#hollywood has always been racist and american racism is way worse than the racism of the romans tbh

[giantkillerjack]

People are so shocked that Black folks existed in ancient Rome like my dudes Italy is like 10 feet away from Africa some of it was literally part of the Roman empire don't make me google maps this for you

[wearejapanese]

In 2001, Sarah Silverman told a joke on Late Night With Conan O'Brien that incurred the wrath of Asian American activists and, in a perverse way, also became her breakout moment. The bit involved trying to get out of jury duty, with Silverman recounting a friend's suggestion that she write something "really inappropriate" on the form — something like "I hate chinks." But, Silverman said, she didn't want to cast herself in such an ugly light, so she opted to instead write "I love chinks. Who doesn't?"

The network that aired the show, NBC, apologized for the slur a few days later. But Silverman refused to, opting instead to fight it out with Guy Aoki, the cofounder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, on Politically Incorrect. The comedian, who in more recent years has shifted her perspective on — and moved away from — the sort of meta-bigot comedy that marked her rise, insisted at the time that Aoki was a humorless scold who'd missed the point: "It’s not a racist joke," she said on Politically Incorrect, "it’s a joke about racism."

She never seemed to hear Aoki's own point that a slur is still a slur, and that the reason Silverman settled on the one she did was because it was seen as permissible and more acceptable as the stuff of humor. Looking back at this particular sorry-not-sorry moment, and how little the conversation has progressed since, what really rankles is not just the implication that racism against Asians is less serious and less real. It's the familiar proprietary ease of it all, the sense that it could be gotten away with because Asianness is colonizable enough as an identity that anyone can gain in-group joke privileges. Silverman didn't intend her chipper punchline (“Who doesn’t?”) to also work as an orientalist slogan, but it did, and still does — a handy summation of the fact that a lot of anti-Asian racism gets presented through a lens of warped, acquisitive affection, and then denied or defended on the basis of it.

When Edward Said wrote the book Orientalism in 1978, he focused on the long arc of Europe's paternalistic conceptions of the Middle East. The term has since been expanded in scope into a broadly useful one for the West's selective seeing of the East — especially, for the purposes of this piece of writing, East Asia — with many sins included under its umbrella: exotification, condescension, appropriation, othering, and general treatment of Asianness as a cultural buffet from which people feel welcome to help themselves to whatever they're inclined to take and reject what they aren't interested in.

Orientalism surfaces in the New Age commodification of Eastern spirituality, in the predilection to glom separate cultures into a blurry whole, in the freedom that still seems to be felt in making open declarations about having a fetish for Asian women or dismissing the sexuality of Asian men. And orientalism shows up onscreen — in films, on television, in music videos — with so much more regularity than good faith representations do that pushing back against it has been a steady drumbeat in Asian American activism for decades now. It's a thread that runs through the history of American movies, especially, from the early studio days when trailblazing star Anna May Wong’s career was curtailed by stereotypes up through the present, when the likes of Wes Anderson, Jared Leto, Anna Wintour, and Scarlett Johansson are still providing plenty to fight about.

On one level, the fact that this regular stream of distorted images persists speaks to how unaware creators seem to be about what they're doing, but on another, it shows how little they seem to care. It's not news that orientalism exists, but it still seems like news to many that there's anything wrong with it, or that there is, indeed, a difference between, say, objectifying homage and legitimate cultural exchange. Which might be why it's been so hard to push back.

When racism — in the minds of many — still means open hatred, the idea that it can also come couched in the guise of fandom or fondness is a reality people really don't want to acknowledge. Orientalism is ultimately about power, which may be why it has taken the rise of international markets, and of China in particular, to force Hollywood to try to see the continent through something other than a scrim of Western assumptions.

The most telling thing about the conversations that have followed the release of Wes Anderson's latest film, Isle of Dogs — a movie that, whatever you think of it, is inarguably about Western assumptions about Japan — is the gap between the thoughtful and measuredcriticism (much of it from Asian American writers) and the outraged, outsized response to that criticism online. It's as if the very implication of racial insensitivity is worse than any offense itself could ever be. These commenters were an odd alliance of Anderson devotees and the usual internet complainers who love to call out "identity politics" and "snowflakes," but most, judging from their Twitter avatars, were white men or sentient anime characters.

But Anderson himself, a filmmaker who has always been clumsy with anything to do with race, has functionally described his own feature as orientalist. At the film’s debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February, he explained that he and his regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman had wanted to make a movie about a pack of dogs, and also "something in Japan," and the two ideas were then just combined: "The story could've taken place anywhere, but it came together when we realized it should take place in a fantasy version of Japan."

And it does, in a near-future Japan that's also decidedly analog, and home to a dual-species adventure that takes some of its cues from the work of Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. Most of the acting talent is from the US — the dogs, voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, and Scarlett Johansson, speak English, while the humans speak Japanese, which frequently goes untranslated. Most of Anderson's movies take place in overtly imaginary renditions of actual places, from the outsider's dream of New York (as drawn from J.D. Salinger and back issues of the New Yorker) in The Royal Tenenbaums to the invented Eastern Europe republic of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Stefan Zweig–inspired wonderland where real historical horrors lurk behind whimsical imagery. In that sense, the similarly fictional city of Megasaki in Isle of Dogs, along with its adjoining trash- and canine-dump island, is no different.

What is different is the real-world cultural context: the tradition of Western othering of Japan that Anderson seems blithely indifferent toward, even as he participates in it. Because it's stop-motion, the film uses scaled-down puppets to represent its characters onscreen, but it also diminishes them in more figurative ways, with a gaze that's detached and dispassionate when it comes to most of the humans, aside from 12-year-old Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) and foreign exchange student Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig). Tracy, who leads the resistance against Megasaki's oppressive anti-dog leadership, is the human who gets the bulk of the English-language lines and, with them, the big shows of emotion. She's the American girl brave enough to take initiative when no native Japanese resident dares — a regrettable foil for stereotypes about Asian compliance.

There's no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs' cultural tourism, but it's marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan — taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!). There's a plot development in which poisoned wasabi is hidden away in sushi, and a scientist character named Yoko-ono, who is voiced by Yoko Ono. This all has more to do with the (no doubt intricately designed and decorated) insides of Anderson's brain than it does any actual place. It’s Japan purely as an aesthetic — and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination.

In the wake of Isle of Dogs' opening weekend, there were multiple headlines wondering whether the film was an act of appropriation or homage. But the question is rhetorical — the two aren't mutually exclusive, and the former is not automatically off the table just because the creator’s intent was the latter. More importantly, it's possible for Isle of Dogs to be both a charming story about humanity's rapport with canines (try saying the title out loud) and an act of erasure; it can showcase both what its director has traditionally done well and how he's opted to lean directly into one of his most evident blind spots.

The online reaction to criticism of the film has been filled with blind spots, too, with people unfairly painting the discussion as a call for cultural purity, insisting that "actual Asians" aren't bothered by any of this, and brandishing cowriter Kunichi Nomura — whom Anderson brought on to advise on cultural specifics as well as provide the voice of his villain — as some kind of human shield against this entire topic. In the space between these two sides of the conversation, you can see how threatening some people find the suggestion that their intent might not matter as much as the reaction of those seeing themselves onscreen. It's not the idea of creating a fantasy Japan that's Anderson's problem — it's the underlying sense that he wouldn't be able to conceive of a real one.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Lena Horne, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump

Back in the Golden Era of Hollywood* white folks would point to Lena Horne as an example of how America wasn’t racist, America offered opportunities for everyone.

“Look at her!  She’s a movie star!  She appears in big movies!

“How could she do that if we were racists?”

Every society, no matter how stratified or hidebound, has space for a few socially approved outliers.

You can always afford one rigidly controlled exception to the rule, who can paradoxically serve as both a reassurance that there’s room for others and as an easily dismissed distraction should they arouse too much or the wrong kind of attention.

Lena Horne was an exceptionally beautiful singer-actress in a time and place where beautiful singe-actresses were the norm.  She appeared in dozens of major movies from big studios, and was well respected by her co-workers and peers.

And she was -- or rather the role she occupied in America was -- totally fake.

Ms Horne never had a substantial role or dramatic scene in any movie that did not feature a predominantly African-American cast.

