can we get our Boys Don’t Cry?
Because trans WOC get killed/abused at a far more alarming rate than our white counterparts.
and can we get our Natalee Holloway missing-beautiful-young-girl type movies?
Because 60% of 2010’s missing people were Black, and 87% of that Black statistic were missing Black women.
oh, and can we get our science fiction/fantasy movies?
I like LoTR, Star Wars, the Avengers, 300 et al, but I find it hard to enjoy a world that is absolutely full of white ‘fantasy’ tropes, and only uses vaguely passing POC when they’re evil or villainous, so can we show some Black scientists, heroes, superheroes, mutants, powerful, etc for (more than) once?
I’d also, as a hopeless romantic, thoroughly enjoy a love film with Black love. The kind that isn’t depicted as only coming from the deep South, or somewhere on the East coast, and it involving all the stereotypes Hollywood has used for the last, oh, 100 years or so.
Black women can be vulnerable, innocent, classy, promiscuous, affectionate, “manic pixie”, too, without having to shame her character throughout the film for any of those attributes; Black men can fall in love with women who don’t pass our paper-bag test, without conditions that again, shame her in some way.
I will say that on horror movies, y’all are doing better not killing us off first — maybe you’re starting to let go of the racist eugenicist view that ‘POC are not capable of outliving whites’ (even if in movies like Cabin in the Woods the POC character was very racially ambiguous), but can you do a film like Deep Blue Sea where they make it to the end and you’re happy about it?
So, those are just a few things I’d like to see from y’all if I’m going to continue giving my patronage to the theater, which is already strained.
Signed,
errka.
this is just how i feel about everything.
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» Literary Role Models
Miller talks of an interesting and inspiring study, but in a problematic article… Why is heterosexual males identifying with homosexual main characters and reducing their bias described as “unsettling”?
(via Neil Gaiman’s Twitter)
Kamanitree: Pretty interesting (yet not surprising) article.
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WHITEWASHING IN WRATH OF THE TITANS (2012): - “Andromeda is the Ethiopian princess, whom Perseus rescued and married. She became queen of Mycenae and, after her death, a constellation and galaxy. Andromeda’s mother Cassiopea was extremely proud of her own beauty (and this is practically all we know about her). And so strong was the pride of this Ethiopian queen, that she could not help comparing her beauty with that of the immortal NEREIDS, boasting of being better than they all. For this reason the NEREIDS were angry, and Poseidon, sharing their wrath, sent a flood and a sea-monster to ravage the land [x].”
As stated in a post before, Andromeda has been whitewashed throughout the history of Greek Mythology/History. Its so entrenched in the minds of readers and scholars everywhere that the fact that she comes from and was born in Ethiopia (and is a woman of color) flies right over their heads. It doesn’t register. So it comes to no surprise that in WRATH OF THE TITANS, Andromeda is portrayed as a blonde, blue-eyed white woman, portrayed by British actress Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice, 2005). -
21 Reasons Why This Movie Sucks [Part 1 of 2]
Playwright/performer Prince Gomolvilas bitch-slaps the movies “21” and “The Last Airbender.” This monologue is one of the central pieces in JUKEBOX STORIES, a storytelling, song-singing, bingo-playing, theatrical extravaganza starring Prince Gomolvilas and musician Brandon Patton. However, this video was captured at Customs & Departures: An Evening With Thai-American Writers, an event organized by PEN Center USA and the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where he also teaches.
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The MPAA recently announced that Latinos make up 25 percent of moviegoers. In fact, the average Latino moviegoer sees 5.3 movies a year, compared to 3.7 movies per year for African Americans and 3.5 movies per year for white moviegoers. In other words, people of color go to the movies more than white people.
