Margaret Cho has been vocal about the erasure of Asian-Americans from Hollywood films, including the casting of Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One, a Tibetan monk, in Marvel’s Doctor Strange. Cho led public conversations online about how Asian-Americans are whitewashed in media earlier this year after the controversy erupted, and apparently she also had private conversations with Swinton herself. “Tilda eventually emailed me and she said that she didn’t understand why people were so mad about Doctor Strange and she wanted to talk about it, and wanted to get my take on why all the Asian people were mad,” Cho tells Bobby Lee on his podcast TigerBelly. “It was so weird.”
Lee joked, “You are the president of all Asians: American division.” “I don’t have a yellow phone under a cake dome!” Cho laughed.
Strangely enough, Swinton initially got into contact with Cho through Alex Bornstein. “She hooked us up. Which is the most ironic,” Cho said, referencing Bornstein’s infamous Asian-ish nail-salon owner character Ms. Swan during her days on MADtv. “’Is it cool if I give Tilda your number because she wants to talk to you?’ And I go all right.”
Cho and Swinton had a “long discussion,” after which Swinton told Cho not to “tell anybody.” “It was a long fight about why the part should not have gone to her. That’s what I thought: The part should not have gone to her,” said Cho. “We’d fight about it and basically it ended with her saying, ‘Well I’m producing a movie and Steven Yeun is starring.‘” (This is no doubt a reference to Bong Joon-ho’s upcoming filmOkja in which Swinton stars with Yeun.)
“Oh, like I have a black friend,” Lee joked.
“It was weird because I felt like a house Asian, like I’m her servant,” Cho said. “Like the ones when they have in the raj, they would have the house servant who was your confidante … The servant that was close to you. That’s sort of what I felt like, like I was following her with an umbrella. I had a weird feeling about the entire exchange, especially the part of Don’t tell anybody.”
The conversation began because Cho and Lee were talking about navigating an industry where there were no other people like them. “The fact is we’re not given roles that are worthy of us,” Cho said. “We’re constantly having to wade through and do what we can.”
So my facebook friend just posted this pic with this text….
Well, I just witnessed blatant racial injustice with my own eyes. I was getting in my car after exiting a store when a young black man stumbled past me and collapsed against the store wall. When I got out to see if he was okay, a group of white people came rushing over, one of whom was a 20-something white woman who declared in distress, “I ran a red light and hit him with my car!” People immediately assured her that SHE would be okay, meanwhile the young man is writhing in pain on the ground, pants leg torn, tears running down his face. When the police arrived and the young woman explained what happened, it was suggested to her that maybe the light had been yellow and that the young man had “darted out into the street into her path.” I was floored. I said, “But she just SAID she ran the red light and hit him in the intersection!”
The police officers then led the young woman away and began talking with her privately in low tones. When the paramedics FINALLY got there I was surprised at the hostility they showed towards the young man. One blonde female EMT (shown in the photo) suggested that he couldn’t be THAT hurt if he was able to walk from the place where he was struck to the sidewalk where he finally collapsed. White bystanders commented several times about “What that poor girl must be going through.” I was the only one who commented on what the young man must be going through, what, with his mangled leg and all. I am absolutely positive that in the end “that poor girl” will be absolved of all wrongdoing and be able to go on her merry way. After all, she just ran a red light and slammed her car into the body of some black kid on a bike, right?
And people wonder why black people are so angry and want to break shit.
this is also why when people make their racist arguments based on crime stats, i leave the conversation immediately. you think this is the first and only instance where a white criminal (and yes running a red light is a criminal act) is not reported or arrested by the police? you don’t think that white criminality is vastly under-reported in this country? you don’t think that if the driver was black the the person hit was white, the cops would have arrested him immediately? you don’t think that these “little” incidents of racism happen to us everyday in different variations?
Sitting in the second row of a Toronto courthouse, Marcia Brown Martel listened with disappointment as the government of Canada sought to absolve itself of responsibility for the suffering of Indigenous children during a period known as the Sixties Scoop.