The big budget musicals she appeared in, the ones aimed at mainstream audiences -- white audiences -- typically cast her as a specialty number:  In the middle of a big show within the movie, the camera would pan over to her standing in front of a curtain where she would belt out a show tune.

And white Americans would say to foreigners who criticized the US for its racism, “What about Lena Horne? Look at all the movies she appears in!”

She appeared as an appendix, a wholly superfluous addition whose presence or absence didn’t affect the film one whit.

Her musical numbers in mainstream (i.e., white) musicals were filmed and edited into the final picture so they could be cut out!

See, there were parts of the US that did not care for Ms Horne’s skin color one little bit.

And when her movies played there -- snip-snip.

Out she came.

That way no lily white audiences ever had to be offended that a n[FL play]er dared sully their lily white screen.

Why was she in there in the first place?

As a sop to the African-American community, to lure them into the theaters so they could have five minutes enjoying a performance by somebody who looked like them.

And to a lesser degree, as a sop to those few white Americans who, while not exactly “woke”, were at least stirring restlessly in their sleep.  “Hey, we can’t be all bad if we let a colored girl sing in a movie, can we?”

[SIDEBAR:  You wanna see what Ms Horne was capable of, track down Stormy Weather, an all African-American musical that I rank as the 3rd best movie musical ever made, trailing narrowly behind Singin’ In The Rain and The Band Wagon.]

Barack Obama was 21st century white America’s Lena Horne.

“Hey, how can we be racist if we elected a black president?” was white code for “We want you black people to shut up about the injustices you have suffered and continue to suffer.”

White America wanted Obama to be their Oreo:  Black on the outside but white on the inside.

They wanted him to champion white values and interests.

Not American values and interests.

White values and interests.

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about the disproportionate justice meted out against African-Americans.”

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about inner city communities that are still reeling from the effects of hundreds of years of dehumanization.”

“Hey, we elected a black president…”

”…so we don’t have to do anything about addressing the needs and concerns of people who have been deliberately and consciously excluded from the American dream.”

No, Obama was supposed to be the magic cure-all, the ultimate placebo that would get those pesky minorities to stop complaining so white folks could like their lives in ease and comfort and not have to worry about how non-whites were being treated.

Just stand up against that curtain, Barack, and sing…

But Barack Obama didn’t do that.

Barack Obama said, “Hey, we still have a problem if police accost an African-American in his own home and accuse him of being a burglar even when he can prove he lives there.”

And ya know what?

We do have a problem if that can happen.

Because in order to reach the relatively mild level of just getting falsely arrested by a police office who doesn’t believe your identity, we first have to undercut your basic rights as a human being and as a citizen of the United States.

We have to pre-judge you on the color of your skin, to assume you are intrinsically criminal and hence worthy only of suspicion and distrust.

We have to assume you are not educated enough to hold a job that would pay enough for you to buy the home we’re accusing you of burglarizing.

Many white people voted for Obama because they wanted to shut up minority critics.

And to their surprise and horror, Obama basically said, “No, they’ve got a point:  There still is a lot we need to work on to make this nation what is claims it wants to be.”

White people lost their shit over that.

Things got worse as the #BlackLivesMatter movement started.

White folks really lost their shit over that!

Most white people do not hate minorities…

…but they do fear them.

They fear minority crime, but not in the way one thinks.

White people are the biggest criminal threat to other white people.

Rather, they fear minorities because they ultimately fear a loss of status.

As I’ve noted previously, white identity defines itself by whom it excludes.

Barack Obama had one white American and one black Kenyan parent.

In the eyes of white America, that made him black.

And to many white Americans, it made him Kenyan as well.

White Americans define themselves by whom they exclude, never by whom they include.

Also as noted previously, despite its claims to be a classless society, America is very much a class-oriented society, one in which white people were guaranteed at the very least working class status by the simple fact non-whites were automatically regulated to lower class status.

When non-whites achieved skills and education that enabled them to climb out of their lower class status, they were only allowed to climb to higher status within their own communities.

An African-American lawyer might be able to plead a case in a white court, but only for a black client, never a white one.

Middle and working class whites feared losing their status; middle class whites feared slipping down to working class, working class feared becoming lower class.

Only if there was a built-in cushion, a concrete floor they were guaranteed they could not fall below, did whites feel comfortable.

(The astute reader will note this also applies to matters of gender, and orientation, and religion; we focus on race in this post because it’s the most obvious example, but it’s far from the only one.)

That floor was a ceiling for the minorities trapped below it, and the cracks that allowed some minorities to rise above it terrified whites who feared they’d slip through it.

Laws and customs and traditions and practices that kept minorities at arm’s length were the spackling that plugged those cracks.

Police and law enforcement and the judicial and penal systems were part of those plugs.

Minorities were treated more harshly, and penalized more severely, that whites who committed similar crimes.

Whites justified this by saying minorities were, by nature or nurture, more dangerous…more violent…more criminal than mainstream (read “white”) culture, and as such were inherently deserving of such treatment.

A white college student caught with a gram of cocaine would likely get A Very Strong Talking To by the judge and perhaps even have to perform some token community service, but a ghetto kid with a joint?  

Five to ten.

But as whites excluded more and more people from their group -- their own children and grandchildren from matings with non-whites -- the number and voice of minorities grew.

#BlackLivesMatter quite literally and explicitly means “Black lives matter as much as all other lives” but the white community couldn’t have that.

First they deliberately lied, and said #BlackLivesMatter meant “only black lives matter’.

I’ve said elsewhere that some people project so much they should really pay union dues to IATSE. #BlackLivesMatter is a response to the “only white lives matter” attitude found among too many people in law enforcement and the judicial system.

Second, whites claimed #BlackLivesMatter was anti-police (no, it only calls for the police to treat all persons with the same degree of courtesy and respect).

They framed that fake anti-police stance as a desire among the African-American community to wreak harm and havoc on innocent whites (though, as noted elsewhere, how innocent are you if you help maintain a system that harms others for your benefit?).

Nobody ever posted #AllLivesMatter or anything like it prior to #BlackLivesMatter making its first appearance, yet the sentiment found in #BlackLivesMatter can be traced back to the earliest calls for racial justice in this land.

Finally, whites promoted #BlueLivesMatter, a completely bogus straw man argument that places the lives and safety of the police above those of common citizens.

Whitey, please…

Being a police officer is a stressful and dangerous job -- though far from the most dangerous job in America (you wanna risk your life on a daily basis, become a roofer).

Being a police officer isn’t even among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America -- and most law enforcement on the job deaths are the result of traffic accidents (not surprising considering how much time the average officer spends on the road).

Being a police officer means one is entrusted with an awesome and terrible responsibility:  The authority to carry a lethal weapon and to use it against anyone the officer deems to be a clear and present danger to the lives of others.

That is absolutely an authority police officers should have…

…but not all police officers today are worthy of that responsibility.

There is nothing wrong or outrageous about African-American and other minority communities insisting the country’s police officers treat all people they encounter with the same courtesy and respect.

There will be people of all races and genders and ages who will respond to the police with defiance, perhaps up to and including armed resistance.

Fine, that’s why we give the police their authority to carry and use a weapon.

But they need to approach every situation based on what the person is doing at that moment and not whether whether they think or they fear the person may do them harm.

We are employing them -- in every sense of the word -- to put their lives on the line, and to risk their safety in order to preserve the public safety.

And most times, this means waiting until you know what the person you’re dealing with intends to do before acting yourself.

Frankly, if you’re inclined to shoot someone because you’re afraid they might do something, police work is not the career for you.

If unarmed, unresisting whites were treated as callously at so many unarmed and unresisting minorities are, if police gunned down a 12 year old white child without warning while playing in a public park the way they killed Tamir Rice, the white people in this country would go berserk and demand systemic changes top to bottom.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

If Obama was the homeopathic placebo that white people thought would give them the “Get Out Of Racism FREE” card they longed to have, Trump was to be their purge to drive all the toxins they perceived out of the system and to restore them to their previous lost status.

Make American Great Again was their motto.

And yet when you asked them what that meant, it never referred to real measurable metrics such as changes in purchasing power, increases in productivity, spiraling health care costs, etc.

It always came back to re-establishing a mythical golden social order, where whites felt safe and secure in their (disguised) middle and working class status, and never feared dropping below the concrete floor that held so many others down.

Several years ago I wrote about the fast approaching year 2048.

