by Guest Contributor Jehanzeb Dar, originally published at Islam on My Side
I really wanted to like this movie.
With its heartfelt message of optimism and living one’s life to the fullest, I thought “Yes Man” would be a film I could enjoy and appreciate after a week of exhaustive finals and papers. Yet it turns out that the film is filled with thoughtless and ridiculous stereotypes that make me feel anything but optimistic.
Before I saw the film, I already detected some suspicion about the film. A good friend of mine had read the book of the same title and told me the author was motivated to “say ‘yes’ more” by an Indian man he met on a bus. The Indian man’s religion is not disclosed, but it could be argued that the Indian man was Muslim since the author searches for him at one point in the book and finds himself in a predominately Muslim part of town. Oh, and did I mention the book takes place in England?
Not only does the film adaptation take place in the United States, but it also removes the Indian and potentially Muslim character. Instead, the man who inspires the protagonist to “say ‘yes’ more” is a White English man played by Terrence Stamp. The producers must have felt that the audience wouldn’t have made a connection with a wise and inspirational Indian/non-White character.
After Jim Carrey’s character starts saying “yes” to everything, we see him checking his e-mail at work and one of the spam messages reads: “Persian Wife Finder.” An Iranian woman wearing a pink hijaab (headscarf) appears on the screen, while puffy clouds are on time-lapse in the background, and says “I am Faranoosh” as if she’s some kind of character you can select from a “Tekken” video game. As she rotates her body to make herself look alluring, the wind blows her scarf into her face, mocking the way Iranian women supposedly dress and drawing ridiculous laughter from the audience.
It’s unlikely that these names ring a bell, that upon hearing them a knot will form in your stomach as often happens to those who hear the names of another trio—Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney. The latter threesome received worldwide recognition after a lynch mob executed them in 1964 for trying to register black Mississippians to vote. On the other hand, the former threesome was shot during Hurricane Katrina by a group of men described as “white vigilantes.” Unlike Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney, however, Herrington (pictured above), Alexander and Collins survived to tell their tale.
Now, A.C. Thompson, a writer for The Nation, has launched an investigation into the shootings of Herrington, Alexander and Collins. In an article called “Katrina’s Hidden Race War,” which was published online Dec. 17, Thompson asserts that at least 11 blacks were shot as the hurricane unfolded—all by white men.
“So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins—in fact, there was never an investigation,” Thompson writes. “As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.” Continue Reading »
In one of the more interesting analytical writings on the American (non-)debate on the Israeli assault on Gaza, Glenn Greenwald considers how alarmingly out-of-step Democratic politicians are with their party’s rank-and-file views. He cites the first poll on American public views of Israel’s attack. While there is a general tie between those supportive and opposed, Democrats are against Israel’s onslaught in Gaza by a significant margin.
Western men who visit red-light districts in poor countries often find themselves surrounded by coquettish teenage girls laughingly tugging them toward the brothels. The men assume that the girls are there voluntarily, and in some cases they are right.
But anyone inclined to take the girls’ smiles at face value should talk to Sina Vann, who was once one of those smiling girls.
As “Crash” was earning plaudits (and a Best Picture Oscar), any number of much knottier and more daring movies were being ignored by viewers entirely. Spike Lee’s “She Hate Me” (2004), a freewheeling, vastly underrated consideration of, among many other things, white America’s anxiety about black male sexuality, managed to earn only $366,000 at the domestic box office - by far the lowest-grossing movie of the director’s career. Alan Ball’s brazen and compelling “Towelhead” (2008) - a portrait of a Lebanese-American girl molested by a white neighbor, who also has an African-American boyfriend - died a similarly quick death.
Even more mainstream efforts have had trouble connecting. The movie I tend to regard as the most important one made this decade about race relations is a knotty romantic comedy-drama called “Something New” (2006), about a black woman (Sanna Lathan) who believes she can’t find a decent black man to date and who eventually decides to go out with a white man (Simon Baker). Its mixture of tenderness and severity, cynicism and hopefulness, proved consistently arresting - and yet it pulled in only $11 million.
Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Republicans who are vying to lead the national party offered a mix of reactions yesterday to the decision by one candidate for the job to mail out a music CD including the song “Barack the Magic Negro.”
Chip Saltsman defended his actions, telling the Hill newspaper that the song — and others on the CD, which was mailed to party members — was nothing more than a lighthearted parody. But his rivals in the contest to chair the Republican National Committee said it carried an inaccurate message about what the GOP stands for.
My favorite quote:
And former Ohio secretary of state Ken Blackwell defended Saltsman and attacked the media.