Brown Martel was one of those children. Now she’s the lead plaintiff in a $1.3 billion class action that accuses Canada of failing to protect the cultural identity of some 16,000 children in Ontario who were taken from reserves by government workers and placed in white homes across Canada, the U.S., and Europe, under a belief at the time that it was in the child’s best interest.
But the Canadian government says it isn’t liable for any loss of identity or tradition, and on Thursday Crown lawyers asked a judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
“I heard from leadership that spoke of taking this out of court,” said Brown Martel, a member of the Temagami First Nation near Kirkland Lake, Ont., who was 9 years old when she was taken from her home in 1972. “But actions speak louder than words.”
“Our healing is already taking place,” she continued. “The government of Canada can choose if they want to encourage that or say they don’t want to be a part of it. They could speed this along and help.”
So where all them bundy land conservatives at? Where all them small government-big gun people?
We’re witnessing the assault on a sovereign nation by our government, but apparently it doesn’t count to the same folks who love to say “don’t tread on me”
People of Color and Where to Find Them (aka Fantastic Beasts’s Severe Lack of Representation)
BONUS:
Actually, this didn’t bother me. I mean, it was AMERICA in the 1920′s. The only reason there were POC in the movie at all is because the American wizarding society had their segregation based on magical heritage rather than skin color. Still, POC would not have been able to mingle with white no-mags, and in a place like NYC, I’m guessing there wouldn’t have been a separate borough for wizards-only. So POC wizards probably could not have, for example, lived in Tina and Queenie’s apt complex, or used the front door at the bank, or gone skating at the park, or shopping in the bakery, or been seen basically anywhere except in the Magical Congress, which is where we saw them. Also, I appreciated that the non-human singer was also a non-white version. I’ve always thought there would be feature variations akin to race in non-humans, but aside from fanart, I’ve never seen, for example, a Tolkien elf who was less than lily-white. In HP, all the goblins and house-elves look the same, but surely there are genetic differences across the globe–unless house-elves and goblins only exist in the UK and America? (Unlikely).
oh, it didn’t bother you? you’re probably white.
this post isn’t for you. fuck off.
AMERICA. NYC. HARLEM. in the 1920′s looked like this:
the harlem speakeasy in the movie?
white as a toilet. spare a racially ambiguous elf singer. couldn’t even make it a black witch. we had celestina warbeck mentions in the books, why not have a black witch singer?
it’s lazy, it’s thoughtless, it’s myopic, and borderline racist.
so, i reiterate: fuck off.
I think snuggleswithmuggles needs to re-open a history book. Harlem was literally one of the biggest turning points for jazz in the 1920′s and it was a hotbed of music and culture. How could someone not know that? This was taught in schools.
This movie is whitewashed as FUCK. It’s not accurate even though it claims it’s trying to be
Also, segregation didn’t apply in speakeasys, which were illegal to start with. They allowed the races to mingle freely, including interracial couples, both het and same-sex. Big Harlem venues like The Cotton Club were white-only (except on stage, which was all Black), but speakeasys? Mostly Black, mixed with some white people. (Source: my g- grandmother and g-g aunt)
In the 1920s in New York, blackness was very much in vogue. It was cool. White people wanted to go to the Black part of town to experience the culture and soak it all in. So the white Harlem reimagining not only erases Black people, it erases the fact that white people were obsessed with Black culture back then, maybe even more than today.
The idea that everything was automatically segregated before the 1960s is false. My white rural grandmother taught both black and white children in a one room school house in Lancaster County Pennsylvania before she married in the ‘20s. Yeah, Amish country, where people to this day vacation to bask in a simpler whiter world that never was as simple or white as they fantasize.
I know. It’s hard to rebuke something you really enjoy, like Fantastic Beasts, a story that reimagined Harlem, NY as minority Black in the 1920s. But it’s not really causing harm, right?
Tell that to Bass Reeves. (Or, you know, his ghost).
