Delivering Justice on Heaven's Behalf

A bunch of tweets about magical POC stereotypes from Twitter:

Magical Negro characters (and Magical POC in general) not only help the white protagonist, they put their needs above their own.

Characters of color being focused around the needs of white characters is like how Bechdel test points to women built on men's needs in film

It's always interesting how focused they are on making POC "give blessing" to the white characters. Like some white guilt assuaging spell.

NDNs tell the white man it's ok their "time is over", the asian admits the white guy is a better ninja, (cont)

...the black person must admit the white guy has (soul/magic power/dance skills/etc.), ESPECIALLY with their dying breath.

It fuels a double dose of white privilege: "White people are just better at everything" and "POC exist to acknowledge & serve that"

Then we see that shit play out when white folks roll up into spaces, act a fool, wonder why no one is singing Kumbayah and praising them.

Then white ppl, "But aren't you HAPPY you got to have a POC in a movie SERVING a white person?!? Isn't it your DREAM?"

And apparently these stereotypes are so accepted, ppl don't get why folks are not happy with The Help, Avatar, Dances with Wolves, etc.

It says a lot to where the expectation is that we should dream to have the honor of dying for white people as a power fantasy.

And coming out of media, we see these supposed activist groups that can't understand why POC would want to put POC needs before their own.

"Oh, no, your needs don't matter. WHY would you want to focus on something so small as your freedom when you could be working FOR us?!?" OH

Media isn't mind control, but it is influence. And when all these movies tell the same story, a lot of people start to believe it true.

Like: black males are dangerous once they can walk. And they need to be shot in the back unless they unless Blackness WMDs from their backs.

Or that NDNs secretly really want to find a white person to pass all their knowledge onto, so white people should get up in their business.

Or that the bloodstained land was given freely and with smiles and the slaves who worked it were happy to serve...

I read a book on advertising & they pointed out- when you think McD's do you think of the last time you were there, or a commercial?

Many people think of the commercial, not the run down, janky place they go to. The fiction overwrote the reality in their memory.

This same thing is the fictions we tell over and over in mass media. Bias is built up by culture, and media plays a big part.

Media & celebs claim to always be about being "edgy" and new, but if you're repeating racist shit from 100 years ago? #Um

And yes, I hold writers and Hollywood to that- you know your craft. Either you're deliberately shaping it, or you're failing your message.

The fact that the magical POC is so widespread means a lot of folks are choosing the stereotypes & othering for the sake of white privilege.

Like I said earlier about the #TrayvonMartin murder - white delusions will be defended as more important than black lives.

It's always interesting when someone puts out a work that is racist, sexist, heterosupremacist, or otherwise fucked up and problematic... that when people point out the problematic elements - that the response goes like this:

1) Well, you people don't buy/read/watch this stuff (and therefore your money doesn't matter)
2) We NEED to include this stuff to sell (the rest of the world is bigots and they're our market)
3) You are being irrational oversensitive (Even though I just said in #2 that I'm totally willing to alter my artistic integrity for the sake of irrational market demands to make a profit)

But... once people start saying, "Well, I guess I won't buy/go see/support this work, and maybe other works by this person" THEN suddenly it turns to, "Why are you hateful people trying to put me out of business and starve me and my family? I'm so poor, I work so hard, etc."

Fascinating how our money doesn't matter enough to NOT include messages that have, and still do, get us beaten, murdered, raped, denied jobs, denied health care, education, arrested, etc. but if we decide to take our money elsewhere (after all, we aren't the "target audience") suddenly our money is capable of wrecking entire lives?

This usually also goes hand in hand with "Well, you're trying to censor me!"... which isn't actually true- your work is already out there and critical analysis of it is definitely not the same as enacting government law to remove it OR say, threats against your person to silence you.

Strangely, though, the idea of consumers exercising their free speech about what constitutes a good product or not, or exercising their right to choose what they want to buy or not buy, suddenly freedom is now a threat that must be stopped.

How convenient.

If you really are happy with the market you're targeting, it should never even be an issue when the people who were a "negligible profit" decide to take their money elsewhere.

Of course, what it turns out to being, instead, is that we have creators who:

a) are profiting on bigotry and promoting it
b) are too cowardly to accept the social consequences of it - if you promote bigotry, your work will be labeled as such, and so will you, whether you "believe in it or not".

This is why they focus so much on blaming critics, fans, and the public despite all the claims that they were making conscious market choices. Silencing the social consequences takes a higher priority than the supposed profits.

And if profit isn't the driving motive- then the bigotry is there just because that IS what the creator meant.

