Black Mermaids and WOke backlash

[Sculptor1]

Sorry to be obtuse. How can "reverse prejudice" be reparation?

Temporary reverse prejudice allows those who have been discriminated against, to 'catch up' with their peers who have not been so mistreated.

Please give an example.

If women had always been denied the right to drive a car, we might extend that right to them, and then, in partial reparation, we might offer them free tuition, temporarily.

I just made that up, of course, but I think the point is clear?

P.S. Hindsight suggests that competitive driving might've been a better choice of example?

Clear as mud.
You might be talking about positive discrimination.
Is that the case?

Aren't 'reverse' discrimination and 'positive' discrimination the same thing?

The former seems to be something you made up, and the second thing is in everyday parlance. If they are the same thing they why use your own phrase rather than the one is common use?

Now back to the question.
I was talking about pedophiles, and you suggested that "Positive discrimination" is somehow redemptive?

Care to explain?

[Pattern-chaser]

Aren't 'reverse' discrimination and 'positive' discrimination the same thing?

The former seems to be something you made up, and the second thing is in everyday parlance. If they are the same thing they why use your own phrase rather than the one is common use?

...

Care to explain?

No need, I don't think. This is the first occurrence of "reverse" that I can find, to which I responded, using your chosen term:

I guess some concepts need to be experienced to be understood. That is, they defy theoretical pondering from the sidelines.

We all face some sort of prejudice, but the way to counter it, is not more (reverse) prejudice.

[Pattern-chaser]

I was talking about pedophiles...

You were? I'm afraid I've lost that thread...

[Sculptor1]

Aren't 'reverse' discrimination and 'positive' discrimination the same thing?

The former seems to be something you made up, and the second thing is in everyday parlance. If they are the same thing they why use your own phrase rather than the one is common use?

...

Care to explain?

No need, I don't think. This is the first occurrence of "reverse" that I can find, to which I responded, using your chosen term:

I guess some concepts need to be experienced to be understood. That is, they defy theoretical pondering from the sidelines.

We all face some sort of prejudice, but the way to counter it, is not more (reverse) prejudice.

Prejudice is prejudice, in denies things to some through discrimination of others.

[seekingpurity]

I saw a lovely tic-tok of some young black girls remarking with amazement that the mermaid was a black girl. For me that was enough to convince me that is was worth making the effort. Giving kids representation is very important for them to avoid alienation.

However, there is a lot wrong with how things are going at the moment. There are really good and creative ways to make sure minorities are represented. At the moment there is a icky tendency for a sort of pedagogic high mindedness which is being generally rejected as absurd by the public. Even people who are full square behind the idea of extending representation and giving, say, black actors a level playing ground with white.

I think the actual problem is an obsession with skin colour. For example, we could decide right now to create a society thatobsesses and categorises people by eye colour. That would be pretty stupid right? Yet categorising people by skin colour is considered to not be stupid.

As for what is going on, Im finding it amazing that Boris Johnson who represented a classical British toff was given endless media attention but Rishi Sunak is not in the papers at all. There were a few embarrassing articles at the start from intelligent newspapers about his skin colour and then.........silence!!! Its almost like hiding that we have a PM that is Indian.

The other thing that is curious about the strategy to fight racism is that in does not include oriental people at all. They are still fair game and the same people who are righteously protecting black people are endorsing hatred of oriental people.

My conclusion is that the whole things is about striving for superiority. Oriental people are a threat to superiority and we cannot feel superior until we have nothing to be ashamed of...hence our desire to correct our mistakes of the past. Ironically the main mistake was believing we were superior to the citizens of the countries we discovered. Its why Christianity has failed abysmally..the superiority attitude when preaching.

Its unfortunate that this quest to be the best, the wisest, the most skilled, the father figure of the world.....has led to us doing these odd experiments on new ways to raise our kids and the result is a lot of very confused young adults with mental illnesses arising. These young adults are trying to figure out who and how to be in a society that is constantly regecting its own design. It is a lack of stability and consistency that is very unnerving. Setting up everything so you need a smart phone to be able to do anything is the latest nonsense. Replacing human contact with contact with automatons and apps. With no thought about what effect this will have on peoples wellbeing.

[seekingpurity]

*reJecting its own design*

[Sculptor1]

I saw a lovely tic-tok of some young black girls remarking with amazement that the mermaid was a black girl. For me that was enough to convince me that is was worth making the effort. Giving kids representation is very important for them to avoid alienation.

