Lucy: Why I'm Tired of Seeing White People on the Big Screen

Olivia Cole 
HuffPost Entertainment
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/olivia-cole/lucy-why-im-tired-of-seei_b_5627318.html
Posted: 07/28/2014 2:46 pm EDT Updated: 07/30/2014 1:59 pm EDT

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 to actually reimagine what the world can and should be.

--

Olivia Cole writes a blog at oliviaacole.wordpress.com and published her novel,Panther in the Hive, in 2014.

Remember, She Was Bold

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.)

Love the Players, Hate the Name

It's not good enough to keep the name because "it's always been that way." That logic has been a notorious roadblock to human and civil rights. It might work in some situations, but not here. Read what Sally Jenkins at the Post has to say.  -- A



The Washington Post 
On Washington Redskins’ name, it’s time the grown-ups talk sense into Daniel Snyder" 
by Sally Jenkins 
Published: February 13
  

Critics demanded the Redskins nickname be boycotted at a symposium on racist stereotypes in American sports at the Smithsonian National American Indian Museum on Thursday.

If you’ve long suspected that football is not a measure of intellect, the proof is currently posted for all to see on the Washington Redskins Web site. A series of prominently displayed pseudo-articles defend the club’s use of a racial slur as a mascot on the grounds that lots of high schools are nicknamed “Redskins” too — so it must be okay. Which we can only take to mean that pretty soon owner Daniel Snyder will be skipping class to build a potato gun.

It would be nice if the NFL franchise in the nation’s capital were an example for all the land. But apparently Snyder takes his example from 10th graders. A couple of days ago, the club launched a campaign to defuse the pressure Snyder is under to change the team name by declaring that “70 different high schools in 25 states are known as the Redskins,” and therefore it’s surely an honorable word. What’s more, “Redskins.com found that there are almost as many schools using the name Redskins as Cowboys.” Oooh! And after school, for fun we’ll shoot BB guns at road signs!

On Tuesday, a new entry appeared, in which a high school athletic director from Oklahoma proclaimed that, “No one has ever been dishonored at our school with that Redskins nickname.” Though he himself was admittedly not American Indian, he said he had consulted one.

He also confessed that he wasn’t sure his students “know the whole history behind the nickname ‘Redskins.’” 

 

No, they probably don’t know. Given that the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress found that only 12 percent of high school seniors were proficient in American history. And only 2 percent were able to identify the social problem addressed by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
 

This is just a guess, unlike the Redskins.com scientific method of surveying high schools on MaxPreps. But I’m willing to hazard that most 10th graders don’t realize a team calling itself Redskins might as well rename itself the Darkies, Guidos, or Slant Eyes. I’m pretty sure they are unaware that the term Redskins dates to the settler era when hunters boasted about shooting down “damned government pets” and peddled Indian scalps as if they were animal pelts along with deerskins and bearskins.
 

It’s Snyder’s favorite ploy to summon “history” and “heritage” to defend his use of a term that belongs in the same class as Dagos, Hymies and Krauts. By history, Snyder seems to mean the apocryphal notion that team owner George Preston Marshall meant to “honor” Lone Star Dietz with the name of the team. A real reading of history shows that, actually, Marshall was a virulent racist and segregationist who liked to play Slave and Master. According to Thomas G. Smith’s book “Showdown,” when Marshall proposed to his wife, he hired black performers to dress up as chattel and sing “Carry Me Back to old Virginny.” He once said, “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.” He also once said, in answer to the charge that he was anti-Semitic, “I love Jews, especially when they’re customers.” It’s far more probable that when Marshall invested in the team known back then as the Boston Braves, he simply renamed it to differentiate it from the baseball team.

 

This is a just another guess, and not scientific method on the level of Redskins.com, but I’m pretty sure that whoever wrote the Redskins.com post wouldn’t score any higher on a history test than your nephew who chews on his arm. I’m willing to make another non-scientific guess: Snyder doesn’t care to do anything about the name because he doesn’t consider American Indians a significant part of his audience. Since they make up only 1.4 percent of the general population, they’re too unimportant to be insulted. So it’s perfectly okay to use a term about them that ranks right up there with Spics, Tar Babies, Wetbacks and Yids.

At last week’s Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian symposium on “Racist Stereotypes” in sports, one American Indian in the audience stood up and said, “If Dan Snyder truly thinks the word ‘Redskins’ is an honorific, I challenge him to attended the next meeting of the National Congress of American Indians and try using that word to people’s faces.”