The phrase about not assuming malevolence where incompetence will do, actually isn't quite right here. Irrational malevolence is generally too incompetent to hide it's motivations- it reveals itself through it's attempts to defend itself.

If it were just a matter of money, either criticism wouldn't matter, or perhaps, there'd be adjustments to future works, after all, it's "what the people want".

But irrational bigotry? That needs defending.

M. Night on the casting choices for Avatar:

Here's the thing. The great thing about anime is that it's ambiguous. The features of the characters are an intentional mix of all features. It's intended to be ambiguous. That is completely its point. So when we watch Katara, my oldest daughter is literally a photo double of Katara in the cartoon. So that means that Katara is Indian, correct? No that's just in our house. And her friends who watch it, they see themselves in it. And that's what's so beautiful about anime.

Where to start?

As a movie director, he knows that visual continuity is created deliberately- you can't haphazardly throw visual elements together and make it work. It's not ambiguous, the series team did a giant amount of research - the architecture, the characters, the clothing, all of this had to be communicated to the animation team.

Sure, his daughter identifies - because how many brown female characters are there for kids? Does she also identify with random white characters? (Maybe. Look at the implication in mentioning her friends identify as well. All white social circles?) Of course, maybe she's just happy to have A Girl Like Me in her cartoons.

Also, I like the "Well I could have used these other ethnicities, but I didn't" as if the would have, could have actually impacts the final result. Kung Fu the TV series could have had Bruce Lee in it! Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee could have been true to the original story! Wizard of Earthsea could have had brown characters! 21 could have had asians in the story, just like the real life events!

What makes this intent bit completely moot is that basically, at the end of the day, despite it all, he chose white actors. Actors of color don't even get considered in many roles, so it's not like "well we could have" works the other way.

This is someone who very deliberately chooses roles. He's very careful with his visuals. Am I to understand suddenly he became enveloped in a magic fog of color-blindness that overwhelmed his craft and experience as a director? (Was this the same magical force of post-racism that exploded across the nation when Obama took office?)

White supremacy isn't everyone's fantasy. There's nothing ambiguous about white folks getting roles and actors of color not.

Try restoring the balance yourself, before telling movies about it.

ETA: Because it cannot be said enough times: These are the Ghosts of the Heroes I never had.

Dear Giant Robot Magazine,

You once made me excited to read you. You were a great voice for asian am folks, at a time when our choices were Asianavenue, A, or Yolk.

You used to have articles about folks traveling to homelands they didn't know, trying to understand traditions, snarky reviews on asian hot sauces or liquors, interviews with asian american performers, stories about small things we'd only know about and pieces of our bits of history.

Then you started just doing music reviews and interviews with people who created kitschy hipster shit.

For awhile, you kept me going for the occasional interview with a movie celebrity... but all of these folks were asian movie stars- not asian americans.

In many ways, you became the Quinton Taratino shopping guide.

Look, you haven't EVEN had an actual asian person on the cover since Issue 18 - instead, all we get are paintings and shit to collect. Is this really any different than bookstore zen gardens or Trader Joe chow mein?

Now, at the end of the day, you're asking for donations, and I'm trying really damn hard to come up with a reason to help. I mean, right now I've got a lot more incentive to send money to the defunct Bamboo Girl Magazine, since the few issues I have still have so much to give to folks.

Community has a reason to invest in community. But consumers? They owe you nothing- you get left behind like an empty PBR bottle on the lawn after they're done with you.

GR, it was a good run while it lasted, but it's been over for a long time.

Maybe it's time you realized that as well.

Wherein I snark, what all is wrong with the Huffington Post & the Uppity Negros AKA ZOMG OBAMA = TIGER WOODS AND ALL BLACK MEN HAVE FALLEN.

I'll just pull some relevant points:

If both men somehow thought they were untouchable, they have been put to right.

First, who said they were untouchable? I don't recall Tiger giving Cassius Clay speeches (god, I don't know golf, who's an arrogant golfer?) or Obama declaring he was the Decider. Oh, wait, that's right, black men don't get compared to other people doing similar activities- they get compared to an assumed status for black men:

How dare you be successful black men?

And now you're "put to right" for being too successful. Don't try that anymore, you hear?

It is tragic when an icon falls. When a black icon stumbles the tragedy seems doubly problematic. Mike Tyson, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jackson were all at the tops of their fields before revelations that made them less palatable as heroes and less of a role model for young black men.

What the hell do these 3 folks have in common, aside from being black and famous?

