Thank you C.I. and flushd. There's nothing wrong with seeing this particular cup as 'half-full', but I think that if no one ever had complained, we'd still be looking at two white men in blackface playing Amos and Andy (not to mention Charlton heston and Chuck Conners playing Native Americans).
I'm "startled" by how much it ruffles some folks' feathers to even raise the questions I've raised here.
cicerone,
Yup, there are a lot more minority actors/actresses on TV today. In that you are correct.
I was just stating that I personally still view them as minority actors/actresses for the most part. I don't see them as 'the same'. When a black guy is the star: I notice that he is black. When Jackie Chan is the star: I notice that he is Asian. Perhaps that speaks more about myself than anything else, but I know I'm not the only one.
flushed, We're still in the "growing pain" stage. I'm not sure we will ever have true equality based on personal perceptions.
flushd wrote:cicerone,
Yup, there are a lot more minority actors/actresses on TV today. In that you are correct.
I was just stating that I personally still view them as minority actors/actresses for the most part. I don't see them as 'the same'. When a black guy is the star: I notice that he is black. When Jackie Chan is the star: I notice that he is Asian. Perhaps that speaks more about myself than anything else, but I know I'm not the only one.
I almost started to write that I wished we did have a world where we didn't notice race, but you know what? I don't think I want to live in a "color-blind" society. It's for the same reason as I like the tossed-salad analogy about the racial diversity here, more than the old thing about a 'melting-pot'. A melting pot melds everything into one big homogenous soup. A tossed salad still has every distinct part distinct from the other, and they enhance each other when mixed.
snood, Well put. Our family is like that tossed salad. As a matter of fact, my niece is getting married to a unAsian man next month. Our family is a conglomeration of many races and cultures. I love it, cause during my childhood, we didn't even socialize with the other minorities in our neighborhood.
Sticking with this 'salad' analogy - the trouble with American film and tv in relatio to depicting ethnics is that everyone has already gotten a chance to become familiar with every variety and color and size and mutation of certain vegetables, but they've only been exposed to one or two instances of certain other vegetables. The salads could be so much more interesting.
We need to get writers to create those shows that reflect today's experiences of those tossed salads so common in our society today. Art must reflect the reality of every generation as they occur or they will be lost forever.
*nodding
Bring on the beautiful tossed salads!
flushd- If we follow the proportional representation theory( a ridiculous one) there would be no more than 13% of African Americans on TV. Yet, ALMOST EVERY COMMERCIAL contains black people. It is difficult to find a movie which does not have blacks in it. I already mentioned the Morgan Freeman syndrome. Morgan Freeman, a fine actor, appears in dozens of movies as a token black.
It was highly annoying for me to watch Morgan as Robin Hood's friend in the most recent Robin Hood movie. Gladiator had a black in it. He was, of course, decent, honorable, etc. etc.
I will never forget the complaints made because Arnold Schwartznegger cut off the head of Thula Doom( James Earl Jones) in "Conan the Barbarian"
Political Correctness run amok.
What about reality? Tell it like it is. A very large proportion of the prisoners in the USA are black.
It is difficult to find a black criminal in the movies.
Gordon Gekkos are almost always white.
The drill sargeant or the front line soldier who is black is usually a heroic highly moral type.
Out with Political Correctness. How many black judges can you watch in the movies? How many black judges are there in the movies? The splendid judge in "A Few Good Men" was black. How many blacks are really judges in the JAG?
Artists should portray African Americans as they see them, not as they are told to or pressured to.
If the portrayal is racist then so be it. It speaks far far more to the artist than the subject.
If our constitutional right to free speech protects the artist that covers a statue of the Virgin Mary with feces or the one who places a crucifix in a jar of urine, why not the one who represents African-Americans in a racist, negative manner?
What are the degrees of offensiveness that we will tolerate and how do we categorize them?
The audience for such offense (whether it is racial, religious, sexual orientation in nature) we can hope, will be small, but since art is not seen by anything approaching a wide audience without a commercial hook, why not allow the marketplace to deal with the offensive?
Quote:If our constitutional right to free speech protects the artist that covers a statue of the Virgin Mary with feces or the one who places a crucifix in a jar of urine, why not the one who represents African-Americans in a racist, negative manner?
What are the degrees of offensiveness that we will tolerate and how do we categorize them?
finn
Whether "offense" has been caused someone is not the important or relevant measure here. The lyrics of Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So' may well cause offense but they were not written with the purpose of fomenting hatred or fear of christians. Nor could the song be seen to have any real social consequence leading to, say, the marginalization of christians even where any such intent would be quite absent.