“Unfortunately, there is hypersensitivity in the press regarding matters of race. This is in large measure due to President-elect Obama being the first African American elected president,” Blackwell, who is black, said in a statement. Continue Reading »
I continue to hear — from politicians and their constituents — that Republicans must start connecting with voters on a cultural level or they are screwed. It was reiterated again this morning by Saul Anuzis, the Michigan Republican Party Chairman running for Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
He had a story for us: On a bus ride, he struck up a conversation with two African-American women who’d just come from a church event in the city. He said they spoke of traditional values and many conservative principles they all shared. When Anuzis asked them what it was like to be black Republicans, they were taken aback. They weren’t Republicans, they said. It was clear to Anuzis that the women possessed principles of the Republican Party but that Party had not reached out to them on a level they related to.
“You can’t ignore groups of people and expect them to vote for you,” he said. Republicans have not done a good job with African-American voters, as we’ve seen. Culture has been put to the side in favor of political agenda but now there is an opportunity to change that.
Frankly, this is (or should be) obvious to anyone who has actually taken the time to analyze African-American political views. The plain fact is that there is - always has been - a natural constituency in the African-American community for conservative ideologies. And I’m not only referencing gay marriage or abortion here. Despite high rates of single motherhood within the African-American community, plenty of black people - I’d say most - are really committed to the idea of two parents and a stable marriage. Indeed, our history almost dictates that we should be; one of the great injustices of slavery was the refusal on part of slave owners to recognize slave marriage vows. What’s more, slave owners purposefully tore slaves apart, sending husbands, wives and children to separate plantations. As such, when the opportunity to marry freely came, blacks cherished it and still do as a community.
It is also worth adding that there is a strain within African-American thought which can be accurately called “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservatism, where “yourself” refers to the black community as a whole. Until the 1930s, blacks (at least those that could vote) were a fairly reliable Republican constituency and in the early 20th century, men like Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey had wide followings. Even the “Black Power” movement was focused - mainly - on black empowerment and black self-sufficiency. Hell, the famous Malcolm X image “By Any Means Necessary” could stand as an advertisement for the NRA if you simply replaced Malcolm’s image with a slightly heavy-set white guy. Continue Reading »
Bottom line: whipping out a dictionary definition during a discussion of complex issues is ill-advised at best. I would even go so far as to say it’s dumb. It doesn’t put you over on anyone else and it doesn’t win the debate. It usually shows that you don’t have any kind of true understanding of the concepts under discussion and usually leads to people either working to educate you or dismissing you outright.
For them, race is such an unrelated issue that it shouldn’t even be brought up in context. “Avatar” is a fantasy world, so whether or not it’s based on real Asian cultures is irrelevant, by their view, in determining which actors are cast. It should be “colorblind”, which is a nice seeming word that doesn’t look as nice in practice as it does on paper. Many of them go so far as take the moral high-ground of “well, we’re just going to watch the movie and judge them on their acting and talent, while you lot are still off judging people on their race.” It’s unfortunate that they’re taking the moral high ground for the sake of a industry that’s already in the racial sewers.
Renee over at Womanist Musings posts a section of the Black Women Walking documentary, noting:
Walking down the street should be a simple thing. We all need to get from point A to point B and yet we must exist with the fear that the next set of eyes we meet will demand much more from us than a friendly smile of recognition. We are expected to shrug this off and not feel anger or resentment, because others feel that they have the right to demean us. We are living, breathing targets because we have been born black and female in a world that has cumulatively decided that we are less than.
An economist in Germany has noticed a curious trend among Americans: For the past 50 years, black women have been shrinking with each new generation.
Young black women today are nearly an inch shorter than white women their age and about half an inch shorter than black women born in the late 60s, according to an analysis of CDC data by John Komlos, a professor of economics at the University of Munich in Germany. […]
“A measure of height takes into a number of aspects that money alone doesn’t measure,” Komlos said. “It’s sort of an overall indicator of well-being.”
Last week, I picked up the new issue of Script Magazine looking for some information on script reviewers . However, what I found was Baz Luhrmann talking about the planning and writing of Australia.
The lengthy article describes the thought process involved in creating a script of epic scope, and reveals that Luhrmann wanted to write a film encompassing the history of Australia. Script explains:
There were a number of issues that Luhrmann knew he wanted to explore, including those related to the continent’s Aboriginal peoples as well as those related to Australia’s to achieve self-determination and self-governance.
