Katsullivan

If by "political ideologies", you mean Patrice Lumumba's inauguration speech that Congo resources would be for Congo and no longer allow USA & Belgium free rein to loot Congo's riches?

A better parallel would the USA/Belgium coup and assassination of Premier Patrice Lumumba of Congo. The bigger problem would be the countries wanting to take Wakanda's power from it. I mean, we only need to look at history to see what happened to Congo: Black Panther has historical roots in nuclear-age Congo. Would-be Wakanda: Black Panther and the Congo Paradox. Searching for Wakanda: The African Roots of the Black Panther Story. Malcolm X: The Rape of Congo.

I've watched Annalise's speech 15 times now. I've graduated from bawling to just goosebumps. Baby steps.

Colour codes for actors. And the funny thing is that I'm sure the irony escaped them.

I just tried to watch Greenhouse Academy on Netflix and it's exactly the same problem. Apart from 2 black boys, the curly dark-haired white lead boy, and his dark-haired sister, every other character on this show is like a clone of someone else. There are 3 or 4 or 5(?) blonde girls that I literally cannot tell apart. There are about half a dozen white boys with the same haircut, and what makes it even worse is that one of them is supposed to be a Professor.

That's nice but I was talking about the Flash.

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It's in something as simple as the latest episode of Black Lightning, when Jefferson's Q was narrating some techno-babble to BL and Jefferson's response was to summarise it, "so it's feedback" or something like that. The same conversation in the Flash would have had Iris or Joe or Cecile or even Wally West, an engineer who rigs out racing cars for Speed Force's sake! - asking that inane, "can you say that in English?" or "no, say it simpler (because I'm too black stupid to understand)". I don't think the writers even know that they're doing this. The racism on that show is so subconscious and pervasive. And yeah, like you said - it's a show that on paper would get high marks in diversity. Which goes to show that it's more than just putting a lot of brown/black bodies on your sets.

The CW is a perfect example of how representatives does not equal representation.

Thank you. If Wakanda was a real country that had just revealed itself to the world, it won't last a year. Europe and America would set their well-oiled machinery of destabilising governments and invading countries into motion and the narrative would be that they were liberating Wakandans from a communist, totalitarian monarchy and protecting the world from Wakanda's arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

T'Chaka and his ancestors were portrayed as villains. T'Chaka, the Black Panther, cannot stop his brother without outright murdering him, leaves his body to rot in the US of A, and abandons his son to become a self-fulfilling monster. Similarly, the other Wakanda ancestors were portrayed as villains for "looking away" while Africa was left to rot. What was fucked up was that White Europeans decided to exploit Africa. Which again, is my problem, with this movie. The movie frames what Europe, and its extension, US of A, did to Africa as "Something That Happened" and frames Wakanda's decision to isolate as a method of survival as Wakanda Making A Choice. Look, it's either one or the other. Wakanda could take on the world and stop White Europeans from exploiting Africa - or it could not.

It sounds really woke... until you realise that Wakanda's system of justice is being equated to straight-up slavery. Which is a big problem I had with this movie. Probably even the only problem I had with this movie but a really big one: The narrative cleverly couches the persecution of Africans and Black people as Wakanda's fault for being isolated and not "fixing" this problem, and side-steps the fact that the persecution was caused in the past and is being sustained by White Europeans/White America.

Yes, I was fearful. I was thinking, "white people tend not to like it when Black people are richer and/or smarter than they are." #LiberateWakanda #BringDemocracyToWakanda2018

Thank. You. I think I'm going to stop. Not just because the movies are bad but because I've basically said all I can think of saying for now, and because this type of discussion is just a lower-stakes model of what happens every fricking day on a large and small scale to PoCs and I know it's hard for (white) people to believe, but PoCs don't watch movies or go to fanforums to find racism, they go there to escape it.

All of my conclusions are based on creative decisions that Abrams (and Johnson to a worse extent because Abrams planted the seeds but Johnson not only took the comedic element of Finn to blatantly offensive slapstick territory, he also minimized the heroic element and sidelined him as a main character) have done that are, objectively, racist. Now whether Abrams (or Johnson, but I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt) set out to be deliberately offensive or they are responding to ingrained/subconscious racist biases is something that I don't have the knowledge to conclude on. I am giving Abrams the benefit of the doubt that at least he didn't set out to be offensive. Because it's one of the two things. You, on the other hand, are whitewashing every decision he's made about Finn, excusing it, rationalizing it, and essentially endorsing it. It's more important to you that your White Hero be seen as flawless than as someone who - intentions aside - is almost certainly as subject to biases as the average American - a country that was literally built on the foundations of racist oppression and has institutionalized racism, working in an industry as Hollywood that has a recorded problem with diversity of race, sex. religion and sexual orientation (to mention just a few) in the way it create stories. (And for the record, I actually like and admire Abrams, and I think he's one of the "good" guys. But he's not flawless. And it's entirely possible for a white man to be good/good-intentioned and still be subconsciously racist. The fact that so many (mostly white) people cannot wrap their heads around this simple fact is why racism is so ingrained in America because people would rather deny and obfuscate than confront and improve).

