I'm going to see "Selma" the film soon. Eventually. I suppose.
Many of us will take young people to see it, I'm sure. May I suggest we not rely solely upon this one source to teach our children about Selma and the civil rights movement? Looking at many sources will give children, and all of us, a more thorough understanding of the movement, and will allow us to examine the events, people, issues, and ideals from different perspectives.
I want to pitch this book for young adult readers. Published around 1980, it was written by two women who were girls in Selma during those consciousness-raising days. They closely watched, wide-eyed, at what was happening around them. They asked questions of the adults, they sensed the urgency and importance of what their parents and neighbors were doing, and they wanted in! This recollection of the Selma story will give young adults a sense that they, too, can provoke change. It will make apathy a shameful and wasteful experience.
Yes, there has been a Disney movie produced based on the book (with Jurnee Smollett). Yet ... there's nothing like getting inside of a story as you do when you read it. There are many stories on, many accounts of, the civil rights movement that we should read. Hollywood depictions, even when they are worthy, give us limited, very narrow, and misleading views of a subject. We surely don't want to rely on Disney to tell this people's history. That can be more dangerous than knowing nothing at all.
This was one of the first books I reviewed when I started my work in public libraries as a Young Adult Services Specialist. I have never forgotten the voices of Sheyann and Rachel. Read it, and share it.
Yes, we can ... do this! Gotta shop? Suggestions, anyone? BZB's Gift Show is back at Shiloh Family Life Center, with a slew of independent, African-American vendors from all over the country. They won't have aluminum foil, dish detergent, and bread, true. Hmmmm... I'd pick Giant and Safeway over the Wal-Martons any day. Employees have a voice, through their union. Giant gets a good salary report, too. http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Employer=Giant_Food_Stores/Hourly_Rate For grown-ups not getting full support from their parents, Target isn't a choice employer. It has a great look and fantastic marketing (and neat stuff), but its labor practices are no better than Wal-Mart's. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-nader/target-walmart_b_4254981.html Costco has a conscientious attitude toward paying people salaries that are appropriate for ... people! http://www.businessinsider.com/costcos-simple-strategy-2014-9 The change we seek in our society has to start not within our collective conscience, but within each individual conscience. Thinking ....
Wal-Mart's Walton family, the Wal-Martons, is a monument to greed and inhumanity, the personification of "selfish." There are those who are scoffing at these protests. Why scoff? Pushing back is just as American (more American?) as corporate greed.
Some people say the Wal-Martons have earned their right to be filthy rich and detached, to control their wealth any way they want. "Their right" ... an overused and misused expression. A throwaway term. Who granted the Wal-Martons this right? No, they did not earn it all by themselves. I view the Wal-Martons as thieves no less conniving than Dick Cheney. Americans become gullible in matters of wealth and fame, other people's wealth and fame, that is. These workers are smart and bold, and not fooled in the least by wolves claiming to be sheep. See this story from Bloomberg -- "How Wal-Mart's Waltons Maintain Their Billionaire Fortune" http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-12/how-wal-mart-s-waltons-maintain-their-billionaire-fortune-taxes.html
Olivia Cole HuffPost Entertainment http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/lucy-why-im-tired-of-seei_b_5627318.html Posted: Updated:
I'm tired of seeing white people on the silver screen.
First, let me note that I am white. I am a white woman who goes to the theater to see probably a dozen films (if not more) in a given year, a white woman who readily consumes TV shows and series and often blogs/tweets about them. I love film. I love what Hollywood could be, but I must say that I don't love what it is, and that is a machine generating story after story in which the audience is asked to root for a white (usually male) hero over and over and over (and over) again. I'm tired. I'm tired of directors pretending that white actors are the default and that people of color are a distraction when it comes to filmmaking. I'm tired of black women in Hollywood being relegated to roles of slaves and "the help" over and over again. I'm tired of films convincing themselves that they are taking on something fresh and new, the likes of which the world has never seen, but in actuality adhering to tired tropes and stereotypes.
One example that comes to mind is Avatar, a "groundbreaking" film about aliens and humanity, which, underneath it all, is the same old White Savior story. But more recently is Lucy, the film starring Scarlett Johansson in which a woman named Lucy evolves and is able to use 100 percent of her brain's capacity after she unwittingly ingests a massive amount of drugs.
