(Source: allmike-everything, via saturn-dust)
Posted 8 hours ago
41,188 notes
If there’s one thing that most fans of Star Trek will agree on, it’s the fact that Gene Roddenberry’s vision for the show — and, more optimistically, for human society — was predicated on the idea that all life is valuable, and that the worth of a person should not be judged by their appearance. Much of this was done through the old sci-fi trope of using aliens to stand in for oppressed groups, but Star Trek didn’t rely on the metaphor; it had characters who were part of the ensemble, important and beloved members of the Enterprise crew, who were people of colour. It had background characters who were people of colour. And, here and there, it had anti-heroes and villains who were people of colour … one of whom, Khan Noonian Singh, became well-nigh iconic.
Image 1: “Who is your favorite villain?” ; Actor John Cho (Lt Sulu) answers.
Image 2: TOS Khan looking at a watercolor of himself. Yes, he’s wearing a dastar (Sikh turban)
Image 3: Cumberbatch and Montalbán (as Khan)
And who is now being played by white actor Benedict Cumberbatch in the new JJ Abrams reboot movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness.
We’re all cynical and jaded enough to know the standard dismissal when it comes to matters of media representation: Paramount Pictures and most film studios are not interested in diversity or visibility, they only care about the bottom dollar. Star Trek as a franchise is too much of a juggernaut to affect with boycotts. There are too many people who love it, who love those characters and that world, and will go to see the movie. And for some of these people, this devotion to the idea of a future where even South and East Asian men get to pilot a starship and love swashbuckling, where Black women make Lieutenant on the Enterprise and actually get the boy, will be trivialized and eroded and whitewashed when the most formidable and complex Star Trek baddie becomes a white man named Khan.
It wasn’t perfect in the 60s when Ricardo Montalbán was cast to play Khan (a character explicitly described in the episode script of Space Seed as being Sikh, from the Northern regions of India). But considering all of the barriers to representation that Roddenberry faced from the television networks, having a brown-skinned man play a brown character was a hard-won victory. It’s disappointing and demoralizing that with the commercial power of Star Trek in his hands, JJ Abrams chose not to honour the original spirit of the show, or the symbolic heft of the Khan character, but to wield the whitewash brush for … what? The hopes that casting Benedict Cumberbatch would draw in a few more box office returns? It’s doubly disappointing when you consider that Abrams was a creator of the television show Lost, which had so many well-rounded and beloved characters of colour in it.
Add to this the secrecy prior to release around Cumberbatch’s role in the film, and what seems like a casting move that would typically be defended by cries of “best actor for the job, not racism” becomes something more cunning, more malicious. Yes, the obfuscation creates intrigue around and interest in the role, but it also prevents advocacy groups like Racebending.com from building campaigns to protest the whitewashing. This happened with the character of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, as well as ‘Miranda Tate’ in The Dark Knight Rises, who ended up being Talia al Ghul but played by French actress Marion Cotillard. This practice is well in effect in Hollywood; and after the negative press that was generated by angry anti-oppression activists and fans when Paramount had The Last Airbender in the works, studios are wising up. They don’t want their racist practices to be called out, pointed at, and exposed before their movies are released — Airbender proved that these protests create enough bad feeling to affect their bottom line.
So the studio has now found a way to keep it secret and underhanded. Racebending.com was there for most of the production of The Last Airbender, and were even able to correspond with Paramount Pictures about it. This time, for Star Trek: Into Darkness, their hiding and opaque practices has managed to silence media watchdogs until the movie’s premiere.
As I said, this racist whitewashing of the character of Khan won’t affect how much money this Trek movie makes. And I’m happy that the franchise is popular, still popular enough to warrant not only a big-budget reboot with fantastic actors but also a sequel with that cast. I’m happy that actors I enjoy like Zoë Saldaña and John Cho are playing characters who mean so much to me, and that they, in respect for the groundbreaking contributions by Nichelle Nichols and George Takei in these roles, have paid homage to that past.