You have 1) someone with a violent past even before his boxing 2) someone who "dared" to get AIDS, and 3) someone who was already "getting weird" before the child molestation charges? One shouldn't be a role-model to begin, one should still be a role model (or does AIDs make you untouchable and worthy of stoning? How progressive.) and the third was well on his way out of being anyone's role model with a Neverland and Bubbles the Monkey.

I guess Famous Black Men is enough of a common thread, right? I'll keep that in mind when I talk about white women: Sinead O'Connor, Barbara Bush, and Tonya Harding are clearly in the same category.

The expectations of real change that had people in tears a little over a year have been so thoroughly dashed that too many of his supporters feel betrayed by their naiveté; they feel, as I do, almost foolish for believing that the status quo could really be kicked out the door....

You hear that Obama? We gave you ONE YEAR. ONE (not quite) WHOLE YEAR to fix the problems of Reaganomics, "Iraq The Prequel" Bush Sr., Bill "Trade & Deregulate" Clinton, and "Fuck yo' Constitution" Bush Jr.

How DARE you not have overturned the death grip of big Pharma on the rest of our legislators!

Having worked for weeks and months for Obama, having written glowingly about his oratory skills and his ability to gather even the disenfranchised together, as well as capture that ephemeral youth vote, I stood at rallies and allowed myself that enormous surge of hope that connected me with the rest of the country.

See Obama, You Owe Her Personally. She said Good Things About Black People (TM). Do you not feel her White Woman's Burden? She was merely trying to UPLIFT you and this is how you repay her?

Both men are of mixed race. Yet the majority of the country, including black Americans, sees them as black. That's not a bad thing. Except when such men of intelligence and talent, men who have such influence and power, can't help but succumb to the age old twins of greed and power.

They are mixed. But they are black. And Black people succumbing to greed and power is WORSE than when white people succumb to greed and power. Or something.

Because, pro-golfers are full of power? And presidents' not overturning almost 3 decades of status quo are simply greedy?

Oh wait, here we go:

Woods income is as tied to endorsements as it is to his talent. And Obama is so caught up in party donations and the power that those who donate have, he can't allow himself or his party to do anything to thwart those donations. If Woods had been smart he would have kept his head down, played golf and taken care of his beautiful family instead of publicly destroying them. If Obama had enacted campaign reform as the first order of business real change could well have happened.

Yes, because endorsements cause you to sleep with people! And Good Black People keep their head down and don't have Normal (white) Human Flaws.

And you publicly destroyed your family by putting up sex tapes on Youtube and selling "A Hole In One" Nike Line of products. Oh wait, no you didn't, you kept it a secret until other folks came public with it. Like everyone else who has an affair.

And Obama, HOW DARE YOU put the crashing economy and the health of the American public before raining down reform upon your party and destroying what support you have there.

What the people who worked and voted for Barack Obama wanted to see was a man who would stand up for principle and the ideals he spoke so stunningly of while campaigning. What those who were shocked at Woods' dalliances wanted to believe was that the first black man to be famous for a sport other than basketball or football was really who he appeared he was.

Yes Obama, how dare you work for healthcare reform that you said you wanted to do! Tiger! How dare you represent yourself as a successful professional golfer and not live up to stranger's projected expectations that you be Bagger Vance!

Woods remains an amazing golfer and athlete but his tumble to earth by hubris makes him far more human than god, and the entanglements that his weakness have brought may in fact undermine his game forever.

Yes, because being a successful black man = claiming to be God! You're no Morgan Freeman!

And Obama remains a brilliant thinker, an orator who can rally the masses, a supremely educated man and, by all accounts a dedicated husband and father. But he has been unable to fight the system he said he wanted to fight. He has been unable to effect real, honest-to-goodness change.

That's right, he betrayed you by not overturning the status quo in a year! Lying to the public with your big plans and centrist policies, telling us it's going to take a lot of work and then not doing it all by yourself!

Thank you Lisa Warren for delivering lessons all Black Men should hear:

Don't be successful, be Jesus.

I'm sure Good, Hardworking, Black Peeple will take heed!

Managed to rewatch a couple of episodes between cooking and chores. Someone finally put the theme up on Youtube:

I came home to see the roommate watching some documentary about some surfers who go down to Peru. As I'm cooking dinner, I overhear the narration:

"...They explored the depths of this ancient culture... They took them in, and revealed their magnificent heritage to them... 'We got to see places people don't go to', etc."

Seriously, you can explore the depths of a culture, or be totally taken in and assimilated in a 2 week trip? And of course, who guided you to all these places "people don't go"?

Oh, that's right. Not everyone counts as people.