What if we limited the number of white men in film and TV?

Are you a dumdum?

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Or maybe simply just racist.

If it quacks…

You’ve put it better than I did. Sometimes I shouldn’t aim for the “high-ground” of being polite, when the much more direct approach is clearly the more appropriate.

Dude, @chipandre, whatever your name is, it’s 2015 and shut the fuck up with the racist bullshit. It’s boring, absurd and seriously makes you look like a dick.

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Let’s be accurate: it makes him look like a racist dick.

Making the claim that it is FACT that white men are more interesting (aka better) is about as basic and literal as one can be when spewing racism. The fact that he thinks it’s appropriate to state while using a clear pic of himself is actually pretty disturbing. I have no qualms being blunt in reply to such blatant racist hate.

It just makes me wonder what he says when in familiar company. Ugh.

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Well, I suspect part of it was the awareness that, in the U.S., income inequality affects minorities more than it does other people. IIRC, there are nearly as many black people in poverty as there are white people, but because they make up such a smaller percentage of the U.S. population, that’s an indicator that there’s a problem.

I also suspect that some folks shied away from the 1% rhetoric because of something more sinister: white supremacists latched on to it. Now, I don’t know if it’s true that a huge percentage of people in banking are Jewish, but apparently Jewish American median income is double that of the general population. I couldn’t help but notice that on the sites I visited, phrases like “progressive stack” and “check your privilege” started coming up about the time a vocal minority of the 99%ers started bringing up weasel phrases like “zionist conspiracy”.

I tried bringing up Jewish-American affluence in a thread about privilege, and got shot down for being racist/anti-semitic/whatever. Sorry, but if we’re going to talk about privilege, we have to talk about privilege. Unfortunately, it can be every bit as twisted as the 99% rhetoric can; when you’re talking about privilege, you can’t leave out an overwhelmingly white group that’s also the most affluent group just because Klansmen can twist it into hate speech.

And I see Saving Private Ryan here.

I wonder if there’s something about Stephen Spielberg’s life that would lead to him being interested in World War II? (Barely-related aside: watch the special features on Casablanca sometime. Several of the cast were actual Holocaust survivors.)

The Holocaust is often used as a reason for denying that anyone of the Jewish faith has any white privilege. I’m torn on this one; on the one hand, people like Spielberg have talked about being bullied and beaten up for being Jewish, and about feeling ashamed of being so different. On the other hand…a broke-ass person trying to decide if they’re going to heat the house or eat has white privilege, but Stephen Fucking Spielberg doesn’t? Are you kidding me?!

The Western world is going to hell in a handbasket, I live in an area that’s economically depressed at best and about to get hit with austerity like the fist of an angry god, and we have a former member of Veruca Salt telling poor people to check their privilege. (and after all, aren’t they privileged? They have refrigerators and TVs!) Meanwhile, this rhetoric is having absolutely no effect on the power elite, other than, I don’t know, Silicon Valley startups making meaningless gestures toward replacing white dudes with white women, or some shit, and Barack Obama pays lip service to it as he agrees to sign bills based on Southern Strategy talking points.

I guess this is a long-winded way of saying I agree.

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Passing is a personal survival skill.
For the dominant culture though perceiving on others is a way to both deny especially in the case of Jews thousands of years of hate and discrimination, IMHO the worst the world has known in both quality and quantity, as well as permitting some kinds antisemitism since it is acceptable to discriminate within the dominant white racial group.
Anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic attitudes are real, though some Jews look white, much as many may try they are only that color but not members of the culture that white really means.

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The thing is being Jewish is both a religion and an ethnicity. I don’t think it is really a race per se. Certainly many of the people who consider themselves Jewish in the US, unless they are wearing something religious or are dressed Orthodox, wouldn’t stand out as being Jewish in a crowd.

At a home school co-op I used to take my kid to, there was a black lady there who had converted to Judaism some time before. Evidently I guess through Bible classes she decided the old school way was the best and was full bore Star of David wearing, Kosher eating, Hanukkah celebrating, etc. Of course she wouldn’t be considered white ever. My Jewish friend Staci has fire red hair and looks like an Irish Catholic, but she was born and raised in a Jewish household. Though she’s not very observant. Married lesbian to boot.

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I just want to say, as bluntly as possible, that this is about 90% of what bugs me about the privilege rhetoric. If it sounds super-racist/anti-semitic when someone points out that Jewish Americans, by and large, have a lot of privilege, it might be time for a re-think.

OK, I got wordy in my last comment, but I saw it during the height of OWS: white supremacists tried to hijack the 99% vs. 1% by bringing up that a lot of people in positions of privilege and power are, in fact, Jewish. They showed their cards by using some of the common weasel phrases, though.

EDIT: I’m surprised nobody brought up this BoingBoing essay on the ugly anti-Semitic side of college quota systems.

“Good news, everyone; we figured out how to look more diverse, and get all these damn Jews off TV, all at the same time!” “Thank God; I’m sick of that Samberg kid!”

One little scratch on the behemoth’s armour is counted as a victory? Give me a break. Meanwhile, Murdoch and the Koch bros et al continue to peddle hate.