After spending six months immersed in research and historical documents, Luhrmann decided to set the film near the beginning of World War II, due to “the transitional period” that it represented in Australia’s history. Also of note:
Another reason Luhrmann chose this time period because it allowed him to shine a light on what he describes as “probably the most heinous and difficult part of our history” - a period that marked a low point in the relationship between Australia’s white majority and the indigenous peoples with whom they share their land. In the time between the two World Wars, so many white Australian cattle stockmen were having relationships with Aboriginal women that the population of mixed-race children was causing a dilemma for those concerned about the country’s racial purity. A government policy was instituted in which mixed race children were taken from their parents, placed in Christian monasteries, and, in Luhrmann’s words, “basically trained to be white. This decimated large sections of the indigenous population - you can imagine the spiritual decimation and the pain. So, it was an extremely dramatic problem that has haunted this nation for a very, very long time and it really began in that period.”
Luhrmann wanted to deal with this issues in his film, not as its primary focus, but woven into the fabric of the piece in much the same way that slavery - while certainly not the main subject of the movie - was an indelible part of the texture of Gone With the Wind.
I find the journalist’s recounting of historical events extremely interesting. Continue Reading »
by Guest Contributor SLB, originally published at PostBougie
I could never be a real militant. Because there’s no way a real militant would’ve sat through Baz Luhrmann’s latest epic, Australia, which clocks in at a superfluous 3+ hours, and dug it as much as I did. It’s a film rife with knee-jerk infuriation potential. It’s got everything to rankle the revolutionary: racial slurs, a brother taking bullets for Hugh Jackman, an abusive white-on-black relationship, the phrase “I’m as good as Black to those people out there,” and even a little blackface for good measure. But I’ve yet to mention the race-baiting facet that receives the brightest spotlight: the magical Negro (and Half-Negro, as it were) archetype.
From the first frame, a puerile, adorably accented voice works overtime to endear you to what will inevitably be another racist tale of White colonists winning the day. But even so, the charms of that voice are hard to resist–especially when you see the chocolate-drop face it belongs to. Nullah (Brandon Walters) is a biracial pre-adolescent (maybe ten? eleven?), happily living on rundown property called Faraway Downs with his aboriginal mother, a few other servants, and a villainous White rancher named Neil Fletcher. Aboriginal mom, villainous White rancher… you probably already see where this is going.
Enter Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. All you need to know about them is that, by the second hour of the film, Nullah is in their custody and by the third hour of the film they’ve lost him to the desolate Catholic mission camp where all mixed-raced Aboriginal children in a priest’s or policeman’s plain sight were herded, after being stolen from their secure, healthy Aboriginal households. Will the stubbornly feuding, but madly in love Kidman-and-Jackman reunite to reclaim their “creamy” boy, Nullah, by the film’s
bombastic ending?
Hello readers. I’m surprised to see how many people still frequent the site over the holidays. I was going to chill on posting, but it appears that most of you are raring for good conversation. So, we’re back on something resembling regular content. I’m still technically on staycation though.
It also occurs to me we haven’t had a reading/watching/listening/doing thread in a while. One of my favorite things about holiday breaks is that I get to catch up on my reading.
Heroes pulled off something rare for its’ fall finale, ending its’ third storyarc with both a bang and a whimper. How bad was it? Your friendly neighborhood Roundtable members were warning me about it before it even aired on the west coast. Take this message, for instance, from Mahsino: “I just finished watching it the ’superior way’ an hour and a half ago … um, yeah.”
Suffice to say, the episode ended up being everything she had me expecting – and less. On the bright side, it gave us a lot to talk about in our final installment of the fall, including:
* The general sense of disarray that undermined the conclusion to Volume III, “Dual”
* Our predictions for Volume IV, the much-ballyhooed “Fugitives”
* Ando’s new power and its’ potential beauty secrets
* The continuing misadventures of everybody’s favorite misfit of science, Mohinder
Arturo:Ok, here’s the thing: I got a couple of e-mails Monday night [about the episode] that didn’t sound too enthused, but I thought, “naah, it can’t be that bad.” I’m never doubting any of you *ever again*
Clara: LOL Mahsino: if i could sum it up in one word, it would have been: meh Erica: That’s absolutely the right word. Clara: My short summary of the episode: eye-roll. Arturo: I mean, even last year’s finale was sorta cool. Mahsino: Classic Heroes: characters of color die so that whiter, blonder, prettier characters may live. Erica: It felt more like a “ok, we’ll just ignore all this volume and start over,” instead of the desired “exciting finale!” Continue Reading »
by Guest Contributor SLB, originally posted at Postbougie
I think if we’re all quite honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that the methods to approaching big-screen biopics are finite—especially biopics about musicians. In order for people’s lives to warrant the silver screen treatment in the first place, those lives have to possess extremes—a series of extenuating events that can be exploited for the highest dramatic impact the actors can generate. And face it: biopics are only as good as their actors. Sure, the writing has to be passable. If you’re lucky, the writing makes the actors’ jobs easy, but to our main point: the lives themselves provide the pathos. The writers need only heighten it. Yes, there are glaring historical omissions. Yes, there are all kinds of melodramatic liberties taken—especially in the film’s second to last scene of this film. But that, too, comes with the predictable territory of biopics, and good actors mine that melodrama for all its worth. That’s what makes a decent biopic so watchable.