That’s the year the census bureau projects the number of people identified as “white” Americans will drop to 49.99%.

The year the white majority vanishes…

…replaced by one large minority…

…but a minority nonetheless.

Knowing this day approaches, we will see more and more acting out by white people.

Uglier and uglier.

Sicker and sicker.

Deadlier and deadlier.

In a perverse way, we are lucky to have Trump now.

A competent racist demagogue could do far more damage.

He will taint the white political waters for at least a decade.

And that will shave white majority status ever narrower.

Remember, don’t feel sorry for whites; they are causing this by excluding their own descendants.

What they do to their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will eventually be visited upon their own community.

The day they fear will finally arrive.

They won’t be anything special.

They’ll just be like everybody else.

E pluribus unum = “Out of the many, one.”

Maybe that will finally come about when there is no longer an arbitrary racial barrier to divide us by class.

 © Buzz Dixon

 * Well, post-WWII era Hollywood; the real golden era ran from the end of WWI to the start of WWII.

[frankenbaby]

When are we going to move past this?

I saw the photo of Zazie Beetz as Domino last night, and I absolutely loved it. I thought, this girl looks glorious!! And I loved the design so much. The vitiligo giving a reversal of white pigmentation on a woman of colour suits the name domino way more than the black on white of the comics. I've always enjoyed the comic character, but this felt fresh. I felt really good about this design, and naively expected that people would share these feelings. Once again, I put too much faith in people. I believed the best and got the worst. The comments were full of thinly veiled racism, some outright racism and a lot of "she shouldn't have a 70's Afro", "she should look like the comic!" and "I hope that they kill her off so that the REAL Domino can come along in the sequel." All idiotic comments, all frightened little white boys that can't handle progressive change. But it was that "REAL Domino" comment that really stuck with me. It remained so much of the Jesse Eisenberg Lex Luthor Jr backlash. It just further solidifies the idiocy of the purist and elitist mentality of certain comic book fans. They believe a character has to look exactly like the comic counterpart. Which in itself is pure stupidity, since it's NOT the comic, it's a separate version inspired by the comics, as all comic adaptations are. It is also impossible to make a character look exactly like a comic book character when costumes and appearances change and evolve constantly in comics. And these fairweather "fans", who get most of their comic book knowledge from wikis, Best-Of graphic novel lists and cartoons, their naivety screams at us. Because for long-term comic book fans, redesigns and big changes were just par for the course for such a long time, that even the vaguest hint at source material was enough to excite us. We long accepted that Hollywood couldn't, or wouldn't directly adapt our comics, so we went along for the ride. Like Singer's leather clad X-Men, Keanu Reeve's American, black haired Constantine, Perlman and Del Toro's cocky, kitten obsessed, lovesick Hellboy, Sam Raimi's organically webbed Spider-Man amongst many others, we were accustomed to change and despite a few bitter comments here and there, we accepted them, because we were grateful we were getting them at all. Comic to screen "accuracy" is still fairly new. And these accuracies are still tenuous at best, but to the Layman, sure, Marvel are 100% comic accurate with their movies (they're not, but that's another conversation). So if Marvel can do it, why can't Fox? My question is, if Fox can have so much success with so many changes, why are Marvel so afraid to do the same? Why did we get Peter Parker in what felt more like a Miles Morales story? Why couldn't we have an Asian ancient one? But I'm getting away from my point. You see, I've been a fan of superheroes since before I can really remember, since I was the kid running around in a homemade Batman costume with ears that could never stay standing, the kid who got his mom to attach a cape to his Superman pyjamas so he could leap off the furniture trying to fly. I've followed and loved movies, especially superheroes, for decades. I still don't feel spoiled. I'm not jaded and greedy. I am so thankful that I get to live in a time where I can go see an Antman movie, were Wonder Woman is breaking cinematic records, and where movies like Aquaman are on the horizon. I don't get mad that Thanos' design looks a little too campy, I'm happy that artistic license allowed a director to somehow make the most original and yet most comic accurate Batman to date, I'm happy that the same artistic license allows elements from several decades of stories to be incorporated into the Avengers storylines. I'm grateful, not because it could be worse, but because it's already pretty damn good. And it gets hard to feel happy about how good we've got it when you wish to wade into an ocean of likeminded people and find yourself in a vat of acid. Because people just can't accept change. They have to have it their way or no way at all. If they can't enjoy it, nobody can. And to hell with these people. Damn their narrow-minded, racist, sexist bullshit. I'm done responding. I'm done arguing. I want to turn down the volume on these idiots until their voices disappear. Because I'm all for free speech, but I am not here for hate. I will not support or condone their ignorance. They can speak as freely as they want, but I'm done listening. I just want to enjoy my movies and live my life. I'll be up here on the bridge, walking straight over the trolls as the river rises around their feet and eventually sweeps them away.

[newstechreviews]

The killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade have once again brought the urgent need for racial justice to the forefront of conversation in America. Wide-scale protests against racism and police brutality as well as civic unrest have made it impossible for the nation (and the world) to ignore the consequences of a long history of racism and racist violence. As many people confront hard truths that black Americans have faced daily in this country, the need for education about the history of the long and ongoing fight for racial justice is critical.

While there are many worthwhile books about race and anti-racism, there are also plenty of resources to be found in other mediums, like film, with much to teach viewers about this history. Below, Ashley Clark, Director of Film Programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and his colleague Jesse Trussell, BAM’s Repertory and Specialty Film Programmer, recommend, in their own words, a dozen feature films and documentaries that help contextualize the current moment.

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

“A lot of these films were works of art, but they were also very importantly used as political agitprop themselves,” says Trussell of Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 historical drama drawn from the Algerian War. “Revolutionaries around the world studied The Battle of Algiers almost like a textbook for how you could potentially have this armed resistance within different spaces, and that idea frequently crosses over to this moment that we’re talking about, where it’s art, it’s political, it’s both an organizing tool and a personal reflection—it’s all of these things at once. It’s a real hallmark of this revolutionary kind of cinema.”

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)

“This documentary is about a 19-year-old Black Panther leader from Chicago who was one of the great inspiring speakers of the 20th century and was cut down in his youth by the FBI and the Chicago police department,” Trussell says. “It directly gets back to this idea of the ways that black dissent and black protest has been destroyed and bodies have been murdered and that process keeps repeating itself over and over again. The film isn’t that easy to [find], which speaks to the fact that with so much of the history of black radical cinema on-screen, it’s not always as easy as going to Netflix and queuing up five films in a row. These are frequently films that were suppressed, that have had secondary or minor distribution—and that’s a major part of the narrative of black radical cinema.”

Where to watch: Amazon Prime, Films for Action

Blacks Brittanica (1978)

The documentary Blacks Britannica, commissioned by PBS in Boston in 1978, examines racism through the lens of black, working-class Brits and includes interviews with several black activists. “It was American-produced, but it was heavily censored in the U.S. and banned outright in the U.K.,” explains Clark. Clark and Trussell make the point that “work that is truthful is often suppressed. The international language is often suppressed.”

Where to watch: YouTube

Handsworth Songs (1986)

“There are a bunch of films from the late ’70s and ’80s that are really important documentaries about civil unrest and police brutality in the U.K.,” Clark says. “The key one is called Handsworth Songs, directed by John Akomfrah and the Black Audio Film Collective.” The film, described when screened at BAM last year as a “freeform documentary mosaic,” uses the 1985 Handsworth riots in Birmingham, England, to examine broader racial tensions in the country.

Where to watch: YouTube

Do the Right Thing (1989)

“The film begins as a languid comedy set on the hottest day of the year, but the tensions build and it ends up in mass civil unrest, kicked off by Spike Lee himself—[Mookie], the character he plays—throwing a garbage can through the window after Radio Raheem [Bill Nunn] is choked by the cops,” Clark says of Lee’s acclaimed 1989 movie. “It’s really interesting to go back and read the responses to the film at the time, which seemed to focus more on the destruction of property than the death of Radio Raheem—and that was, ostensibly, liberal critics. It’s amazing to see those patterns repeat now, specifically in the discourse of people focusing more on the destruction of property than on lives that are lost. The film also ends with contrasting quotes on the use of violence as self-defense vs. the use of non-violence with Malcom [X] and Martin [Luther King, Jr.].”