However, there is a lot wrong with how things are going at the moment. There are really good and creative ways to make sure minorities are represented. At the moment there is a icky tendency for a sort of pedagogic high mindedness which is being generally rejected as absurd by the public. Even people who are full square behind the idea of extending representation and giving, say, black actors a level playing ground with white.

I think the actual problem is an obsession with skin colour. For example, we could decide right now to create a society thatobsesses and categorises people by eye colour. That would be pretty stupid right? Yet categorising people by skin colour is considered to not be stupid.

As for what is going on, Im finding it amazing that Boris Johnson who represented a classical British toff was given endless media attention but Rishi Sunak is not in the papers at all. There were a few embarrassing articles at the start from intelligent newspapers about his skin colour and then.........silence!!! Its almost like hiding that we have a PM that is Indian.

The other thing that is curious about the strategy to fight racism is that in does not include oriental people at all. They are still fair game and the same people who are righteously protecting black people are endorsing hatred of oriental people.

My conclusion is that the whole things is about striving for superiority. Oriental people are a threat to superiority and we cannot feel superior until we have nothing to be ashamed of...hence our desire to correct our mistakes of the past. Ironically the main mistake was believing we were superior to the citizens of the countries we discovered. Its why Christianity has failed abysmally..the superiority attitude when preaching.

Its unfortunate that this quest to be the best, the wisest, the most skilled, the father figure of the world.....has led to us doing these odd experiments on new ways to raise our kids and the result is a lot of very confused young adults with mental illnesses arising. These young adults are trying to figure out who and how to be in a society that is constantly regecting its own design. It is a lack of stability and consistency that is very unnerving. Setting up everything so you need a smart phone to be able to do anything is the latest nonsense. Replacing human contact with contact with automatons and apps. With no thought about what effect this will have on peoples wellbeing.

I hope that one day King's dream will come true that the colour of a person's skin is of no more significance than the colour of their eyes.
How we get to that point is fraught with problems and landmines.
The more we talk about it; the deeper a hole we seem to dig ourselves.
The Black Panther films have two effects. One positive the other negative. Whilst black people might feel that at last they have something for themselves rather than always on the side lines tokenised, the structure of the film inevitably re-inforces the differences between colours and plays into the tropes of colour supremacy. Rather than white supremacy we have a black version of the same thing.

I do not have a solution. But I know right now nothing we are doing is going in the right direction.

[LuckyR]

Actually when viewed over time, things are improving. Setting aside the obvious examples of slavery and official segregation, objective measures like life expectancy and percentage of earned college degree differences recently between blacks and whites (while still present) are narrowing.

[Sculptor1]

Actually when viewed over time, things are improving. Setting aside the obvious examples of slavery and official segregation, objective measures like life expectancy and percentage of earned college degree differences recently between blacks and whites (while still present) are narrowing.

I know that this generation is the first for a long time where our children are expected to live a shorter life than their parents.
I would have thought that that sort of change would act to further divide.

And the matter of wages, we have growing inequality and that has been the case for about 40 years. I do not know how this breaks down into ethnic group differentiation.

[Stoppelmann]

But there is a growing problem which undermines the effort. In RIngs of Power for example as in other programmes (eg Wheel of Time) which have several examples of white characters with black children and black parents with white children. When we watch a drama we enter into a contract whereby the audience suspend their disbelief and pretend that what we are watching is real. This is most important with fantasy programs. So why not cast Morgan Freeman as the child or even wife of a character played by Emma Watson? WHy not? Because it would be ridiculous! It would stop you in your tracks and the spell of belief would be broken. So why is the daughter of the HIgh King of Numenor(white) and black women - a great performance by the way, but an example of bad casting since she simply does not look like her father in a very profound way.

So why not make the entire family of Isildur black instead? The point is Amazon are imposing a moral point virtue signalling in the most exhibitionist way. When I watch a series on Netflix or Amazon, I am pleased to see a range of different human groups represented, but I do not want it to be in my face to the degree that it makes the drama look idiotic.

I agree with you on this one. But only having seen Rings Of Power, I can only comment on that production.

I found it to be badly made, especially considering the cost of it. There were some things that were good, but the scriptwriting was bad and the total lack of concern for the original storyline had me realising that they were cashing in on the Lord of The Rings and Tolkien franchise but writing a completely different story. Their main characters were not the Tolkien characters and Galadriel, who at the time of ROP was somewhere between 5,000 to 5,300 years old, had a husband and daughter, who vanished in this adaption.

