rolling "Is This Racist?" thread

I agree, in theory, but i'm not sure how well posting the tweets of thirteen-year-old morons does that. Millions of people will have read the books or seen the film, some of them are going to be racist jackasses. It's difficult to ascertain how large a percentage they form.

how are jezebel and other places the ones stirring up shit, rather than the people actually saying the shit

"let's just ignore it and it'll go away" has proven to be a p ineffective strategy

Why do you have to keep telling me that people think racist things? If we just talked less about it, it'd go away!

most fucked up part are the ppl who think that Rue not being white ruins the idea of the character, aka a shy, quiet, innocent naif type. bc what? black ppl can't be those things?????

yeah I agree w/ DJP and zachlyon - "it's 2012 and racism is fixed!" is a p common argument that needs to be shot down

american teens betrayed, deceived, tricked into caring about fictional black people

I blame liberal hollyweird

lenny kravitz is in this fucking thing? lol.
it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case. like, what's the goddamn point? they don't match the images in your head?
book is sitting by my bed, it is pretty dire 20 pages in.

I am perfectly happy with Lenny Kravitz being in movies and not inflicting his music on us anymore.

xp i have learnt recently that despite the truism that the book is always better than the movie, this is actually not always the case. cf game of thrones.

i am learning that by reading goThrones now! i am like three unnecessary paragraphs away from just jumping to book two

I agree w/zachlyon that Kravitz was an inspired choice!

in the wake of the Treyvon Martin shooting I don't think it's actually a bad idea to point out exactly how baseline racist US society is

OTMFM

xxp for GoT i recommend a) just watching the tv show b) if you must read ahead, read the wiki summaries of the books

hm. i think i'm gonna wait to watch season 2 until it's all on the tivo. That worked well for season 1, might as well.

it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case. like, what's the goddamn point? they don't match the images in your head?

... yeah, that's kind of the point there, yeah.

exactly - for example, seeing Ford Prefect portrayed by Mos Def was kind of a shock, since I remembered the book describing him as a tall, proper Englishman, sort of the antithesis of cool

obviously it all matters very little, though I do think the Asian community complaining about the movie 21 had a point, since in that case their ethnicity actually did matter in the story

seems like kind of a dumb point! don't go see the movie if you want to see things the way you see them!

There's this thing, right, called Harry Potter...

Actually that's not fair, but there's definitely this thing called Lord of the Rings.

here's a dirty little secret: i never liked the lotr gollum design, looked nothing like what I thought he should be

just to head off another 40 posts of people missing the point, the problem isn't people getting irritated at characters in a movie based on a book not looking like how they imagined them (because this will happen in every movie based on a book) but people thinking that a character being black when they didn't expect them to be black ruined the movie because they are huge racists

oh well in that case fuck em

it is weird that anyone would care what color the characters would be in a fiction adaptation in any case

not very weird that readers project their own race onto (sparely described) characters as a means of identifying w/ them, i guess? but it is sad and stupid that race is a commonly accepted shorthand for character types / traits. america, fwiw.

america, fwiw.

not much, apparently

article drops a nice spoiler btw

just to head off another 40 posts of people missing the point

No no this is shocking, I was totally unaware that was what was going on here.

xpost - except maybe forks and elmo are actually unaware? - it's not that people project their race onto generic fictional characters which sucks but is probably not going anywhere any time soon, it's the twin poles of "I overlooked that Thresh was black" and "I really liked Cinna so he can't be black", and especially their intersection in "But Rue is supposed to be nice and good and so I will ignore and indeed agrily deny that she's explicitly not white in the book"

that's basically what elmo is saying

as i read him anyways

not to be faux naive but the idea of somebody rejecting a fictional character based on their skin color is just too ludicrous for me to take seriously

this would all be easier if we could see their birth certificates

american teens betrayed, deceived, tricked into caring about fictional black people

I think this nails it. It's not the projection, it's the rage and betrayal. It's fucking awful, really.