Clark adds that Do The Right Thing is also timely “precisely because it ends on a moment of irresolvable tension, because this is not a problem that can be solved easily. That’s what I think elevates it above so many other films of its time that try to examine [the same themes], because many put a white character as a proxy—I’m thinking of things like Mississippi Burning, which came out the year before—so much of the Hollywood way was to put a white crossover character in the way to make it palatable or to force a clearly legible reading. Do the Right Thing doesn’t do that. And for that particular reason, I think it’s the ultimate film for this moment. Its relevance continues to grow, if anything.”

Where to watch: YouTube, Vudu, Google Play, iTunes, Amazon Prime

Malcom X (1992)

“To return to Spike Lee, Malcolm X, which is a big film from 1992, integrates footage of the Rodney King beating into the main credits,” Clark says of the film, for which Denzel Washington received an Oscar nomination. “Lee is someone who has always been unafraid to integrate and intercut extremely contemporary things, which at the time can sometimes feel a little bit like he’s overdoing it or he’s too on-the-nose, but then the longer that racism goes unaddressed or gets worse, the more timely and powerful his films seem to become.” (Lee employs a similar tactic in 2018’s BlacKkKlansman, which concludes with footage of the prior year’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.)

Where to watch: Netflix, YouTube, iTunes, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime

The Glass Shield (1994)

“There’s a really great film by the great filmmaker Charles Burnett called The Glass Shield, which is about a young black man [Michael Boatman] going into the LAPD with sort of high hopes about what he can do there and then seeing, from inside, the nature of the systemic corruption and how that can even infect him as a black man inside this space,” Trussell says. He adds that the movie, made a few years after the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the four officers involved in the beating of Rodney King, addresses the concept of “policing as something that crosses all color lines within the police forces themselves.”

Where to watch: YouTube, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, iTunes

Fruitvale Station (2013)

Clark finds Ryan Coogler’s 2013 film about Oscar Grant interesting “because it was very concerned with upending the idea of the young black man as ‘thug’ stereotype. It was a very sensitive portrait of this man on the last day of his life, and that felt like a very necessary corrective, given how black people are so often portrayed in the media. Obviously, Coogler has gone on to do great things and much bigger things [like Creed and Black Panther], but that’s a film that’s not spoken of so much. It’s a really notable attempt to breathe life back into someone who was taken—and that’s valuable.”

Where to watch: Tubi, YouTube, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime, iTunes

Selma (2014)

Ava DuVernay’s historical drama about the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Marches, starring David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, Jr., “is obviously a period film, but something that really struck me about it was how focused it was on the process of direct action,” says Clark. “While there are a couple of big Hollywood moments, a lot of the film takes place in back rooms and churches, with people talking about how to make this happen. That was only a few years ago, but it seems strikingly relevant.”

Where to watch: Youtube, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime, iTunes

13th (2016)

Clark calls 13th, also by DuVernay, “a really solid documentary that got to the heart of the origins of America’s carceral state.” The briskly paced movie traces the mass incarceration of black men back to the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865. In an interview with TIME at the time of its release, DuVernay explained why she crammed so much history into a brief watch: “It’s hard enough to get a national conversation in America going about race in a meaningful way, that’s not in reaction to something bad happening.”

Where to watch: Netflix

I Am Not Your Negro (2017)

“I Am Not Your Negro, by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, is a propulsive documentary about James Baldwin, his writings and his times,” says Clark. In her review of the film, which includes many clips of Baldwin and narration by Samuel L. Jackson, reading an unfinished book project by Baldwin, TIME’s critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote that “Peck’s aim seems to be to reintroduce Baldwin and his way of thinking to the world. Not that Baldwin is forgotten, but sometimes we need a bold red arrow to help us redirect our thinking, especially in a media world as cluttered and noisy as ours.”

Where to watch: Youtube, Google Play, Vudu, Amazon Prime, iTunes

Whose Streets? (2017)

This documentary, says Clark, is “essentially about the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Ferguson, a record of the demonstrations. Its filmmakers [Sabaah Foloyan and Damon Davis], who were there on the ground, fashioned a very raw, boots-on-the-ground record of activism and community building in process.” Adds Trussell: “It does an incredible job of spotlighting the women and queer people who were central organizers in that movement and making sure that their stories are not erased from the history of Black Lives Matter.”

Where to watch: Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube, Google, Vudu

[scarffile0-blog]

Roseanne Should Know Being Racist is a Reverse Facial

Listen. I don’t use the word “ugly” but to describe people who are hatemongers. Racists are hatemongers and their outside seem to reflect it, as their insides spill out in the form of faces that are meant for radio: audio only please. It’s like your spirit just decays from all the prejudice you make it engage in. Like your entire being wrinkles from the core.

Note: if you are going to comment about me face-shaming someone, and kumbaya and high road, save your words. I don’t care. Calling racists on their ugliness is my form of resistance. Carry on. You’re welcome.

I’ve already talked about Steve Bannon at length. His soul rot keeps showing up in a way that his visage always looks like it’s on the brink of melting. Like halfway through melting, it found some resolve so the process paused. Seriously. Read my blog post on: Steve Bannon’s Face is the Physical Embodiment of Soul Rot. If shame had a human form, it would be him.

But the thing that kills me about racists is that their hate is so illogical, they end up feeling bold enough to call themselves superior. Or talk about what other people look like. Today’s asshat is Roseanne Barr, the Mother of  Proud Redneck Americans. It’s like the first MAGA hat was a fitted New Era and they used her head size as prototype.

Anywho, today, Roseanne felt herself feeling froggy and decided to tweet:

VJ refers to Valerie Jarrett, President Barack Obama’s senior advisor and powerful Black woman.

The sad excuse for a homo sapien, Roseanne, whose show just got rebooted almost just so she can spew her love for Cheeto Satan, fixed her fingers to compare a woman who is widely respected to an ape.

And I got mad. I was livid. For logic reasons. Even if one of my favorite pastimes wasn’t defending Black women for troglodytes. Let’s just talk facts here.

Roseanne making fun of someone’s looks is like Donald Trump aka Cheeto Satan calling someone’s hair “ridiculous.” Like, girl, you got ALL THE NERVE in the world. So much nerve. Peak nerve. Ultra nerve. The thing about racists is that their mirrors also lie to them. Or their eyes get cloudy with self esteem cataracts. Racism is a reverse facial and ain’t no amount of face peels or vitamin C serums to cure the effects of harboring so much hate.

N’an one of yall living right.

This fool trying to come for what Valerie looks like should let you know how truly STUPID racists are. Ma’am. You cannot challenge ANYBODY’S LOOKS. You just don’t have the range or the right. You coulda shut the entire fuck up for free. But alas… what’s a queen to a goblin?

Racists be out here looking like God put them together with spare parts and wanna have the nerve to talk about what other people look like. As if God had a few rough drafts He just let out cuz He wanted to see something real quick. I DON’T HAVE TIME. But I got time.

And the internet had time too. People been dragging her for her eyebrows since this morning.

I took to Facebook to fight the air and you know LuvvNation is undefeated. They had some things to say:

Sue: Whaaaat? Valerie Jarrett is just so poised and lovely all the time and Roseanne looks like someone who just finished cleaning out the garage.

Nicole: Sue, I think you’re being generous. She looks like she lives in the garage.

Maxine: Rosanne outchea walking around looking like a leaky bag of curdled milk. FOH

Aprill: The fact that it took her decades of continued plastic surgery to achieve an average face definitely makes this more appalling.

Lisa: Roseanne trying to insult somebody, out here looking like unwashed first cousin sex, high fructose corn syrup, and prices dropping at WalMart.

Biafra: Ol popped can of biscuits, bottom of the Cracker Barrell looking ass. Miss Mississippi Methhead looking ass.

Eva: When, after years of surgery, your neck still looks like lasagna edges, can you really talk about anyone? I say nah.

Mak: Roseanne looks like a pile of warm mayonnaise lightly sprinkled with dollar store black pepper.

Kara: often with a teeth-to-tattoo ratio that is not favorable…. 🤔

Shel: Oh dear, that teeth to tattoo ration describes my meth infested town to a T(eethless)! I repeatedly state that if you go into a bar, collectively the entire place has a full set of teeth.

Jasmine: Roseanne has a lot of nerve talking about anyone. Out here looking like curdled milk and melted candle wax. Stand down, madame.