As to the skin colour that was made such a lot of, if you know the Tolkien’s lore, a black skinned Elf is silly, because they are not human beings and come from a time when there was no sunlight. The multi-ethnic society Amazon created “to make it more like today” is rather missing the point. There would have been no objection if different races of men had been dark skinned, or even the Harfoots who seemed to be coming from the south, but the multi-ethnic thing in Elves, Númenoreans, Dwarves, and Humans made no sense.

As it stands, many productions are becoming the same, and it is disconcerting, because if the fantasy worlds are exactly like ours, except that women are the better men, and they all speak lines “as they should” – that is, according to woke rules – the stories will start becoming all the same, and boring.

[Sculptor1]

But there is a growing problem which undermines the effort. In RIngs of Power for example as in other programmes (eg Wheel of Time) which have several examples of white characters with black children and black parents with white children. When we watch a drama we enter into a contract whereby the audience suspend their disbelief and pretend that what we are watching is real. This is most important with fantasy programs. So why not cast Morgan Freeman as the child or even wife of a character played by Emma Watson? WHy not? Because it would be ridiculous! It would stop you in your tracks and the spell of belief would be broken. So why is the daughter of the HIgh King of Numenor(white) and black women - a great performance by the way, but an example of bad casting since she simply does not look like her father in a very profound way.

So why not make the entire family of Isildur black instead? The point is Amazon are imposing a moral point virtue signalling in the most exhibitionist way. When I watch a series on Netflix or Amazon, I am pleased to see a range of different human groups represented, but I do not want it to be in my face to the degree that it makes the drama look idiotic.

I agree with you on this one. But only having seen Rings Of Power, I can only comment on that production.

I found it to be badly made, especially considering the cost of it. There were some things that were good, but the scriptwriting was bad and the total lack of concern for the original storyline had me realising that they were cashing in on the Lord of The Rings and Tolkien franchise but writing a completely different story. Their main characters were not the Tolkien characters and Galadriel, who at the time of ROP was somewhere between 5,000 to 5,300 years old, had a husband and daughter, who vanished in this adaption.

As to the skin colour that was made such a lot of, if you know the Tolkien’s lore, a black skinned Elf is silly, because they are not human beings and come from a time when there was no sunlight. The multi-ethnic society Amazon created “to make it more like today” is rather missing the point. There would have been no objection if different races of men had been dark skinned, or even the Harfoots who seemed to be coming from the south, but the multi-ethnic thing in Elves, Númenoreans, Dwarves, and Humans made no sense.

As it stands, many productions are becoming the same, and it is disconcerting, because if the fantasy worlds are exactly like ours, except that women are the better men, and they all speak lines “as they should” – that is, according to woke rules – the stories will start becoming all the same, and boring.

I think it is really important to tell the truth about history.
When we depict times when there was racial discrimination it is important to show that it existed rather than pretend it never did.
Does it favour white centred society to allow this re-writing of history?
ATM watching Ep 6 "Cabinet of Curiosities". Set in 1933 Two equal friends one black one white, separate. The black guy goes to get a job writing for Time magazine. Now, I might be wrong but I would have thought that the only black guys working for Time would be janitors. There were some great black writers in the US during the 1930s but life was tough for them to get accepted. Maybe we do not need to be reminded of the prejudice but why pretend it never existed?

[Sculptor1]

But there is a growing problem which undermines the effort. In RIngs of Power for example as in other programmes (eg Wheel of Time) which have several examples of white characters with black children and black parents with white children. When we watch a drama we enter into a contract whereby the audience suspend their disbelief and pretend that what we are watching is real. This is most important with fantasy programs. So why not cast Morgan Freeman as the child or even wife of a character played by Emma Watson? WHy not? Because it would be ridiculous! It would stop you in your tracks and the spell of belief would be broken. So why is the daughter of the HIgh King of Numenor(white) and black women - a great performance by the way, but an example of bad casting since she simply does not look like her father in a very profound way.

So why not make the entire family of Isildur black instead? The point is Amazon are imposing a moral point virtue signalling in the most exhibitionist way. When I watch a series on Netflix or Amazon, I am pleased to see a range of different human groups represented, but I do not want it to be in my face to the degree that it makes the drama look idiotic.

I agree with you on this one. But only having seen Rings Of Power, I can only comment on that production.

I found it to be badly made, especially considering the cost of it. There were some things that were good, but the scriptwriting was bad and the total lack of concern for the original storyline had me realising that they were cashing in on the Lord of The Rings and Tolkien franchise but writing a completely different story. Their main characters were not the Tolkien characters and Galadriel, who at the time of ROP was somewhere between 5,000 to 5,300 years old, had a husband and daughter, who vanished in this adaption.

