i’m cross-posting these from my okcupid journal. heh. 🙂 i don’t think these kinds of posts are helping me meet any “nice” men. 😉 hehehehe
Disgusting happy deep south racist propaganda
Aug 21
aka – The Help.
i’m tired of revisionist bullshite designed to make white people feel more comfortable with ongoing fucking white domination. It’s so disgusting. Where’s the fucking toilet? I want to puke.
I hear that there’s a lawsuit against Kathryn Stockett. Why am I not surprised?
Remember when the supposed visionary writer/directors of The Matrix got dragged into court for stealing from a Black woman? henh. 🙂
I’m so tired of romanticized movies about the not too distant old south.
I prefer flicks like The Skeleton Key (for those of you who haven’t seen the movie but now want to, this link is full of spoilers).
Now, that made me laugh uproariously, especially the ending. BooooOOOOO…(spoiler alert!!!) scary negro slave possession. LOVED IT! 🙂
But of course, I’m the same person who has been faithfully watching episodes of the perky breasted Sookie, tooth picked fanged Bill and potty mouth AIDS Burger Lafayette, True Blood for a few years, now. 😉
yup. no utopian, happy clappy solutions to real life problems that the oppressed face every fucking day.
even though the show participates in that fine old racist tradition also known as colour blindness, it has so many raw and bloody layers of meaning that i appreciate. and yes, the dialogue is filled with oppressive tidbits that anyone can recognize and unpack ad nauseum. but what i like is that the black gay man is proud, full of voice and triumphant rather than dominated, silent and defeated, able to turn the implied threat of aggressive white male violence the white straight men are attempting to use against him back on them, walking away, not limping away emotionally and physically bruised, with his pride and with the sense that he has resisted multiple layers of domination to the best of his ability with whatever analysis he possesses. queers bash back!
i don’t fault him the patriarchal cussings. i’d use whatever tools i had at my disposal as well if i lived where he lived, surrounded by the kinds of idiots he is. due to who he was dealing with and what it took to effectively put them in their place, but also because he (and working class queer men of colour living like him fer real) reserves this kind of speech for men like that and always functions as ally to (human) wimmin, i don’t think it’s necessary for me to hyper focus on this character as the locus of patriarchal oppression on the planet. he’s not. i remember whose men actually need to be dealt with.
i have to say that i’m not at all impressed with tara’s character. the white people have of course made her into a perpetually victimized, deprived, traumatized, incoherently cussing, crazy, aggressive, unable to love anyone or herself black woman. nope. hate them for that…deeply. her character doesn’t seem to be able to stop being dominated. at least the show’s writers are clear about her possibilities. cheups.
so yeah…
tired of smarmy denial filled big budget features about southern black folks allying with well-meaning white folks. miss daisy, drive my fucking car. 🙂
then i wrote…
I’m so glad I wasn’t the only one who noticed…
Aug 23
how thoroughly FUK’s “The Help” movie was. The last time I heard about something with a premise this horrifically bad it was that awful South African alien movie – District 9 (my review cut and pasted in below) – where images of alien characters being dominated, brutalized, humiliated, objectified, hunted and just generally treated like…Black South Africans…allowed the (insanely racist) filmmakers to make a homage to apartheid, get it funded and distributed all over the mofo planet. Dis…gust…ing.
and now, a few words on that piece of disgusting tripe they released a few years back – district 9…
I’d like to rename “District 9″…
Aug 17, 2009
I’m thinking that a better name would be “Disgusting Racist Bile”. Yeah…that pretty much says it.
I’m watching it right now. So I dunno…maybe it gets better. Maybe the creators meant it as some sort of allegory. I guess the uplifting meaning is escaping me.
heh. I bet the filmmakers had a lot of fun creating these lovely civilized white south african characters, narrating the story of these smelly, animalistic, violent, criminal, destructive, dirty “aliens” living in squalor, disturbing civilized society, needing to be removed en masse for their own protection and for the protection of their gentle, well meaning, (human) betters.
Given that “truth” and “reconciliation” were such loads of total bullshit…
Given that the people who ran South Africa managed to safe guard their hold on that country’s economy, thereby maintaining their racial dominance via the hoarding of class privilege and economic control…(please, no one talk to me about the birth of a tiny, toothless, co-opted Black South African middle class created as a buffer and as an incentive)…
We are not far enough removed from stories like this involving white colonizers and Black South Africans for me to just nod my head and feel comfortable discussing this movie as it has been constructed and offered for mass consumption.
This movie does not successfully teach or pursue any transformative agendas related to anti-racism. It more functions as a normalizing tool, erasing, painting over, sweeping under the rug an experience of white domination that continues in another phase, under another name, with the full consent of the world.
It offers a completely artificial liberal feel good opportunity where we can feel righteously indignant about obvious wrongs and where the bad guys (all middle or working class) do not still control the banks but where they are soundly punished. We are offered immediate gratification and a sense that undoing centuries of wrong is easily righted, just by being “infected” by those a colonizer has been taught to hate.
In this sci-fi juiced South Africa doing the real right thing is possible and clearly delineated. With this movie as insidious tool, an experience of (allegorical, indirectly communicated and therefore totally safely contained) “truth” and (carefully constructed and story boarded, tidy, media based) “reconciliation” can be consumed emotionally while in no way hampering the actual ongoing, oppressive reality of today’s “new” South Africa.
In this South Africa, white people work respectfully alongside the Black people they formerly oppressed for the good of a South Africa united against an alien threat. Yeah, right.
This movie is a massive advertisement for the “new” South Africa. Filled with black market racketeering Nigerians and other Black “criminal” elements, when everyone knows the White South Africans, stealing a whole chunk of African land, were/are the real criminals, this movie offers an easily digestible product, which reinforces dominant racist beliefs about Black Africans and about their white invader/colonizers, offering a movie going public often so susceptible to the media that whatever images and ideas they are offered end up being taken as fact, a product that does not disturb or turn stereotypes upside down at all.
In the form of “Disgusting Racist Bile” (the movie formerly known as “District Nine”), we are being offered centuries’ old oppressive bile, the ongoing seeds of our own denial dressed up, futurized and filled to the brim with special effects, positioned as cutting edge sci-fi commentary.
Unacceptable.
Oh…and I also found it completely impossible to identify with the white liberal middle class civil servant, so well meaning as he participated in the removal of the aliens and then so thoroughly disgusted by the thought of inter-species breeding and by his eventual, inexorable transformation. I just didn’t feel sorry for him.
if what you’re reading here grips you, holds you, fascinates you, provokes you, emboldens you, pushes you, galvanizes you, discomfits you, tickles you, enrages you so much that you find yourself returning again and again…then link me.