Tata: Every racist I’ve ever fought with in Facebook comments or in real life be looking like they on their last horcrux

Dee: Sit yo’ refurbished lookin ass down!!!

Noelle: The thinner the lips, the worse the opinions…

Lana: My momma calls them Chicken Lipped Bigots.

Tanya: I found out Katie Hopkins is a few months older than me. I saw her picture and presumed they were talking about dog years not human years cuz clearly the years have not been good to her. She is proof positive that God don’t like ugly.

Katie Hopkins. This is a woman who SHOULD have a winning personality. For reasons.

Lynn: Look, I’m a full 10 YEARS older than her. I refuse to believe that she’s not a walking Dorian Grey portrait of some spectacular looking Hollywood actress.

Tanya: I saw her picture and was like what in the AARP geriatric dog yeared hell?!?

Shaquane: It’s always the sponge bob shaped, no lip having, stringy haired, yellow teeth having racist who have the most to say about someone’s look. You can’t be ugly and racist, pick a struggle.

Tisha: I swear God put those people together at 11:58pm on Saturday night cause he thought he was done early and was probably out celebrating when one of the Angels tapped Him on the shoulder and reminded Him and he was like “oh crap….I’ll just throw all these left over parts together and hope for the best

H Loretta: Kate Hopkins and Roseanne Barr out here lookin like a chewed on toothpick and sour milk got the nerve to be outchea talking people?

Isis: Be looking like relatives of the Crypt Keeper but always have something nasty and mean to say about other and how others look.

Dayyanah: Bannon, for one. Steve out here lookin like some hybrid produce… the looks of a potato and the shelf life of an avocado. 😒

Elia: Seems like it’s always the ones with little or nothing to offer that blab about everyone else being mean/ugly/inferior.

Patrick: Those racists don’t use 23andMe. More like 22andGodOnlyKnows.

Whittley: All the way outchea smelling like every thing wrong with wet dreams and built like sofas from a 90s sitcom. Lookin’ roughed up, ran through, beat down, full o’ funk, and sittin’ low. Just sad. Sad, sad, SAD.

Kendhra: Oh fa’sho. Looking like they were created at a hot dog factory.

Morgan: Lookin like a dusty leather bag on clearance talmbout ~superior genes.

I’m just saying. Today has been for one thing and one thing only: drag Roseanne. Nothing else I put on the list got done.

Wait. I did finish this blog post so I can cross that out too. And since it was essentially to drag Roseanne, DOUBLE CROSS OUTS!

All this dragging did serve a purpose, cuz with the entire internet on their tail, ABC had to act quick. They swiftly cancelled that foresaken reboot of hers. Roseanne is out of a job because she wrote a wrong ass check that her loud mouth could not cash.

If you need me, I’ll be over here cackling like a drunk seal. Sometimes, things go right. Roseanne losing these coins made today go right. Shoutout to Channing Dungey, the president of ABC Entertainment, who also happens to be a Black woman. She is now officially an Apollo legend for her work.

Y’all be blessed.

Source: https://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2018/05/roseanne-racism-rot.html

[ethelbertpaul444-blog]

6 Modern Countries With Shockingly Backwards Views

Racism and prejudice are as American as apple pie and mass shootings. We like to think that some of those foreign countries we incessantly make fun of might be more refined neighbourhoods. What could possibly be wrong with a nation that yields its citizens universal healthcare and paid parental leave? Well, if you happen to belong to one of the minority groups those countries have arbitrarily chosen to hate, you’re about to find out. 6 In Japan, Some Common Professions Are Goal As Subhuman Garbage collectors are criminally underappreciated everywhere, but Japan takes it to the next position. Sure, you might have a few strong messages if your bin goes skipped, but Japanese sanitation laborers are ostracized simply for subsisting. They — along with other “unclean” works, like butchers and morticians — are categorized as burakumin . Shintoism and Buddhism consider them spiritually tainted, which left them at the bottom of the social totem pole for centuries. They’re sometimes called hinin ( literally “nonhuman” ), and the period for the lowest burakumin , eta , is translated into “abundance of filth.” A 19th-century legal document declares that any eta who committed a crime could be killed freely by samurai, because “an eta is worth one-seventh of an ordinary person.” You ever had someone whip out a calculator and calculate your worth mathematically? It’s hurtful.( We had some harsh math teachers .) Utagawa Kuniyoshi At least the school board took our surface on that “expulsion via samurai” debacle. div > Read Next 6 Things Hollywood Always Gets Wrong About Being A Teenager Despite many attempted alleviates, sexism against burakumin and their descendants persists. Burakumin are shunned by civilization and often forced to live in their own communities, which are inundated with hate forward. Indices of burakumin communities and calls originated circulating in the ‘7 0s and were soon proscribed, but some of those schedules have lived to this day, and people use them to screen everything from possible employees to future in-laws. Hinder in mind, they’re not just checking to see if ( breath ) their daughter is wedding a garbage man. Anyone who has ever been relevant to one is off-limits. That’s about 50 percent of the Japanese population. It’s like an part person of Emily Gilmores. Things are coming a bit better. One high-profile buraku activist does beings are contacting “the organizations activities” about discrimination more, and hate discussion constitutions are starting to be enforced. But to this day, if a buraku is asked what they do for a living, it’s common to lie — not out of pity, but to protect their own children. Nesnad/ Wikimedia Commons Which may have gotten much easier, since one industry is very open to burakumin : the Yakuza. Hug your local sanitation worker. 5 In Germany, Racist Stereotypes of Asians Are( Literally) Reinforced After gale up with some serious egg on its front thanks to that entire Holocaust thing, Germany became a quite progressive place. Today, culture and education is influenced by various categories of all-inclusive programs suited to its multicultural citizenship, about 20 percent of whom are foreign-born. One radical that isn’t quite so well-represented? East Asians. It’s hard to get an accurate count, since about half of Germany’s two million “Asian” citizens are from the Countries of the middle east( which is indeed part of Asia, but still ), but there are at most one million Asian-Germans in a country of 82 million people. Having apparently figured “what they can’t look won’t hurt ’em, ” Germany has become very cool with “re making fun of” Asians. In happening, they give out apportions for it. Exclusively, for this, an ad for a Wagner concert by Japanese conductor Kent Nagano. Scholz& Friends Berlin All the pomp and culture of the concert as reimagined by a morning zoo DJ. div > Yes, that’s Richard Wagner himself reimagined as your least-favorite uncle. This ad would provoke a tsunami of pique in the U.S ., but Germans predominantly didn’t maintenance. The one group of beings that did, a Berlin advertising organization called the Art Directors Club, awarded the ad a gold prize that time. Their spokesman said the ad “[ is] attractiveness and odd and presents openness and multiculturalism, ” and announced it “an excellent posting that goes beyond cultures to constitute a great work and that extremely strikingly and succinctly demonstrates Asian culture.” We’re gonna hazard a guess that the Art Directors Club doesn’t include a lot of Asians. 4 All Jews Are Welcome In Israel( Except Ethiopians ) div> In 1977, Israel decided to bring over 56,000 Jews from Ethiopia, and then gave them like a trendy domesticated that turned out to be more labour than they’d negotiated for. Thirty-five years after they were forced into ghettos and isolated from mainstream Israeli life, numerous canvas experienced Ethiopian Jews were dead last-place on the roster of desirable employees — 75 percent of non-immigrant Israelis wouldn’t allow their children to marry one, and fewer than 50 percentage reinforced mixed classrooms. Oh, and in 2016, Israel’s top police official said that it’s natural for police to be more suspicious of Ethiopian Jews ,~ ATAGEND as their “community is statistically involved in atrocity more than others.” Sound familiar? div > In 1996, it was discovered that all the blood Ethiopian Jews bequeathed to Magen David Adom( Israel’s equivalent of the Red Cross) was calmly destroyed ,~ ATAGEND for fear of HIV infection. Blood donation has been a hot-button issue for Ethiopian Jews ever since. They were only granted permission to donate blood without restrictions in 2017 . It gets worse. A 2012 film revealed that Ethiopian Jewish gals were forced to make contraceptives if they wanted to keep their healthcare. Some didn’t even know what they were being given. As a reaction, Ethiopian immigrants’ birth rate fell by half in one decade. You’d think that, as a beings, Israelis would be a little less pleasant with the relevant recommendations of eugenics. Benny Voodoo/ Wikimedia Commons Proving once again the almost infinite dominance of humans to not read a damn thing from their experiences. 3 In The UK, Poles Are Viewed As Job-Taking “Vermin” We’ve all heard foolish gags about the Polish for reasonableness we never quite understood, but they’re deadly serious in the UK. A 2014 examine reported that 81 percentage of UK Poles digested physical or oral insult, or knew somebody who had. In 2013, 585 beings were arrested for hate crimes against the Polish. This outburst of antagonism seems to stem from Poland’s entrance into the EU in 2004, after which Poles began immigrating to the UK en masse — though not quite as massively as the tabloids would have you believe. The Sun formerly claimed that an entire Polish metropolitan up and moved to the UK. The metropoli indicted, likely on the grounds that anyone who’s ever been to a city council session knows how hard it is to get an part township to do anything, much less physically uproot. This paranoia about foreign workers infiltrating the country and making everyone’s positions is at least in part what contributed significantly to Brexit. After the vote, laminated placards that speak “Leave the EU/ No more Polish vermin” were found in Cambridgeshire. div > Laminated, “theyre saying”! That means they were super serious . Kathleen Gaynor Youve gotta be genuinely committed to jingoistic hatred to take that shit to a print shop. 2 South Korea Has A Gravely Shambled Up View Of People With Dark Skin Until lately, racism was an tacit way of life in South Korea. Biracial prototypes were called “mongrels, ” the 200,000 children of “marriage migrants” were often treated as second-class citizens, and a scandalou number of businesses can still legally refuse to serve natives. In South Korean media, black people face the same various kinds of stereotypes you’d expect from a Civil-War-era KKK pamphlet. We kid you not TAGEND Via Jezebel American culture exports arent always something to take pride in. div > We’re not plucking obscure content from the ‘7 0s. This was on state-run Tv as of 2017 TAGEND MBC Yeolum Entertainment SBS Entertainment So to recap, thats a shot at black people, Native Americans, and Polynesians in a single outfit. Like a Swiss horde knife of racism. section > Anti-discrimination monies designed to ease the abundant casual racism have recently been introduced, and the person lastly aimed obligatory HIV-screening policy for foreign-born works in 2017. The UN likewise requested that the person stop using prejudiced words like “pure” and “mixed” blood back in 2007. So, you are familiar, that’s something. 1 Concentration Camps Still Exist … For The Roma In Italy The Roma have traditionally not been well-liked by, well, anybody. But they’ve been frighteningly suppressed in Europe, and lately. The Czech Republic forcibly fumigated Roma until 2007, France evicted over 10,000 Roma from their agreements in 2013, Swedish police were found to have a secret register of 4,000( predominantly Roma) refers the same year, and Denmark cleared out 25 Roma tents in 2 months, after making them illegal in 2017. It seems like an unnecessarily large-scale fuss over the working group that doesn’t even crack 2 percent of the European population. div > But that’s all good-for-nothing compared to Italy. In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi’s government declared that the fact that there is Roma colonizations( one one-quarter of a percent of the population) constituted a state of emergency, and henceforth required that all Roma be fingerprinted and ejected from their settlements into “nomad camps.” What do you think the likelihoods are that those tents were in breathtaking Tuscan villas? Surprise: They were filthy, vermin-infested shanties, lacking in even the most basic services. This was -AOK with the person or persons of Italy, 86 percentage of whom have an unfavorable view of Roma ,~ ATAGEND as well as with the courts, who affirmed discrimination against Roma acceptable “because they are thieves.” Again, this seems like a number of countries that should be a bit more attentive of xenophobia-based roundups, but hey, as long as the civilizes run on time. Kent Nagano is really fairly the conductor, give it a listen . i > b> Support Cracked’s journalism with a trip to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you . i > b> For more, check out 5 Shocking Laws Modern Countries Had Until A Few Years Ago and 5 Shockingly Progressive Program From Insane Dictatorships . i > b> It would be a shame if you didn’t follow us on Facebook . i > b> Read more: http :// www.cracked.com/ article_2 5483 _6-modern-countries-with-shockingly-backwards-views. html http://dailybuzznetwork.com/index.php/2018/06/08/6-modern-countries-with-shockingly-backwards-views/