As to the skin colour that was made such a lot of, if you know the Tolkien’s lore, a black skinned Elf is silly, because they are not human beings and come from a time when there was no sunlight. The multi-ethnic society Amazon created “to make it more like today” is rather missing the point. There would have been no objection if different races of men had been dark skinned, or even the Harfoots who seemed to be coming from the south, but the multi-ethnic thing in Elves, Númenoreans, Dwarves, and Humans made no sense.

As it stands, many productions are becoming the same, and it is disconcerting, because if the fantasy worlds are exactly like ours, except that women are the better men, and they all speak lines “as they should” – that is, according to woke rules – the stories will start becoming all the same, and boring.

As for R of P, I'd tried to read the unreadable SIlmarillion when it first came out so that I knew it was no basis for a TV series.
I was really annoyed with the films of The Hobbit for all the unnecessary packing so when R of P was to come out I decided, in advance, to see it on its own terms. In this way I was able to enjoy it more than if I had expected it to be cannon. There were irritating things about it, but I was able to appreciate the efforts made by the actors and set designers.

[Stoppelmann]

I think it is really important to tell the truth about history.
When we depict times when there was racial discrimination it is important to show that it existed rather than pretend it never did.
Does it favour white centred society to allow this re-writing of history?
ATM watching Ep 6 "Cabinet of Curiosities". Set in 1933 Two equal friends one black one white, separate. The black guy goes to get a job writing for Time magazine. Now, I might be wrong but I would have thought that the only black guys working for Time would be janitors. There were some great black writers in the US during the 1930s but life was tough for them to get accepted. Maybe we do not need to be reminded of the prejudice but why pretend it never existed?

Once again, I agree, for this reason: In some historical dramas, various ethnic groups have played aristocratic people, which does beg the question since many of them were invested in the slave trade. It seems ironic to portray the past as though it were like today because of the injustices that were going on, which opposed any idea of multi-ethnic societies, in fact they were servants of colonial masters. There were a few people that rose to privileged positions, but it was mostly via the military or humanities. The contribution of Black military drummers in this era is renowned.

The 18th century life of Charles Ignatius Sancho, the first British-African to vote in Britain, was extraordinary. He was a composer, actor, and social satirist. There was also Joseph Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George (1745–1799), a musician, athlete, and soldier, who came to England from France to increase his reputation as a leading composer and musician – he was known as the ‘Black Mozart’. George Africanus in Nottingham became a successful entrepreneur, founding the first employment agency for servants in the city in 1793. So there was some prominence among ethnic minorities but nowhere near what it is like now.

[Xenophon]

What are your thoughts on Aaron Burr being played by a black actor in Hamilton?

What would be your thoughts about, say, a young Jackie Chan playing Kareem Abdul Jabbar in a movie?

[Sy Borg]

I saw a lovely tic-tok of some young black girls remarking with amazement that the mermaid was a black girl. For me that was enough to convince me that is was worth making the effort. Giving kids representation is very important for them to avoid alienation.

However, there is a lot wrong with how things are going at the moment. There are really good and creative ways to make sure minorities are represented. At the moment there is a icky tendency for a sort of pedagogic high mindedness which is being generally rejected as absurd by the public. Even people who are full square behind the idea of extending representation and giving, say, black actors a level playing ground with white.

But there is a growing problem which undermines the effort. In RIngs of Power for example as in other programmes (eg Wheel of Time) which have several examples of white characters with black children and black parents with white children. When we watch a drama we enter into a contract whereby the audience suspend their disbelief and pretend that what we are watching is real. This is most important with fantasy programs. So why not cast Morgan Freeman as the child or even wife of a character played by Emma Watson? WHy not? Because it would be ridiculous! It would stop you in your tracks and the spell of belief would be broken. So why is the daughter of the HIgh King of Numenor(white) and black women - a great performance by the way, but an example of bad casting since she simply does not look like her father in a very profound way.

So why not make the entire family of Isildur black instead? The point is Amazon are imposing a moral point virtue signalling in the most exhibitionist way. When I watch a series on Netflix or Amazon, I am pleased to see a range of different human groups represented, but I do not want it to be in my face to the degree that it makes the drama look idiotic.

I would just like to post my appreciation of this post. Nailed it.

It's sad that people are, in a sense, not being allowed to escape into art, especially at a time when escapism is especially desirable. Instead, viewers must always be reminded of the world's problems. It's cruel to viewers and recklessly divisive. The current virtue display behaviour is creating a backlash against minorities (and we'd been doing so well until recently). People have become resentful as their favourite stories are increasingly distorted by political messaging, and some blame the messenger.