Then again there may actually be a cultural blind spot here. The person who is raised in a poor or lower middle class mostly black neighborhood is likely to think of that as the 'black experience'. I, a middle class WASP, has little contact with anybody from a neighborhood like that, indeed if Albuquerque even has one. My black friends and acquaintances are people I go to church with, now or in the past have worked with, my neighbors. So for me, these people are the 'black experience' which, from my perspective, doesn't look any different from my experience. Those my age are old enough to well remember the injustices of segregation, discrimination, race hatred, but when we compare notes in casual conversation, none would have traded their childhoods for mine.
All this is to say that most of the black people in the movies, in commercials, and/or on television these days look pretty normal and natural to me, at least as much as anybody does. As for that tossed salad, isn't everybody's family pretty multi-ethnic these days? Mine sure is.
Fd'A wrote:
The audience for such offense (whether it is racial, religious, sexual orientation in nature) we can hope, will be small, but since art is not seen by anything approaching a wide audience without a commercial hook, why not allow the marketplace to deal with the offensive?
_________________
Market forces do play largely in controlling all types of bigotry.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:The audience for such offense (whether it is racial, religious, sexual orientation in nature) we can hope, will be small, but since art is not seen by anything approaching a wide audience without a commercial hook, why not allow the marketplace to deal with the offensive?
Interesting factoid from an article I read last year - the largest drop in attendance of movie-goers came when Hollywood dumped the Hays Code in the late 60's.
Quote:In 1965, the year before he [Jack Valenti] left the Johnson administration to assume his plush position as chief mouthpiece for the entertainment industry, 44 million Americans went out to the movies every week. A mere four years later, that number had collapsed to 17.5 million.
[...]
So what happened 38 years ago to drive millions of Americans away from movie theaters? In 1966, Mr. Valenti's Motion Picture Association of America quietly dropped its enforcement of the restrictive old Production Code that Hollywood studios had imposed on themselves since 1930. Then, on Nov. 1, 1968, Mr. Valenti introduced the "voluntary rating system" that continues in force to this day. As he proudly declared in his farewell address to the industry on March 23 of this year: "The rating system freed the screen, allowing movie-makers to tell their stories as they choose to tell them." That new freedom allowed the profligate use of obscene language strictly banned under the Production Code, the inclusion of graphic sex scenes along with near total nudity and, more vivid, sadistic violence than previously permitted in Hollywood movies.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004914
JustWonders wrote:Interesting factoid from an article I read last year - the largest drop in attendance of movie-goers came when Hollywood dumped the Hays Code in the late 60's.
That's not interesting at all, unless you (like the WSJ article you cited) are suggesting that there is a
correlation between the two events.
When will I learn
I should have posted "Interesting (to me) factoid".
Not to hijack this thread, but perhaps you'd share (either here or elsewhere) what you think is the potent, puzzling force which drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going.
TV?
JustWonders wrote:When will I learn
I should have posted "Interesting (to me) factoid".
Not to hijack this thread, but perhaps you'd share (either here or elsewhere) what you think is the potent, puzzling force which drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going.
TV?
Hey that sounds like a great start of a (different) thread!
JustWonders wrote:When will I learn
I should have posted "Interesting (to me) factoid".
Not to hijack this thread, but perhaps you'd share (either here or elsewhere) what you think is the potent, puzzling force which drove more than half of the nation's film fans to break the habit of movie going.
TV?
I don't know. But then I doubt that Michael Medved (the author of that WSJ article -- I should have guessed it) knows. He attempts to eliminate all other possible explanations (e.g. television), but he does a rather weak job of it.
In order to offer an opinion as to the reasons behind this event (if, indeed, this "event" even occurred), I would need to look at far more information than I currently have at hand, but then I suppose that's what differentiates me from Medved.
blatham wrote:Quote:If our constitutional right to free speech protects the artist that covers a statue of the Virgin Mary with feces or the one who places a crucifix in a jar of urine, why not the one who represents African-Americans in a racist, negative manner?
What are the degrees of offensiveness that we will tolerate and how do we categorize them?
finn
Whether "offense" has been caused someone is not the important or relevant measure here. The lyrics of Gershwin's 'It Ain't Necessarily So' may well cause offense but they were not written with the purpose of fomenting hatred or fear of christians. Nor could the song be seen to have any real social consequence leading to, say, the marginalization of christians even where any such intent would be quite absent.
There is a difference, also, I believe, between cultural icons (like Virgin Maries, crucifixes, flags, Blinky Bills, labryses, statues of Buddha etc) no matter how dearly loved and revered and real actual human beings.
Finn d'Abuzz wrote:If our constitutional right to free speech protects the artist that covers a statue of the Virgin Mary with feces or the one who places a crucifix in a jar of urine, why not the one who represents African-Americans in a racist, negative manner?
I haven't noticed anyone in this thread arguing for pro-black or anti-racist censorship, which would no doubt violate the freedom of speech. I have only seen lots of people who disapprove of racial stereotyping. This is an entirely consistent position.