[njawaidofficial]

“Isle Of Dogs,” Jared Leto, And Our Problem With Talking About Orientalism

https://styleveryday.com/2018/04/04/isle-of-dogs-jared-leto-and-our-problem-with-talking-about-orientalism/

“Isle Of Dogs,” Jared Leto, And Our Problem With Talking About Orientalism

Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) in Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

In 2001, Sarah Silverman told a joke on Late Night With Conan O’Brien that incurred the wrath of Asian American activists and, in a perverse way, also became her breakout moment. The bit involved trying to get out of jury duty, with Silverman recounting a friend’s suggestion that she write something “really inappropriate” on the form — something like “I hate chinks.” But, Silverman said, she didn’t want to cast herself in such an ugly light, so she opted to instead write “I love chinks. Who doesn’t?”

The network that aired the show, NBC, apologized for the slur a few days later. But Silverman refused to, opting instead to fight it out with Guy Aoki, the cofounder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, on Politically Incorrect. The comedian, who in more recent years has shifted her perspective on — and moved away from — the sort of meta-bigot comedy that marked her rise, insisted at the time that Aoki was a humorless scold who’d missed the point: “It’s not a racist joke,” she said on Politically Incorrect, “it’s a joke about racism.”

She never seemed to hear Aoki’s own point that a slur is still a slur, and that the reason Silverman settled on the one she did was because it was seen as permissible and more acceptable as the stuff of humor. Looking back at this particular sorry-not-sorry moment, and how little the conversation has progressed since, what really rankles is not just the implication that racism against Asians is less serious and less real. It’s the familiar proprietary ease of it all, the sense that it could be gotten away with because Asianness is colonizable enough as an identity that anyone can gain in-group joke privileges. Silverman didn’t intend her chipper punchline (“Who doesn’t?”) to also work as an orientalist slogan, but it did, and still does — a handy summation of the fact that a lot of anti-Asian racism gets presented through a lens of warped, acquisitive affection, and then denied or defended on the basis of it.

It’s not news that orientalism exists, but it still seems like news to many that there’s anything wrong with it.

When Edward Said wrote the book Orientalism in 1978, he focused on the long arc of Europe’s paternalistic conceptions of the Middle East. The term has since been expanded in scope into a broadly useful one for the West’s selective seeing of the East — especially, for the purposes of this piece of writing, East Asia — with many sins included under its umbrella: exotification, condescension, appropriation, othering, and general treatment of Asianness as a cultural buffet from which people feel welcome to help themselves to whatever they’re inclined to take and reject what they aren’t interested in.

Orientalism surfaces in the New Age commodification of Eastern spirituality, in the predilection to glom separate cultures into a blurry whole, in the freedom that still seems to be felt in making open declarations about having a fetish for Asian women or dismissing the sexuality of Asian men. And orientalism shows up onscreen — in films, on television, in music videos — with so much more regularity than good faith representations do that pushing back against it has been a steady drumbeat in Asian American activism for decades now. It’s a thread that runs through the history of American movies, especially, from the early studio days when trailblazing star Anna May Wong’s career was curtailed by stereotypes up through the present, when the likes of Wes Anderson, Jared Leto, Anna Wintour, and Scarlett Johansson are still providing plenty to fight about.

On one level, the fact that this regular stream of distorted images persists speaks to how unaware creators seem to be about what they’re doing, but on another, it shows how little they seem to care. It’s not news that orientalism exists, but it still seems like news to many that there’s anything wrong with it, or that there is, indeed, a difference between, say, objectifying homage and legitimate cultural exchange. Which might be why it’s been so hard to push back.

When racism — in the minds of many — still means open hatred, the idea that it can also come couched in the guise of fandom or fondness is a reality people really don’t want to acknowledge. Orientalism is ultimately about power, which may be why it has taken the rise of international markets, and of China in particular, to force Hollywood to try to see the continent through something other than a scrim of Western assumptions.