Bass Reeves was an Oklahoma lawman in The Old West. Born into slavery, he grew up into a legendary American hero, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.
Except, oh wait, unless you’re an avid watcher of Drunk History, he’s probably not anywhere near the household name Boone and Crockett are.
There is controversy over whether Reeves was the true inspiration for The Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger, they argue, was always imagined as a white man. Of course he was! That doesn’t change the fact that historically, if you look at all the Old West lawmen, the one who comes closest to the fictional Lone Ranger is Bass Reeves. It doesn’t matter that the Lone Ranger was created as a white character with no nod to Reeves – The Lone Ranger is effectively erasure.
And it’s not just something backward ‘50s people did. The 2013 Lone Ranger movie did it, too.
But wait, you say – if The Lone Ranger was always white in popular media, it’s not whitewashing to portray him white like in the traditional stories!
Except it is. Here’s why.
When popular media decides that the greatest lawman of the Old West was a white man when, in reality, the man closest to the fictional hero was Black, it amounts to historical revisionism. Especially since Bass Reeves himself isn’t as well known as Crockett, Boone, or even Paddy Garrett.
Think about how different things would be if the Lone Ranger had been Black from the start. It’s historically accurate, after all, it’s not “political correctness.” Kids going back to the early 20th Century looking up to a Black Old West hero? It’s unimaginable, but it would have been based more in reality.
Instead, kids were given the illusion of an all-white “good guys” Old West. Not just white kids, Black kids were told that, too.
Considering that my video review is almost an hour long, obviously it inspired a whole host of grouchy thoughts on my end. Mainly that the film’s beautiful cinematography and the way that the magical creatures first brought to our attention in Rowling’s 2001 magizoological textbook are brought to life on the big screen don’t make up for barely unbroken whiteness, Rowling’s misuse of Native cultures in and out of the film, and what reads to me as a really shitty narrative about abuse survivors.
I fell out of love with the Harry Potter series pretty early on. I liked the idea of the franchise and owned all of the books at one time or another, but with every new tidbit that Rowling revealed about her characters and the world that they lived in, I found myself increasingly disenchanted. This is all thanks to Rowling’s constant need to express regret for everything except how lacking her works were in diversity and her new material which contains things like confirming/canonizing her “lycanthropy as a stand-in for AIDS/HIV” stance or the way she views Native cultures as a monolith while misrepresenting and misusing Native peoples and cultures.
I watched Fantastic Beasts specifically because I wanted to check the film out and provide an honest opinion of it. I did go into it expecting to hate two specific things (the lack of diversity and Johnny Depp) but I was surprised at all the other things that made me annoyed or uncomfortable throughout watching it.
Note: If you’re unfamiliar with the critical slant I tend to take when watching films, understand that this isn’t going to be a review where I say super goopy things about the film. I think I say one and a half nice things about it and they’re not very nice at that. So be prepared for a rather caustic look at the thing you probably love!
How fast things move! Here’s us, suggesting that media people stop using the cutesy term “alt right” to describe Sieg Heiling white supremacists. But they’re already moving onto the panel discussions on the issue of whether Jews are people.
Fortunately, both of CNN’s panelists are in favor of Jews (such as CNN chief Jeff Zucker) being people, and smile beatifically throughout their condemnation of white supremacists. Nevertheless, that chyron is surreal stuff. It presents a Schrodinger’s shitfeast of a rhetorical question that everyone knows isn’t really a rhetorical question for the people being discussed.
Its almost as if there were a cynical fatalism at hand, riding the Trump wave however long it lasts, perhaps even happy at its unexpected persistence.
White people use the majority of drugs but black people go to jail longer. This talks more about why our jails and prison are full of black and poor people
Since this is much longer than the others if you scroll down to figure 5 and read the information about it that’s where this is detailed but the whole thing is a good read.
Reblogging this to here because I can never find examples of white privilege and systematic oppression when I go searching for it in our blog or my personal one.
myblog 