 

Plenty of important people have raised the issue of the team’s name, from Mayor Vincent Gray to several columnists at this paper to WRC anchor Jim Vance. But none of them have the power to make Snyder or the NFL uncomfortable, and he seems beyond embarrassment about using such an ugly term, though lord knows I’ve tried in the preceding paragraphs. What’s needed is an influential lobby. I think I have just the group. Snyder may be careless about insulting American Indians, but there is another population that he should take care not to insult. They make up a large part of the NFL audience, and have considerable sway with league commissioner Roger Goodell: the U.S. military.

I’m betting that the owner has no idea American Indians have the highest per capita military service commitment of any ethnic group in this country. Or that 47 percent of all tribal leaders are veterans.
 

As of 2010, there were 22,569 enlisted service men and women and 1,297 officers on active duty from the native population. It’s a tradition that dates back to World War I, when 12,000 American Indians served before they even had citizenship rights, and four won the Croix de Guerre. In World War II, 44,000 served.
So I have a suggestion for the commander in chief and the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and their chiefs of staff and sergeant majors. Pick up the phone. Put in a call to Snyder, and tell him, “Stop demeaning our most loyal volunteer troops.”

Of course, he may be too busy setting off stinkbombs in the school bathroom to listen.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/redskins/on-washington-redskins-name-its-time-the-grown-ups-talk-sense-into-daniel-snyder/2013/02/13/867b1ace-7610-11e2-95e4-6148e45d7adb_story.html 

The Individual Mandate – A Modern Fairy Tale

Posted on June 28, 2012, by blogger Al Davis at Seriously Left

One of the world’s oldest and most successful hustles is insurance. “What?” you say. What do you mean hustle? Well, imagine you and a few of your friends — lets call them pirates — are sitting around a table after a full day of pillaging the local town, killing the farm animals, and raping the women. The drunken stupor is finally wearing off, and you are ready to go out and do it all again. 

However, you have already sacked this town, destroyed it so that there is barely anything left to take away and sell. Nothing to sell, except, FEAR.

Yeah, that’s it! You and your friends will sell fear. You’ll make the townspeople fear that nothing they own is secure — not their farm, not their farmhouse, not the stuff in the house — including the people. Mayhem is lurking just around the corner! The folk will want to protect their stuff, their health, their very lives. And that’s where your gang comes in. You tell the townspeople that, for a monthly fee, you will promise to pay a PORTION of the replacement cost of anything they decide to insure. Even their wife and children — after all, don’t the husbands own their wives and children … uh, wait, that’s a different fairy tale. 

Anyway, as we all know, stuff happens. There could be a storm that destroys the crops, we tell them. Or the King and his staff (also referred to as your elected representatives) could raise your taxes and — wait a sec, thats a roving band of marauders … that’s what we do. Well, anyway, you get the picture: stuff happens. You just never know.

So the townspeople, having just come through a very difficult situation through no fault of their own, decide they like our idea. So people start signing up in droves to insure their stuff. Not everybody, but many. Other pirates from all around the world hear about the great business opportunity where you don’t have to produce ANYTHING, just make people nervous about losing their stuff, ask them to give you some just-in-case money — AND PEOPLE DO IT! Willingly and proudly. And the best thing about it is that since raping and pillaging is against the law, you don’t have to do that anymore and risk going to jail. Just tell folks it COULD happen. Sweet.

What do we do with all this money? We take it and buy gold! We invest in pharmaceutical companies. We make scary television commercials. We sell more insurance. Then we buy gold! We invest in… you get the picture. We just won’t tell them THAT. So, this goes on for many years. The new King of this (by now) VERY wealthy land, decides that it is a good thing for his subjects to have some protection against the unknown so that when times get hard they can at least remain marginally productive and continue paying taxes, making this an even WEALTHIER land. He (and most of the people) decide: “Insurance for everybody! Halleluia!” Great idea. Really! Except for one little glitch.

Instead of the King using some of his subjects’ hard-earned tax money to provide the insurance, he decides that little ‘ole you MUST go to THE PIRATES (you know, the ones who did the raping and pillaging in the first place) and BUY it from them. And if you don’t do business with THE PIRATES, then the King will FINE you a pound of flesh. Now, in fairness, the King SAID he didn’t initially want to FORCE you to buy from them. The devil — I mean, THE PIRATES and their cabin boys, also known as lobbyists — made him do it.

Whatever.

“Still waiting for our first black president.” Really…?