Another variant of the "This person isn't racist because I don't want to believe he is." By definition, JJ Abrams can't even vouch for his own subconscious but you apparently have such intimate knowledge of him that you can?

The Brotherhood in the X-Men movies aren't killing random people, and I don't see any evidence that the Hellfire is to. We haven't seen a lot of the Hellfire Club but so far, the Cuckoo Sisters went after Trask industry and the Senator who was in bed with them. Based on my own vague memories, Magneto went after: the US Senator who wanted to sign the Mutant Registration Act, Stryker who planned to carry out Mutant Genocide, the Maker(s)/Distributors of a Mutant Cure. In the Fassbender movies, he was going after Sebastian, a mutant who exploited other mutants, and then Peter Dinklage's character, who invented the Sentinels that would wipe out Mutants. Magneto's philosophy was "Us or Them. They Will Kill Us so We Have To Kill Them First." His methods were brutal and ruthless, and that will attract the kind of people who "like the work too much". But he wasn't causing chaos for the sake of chaos. He wasn't killing "random" people and I haven't seen any evidence the Hellfire Club is doing that either. In The Gifted so far, more random people have died at the hands of the Human Faction than the hands of the Hellfire or Mutant Underground. The "humans" in the Gifted aren't making co-ordinated attacks on military visible mutant targets. They attacked Blink's foster home and apparently murdered her foster parents and most of her siblings. They sent Sentinel services after underage children and would have used deadly force to bring them in, without due process. And technically, they aren't terrorists because they *are* the law. Which makes sense. No war is ever fought the way you describe, not in fiction and not in reality.

At the time Lucas hadn't decided that Leia and Luke would be siblings. It wasn't written to be a punchline. The argument has never been about "recovering" physically from a slap. It's the specific humiliation which has only ever been used in this series on POCs. I specifically used this example as a counter to your argument that implied that "slapping" was just another version of heroes suffering at the hands of "villains". And I also said that here have been situations where slaps would have made sense but the creators held back from having white characters subjected to this specific humiliation. Neither of your posts is a response to any of the actual points I've made. Instead, you seem to be deliberately misunderstanding them and/or mocking them. Which I would really rather you not do. This might be a mere intellectual exercise for you to see who can make the most "points" but for me it's personal. That's neither of our faults but I am interested in a genuine discussion, not in replying to statements that are apparently made just to get a reaction.

Poe wasn't slapped by a "bad guy". Off the top of my head, I can imagine scenarios where Anakin would have earned himself a slap or two from Obi-Wan or Padme. Or where Han should have been slapped by Leia, at the very least. But as @doram pointed out, none of the creators saw it fitting for any of their white heroes to be slapped because that's a specific kind of humiliation. But since you've brought up the counter-argument of heroes suffering in general, it's worth examining how Finn's heroic suffering is entirely different from the other white heroes. At the end of TFA, Finn is in a coma, from a severe injury he got from battling Kylo Ren. (I use battling very loosely here). Finn's injuries are grave enough to require him to be put in a coma, in a bacta suit. This is superficially similar to Luke's injury from the wampa at the start of ESB. It's not a light-saber duel with a pseudo-Sith but it's a severe injury, and this plus Luke's exposure to hypothermia is clearly supposed to be something the audience should be worried about. Han and Leia are shown to be visibly worried about Luke while he's in the bantha tank. They are by his bedside when he wakes up, and we see them bantering with him, not at him. None of the jokes there are at Luke's expense. In contrast, no one seems particularly worried about Finn before he wakes up. When he does, it kickstarts a series of British humor moments - he bangs his head, falls off the floor, wanders around the ship naked nad leaking. Finn is supposed to be our hero, right? Who - according to you - has gone through the same kind of heroic crucible as Han, Leia and Luke's at the hands of their respective nemesis? Even Poe - apparently the only person in the Resistance besides Rey who gave a hoot about this - can't express sympathy towards Finn without the insertion of a BB-8 joke to remind the audience that yes, this isn't an accident. We're really supposed to find this entire scene a hoot. Ha! Ha! Ha! Stupid clown of a black man! What a riot! The fall-out of Finn's injury at Kylos's hands, the culmination of his arc in TFA, is slapstick comedy that is quickly forgotten. Non-white people can also consciously or subconsciously support white supremacy. The way I see it, if I'm not solving a problem (and this includes, at the very least, being willing to admit that there is a problem), then I'm part of that problem. And whether my motivations are conscious, subconscious or just passive disinterest, it doesn't change the effect on the people who are on the receiving end of that problem. Like I can never understand the point of trying to rationalise these things. It's not like if racism doesn't have a history of being whitewashed by everything from Science to Religion. Being backed up by the Gospel according to Matthew or Darwin has never made racism less racist so I have no clue what statements that boil down to: "This isn't racist because I don't [want to] believe that it is" are trying to achieve besides telling me that personally, you're not willing to have an open-minded discussion.