Lucy is about what humankind could be -- it's about possibilities. As Lucy's brainpower grows stronger and the volume of knowledge she is able to access increases, she delivers monologues about how little humans understand about death, existence, and the universe, mediating on time and history. The film likes to think of itself as reimagining everything that we think we know about humanity, and presents to us their vision of what the most evolved woman on earth looks like:
A blonde white woman.
See, I just can't get right with that.
You see, I was an anthropology major in high school and by the time I was 16 I'd learned all about Lucy (Australopithecus), the collection of bones found in Hadar and thought to have lived 3.2 million years ago, one of the oldest hominids we know of. Lucy the film doesn't try to hide how cute they thought they were being by naming the supreme evolved being in their film "Lucy" -- they show an ape-like creature crouched by a stream to illustrate just how far human beings have come, and say as much in the opening lines, depicting vast cities built up to show our progress. The original Lucy was not really an ape, though. She had small skull capacity like apes, but her skeleton shows she was bipedal and walked upright like humans. Hadar, by the way, is in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia.
So I guess what's sticking in my craw is the assertion that while human life originated in Africa -- a detail the film neatly skims over, placing the ape-like Lucy that Johansson sees in North America -- somehow the way we imagine the most evolved human being is blonde and white. Even more, when Lucy gets surges of knowledge in the film, her eyes flash brightly blue. Because blue eyes, we all know, are the universal symbol of superiority, right?
How is it that in a film whose premise rests on the idea of reimagining the past, present and future, we still end up with a blonde white woman with flashing blue eyes as the stand-in for what personifies evolution and supremely fulfilled human potential? At one point the Ape-like Lucy and Evolved Lucy meet face-to-face as Evolved Lucy does a bit of time-traveling. Their fingers touch, and we see them deliberately posed to mimic the famous Creation of Adam painting, and in that moment I saw what I suppose we were supposed to see: humanity at its beginning, and then humanity at its end, at its most perfect. Blonde, white and blue-eyed.
I can't accept that. I can't accept that there was only one black woman in the entire film, who delivered one line and who we never saw again. I can't accept that the bad guys were Asian and that although in Taiwan, Lucy's roommate says, "I mean, who speaks Chinese? I don't speak Chinese!" I can't accept that in Hercules, which I also saw this weekend, there were no people of color except for Dwayne Johnson himself and his mixed-race wife, whose skin was almost alabaster. I can't accept that she got maybe two lines and was then murdered. I can't accept that the "primitive tribe" in Hercules consisted of dark-haired men painted heavily, blackish green, to give their skin (head-to-toe) a darker appearance, so the audience could easily differentiate between good and bad guys by the white vs. dark skin. I can't accept that during the previews, Exodus: Gods and Kings, a story about Moses leading the Israelite slaves out of Egypt, where not a single person of color is represented, casts Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton to play Egyptians. I can't accept that in the preview for Kingsman: The Secret Service, which takes place in London, features a cast of white boys and not a single person of Indian descent, which make up the largest non-white ethnic group in London. I can't accept that in stories about the end of the world and the apocalypse, that somehow only white people survive. I can't accept that while my daily life is filled with black and brown women, they are completely absent, erased, when I look at a TV or movie screen.
I can't accept that. And I can't accept that when we think about the potential of humankind and what our brains are capable of doing and thinking and feeling, that people of color would be absent from that imagining. I can't accept that. And I won't. I'm tired of seeing people that look like me crowding screens both big and small: I am not what the world looks like. Hollywood, stop whitewashing characters. Give us more films like this year's Annie. I'm no Lucy -- like everyone else I'm only using a tiny amount of my brain's capacity. But you don't need to be a superhuman logic-machine to see that Hollywood has a major problem with depicting people of color, and it's time toactuallyreimagine what the world can and should be.
I hope we don't remember Maya Angelou as a mere celebrity.
What is that? Nor as some sainted statue. Not haughty, nor the possession of exalted institutions. Let's place her with the other truth
tellers and freedom fighters, where she belongs, with Sojourner Truth and
Harriett Tubman, with Ida B. Wells, Josephine Baker and Ella Baker, Mrs. Hamer and Shirley Chisholm ... all of them and the many, many more; the fathers and sons and brothers, including her friends and teachers Malcolm and Martin, and the many, many more; and the ones whose names only we know, the ones who reared us, guided us, educated us, showed us to value kinship, to build strong ties with good people, to be the (wo)man in the mirror, asking: "Who am I to be blind, pretending not to see their need?" (Yeah, threw in MJ.)
I'm going to see "Selma" the film soon. Eventually. I suppose.
.jpg){kind=link}