All these people are basically saying is that they can't identify with -- or sympathize with or be emotionally involved with -- a black character like they could with a white character -- even when they are the SAME fucking character portrayed in two different media. I think that's pretty racist.

i mean, putting aside that they willfully disregarded the description of the character's race to begin with

Even if these are like 12-14 year olds tweeting this shit, that's a fine age at which to be horrifically shamed about saying asshole racist stuff.

I think this nails it. It's not the projection, it's the rage and betrayal. It's fucking awful, really.

OTM. even absent any overt rage at the betrayal, an awful lot of people seem to be saying that they're outright incapable of caring about or feeling sympathy for a black character. maybe i'm naive, but that's shocking to me.

if you must read ahead, read the wiki summaries of the books

this is insane

Even if these are like 12-14 year olds tweeting this shit, that's a fine age at which to be horrifically shamed about saying asshole racist stuff.

I don't know about that. Kids of that age committing crimes would be granted some sort of anonymity, usually, it seems a bit off to be shaming them nationally for this when it would be easy enough to blank out their names.

My objection isn't so much their age, though, it's the inherent confirmation bias involved in scouring Twitter for objectionable material and then writing it up as a news story. It doesn't matter if it's "actress + racial epithet", "i'd let Chris Brown beat me" or "Muamba + LOL", or whatever, you're going to uncover some nasty people saying nasty things whatever you go looking for. It's horrible and depressing but doesn't, in itself, demonstrate much about society.

The earlier stories about Hunger Games communities online being split over the casting had more to go on than simply reproducing the tweets of random idiots.

at some point confirmation bias is overwhelmed by, well, confirmation

we have probably reached that point with this

Possibly, but i'm not sure there's much of a sense of that from the article. The difficulty with this approach is that it's impossible to tell how widespread a viewpoint the individuals are representing. The film has got great reviews, took tonnes of money and the stars have been widely praised in the fan communities. How many racist idiots does it take to tip the balance towards it having a negative reception?

that's a fair question, but in this case i think it's appropriate to draw attention to the blatant racism, regardless of how many or how few people are promoting it

Absolutely. The casting, and the (frequently racist) reaction to it, is definitely something that needed to be discussed. I think it was pretty well analysed before the film was released, though, and i'm not sure what this particular article adds.

i think the point is that it is p much always worthwhile to call attention to how casually racism has been adopted by horrible youth?

like ok i guess an article pointing out that some idiots on twitter are racist is obvious or subject to confirmation bias (btw who cares) but that's ok because the problem with the world isn't that there are too many articles about racists, it's that there are fucking racists

like, you say that the casting and reaction to it was "something that needed to be discussed" as it is now an issue that has been covered, accounted for, sorted. that might make sense if it was the casting of a dumb movie that was the actual issue---it wasn't, and the real problem is extant and ongoing.

xp i have learnt recently that despite the truism that the book is always better than the movie, this is actually not always the case. cf game of thrones.

this is wackily wrong, i never understand the sentiment. it only makes sense when you're limiting yourself to remember the classic novel adaptations and not like, 80% of adaptations that make a decent movie out of a forgettable book or story (the godfather! gone with the wind! shawshank redemption? l.a. confidential? etc)

anyway back to racism

exactly - for example, seeing Ford Prefect portrayed by Mos Def was kind of a shock, since I remembered the book describing him as a tall, proper Englishman, sort of the antithesis of cool

obviously it all matters very little, though I do think the Asian community complaining about the movie 21 had a point, since in that case their ethnicity actually did matter in the story

― Estimate the percent chance that a whale has ever been to the moon? (frogbs), Monday, March 26, 2012 5:15 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think this is silly too; it does matter. even if thresh and rue were written in the novels as white, people still wouldn't have a right to complain about casting them black. whitewashing happens all the gd time and there are already much fewer roles available to POC (and those roles are typically stereotypical/one-dimensional). reversing the trend isn't a bad thing. and adding mos def to a movie is always a good idea (i hope i'm not the lone be kind rewind fan here).

LA Confidential book is sweaty thrillride, movie is a damp piece of shit

in this weird case, mos def's american imperialism dominates, like if will smith was cast as james bond.

actually, is mos def canadian?

no