Posted on June 3, 2012 by blogger Al Davis at Seriously Left

Just read an article in the June 1 edition of the  Washington Post Opinions by Frederick Harris, a professor of political science and director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. The title of the essay is “Still waiting for our first black president.” In order to be sure I approached it with an open mind, I read it twice. After the second reading, I was sure it was a crock (in my humble opinion). But not wanting to be a bomb thrower, I mustered up the gumption to read it a third time. Just to be sure.
Now, I’m sure.
When are our academicians going to stop seeing black folks as a special-interest group? The key problems affecting African Americans are the same problems affecting everybody else: economic and social class-ism. African Americans are citizens, fully and completely. Anything any president does on a national level to address economic and social injustice should be done to benefit us and everybody else.
There are white folks living in abject poverty in Appalachia, and it would be great if someone were paying attention to their plight. Imagine what the reaction among blacks would have been if George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, or any other president, had announced that the economic situation of white Appalachian folks was so much worse than everyone else’s and the government was going to do something to help them — just them.
No, President Obama hasn’t let down black folks. All politics is local.
Black folks have been let down by their pastors, elected officials, and other recognized leaders who have had nothing to say about the economic discrimination happening right in black communities. These leaders have had nothing to say to the African-American drug dealers who run amok in African-American neighborhoods. They have nothing to say to their neighbors when resources intended for local services ended up lining their own pockets.
Religious leaders don’t hold vigils until after the blood is in the street. They won’t stand up and say, “Let’s run out the drug dealers. Let’s have a prayer vigil every night on this corner until they are gone. Let’s tell the police who the dealers are, who is sporting guns, and who is breaking into folks’ homes.”
No, the churches won’t do this. Instead, they busy themselves raising money to build bigger barns, I mean churches, or whatever they call them these days. ”Oh, bless me Lord, bless ME, Lord.” That’s all I ever hear.
Why point the finger at Obama when Black elected officials keep on dropping the ball right in their front yards? When it comes time to get elected, they are all over the community. But when it comes time to get into the community, to bring together the community to start affecting change, they are silent and invisible. Local policy makers continue giving us the same sorry excuses for their failures. In the school system, they point the finger at the easy target: teachers. But it can’t possibly be just the teachers. No, it’s a fact that there are leadership deficiencies at the top tiers of our local governments. We can look at the District of Columbia, Newark, Baltimore, Atlanta and Prince George’s County, Maryland, just to name few.
Perhaps, like Harris, local black leaders are looking to Obama to fix their communities’ problems. I sure hope not. If Mr. Obama doesn’t win in November (although, he most likely will), then there goes that plan. If Mr. Obama does win in November, there will be only four years left to get anything done for black America, if we rely on Harris’ logic. After those four years are up, it will be back to business as usual — unless our local leaders are counting on America electing a black man or woman president in 2016. If we don’t elect a black president in 2012 or 2016, then the best-laid plan of these mice and men — the hold-somebody-else-responsible plan – will have gone astray. And we will be screwed.
Then who would be our Moses? I can just hear the the crying, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. “Lawdy, lawdy, who gon’ save us now?”
Harris writes, “The key question is not why Obama, as a black man, isn’t doing more for the black community. Rather, what is he doing for the most loyal constituency of the Democratic Party, a constituency that just happens to be black, and just happens to be in need of policies that are universal as well as targeted to address long-standing inequalities?”
I want to know what President Obama being a black man has to do with doing the right thing for all Americans. I expected every president I ever voted for to do the right thing for all Americans. Segregationists in the south were a loyal constituency. If we follow Harris’ logic, doing what the loyal constituency wanted as opposed to doing the right thing would have resulted in Black folks being disenfranchised even longer than we were.
Black Americans, as well as all Americans, are in this economic and inequality mess  because few want to acknowledge the real  issue. The issue is class. Pure and simple. While the oligarchs steal the cake and run off, the rest of us fight over the crumbs.
The Godfather of Soul said, “I don’t want nobody to give me nothing. Open up the door, and I’ll get it myself.” A couple of generations later, Tupac said, ”If you won’t open the door, that’s okay. We’ll just take it off the hinges … but we comin’ in.”
You want to get serious about addressing social and economic issues in the black community? Deal with the locals. Create change on that level. Hold those on the local front lines responsible. Put their feet to the fire. Success on that level will rise to the national level. If it can’t or won’t get done locally, it won’t get done nationally.
I’m not waiting for a black president. We have one. I’m waiting for some local leadership with backbone, integrity, and guts — in our churches, in our city halls, and in our local governments.