Yeah, SOS and repugnant white savior revisionism.

http://politicalblindspot.com/the-gods-of-egypt-film-to-feature-all-white-cast/

Kill Hollywood plz. I’m white and I’m tired of watching white people be everything all the fucking time, and this type of shit makes a dude wanna toss some fucking bricks. Holy shit.

But I’m struck by how many different white actors are used, and white academics consulted. It seems like every accent has its own actor, and there are old Maine men and young Maine men, and old Alabamans and young Alabamans…but only for whites. For Blacks there is…Morgan Freeman. He is Frederick Douglass, an educated orator and writer, as well as illiterate young privates from New Orleans, and former Virginia and Georgia slaves talking about returning to the plantation to kill their former overseers, and a middle-class pharmacist or something from Boston.

Morgan Freeman – who is absolutely wonderful in this! – renders his usual excellent work, providing the voices for pretty much every single Black man in the series. Historian Barbara Fields is the only academic of colour consulted. About the US Civil War, one of the most central major events in the history of Black people in the US. One man doing all the voices, and one academic speaking for all Black points-of-view on the war.

There are a couple of other voices of people of colour heard; the granddaughter of a freed man who’d become a cavalry sergeant in the Union, and a couple of bits of music that are clearly voices of PoC.

It’s an excellent show, but it very clearly illustrates the point I think is being made in the OP: that “Black” is considered a genre and a token, and “call Morgan Freeman, wouldja?” is considered “looking after that diversity stuff”.

No worries, Stevie. I fully expected that to go over your head. Seems like at least one other person got a chuckle out of it. As for the definition of liberal being different down under, that’s horseshit. Just because we don’t have a left wing party here doesn’t make our centrists magically lefist.

@ dysomniak, darwinian socialist :

“Phil Ochs — Love me, I’m a liberal”

Well to be honest I’ve either never or only vaguely heard most of the names there and I’m an Aussie not an American so this hardly applies.

BTW. ‘Liberal’ in Oz means kinda the opposite of what it does in the USA so yeah, nah. Doesn’t really work for me.

Also if you think I’;m not genuine about saying I want more African American role models and wish them the best – well, you’d be wrong ’bout that..

Yes. Racism makes me angry and sad.

Just checked on wiki and , yes, you’re right.

I am, once again, surprised. Clearly I’m a lousy judge of age – would not have guessed they were as old as they are. I dunno. I really don’t.

I’m not disagreeing, didn’t mean to, just surprised and yeah, okay as a priviledged white guy maybe I’ll never get it. I try to understand and I do think I now get what you are saying so, well, fair enough. You win.

I contend Jet Li and Chow Yun-fat were at least as sexy as similarly aged american actors at the time, but no, asian guys apparently are eunuchs. Who knew? It’s like those california laws against whites marrying the chinese were still in effect.

Good link!

Also, for the record: Ms. Berry is just younger than I am (like, days), and I’m nearer 50 than 45. She’s by far the youngest of the five mentioned. Mr. Freeman is nearly 80, Mr. Glover is in his late 60s, and Mr. Washington and Ms. Goldberg are both nearer 60 than 55.

But Black people are some 13% of the US, and half a dozen – even outstanding, as some of these folk are – actors are hardly a counterevidence to “there are virtually no role models”, especially since even if all of them genuinely were perceived as such (and see above, re: the difficulties of getting majority-PoC casts any award recognition from voting lists made up of 95% old white men), there aren’t anywhere near the prevalence in the population.

So my “anger” – snark, actually, but I think there’s stuff here to be worth being angry over, so I’m not going to argue the characterization much – comes from the casual suggestion that “Oh, but there’s these few Exceptional People over here, what do you mean you don’t get any role models?”, which has been used to dismiss concerns over wildly out-of-balance role preference for a particular, clearly identifiable segment of the population many times. I’ve heard it about queer role models (“But there’s Ellen! And Elton John! And that guy from Bronski Beat, he was important to you people, wasn’t he?” – “Possibly, for a few minutes, in the early 80s…”), I’ve heard it about Asians (“But Fez! and Lucy Liu! And Jackie Chan, he’s really funny, that’s kind of a role model! And that cute little Japanese guy in Heroes, he was nonthreatening! Plus Ling Yao and Jeremy Lin, how many do you need, anyway?” “We’d settle for 1/50th of what you get, would that be an okay start?”), I’ve heard it about women (“But Lena Dunham! Leni Riefenstahl! Twilight! Why can’t you be happy with those?” “Because they suck and/or are Nazis?”), et c., et c..

So seeng you deploy it again, opposite a thoughtful and carefully-reasoned and evidenced post laying out a clear and cogent case for the issue at hand, is, I believe, eminently snark-worthy.

I hope that helps to explain. If calling it angry makes you happier, then sure, I’m angry, racism makesme angry. Doesn’t it make you angry? Shouldn’t it?

They are both over 45, and, as CC noted, once you get past the usual black (primarily male & cis) suspects trotted out ad nauseum as lone wolf exceptions in Hollywood film it’s neo-Jim Crow.

In my entire 10 plus years of teaching in high schools that are 100% Afr-Am and Latino I have never heard Denzel W or Halle Berry cited as role models. Though a great actor, the former was only granted an Academy Award for playing a murderous renegade “gangsta” cop and the latter got hers playing a Jezebel stereotype. In K-12 youth of color are simply not given exposure to a range of complex, substantive historical/literary/artistic/political figures of color in mainstream K-12 curricula. Contemporary scientists of color like Tyson are virtually unknown to children of color due both to the narrowing of said curricula and mainstream/academic depictions of science as the province of elite white male “geniuses”.