Boss (Bill Murray) in Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

The most telling thing about the conversations that have followed the release of Wes Anderson’s latest film, Isle of Dogs — a movie that, whatever you think of it, is inarguably about Western assumptions about Japan — is the gap between the thoughtful and measured criticism (much of it from Asian American writers) and the outraged, outsized response to that criticism online. It’s as if the very implication of racial insensitivity is worse than any offense itself could ever be. These commenters were an odd alliance of Anderson devotees and the usual internet complainers who love to call out “identity politics” and “snowflakes,” but most, judging from their Twitter avatars, were white men or sentient anime characters.

But Anderson himself, a filmmaker who has always been clumsy with anything to do with race, has functionally described his own feature as orientalist. At the film’s debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February, he explained that he and his regular collaborators Roman Coppola and Jason Schwartzman had wanted to make a movie about a pack of dogs, and also “something in Japan,” and the two ideas were then just combined: “The story could’ve taken place anywhere, but it came together when we realized it should take place in a fantasy version of Japan.”

And it does, in a near-future Japan that’s also decidedly analog, and home to a dual-species adventure that takes some of its cues from the work of Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki. Most of the acting talent is from the US — the dogs, voiced by the likes of Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, and Scarlett Johansson, speak English, while the humans speak Japanese, which frequently goes untranslated. Most of Anderson’s movies take place in overtly imaginary renditions of actual places, from the outsider’s dream of New York (as drawn from J.D. Salinger and back issues of the New Yorker) in The Royal Tenenbaums to the invented Eastern Europe republic of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a Stefan Zweig–inspired wonderland where real historical horrors lurk behind whimsical imagery. In that sense, the similarly fictional city of Megasaki in Isle of Dogs, along with its adjoining trash- and canine-dump island, is no different.

Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig) in Isle of Dogs.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

What is different is the real-world cultural context: the tradition of Western othering of Japan that Anderson seems blithely indifferent toward, even as he participates in it. Because it’s stop-motion, the film uses scaled-down puppets to represent its characters onscreen, but it also diminishes them in more figurative ways, with a gaze that’s detached and dispassionate when it comes to most of the humans, aside from 12-year-old Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin) and foreign exchange student Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig). Tracy, who leads the resistance against Megasaki’s oppressive anti-dog leadership, is the human who gets the bulk of the English-language lines and, with them, the big shows of emotion. She’s the American girl brave enough to take initiative when no native Japanese resident dares — a regrettable foil for stereotypes about Asian compliance.

There’s no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs‘ cultural tourism, but it’s marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan — taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms, and a mushroom cloud (!). There’s a plot development in which poisoned wasabi is hidden away in sushi, and a scientist character named Yoko-ono, who is voiced by Yoko Ono. This all has more to do with the (no doubt intricately designed and decorated) insides of Anderson’s brain than it does any actual place. It’s Japan purely as an aesthetic — and another piece of art that treats the East not as a living, breathing half of the planet but as a mirror for the Western imagination.

It’s not the idea of creating a fantasy Japan that’s Anderson’s problem — it’s the underlying sense that he wouldn’t be able to conceive of a real one.

In the wake of Isle of Dogs‘ opening weekend, there were multiple headlines wondering whether the film was an act of appropriation or homage. But the question is rhetorical — the two aren’t mutually exclusive, and the former is not automatically off the table just because the creator’s intent was the latter. More importantly, it’s possible for Isle of Dogs to be both a charming story about humanity’s rapport with canines (try saying the title out loud) and an act of erasure; it can showcase both what its director has traditionally done well and how he’s opted to lean directly into one of his most evident blind spots.

The online reaction to criticism of the film has been filled with blind spots, too, with people unfairly painting the discussion as a call for cultural purity, insisting that “actual Asians” aren’t bothered by any of this, and brandishing cowriter Kunichi Nomura — whom Anderson brought on to advise on cultural specifics as well as provide the voice of his villain — as some kind of human shield against this entire topic. In the space between these two sides of the conversation, you can see how threatening some people find the suggestion that their intent might not matter as much as the reaction of those seeing themselves onscreen. It’s not the idea of creating a fantasy Japan that’s Anderson’s problem — it’s the underlying sense that he wouldn’t be able to conceive of a real one.

Jared Leto in the Netflix movie The Outsider.

Netflix

Of course, it’s very possible for a film to be imbued with fantasy even when it attempts to put a real version of Japan onscreen. The new period drama The Outsider, in which Jared Leto plays an American GI who joins the yakuza in post–World War II Japan, received less attention than Isle of Dogs when it premiered on Netflix earlier in March, but is even more entrenched in the idea of the ownable East. Over years in development, The Outsider tumbled from a potential prestige project — with a Black-Listed script, a perch at Warner Bros., and Michael Fassbender and Tom Hardy bandied around as possible stars — to streaming’s equivalent of direct-to-video. You could interpret that as Hollywood reluctantly waking up to what, exactly, they would be peddling. But that didn’t stop the movie from getting made, with slick production values and an Oscar-winning star.

The relative lack of coverage of The Outsider is partially a function of it being a Netflix original, but it also hints at exhaustion that films like this still get made without any deeper consideration. The premise is one that stretches from Lawrence of Arabia to Avatar: A white man gets dropped into a community alien to him, becomes a part of it, then becomes a better embodiment of the culture than those born into it. It’s an assertion of supremacy The Outsider makes no move to subvert or diverge from as it fits the yakuza genre around its foreign expat, who’s welcomed into an Osaka clan after coming to the aid of a high-ranking member (played by Tadanobu Asano) while they’re both behind bars. Everything else goes pretty much exactly as you’d guess, especially if you’ve seen and remember the beats of The Last Samurai, right up to an ending that affirms Nick as a truer manifestation of yakuza honor than the resentful rival who’s been a lifelong part of the family.

Projects like The Outsider tend to get labeled as acts of whitewashing, but the term doesn’t quite fit; whitewashing is meant to describe white actors getting cast to play nonwhite characters or in place of characters originally written as nonwhite. There was never an Asian lead at the center of The Outsider — it was always, as the title affirms, about a foreigner, and that foreigner was always (given the reported casting efforts) white.

The Outsider would be better described as the latest iteration of an unabashed orientalist fantasy that’s not just about trying on a particular idea of Asianness like an outfit, but establishing dominance over it as well (filmmaker Aaron Stewart-Ahn claimed that in an earlier version of the script he read, “Page 2 actually mentions Caucasians having bigger penises”). Maybe that’s why Leto plays Nick with uncharacteristic reserve, as if he’s not a character so much as the audience’s avatar. It is not the Japanese characters the film expects its audience to relate to, but Leto, a beautiful blank onto which viewers can project themselves.

Rihanna, in a gown by Chinese designer Guo Pei, arrives at the Met Gala benefit in honor of the exhibit “China: Through the Looking Glass” in May 2015.

Timothy A. Clary / AFP / Getty Images

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All The New Shows To Screen Or Skip In Spring And Summer 2017

There’s a reason networks often save their weakest fare for the time of year when more people are less likely to spend their evenings indoors.

Of course, that’s not always the case, since “Game of Thrones” is scheduled to make it’s much-awaited return this July. 

But when it comes to new shows, you can bet networks generally save the worst for last. In the coming months, viewers can look forward to some stellar series this spring (including ”The Handmaid’s Tale,” “American Gods,” “GLOW”), while they’re more or less better off embracing the warm weather and misplacing their remotes by the time summer hits. 

APRIL   “Girlboss,” April 21, Netflix 

With allegations that former Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso was accused of creating a “toxic” workplace, it’s easy to see why the lead character of Netflix’s “Girlboss” is so incredibly unlikeable. The question, however, is why would anyone want to spend a significant amount of time watching her?

“Girlboss” is loosely based on Amoruso’s memoir of the same name and tells the story of how she began her vintage clothing eBay shop, before it became what we now know as Nasty Gal.

The show stars Britt Robertson as 23-year-old Sophia, a college dropout who works menial jobs and yet can somehow afford a studio apartment in San Francisco circa 2006 ― and damn is it ever hard to watch. Sophia is petulant, whiny, and often just flat-out mean. What’s worse is that the series rarely gives you a reason to root for her. Characters don’t always have to be likable, but there has to be at least some reason to follow a person through their journey. With “Girlboss,” there’s nothing here.  

“Great News,” April 25, 9 p.m. ET, NBC

”Great News,” the new workplace comedy from executive producer Tina Fey, can’t be described as great or even good.

