Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

None of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor are charged. I have not seen the evidence against three of the four officers on the indictment, so I won't comment there. The fourth officer is Brett Hankison, an officer who was at the apartment, did not fire at Taylor, but did fire into the apartment and was charged by the state on those actions. The jury acquitted him, and now the federal government is charging him on the exact same actions. Whether or not the jury in the state case made the right call this reeks of double jeopardy.

 

*enjoys the silence of black characters replacing white characters in Netflix’s Sandman*

The silence from both the racist crowds and the super pro-black crowds has been heavenly. I LOVE seeing black characters in art or media that doesn’t singularly focus on them being black. More regular characters please!

 

I think a majority of characters who are black don’t have that as their main or even any character trait.

 

That hasn’t been my experience. It feels like so often black characters are treated as “other” (as in there’s something unique about them) or they are aggressively or obviously pro-black.

A good job of avoiding this was in the second season of the HBO show “Love Life”. They have a black man where his blackness isn’t treated as some big deal, it’s one of many aspects that make the story and, in the grand scheme, not even that important.

A lot of shows, especially in the socio-political climate we have now, LOVE focusing on how hard it is to be black or the assumed trauma that comes with being black OR the flip side, which is when they focus on how strong the character is and how much they’ve overcome and how much they love being black.

There’s a space for that, sure, but it’s permeated the market in the past decade.

 

I love how the neighbor called back later and said “This is probably my fault.”

NOOOO YOU DONT SAY.

 

You definitely have to think twice in these matters. Yes there are times to call the police. For instance a young man who happened to be black was at my door late at night once banging on it and trying to open it. I got a text from my neighbor saying he'd banged on her door also asking for money a few minutes before.

I did call the police in this situation because both of us are women who live alone and having any male banging on our door aggressively late at night is scary.

But I did think a few minutes before calling, because I was worried what might happen to this guy because he was black. I heard from the police that they simply spoke to him about stopping this behavior. So that's a good outcome.

 

?????

People were on Twitter specifically calling out Neil Gaiman personally for 'ruining Death', so the racist crowds certainly weren't silent about it.

 

Just read about this:

The "Battle" of Bamber Bridge during World War II.

Basically, U.S. troops tried to impose Jim Crow like laws on a British town. Didn't exactly go well, although that didn't trigger the violence right then and there.

 

Bigots are now using AI to remove actors of color from trailers of movies like The Little Mermaid.
The account that Alejandra pointed to has been suspended from Twitter. However those racist altered clips will no doubt continue to circulate on the internet.

 

AI was a mistake.

 

Not every Spielberg movie is a masterpiece

 

I didn’t see that nor did I see people applauding the casting choices (though there almost certainly were). It didn’t become a storyline and I enjoyed the silence at the time.

Now the Little Mermaid controversy is different: people are very vocal about that. I don’t care because it’s a race issue about a fictional story about a fictional creature. Representation matters, sure, but I think in recent years it’s importance has been greatly exaggerated.

That being said…. The same people who are criticizing the race switch are likely the same people who were silent when this catastrophe occurred:

 

It... did. Like I said, they were going on Neil Gaiman's Twitter to confront him - and also blame him for the other racist concern, the inclusiveness of Rings of Power, which (using their lack of any sort of understanding) thought Gaiman was part of. And yes, there were articles covering both.
The Little Mermaid 'controversy' is just the next racist outrage, which likely involves the same people. Because it's all the same issue, i.e. racists trying justify their racism using 'science' and 'reasoning' in a purely made up, fictional setting.

As for "Gods of Egypt", I recalled there was controversy, but as the movie quickly tanked, people ceased to care.

 

"The same people" in this case are just called racists.

 

My general position on casting for fictional characters is: unless it’s part of the story and/or an important part of the character’s background, I don’t care.

It wouldn’t matter to me if someone recast Harry Potter as a Mexican dude, because nothing about Harry’s story emphasized that his whiteness was important.

But no, to the people posting Ryan Gosling as the next black panther, that isn’t right because then you would have to explain how a white guy is able to pull off the name T’Challa.

However, I do generally oppose any suggestion that Superman could be cast as a black dude, only because there’s a character in DC named Icon that has damn near an identical origin story as Superman (alien from another planet comes to earth and is basically a god) and I’d rather see a movie about him than a black Superman.

 

There are white Mexicans, black Mexicans, Asian Mexicans, Middle Eastern Mexicans. Just saying a character is Mexican doesn't tell you the whole story.

 

…. Yea, sure, but my point was you could switch British Harry out with a Mexican Harry(of whatever color derivative you prefer) and the story could largely be told in the same way.

 

Spain?

 

It would have been plain photoshop.