peoples, then. That is, if we are talking about getting rid of unfair advantages.

 

As the one totally guilty of doing this in the Spiderman thread, I admit it was contextless. Mostly born of frustration over the coded language that gets thrown around by people (mostly dudes, mostly white) wanting to preserve a characters "history" and "tradition". It happened a lot around the Hermione casting and a bunch around Riri Williams as the new Iron Man (now Ironheart). Like as if to say several movies and a collected history of comic books will cease existing once you change around a characters race or gender.

On top of what Nathan said about the difficulty of just creating and selling new characters, I just think it's important to reimagine these iconic ones. A lot of the people complaining about these changes take for granted how easy it is for us (white straight guys) to open a comic/book/movie/whatever and see ourselves very well represented. I think it's cool and important for young women of color to be able to see Iron Man or Hermione or MJ and be like " oh hey that's me".

I hope any of this made sense and I usually just come to this thread to read/learn so if continuing this convo is going too off topic/bogging down this thread I'd be glad to take it to the Representation in Entertainment/Media thread.

 

And honestly, in theater OR film, unless someone's race is a plot-defining component of the story, it shouldn't matter anyway. There's zero need for Hermione or Mary Jane or anyone else to be white if their whiteness isn't directly linked to their story. (And even then, thanks to artistic license the story can always be rewritten so that it makes sense.)

 

Definitely, comic book fanboys are the worst though.

 

I apologize for my earlier comment. I was mad when I posted it.

 

I know, and I get where you're coming from. Just gotta find a less violent way to phrase the distaste for that kind of awfulness next time.

 

Having grow up in the epicenter of Polish America I am not at all surprised by that comment.

 

When I was young I pretended to be Spider-Man, Wolverine, Batman, etc. with the understanding that they don't look like me. But I wanted to be them. Now some POC has a chance to fulfill that dream. So good for them.

 

Can def see the positive aspects of this now relating to representation, especially considering how iconic the comic book type characters are and the fact comic book movies have such a worldwide reach. My original comment came from me remembering the #OscarsSoWhite controversy and a quote that said not enough roles were written for POC - for some reason I took that to mean 100% original roles written from scratch; clearly, that does not need to be the case!

 

There were 2 American wrestlers who won Gold and Silver, neither placed their hands over their hearts when the anthem was playing...they didn't get crucified like Gabby did...they were both white.

 

There were ALOT of athletes that didn't. Almost the entire track and field team didn't do it either.

 

As Malcolm X said,"The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman."

 

Trump Forgets Cameras Exist, Says Black People Are Uneducated, Poor & Jobless - David Pakman Show - The Ring of Fire Network

The near-entirety of my experience with persons of color is with the lower, lower-middle, and underclass because of where I live, what businesses I patronize, and in small part my occupational history, so I know it's a very spurious and potentially unrepresentative experience. But, in those experiences, I notice a cultural gender difference between black men and black women that is much, much starker and more pronounced than between genders in the white, Latino, and Middle Eastern American communities. And the differences present themselves both in communications between the genders that I observe and my own individual interactions with them.

I've considered bringing it up on several occasions, but haven't.

 

I'm not sure what you mean exactly. We live in a patriarchal world, in which women, on a global level, are subordinated to men.

 

I don't mean with regard to social hierarchy, so much as general social and interpersonal disposition. In my, again economically limited, experience, black men are very forward, both socially and romantically, and fraternal-- of the strangers who say hello and shoot the shit with me (I'm fairly tight lipped in public by nature--blame it on my strict protestant upbringing or familial history of anxiety, whichever) in my very-racially-diverse neighborhood, almost all are black men. Meanwhile, black women seem recognizably socially guarded and conservative--even thorny. This juxtaposition rings true in both social and commercial settings, i.e. whether between citizens or between consumers/representatives. The difference seems so stark that I would certainly regard black men and women to be on the complete opposite ends of the social spectrum in that regard. But this certainly does not insinuate a prima facie replication of gender hierarchy that you brought up, as black women simultaneously seem to be much more independent and socially non-submissive compared to their white counterparts.

This is obviously subjective and general, but it's a dynamic that has been undeniably apparent to me over the past few years and, without sounding exceedingly obtuse or prejudiced, I do wonder whether there is any insight or research that would reconcile these observations.

 

I honestly don't know how this is particularly different from any other race. I'm not being facetious. I just do not understand how this is racially specific.

 

In my experience, gender differences are not nearly as pronounced, and if you are setting demographics along a spectrum as referenced above, you generally have groups divided more by culture than by gender (i.e. East Asian and Jordanian men and women being socially reserved, Brazilians [especially], Bosnians, and Libyans being fairly forward--all directly descendant of their respective cultures) in that, even if women are almost universally less assertive than their male counterparts, they are still grouped next to each other, or at least fairly close. Whereas it would seem that African American men and women are on complete opposite sides of the spectrum--not conjoined by a similar cultural disposition. In short, I notice a much larger social difference between black men and women with regard to how they conduct themselves in public. This dynamic did not strike me early in life when my experience with persons of color were restricted to rural or educational settings, but leaped out to me in black-plurality urban settings.

I hope that made it clearer. And I'm sure there are regional underpinnings to the dynamic as well, but I have had other people remark on it to me as well, but I'm gun shy on posing the question to any of my friends of color, as treading such topics verbally off the cuff is always far less calculated than through type.

 

i think we would need data supporting this first. but from a purely theoretical standpoint, "black men and women" is a very broad category without the same geographical precision as Brazilian or Libyan. this even more so if you compare it to a country with a relatively homogeneous approach to religion or gendered interactions through society. in the US, there's a massive amount of religious diversity, and because of how fractured American communities are educationally, financially, and ideologically, you're going to see an enormous range of behaviors in how black gendered interactions play out.

it's hard to quantify off the cuff - there's risk of confirmation bias, of unconscious stereotyping, and, again, just a limited scope depending on where you've lived and whom you interact with. but i would expect there to be a lot of underlying factors beyond the most visible one of race that influences how those interactions play out, even if you could personally view it entirely objectively.

 

UPDATE: IMPD identifies officer who mistakenly shot homeowner during 911 callout

 

French police make woman remove clothing on Nice beach following burkini ban

 

My brain is struggling to understand any part of this. What in the ever loving fuck? An attack like this on Muslim women and people are... applauding? Their islamophobia is so strong that nobody has an issue legislating how much clothing women have to wear in public? So to follow their beliefs they... don't get to go to the beach ever? So it's segregation lite, because they can argue all she has to do is remove her clothing to go to the beach. This is so violating on so many levels.

I'm not saying anything anyone doesn't already know from reading that, but I'm trying to process how this kind of regression is a thing that's actually happening in 2016.

 

In effect, due to France's endemic racism, their experiences with terror and their history with secularism, along with this conception of a clash of civilizations that has been stoked by the west, they're trying to discipline and punish the Muslim/Arab/Northern African populations. Many people have pointed out that nuns go to beaches in their garbs with impunity because Catholicism is a western product, whereas the age-old racist trope of the "savage brown person in need of repressive liberation" has remained part and parcel of western politics.

 

Video game fanboys are up there too.

 

Well I think there need to be more original roles, at the very least. NOT to put down or disagree with gender/race switching of those otherwise male/straight/white etc at ALL. That is a great thing. I just want to see more characters originally written as a female, POC, LGBT, etc AS WELL. I have a tendency to gravitate more towards DC over Marvel because of this, as well as other reasons (better written characters, more relatable, etc). Both heroes and villains, they have an interesting variety of female characters. Wonder Woman, Starfire, Raven, Supergirl, Harley Quinn, Killer Frost, etc.