Your logic that not being "racist" in one casting gives them leeway to be racist in another fails me. These male supporting characters (by your own definition, Finn and Poe and Cassian aren't leads) are constantly subject to abuse. In a world populated with droids, I'm sure racists were glad to know that PoCs can still clean white people's toilets. No one in any star wars movie had ever been slapped on screen. TLJ had not one but two men of color slapped around by white people was disgusting. Just because they put male leads in offensive, supporting roles does not make them "not-racist".

That the mutants are a tormented minority is not debatable. We've watched enough of the show to see that: under-age mutants can be arrested without due process, mutants can be literally sold into slavery as medical guinea pigs, hooked on drugs and turned into weapons without their consent, mutants are regularly discriminated at on the fundamental levels (denial of proper healthcare, Carlos being not just suspected by the random doctor of abusing his "girlfriend" despite her insistence that he wasn't but arrested) etc. That the mutants are a tormented minority is not disputable. That a war is being fought is not disputable. I think - in this show at least - that they're already past the point of humans not wanting to destroying the mutants. By your logic, the mutants should "wait and see" if the humans would "give" them basic human rights while with every passing episode, their own rights are being restricted, and there is really no sign that any human - except humans like the Strikers who are mutant-adjacent - are sympathetic to the mutant cause. There was even an entire episode about it, where Mom Stryker confided in her husband that truth be told, if her children hadn't been affected by this, she'd have been just as happily oblivious of the human rights abuses going on around them as the next picketfence neighborhood. If there's a 3rd option besides "Lie Down and Die" or "Fight Back" , this show has failed badly to show it.

I'm agreeing with you. I'm agreeing with you that there are many ways of telling a story - in a fantasy world, mind you - than the binary option of "be offensive" OR "not hire PoCs." And I'm rolling my eyes metaphorically at the whole discussion because in my experience, the insistence of this Either/Or/No 3rd Option stance is just a conscious or subconscious desire to uphold white supremacy at all costs.

Thanks for this. Black female leads have the double burden of racism and sexism, and it's so bothersome to see the racism aspect ignored, and swept under the blanket of generic feminism. io9 just published an article about Wesley Snipe's recent Blade interview that is so pertinent to this: "I don't understand why people like this." As @doram said: Exactly. I mean, apart from the fact that there's already a "Legends" -foundation for this, and we've seen the new canon pick and choose from this whenever they want, there's nothing stopping them from - GASP! - just casting a female character as non-White. I'm not particularly interested in the "well, Hollywood only started making female-led action movies in the last 5 years" because apart from the fact that it's blatantly not true, Emilia Clarke isn't the lead of the Han Solo movie. Jyn might have been technically the first-billed star on Rogue One, but I'll argue that just as Jack got first billing in Titanic even though the movie was equally about Jack and Rose, Rogue One was just as much Cassian's movie as Jyn's. Which reminds me of how disgusted I was with Felicity Jones and Daisy Ridley mocking theorists of coming up with Luke+Jyn=Rey theories then. Jeez, maybe if the role of Rey had been given to a Nigerian-British girl and/or Jyn was being played by a woman of Korean ancestry, people won't be trying to come up with non-racist explanations for why Disney kept casting the same brand of generic thin white girl as their female leads. At least with Padme and Leia there was a canon excuse. What exactly was so unique about Rey and Jyn that only white women could play them?

Good point. Groan. These discussions are so frustrating. There's too much "in a world where metas with super-powers, aliens, time travel, doppel-gangers from another Earth, there's only one way ever this plot can go." Failure of imagination or a determination to uphold white privilege/white supremacy beyond reason? From abolition to civil rights to diversity in media --- why do white people always bend over backwards to justify racism?

I love (most) of this entire discussion and the fact that, at the core, most people don't see it as a black and white issue of who was wrong and who was right between Jackson and April. If anything, the theme here is that the writing let them down.