I’ve had people say that to me. Yes, I wanted to smack them. It’s not actually what I’m saying here, I just liked it as a title.
Recently a young lady on my Twitter feed decided to tweet some pictures of herself in various outfits. I clicked a few (I was actively avoiding editing, of course), and my first reaction was “oh honey. Don’t.” But then I stopped.
She was not, by Hollywood standards, beautiful. The lighting was bad, and the angles not perfect. But she was a happy young woman in clothes she loved, that looked just fine on her. They were not sexy or meant to be, just pictures. And my first reaction was “don’t send pictures like this to strangers!”
Well, screw that. I tweeted back that her outfit was lovely, and so was her smile. And by the time I tweeted it, I felt that way.
Last night was the Golden Globes, and while I haven’t seen a single picture, I can (or could have, last night) told you what lots of people wore and how people thought they looked in it, just from glancing at my Twitter stream. It was annoying to me then; now it makes me sad. So many people get their information on how to live life from their TV, and with TV it’s all about appearance. It’s all about one narrow set of “this appeals to the most people, everything else must go.”
Apparently they’ve cast a white man to play the lead in Akira. The movies market to white people, and white people won’t see movies about with Asians, apparently. (Jackie Chan’s sheer awesome aside, of course. He’s the exception.) Anyway. That’s the decision. Anime fans around the world are banging their heads into walls.
I don’t mean to say that racial issues are caused by the movie business; I just want to point out that major media companies don’t seem to be fighting on the side of justice, whatever they like to put out through their PR firms. (George Lucas backs me up in this.)
The really sucky thing is, the movie studios are perpetuating something that’s already there, at least in me. I’m ashamed to admit that when I decided to make Zeke Cayden in Queen’s Man black, I struggled with it. I was raised in a white area (one black kid in my high school graduating class) and I’m not used to seeing black people dating white people. Unless it’s a movie about interracial relationships, it doesn’t happen much onscreen (at least, in the stuff I watch. Which is not exactly intellectual most of the time.) Â The only thing I’ve seen that I can think of offhand is Firefly, and even there, it’s the woman who is black. I remember the nasty meme of how black men will steal your women! and I wince.
One of the things (many things!) I love about English TV/movies is that they’ll have biracial couples without making a single mention of how it’s an amazing thing.
So, my problem. Before I could write Zeke, I had to be able to picture him. I had to do therapy. Lots and lots of therapy.
Poor me.
*ahem* So, anyway. There’s a problem. Many of us know there’s a problem. It’s not going to go away easily. I guess I’m just blogging to say–
It’s all in our heads (which is where a lot of the worst stuff lies), but we can change our thoughts. Keep thinking.
INCOHERENT RAMBLING AHEAD.
Grey’s Anatomy. This TV show is running out of steam right now, and I know it’s sort of denigrated as the show about “who’s sleeping with who”, but I’ve personally enjoyed the show. (Wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to everyone, though.)
And one of the things I like about it– and this is something that I realized in passing, and is not really a reason why I like the show–is how it treats racial characters as just-is. It’s not a big hoo-ha. It’s not a focus that says “SEE, SEE, WE’RE MULTIRACIAL DEALING WITH THESE ISSUES.” There are Caucasians, Asians, African Americans, Latinos, Middle Eastern, and African characters just flitting in and out this Seattle-based show, and as I understand it, Seattle’s pretty multiracial, so that makes sense. One of the main characters is Asian (Sandra Oh) and she had a relationship with an African American character at one point.
Other viewers might nitpick at how they portray sexuality in the show, but I’ve always thought that one of the pretty neat things is how one straight female character fell in love with a male character, married him, got divorced after he had an affair (yes, I know, the “who’s sleeping with who bit”), and then went on to explore her attraction to other women before finally accepting she was bisexual and then eventually married a lesbian character.
Part of the character arc had to do with her dealing with her family’s reaction to her coming out (there was this awesome scene when she argued with her very religious Catholic father who brought their church priest to “help”. Also another awesome scene was when her then-girlfriend, now-wife told the father how HER father reacted to her coming out.)
Anyway… I’ve probably rambled in a way that I’ve made no sense, but basically: yeah, your entry got me thinking (again). 🙂
Cool! Now you mention that, I remember the romance (well, friends with benefits) relationship between Peter what’s-his-face and Redhead What’s-her-Face on ER.
It’s something that needs to be shown. Treating interracial relationships as nothing unusual shouldn’t be a rarity.