The show follows Katie (Briga Heelan), a wallflower of a producer at a cable news program called “The Breakdown,” and her overbearing mother (Andrea Martin), who manages to land a job as as the show’s intern. Hilarity ensues, right? Not so much.

The show’s jokes just repeatedly fall flat, though surprisingly it’s Nicole Richie as a super-hip if slightly vapid co-anchor who actually shines brightest.  

“Genius,” April 25, 9 p.m. ET, National Geographic 

What do you really know about Albert Einstein aside from the fact that he developed the theory of relativity? National Geographic is willing to wager that you know very little.

“Genius” is an anthology series from executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer about the lives of those deserving enough to be deemed as such, and Season 1 kicks off with none other than Mr. E = mc2 himself.  

Based on Walter Isaacson’s book Einstein: His Life and Universe, the show stars Johnny Flynn when Einstein was a student in Zurich the 1890s, and Geoffrey Rush, as his older counterpart against a backdrop of the rising anti-semitism in 1922 Berlin, Germany.

“The Handmaid’s Tale,” April 26, Hulu

Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is by far the best new show debuting in the spring and summer season. Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, if you don’t already have a Hulu account, you’re going to want to sign up for one today.

Set in the not-too distant future where a fundamentalist Christian regime rules over the former United States, now known as the Republic of Gilead, women have been stripped of their rights and any sense of life as they once knew it. Elisabeth Moss stars as Offred, a woman who is forced to bear children for high-ranking men and their wives, after environmental problems cause widespread infertility issues. 

The series is a chilling reminder of how quickly the Republic of Gilead could become a reality. 

“Dear White People,” April 28, Netflix 

If you liked “Dear White People” the movie then you should probably watch it again, because the 2014 film from writer/director Justin Simien is far better than Netflix’s 10-episode series.  

That’s not to say the series adaptation is a failure by any means. The show is still a smart and sharp take on the complex issue of race relations, and is definitely worth checking out. 

The series picks up where the film left off in the aftermath of a racist blackface party, which has left a campus divided. Episodes are told and then retold through different student’s perspectives, which requires some commitment by the viewers since that format can feel awfully repetitive. 

 “American Gods,” April 30, 9 p.m. ET, Starz

“American Gods” is absolutely the weirdest and most mind-bending new offering this season. Starz’s visually-stunning new drama is based on British author Neil Gaiman’s 2001 fantasy novel of the same name and requires total suspension of disbelief. 

In this America, gods live among us mere mortals. There are two types of gods ― old and new. The old are the ones you’ve read about in myths and were brought to America by faithful immigrants centuries ago, while the new gods have gradually replaced the old ones and were born out of our modern obsession with media and technology.

As war brews between the gods, an ex-con named Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) finds himself caught between the two sides.  

MAY “Anne with an E,” May 12, Netflix 

Netflix’s “Anne with an E” is easily one of the most charming new shows. Yes, this is yet another adaptation of Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved children’s novel Anne of Green Gables, but it’s far the best. 

Amybeth McNulty stars as Anne Shirley, the young orphan who never stops talking and comes to live on Prince Edward Island with elderly siblings Marilla (Geraldine James) and Matthew Cuthbert (R.H. Thomson).

While you may have read the book a 100 times as a child, Netflix has managed to reenergize the story for modern audiences without betraying its source material. If anything, “Anne” digs deeper at some of the darker elements that Montgomery glossed over in the novel, and is a thoroughly binge-able experience for all ages. 

“I Love Dick,” May 12, Amazon 

You may have already watched the pilot episode of Amazon’s new series “I Love Dick,” based on Chris Kraus’ 1997 novel.

The show stars Kathryn Hahn as a filmmaker in an unhappy marriage, who follows her husband (Griffin Dunne) to his writing residency in Marfa, Texas, and becomes completely infatuated with a professor named Dick (Kevin Bacon).

“I Love Dick” is the latest show from “Transparent” creator Jill Soloway and is an intentionally uncomfortable yet humorous examination of human sexuality and the female gaze. 

“Downward Dog,” May 17, 9:30 p.m. ET, ABC

From ABC comes “Downward Dog,” a sitcom about a dog named Martin and his owner Nan (Allison Tolman), a woman struggling to get ahead at work and make sense of her personal life. 

The show is told from Martin’s perspective’s via his internal monologue, voiced by Samm Hodges. The series is inoffensive enough if you can stand to listen to Martin, who is the male incarnation of a droning Valley-girl in canine form. 

 “Twin Peaks,” May 21, 9 p.m. ET, Showtime 

Showtime didn’t provide any screeners for “Twin Peaks,” which is returning as a limited series 24 years after David Lynch’s original version ended.

Because of this, we can only tell you what you probably already know: Lynch will direct the entire series and you can expect to see many familiar faces, including Kyle MacLachlan, who returns as FBI Agent Dale Cooper. 

JUNE “I’m Dying Up Here,” June 4, 10 p.m. ET, Showtime

Showtime’s new drama “I’m Dying Up Here” is a look at the lives of stand-up comics trying to make it in Los Angeles in the 1970s ―  and you’ll be tempted to heckle if you can muster the strength to make it through a full episode. 

Yet another show based on a book, the series is inspired by William Knoedelseder‘s 2009 nonfiction work I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden Era and features an ensemble cast including Ari Graynor, Melissa Leo, Clark Duke, Michael Angarano and RJ Cyler.

“GLOW,” June 29, Netflix 

Even if you’d rather do just about anything else than watch professional wrestling, you really shouldn’t discount Netflix’s new original series “GLOW.”

Inspired by the real story of the 1980s women’s wrestling league “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling,” “GLOW” is one of the most enjoyable shows to debut this season. 

Alison Brie stars as a struggling actress desperate to make it in Hollywood, giving one last shot at her dreams when she auditions for a series about female wrestlers. Featuring an outstanding and diverse cast, the series hilariously tackles issues of racism, stereotyping, sexism and sisterhood in the world of women’s wrestling. 

JULY “The Bold Type,” July 11, 9 p.m. ET, Freeform 

Freeform’s “The Bold Type” is inspired by Cosmopolitan and its editor-in-chief Joanna Coles, and it’s the perfect show for summertime viewing. 

Starring Katie Stevens, Aisha Dee and Meghann Fahy as three friends working at Scarlet Magazine, the show follows the young women as they navigate their careers and personal lives in New York City.

This show is exactly what you would expect from reading Cosmo ― not a bad way to curl up on the couch with a glass of wine. 

“Midnight, Texas,” July 25, 10 p.m. ET, NBC

The remote town of “Midnight, Texas” seems to be the supernatural center of the United States with witches, ghosts, assassins, angels, psychics and other creatures calling it home. But there is entirely too much going on. 

Based on the trilogy series of the same name by author Charlaine Harris, “Midnight Texas” follows Manfred (François Arnaud), a psychic who can communicate with the dead, as he arrives in Midnight and befriends fellow outsiders like himself. 

AUGUST “The Sinner,” Aug. 2, 10 p.m. ET, USA

USA’s “The Sinner” is a different kind of thrilling mystery that finds Jessica Biel starring in a TV series for the first time since her days playing Mary Camden on “7th Heaven.”

Biel plays Cora, a young mother who commits an unspeakable act of violence against a stranger at the beach. There’s no question that she did it. The only question is why. Bill Pullman also stars as a detective obsessed with uncovering Cora’s motives.

As the series delves into Cora’s past and pieces together what happened that day at the beach, chances are you’ll be just as obsessed. 

“Weekend Update,” Aug. 10, 9 p.m. ET, NBC

“Saturday Night Live” is on hiatus this summer, but Colin Jost and Michael Che will fill the void with “Weekend Update” ― a 30-minute, primetime version of the long-running segment. With “SNL” seeing some of its highest rating in years, Jost and Che will keep things going in August and make sure you’re on top of all the news that can be satirized. So basically everything.

“Marlon,” Aug. 16, 9 p.m. ET, NBC 

Marlon Wayans stars in what’s supposed to be an update on the classic family sitcom, but this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before. 

“Marlon” is loosely based on Wayans’ real life as he plays a wise-cracking, over- protective yet immature father to two precocious kids (Amir O’Neil and Notlim Taylor). He also appears to share a too-close relationship with his ex-wife (Essence Atkins). 

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