Some Jews have money, some not, some are good at putting up a show; not sure how we suddenly became the most affluent and privileged group of white people.
You can forever promise that this time, as opposed to the last 3500 years it will be different(remember how they said that about the dot-com bubble), this time people will not again turn on ‘the Jews’. The position of even the most passing Jew is forever precarious unlike the lives of Europeans or European descended American and Australian region settlers.

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“not members of the culture that white really means”
I suspect you’re thinking of WASP culture, if there is such a thing, but not all “whites” are WASPs. Irish and Italian Catholics faced a lot of discrimination in the twentieth century. Italians, in fact, weren’t even considered white, by early twentieth-century standards. It’s a mutable identity that has changed quite a bit over time.

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Yes, these are not the only stories worth telling.

Ah yes, the “creating” part - which is far more difficult to do without experience, funding, backers, insurance…

The problem is that not-white-not-male entities are generally shut out of the process at every step of the way. It’s not that they don’t have ideas or are somehow creatively or professionally deficient.

Tell me Sean, how many books have you read this year that were written by women ? If you are straight, how much queer media do you consume ? If you are white (eye roll) how many films have you seen that were directed by people who are not white ?

Ah yes - the inverse cry of censorship - when the people who are not represented just haven’t been good enough to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to be on some sort of imaginary level playing field. Hmmm. Daring to point this out will result in the terrible suppression of the unheard stories of heroic white male cops, heroic white male fighter pilots, heroic white male race car drivers, etc.that are the default setting of today’s entertainment standards.

It’s a sad day when the segregated race films of the 20, 30’s and 40’s look positively progressive just by the fact of being made at all…

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Different folks have their different causes, and that’s obviously fine - there’s nothing derogatory about the ‘pet issue’ term.

If you weren’t so gung-ho about proving your commitment to your own in-group, rather than being more interested in solutions, it’d probably be more obvious to you that I’m not your enemy.

All I’m saying is that if your pet issue isn’t systemic, institutionalised disenfranchisement, you’d do your own cause a favour by de-prioritising it in favour of seizing some fucking agency.

Whether it’s CO2, saving the whales, protecting indigenous cultures or what have you, you’re banging your head against the wall as long as we live under this regime of complete fucking scumbags jumping from government to the top end of town and back again. Therefore, every other issue is secondary. The status quo, including racism and sexism, perseveres in the face of better ideas to serve the scum, because they have the means to perpetuate it long past the point it should have changed.

Can we stop telling each other to check your damn ‘privelege’, and start going after the truly overpriveleged? Follow the goddamn money.

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FWIW, I was just watching a documentary that had a clip of the 1947 film “Body and Soul,” and in it a social worker reads off a form: “Race: white; religion: Jewish.” I’m not saying this is the the be-all, end-all of the argument, but I thought it was funny that I saw it just now.

I wonder how much of this is regional: growing up in suburban Northern California, I never heard that you could theoretically guess someone’s religion by their name or facial features until I was in high school. (Ironically, the only people I ever heard making jokes about “Jewish names” and “Jewish noses” were some Jewish kids from a different city than the one I grew up in. I didn’t get these jokes at all.) But quite possibly Aloisius’ experience of being seen as “Jewish first” has to do with where he lives. I don’t think it’s the typical attitude where I am. I have never heard anyone refer to someone in a group as “that Jewish guy,” and Aloisius implies that happens all the time where he is.

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Nick Fury was reimaged as black in the Ultimates series long before the films. The remodelled Fury was based on Jackson tho.

(Edit: Beaten not once, but twice!! D’oh! 'tis what you get for reading on a smartphone between errands :wink: )

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I agree, as long as she actually converted to Judaism and is not just a vanilla Christian Protestant Jews for Jesus imposter. These nutcases wear a Jewish fleece while remaining fully compatible with American white culture.
I have a few friends like this who actually converted to Judaism, some feel no connection to their old black culture, some do both within the Jewish community and with African Americans. Most are irritated by the assumption that they had anything in common with the larger Ethopian-Jewish community other than similar skin tone. They are 100% Jewish by any measure.
Perhaps it is better to say that appearance is not all to making a minority.

I would think not in the current case of Irish, while Italians are sometimes on the edge along with direct European Spanish they share enough culture and religion is much less a factor in American social life now. I think white as meaning White European descended Christian descended is a better definition of white in American life then the old WASP.

For what it’s worth, this fact was pretty amazing all three times it was posted :wink:

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FWIW, the Cracked podcast had a decent discussion on this topic: http://www.earwolf.com/episode/racist-stuff-white-people-believe/

Their points about how more diverse or “non-traditional” shows or movies are always dismissed as lucky is probably the most important aspect of the way those who produce shows behave.

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And hell, it could still be Robert Downey Jr:

(note: I am not advocating Robert Downey Jr as black Tony Stark)

Well, at least in the case of Beyonce, that does not appear to be the case (based on her performances in Austin Powers and the Pink Panther, any way. She was a bit better in Dreamgirls, but I still find her to be kinda meh).

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