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0 pointsCapricornNoble3y ago0 comments

>>>What I wonder though is how much those stories are a part of the average Afro American active culture. Do they grow up reading those books too, or they do so reading Tolkien instead?

I read Tolkien, because my mother was a nerd, and shared her love of sci-fi/fantasy with me. I presume she got her exposure to sci-fi/fantasy at university (graduated 1973), despite attending an HBCU. I really do wonder who introduced her to Tolkien.... I can't say I've ever consumed any "high fantasy"-like stories of African origin.

>>>If the experience of an Afro American child is Marvel Comics, Disney movies, and Tolkien stories, and you continue to exclude them from the characters, it just seems wrong.

This is a bizarre line of thought that has really only emerged in the past ~15 years or so, IMO. Growing up, I never once looked at Sean Connery as James Bond and thought "I can't relate to this guy because his skin is too light." My favorite Marvel character in the early 90s wasn't Blade or Black Panther, it was Cable.

All of this cultural squabbling is the fault of a loud demographic of predominantly-young, emotionally-immature, college-brainwashed intersectionalists, deep in a the Hollyweird bubble. We have members of the black community who are critical of this nonsense, but they are often marginalized by the mainstream. JustSomeGuy on YouTube (a black guy from Chicago) shits all over the "woke" LOTR community: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy089HU5Ksc

Also Eric D. July ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhFvd5vkB8o ) who calls out modern "diversity" characters as "tokenized": they're not actually black/minority characters, they're just the exact same white characters with a lazy skin-color/sexual orientation change. That's why Eric July went and created his own entirely-new comic book universe, which pre-sold $3M+ dollars of comics in just a few weeks. Almost no coverage from mainstream comic websites, and discussion of his success is banned on the major comic sub-Reddits.

>>>And maybe this is my point as well, if you write fantasy, but your experience is American, why wouldn't you include people of all color in your story? But if you did, you'd one hundred percent get some folks come out and say that fantasy stories are European inspired and should only have white people in them.

I think this is a strawman. I've never heard such criticism for Game of Thrones. My understanding is Westeros is based on the War of the Roses period in England, but the world is still built with other regions and non-white cultures (Dothraki = obvious not-Mongolians, etc...). But if they had cast Wesley Snipes as Eddard Stark, there would be a rightful uproar.

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didibus3y ago· 2 in thread

Thanks for your perspective.

I've got some follow up questions if you don't mind.

I understand you don't have issues with stories where there are no black characters. And I totally get that, I don't mind stories where there are no white characters, so the reverse seems true as well.

But my question is, do you mind if there were simply no big budget movies or TV shows to ever be centered around black American characters, or portray black American culture in any way?

Do you feel it's okay to have a large ethnic population and continue to exclusively produce content with only white people and historically white culture in them?

CapricornNobleOP3y ago

>>>do you mind if there were simply no big budget movies or TV shows to ever be centered around black American characters, or portray black American culture in any way?

I think those are strange questions, because they aren't the situation we have in America. We have plenty of entertainment content focused on the black experience. Friday franchise, Shaft franchise, Undercover Brother, Black Dynamite, all those terrible Tyler Perry movies, even some of the classic blaxploitation films such as Coffy (Pam Grier in her prime, 1973) are solid entertainment. So I wouldn't prefer that this stuff not exist.

>>>Do you feel it's okay to have a large ethnic population and continue to exclusively produce content with only white people and historically white culture in them?

Why deprive all the non-white people of their agency? If a non-white culture wants content that better communicates their lived experience, they should produce it themselves. Japan does it. India does it. Those cultures rightly recognize that they don't need some goofy Americans with gender studies degrees to write their stories for them. Stop outsourcing your culture to people who hate you ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt9MKUsKqHk ).

The amazing thing we are seeing lately is the decentralization of content production; people are realizing that they don't have to rely on the weirdos in Hollywood to produce culture for them.

This means the content created by independents needs to stand on its own merits though, it can't coast to success on established star power or well-refined CGI content mills: it needs genuinely good storytelling, compelling characters, innovative but affordable visuals, etc.... And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks. You have mediocre creators trying to separate the buying public from their money by brow-beating people with "if you don't buy my product you're a racist!". The backlash to such tactics was predictable and IMO well-deserved.

We might be better off looking at African storytellers to write uniquely-"black" scifi: http://theblerdgurl.com/comics/the-rise-of-african-comics/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism

didibus3y ago

> Why deprive all the non-white people of their agency? If a non-white culture wants content that better communicates their lived experience, they should produce it themselves

Historically, in the US, they were not allowed to produce it themselves. So many decades went by where they were in fact deprived of their agency.

Not only that, but they were deprived of political, financial and economic agency as well, which means today, they are generally less wealthy, since they missed on decades of opportunities for wealth accumulation.

So in order to produce it themselves today, capital is required, especially if we're talking about big budget production.

The woke argument is that, it seems that some effort from white investors should be made to invest some of their capital to non-white artists, as retribution for all those years where they had their agency taken away.

That's different than the corporatist take, which is simply to appear progressive by checking some diversity boxes in order to get more sales, or protect their brand from backlash or bad press. I reckon that, and it's possible LOTR is of this kind of attempt.

So my question is, do you feel this retribution maybe actually comes with a hidden price? White capital somehow can compromise the work and have clauses that hurt the creative output and maybe ends up making the content worse. Do you feel it isn't necessary? Or do you feel it's a good thing that should help support and kickstart better quality non-white content?

By the way, as I understand, this capital doesn't need to come straight up as budget for a movie production, though it can, but I think it can also be as scholarship, financial aid, talent programs, etc. which can all focus more on non-white artists. It can also be done simply by opening up more roles for non-white artists, which does imply that some characters which maybe were meant to be white or which had non-specified gender/race needs to be made non-white, in order to create more job opportunities for non-white actors for example.

> And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks.

Does it suck any more/less than similar non BIPOC/LGBT content though? I personally don't feel like it does. I feel there's a similar likelihood of content sucking, no matter if it's trying for diversity, is promoting or made by BIPOC/LGBT or if it isn't. The only difference is there's simply more non-BIPOC/LGBT content being made, so it ends up there's more good content that make it past all the crap.

If for any 10 movies, only 1 is actually good, you'd need a lot more attempt at BIPOC/LGPT movies to get some good ones no?

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wizofaus3y ago

> All of this cultural squabbling is the fault of a loud demographic of predominantly-young, emotionally-immature, college-brainwashed intersectionalists,

You are undoubtedly better qualified to have an opinion on such matters than I am, but the article I linked to above suggests your view is not shared by all with strong ties to their African heritage.

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