Alyssa Rosenberg writes:
I tend to end up pointing to the performance of movies with African American leads or diverse casts to point out that there’s an underserved market there, and I think that point remains true. But maybe an ancillary point is that African American moviegoers are, by a narrow margin, and Latino moviegoers are by a wide margin, more dedicated customers of Hollywood’s existing products than white audiences are, and their numbers are growing. You’d think Hollywood would want to hold on to those customers, and to recognize that the day is coming when those consumers’ preferences will be more important than the white consumers who no longer have either numerical superiority or proof that they’re more loyal customers. Nothing about the state of writers’ rooms and directors chairs suggest that movies are television are actively preparing for that eventuality.
"To continue reading this article…………click this link to visit jezebel.com (via diversityinfilmtv) -
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Shading Dark skin is so much easier
It was soo much easier when I was first learning how to use photshop back in ‘05 the tutorials they had were pretty much all for pale skin and they were pretty as fuck but I had Black OC’s that I wanted to colour. So what did I do I searched deviantart for great artwork that had brown skin people, discovered The Boondocks and try and then I used the most awesome tool that ever existed on photoshop
Now for those who don’t know this glorious, magical, splendiferus tool called the eyedropper can allow you to same the same colour from anything. For example I used it the other day when colouring in the lineart that Riley drew of Ain from The Arkh Project.
I got a page from the fanart comic strip and used it on the hair, skin and eyes and boom and since I basically rushed it all I used was the dodge tool and the burn tool for highlights and shadows.
Kamanitree: For all the confused souls out there!
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Fair or Not?: The Snow White Complex
A documentary about Eurocentric standards of female beauty that are held across most (post-Colonial) cultures.
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Shadeism
This documentary short is an introduction to the issue of shadeism, the discrimination that exists between the lighter-skinned and darker-skinned members of the same community. This documentary short looks specifically at how it affects young womyn within the African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas. Through the eyes and words of 5 young womyn and 1 little girl - all females of colour - the film takes us into the thoughts and experiences of each. Overall, ‘Shadeism’ explores where shadeism comes from, how it directly affects us as womyn of colour, and ultimately, begins to explore how we can move forward through dialogue and discussion.
This video does a good job of capturing the culture that I have grown up with (I am mainly referring to India). I also grew up with the notion that I need to protect my skin from the sun so I don’t get darker. I remember reading a horoscope (or something of the sort) that my mom had gotten when I was a kid; it said that I would grow up to be very fair. I remember talking to my mom about how it was wrong because I wasn’t as fair as I used to be and she said that I’d probably get lighter again. And that Fair&Lovely commercial? I have seen that on TV in India multiple times but it’s sad that I had never noticed how problematic it is. While watching it right now, I was appalled at how openly they were criticizing darker skin. And that’s just one of the many Fair&Lovely (and other “fairness” creams) commercials. [One new thing that the video brought to my attention was the fact that this notion of lighter = more beautiful existed before colonialism (at least in India)]
A good watch.
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Thea Lim is a writer and a cultural critic focusing on the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and pop culture. Her work has been published by the Guardian, Salon, Bitch Magazine, Jezebel, the Utne Reader, Canadian Women’s Studies\les cahiers de la femme, and in multiple university textbooks, including Opposing Viewpoints: Canada and Canadian Content. She has been cited by the Christian Science Monitor, the Atlantic and Roger Ebert. She co-facilitated the famed Asian Arts Freedom School in Toronto, and she served as editor of the award-winning Shameless Magazine blog and as deputy editor for the blog Racialicious. Invisible Publishing released her first novel, The Same Woman in 2007.
Her most recent writing has focused on fandom of colour, probing what celebrities of colour like Manny Pacquiao, Jeremy Lin and Mariah Carey mean to fans searching for rare images of themselves in the Western pop cultural landscape.
She currently teaches and studies creative writing at the University of Houston, where she also served as a non-fiction editor at Gulf Coast Journal. She grew up in Toronto and Singapore and is an (anti-imperialist) Third Culture Kid and an untragic mixie.
Follow her on Twitter: @theapants.
- Day 69 of Racism Free Ontario’s100 People of Colour Spotlight.
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(via Thea Lim)