Everyone involved in Darnell Martin’s Cadillac Records understands the pecking order of the biopic genre—which is precisely why this one works so well. Fortunately, the casting directors brought their A-game, tapping Adrien Brody as Leonard Chess, the Jewish-Polish immigrant who founded the most successful Blues and R&B label in Chicago history, Chess Records, and the incomparable Jeffrey Wright as Muddy Waters, Chess’s flagship artist.
With Brody and Wright anchoring the film, the substantial supporting cast had no choice but to tow the Oscar-caliber line and, with very few exceptions, they did. Granted, Cedric the Entertainer was probably miscast as songwriter Willie Dixon. He always sounds like he’s faking an accent, rather than playing a role. It’s as though his acting ability doesn’t extend beyond varying the tenor of his voice. But since he was only in a few scenes, total (even his role as the narrator didn’t yield him that many lines), he wasn’t distracting at all. Continue Reading »
My brother likes to push my buttons. When I bring up women’s issues, he tells me to get back to the kitchen. When I bring up Iranian culture, he cracks jokes in a fakey Middle Eastern accent.
I love him anyway.
We’re pretty close. We look alike, family members often confuse our voices on the phone, and we crack jokes to keep each other entertained when things get tense or boring. I feel very blessed to have him, and to have the relationship that we do.
Since high school, I have been striving to reconnect with my Iranian and Muslim identities; he hasn’t shown the same inclination. This isn’t to say that he’s remained the same person since high school: he and his interests have developed and evolved, but they have not done so in a direction that seeks to connect with this half of his ethnic identity. He is just as Iranian as I am in his biological makeup, but his identification doesn’t mirror mine.
by Guest Contributor Neesha Meminger, originally published at Neesha Meminger
This weekend, I was interviewed for a magazine article. Nothing to do with my book, or even writing, for that matter. The topic of the hour was body image. This is a topic I could go on and on and ON about (and have, on several occasions), but I’ll refrain just this once.
Before the interview, all sorts of thoughts went through my head about what I might talk about — will I do the usual issue of weight and body size/shape? Would I go to the more familiar topic of areas of my body I’ve waged war with? Or would I go into the skin shade territory? So many areas to cover (no pun intended), not enough interview time . . .
So, when the lovely interviewer called me, we had a fantastic, lively, friendly discussion. It was fun and hilarious. We were about forty-five minutes through when I realized all I’d talked about was my hair. My hair. Not the usual trilogy: butt, boobs, belly. Not flab, sag, and lumps. Hair. And not body hair, either.
I had no idea what a huge issue hair has been all through my life. But as I talked to Ms. Lovely Interviewer, I realized that as a Sikh girl-child, then young woman, so many battles over control and power in my house were fought around the territory of my hair. I was not allowed to cut it, there were certain hairstyles I could not wear, and there was just so much IMPORTANCE placed on what I did or did not do with my hair. Continue Reading »
Addicted to Race Premium is the premium version of New Demographic’s podcast about America’s obsession with race.
Since this is the public RSS feed, you will receive just a 15-minute preview of the interview.
Why are Asian-Americans seen as a model minority, and why is it problematic to be associated with a so-called “positive” stereotype? How does the type of racial discrimination and prejudice faced by Asian-Americans compare or contrast with that of other people of color? What are the real-world impacts of racism on Asian-Americans, ranging from mental health to romantic relationships? Rosalind S. Chou is co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism.
Rosalind S. Chou is co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism. She spent six years working at a nonprofit camp for at-risk girls before moving to Texas in 2005 for graduate studies in sociology at Texas A&M University and to play rugby for the Austin Valkyries.
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Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of New Demographic, a diversity education firm. Her perspectives on race and diversity have been featured on CNN, MSNBC, NPR, USA Today, and The New York Times.
This weekend, I was interviewed for a magazine article. Nothing to do with my book, or even writing, for that matter. The topic of the hour was body image. This is a topic I could go on and on and ON about (and have, on several occasions), but I’ll refrain just this once. 
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 