But all of that will be marred by having my own skin edited out, rendered worthless and silent and invisible when a South Asian man is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch up on that screen. In the original Trek, Khan, with his brown skin, was an Übermensch, intellectually and physically perfect, possessed of such charisma and drive that despite his efforts to gain control of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk (and many of the other officers) felt admiration for him.
And that’s why the role has been taken away from actors of colour and given to a white man. Racebending.com has always pointed out that villains are generally played by people with darker skin, and that’s true … unless the villain is one with intelligence, depth, complexity. One who garners sympathy from the audience, or if not sympathy, then — as from Kirk — grudging admiration. What this new Trek movie tells us, what JJ Abrams is telling us, is that no brown-skinned man can accomplish all that. That only by having Khan played by a white actor can the audience engage with and feel for him, believe that he’s smart and capable and a match for our Enterprise crew.
What an enormous and horribly ironic step backwards. For Star Trek, for media representation, and for the vision of a future where we have transcended systemic, racist erasure.
(via RaceBending)
I’ve been trying to explain this to the people around me that I love and care about, whose opinions I cherish, and their responses have been something along the lines of “Who cares?”
And that just enrages me on a level I cannot describe.
(via racebending)
Kanye West getting deep on twitter
SOLID.
this is why I love this man.
Okay, if you don’t love Kanye, I question you and will forever until you learn.
I’ve never had a man ask me straight up if it was okay to use the word “bitch” even endearingly.
Not once.i forever dislike any’t like kanye.
NGL every time I put on my Childish Gambino pandora station some song catches my ear and I think “damn this is enjoyable I should see who it is CURSE YOU KANYE WEST YOU TRICKED ME AGAIN.”
(Source: elenacupcakegilbert, via grumpytea)
![goddessofcheese:
erkings:
thefoxxypoet:
odinsblog:
A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.
The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”
The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.
The tour guide warned of the dangers of going to a park in the Bronx and also gave inaccurate information about the origin of the word “pig” to describe a police officer. While Battaglia claimed the word came from the Bronx, in reality it originated in London.
The Bronx borough president harshly criticized the guide and the tour.
The guide is “the biggest fool on the planet,” said Ruben Diaz, the borough president. “To have foreigners come and gawk at a long line of people who are less fortunate than they are and to make money off of that and to view them as they are some sort of entertainment is pretty disgusting.” [emphasis mine]
This is a total diss to my hometown. Ugh the Bronx is many things, but there is beauty there…and I’m happy I spent a good chunk of my childhood there.
It’s irritating to see these dumb ass tourists come to my city and mock it for their enjoyment and someone is getting paid to be a racist/classist asshole.
This is disgusting on so many levels.
Good news, everyone — it got cancelled
Dude, I went with my boyfriend to NYC in October (right before the Frankenstorm, actually—the weekend before, we were lucky) and we stayed in the Bronx. I think we were the only white people we saw there, but everyone was extremely friendly and wonderful to us, and we had a great time.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/995add3e56895037dae65ed18f79e55b/tumblr_mn7z87RZ0C1rncbh7o1_500.jpg)
A Bronx bus company is offering tours billed as a “a ride through a real New York City ‘GHETTO,’” the New York Post reports.
The company, Real Bronx Tours, has taken largely white foreign tourists around the Bronx. The tour guide was caught mocking the Bronx by Post reporter Candice Giove.
Three times a week, Real Bronx Tours takes riders — mainly white Europeans and Australians — on a trip that includes stops at food-pantry lines and a “pickpocket” park.
“Last week, on the first stop of the $45 tour, guide Lynn Battaglia, from Pittsburgh, pointed out a housing project. She then mocked the Grand Concourse, modeled after a Parisian boulevard,” reports Giove.“‘Do you feel like we’re on the Champs-Elysées?’ she teased a couple from Paris.”
The tour also included a drive near a food pantry at a church. Battaglia wondered out loud, “I don’t know what that line’s about, but every Wednesday we see it. We see them go in with empty carts, and we see them come out with carts full.
This is a total diss to my hometown. Ugh the Bronx is many things, but there is beauty there…and I’m happy I spent a good chunk of my childhood there.
It’s irritating to see these dumb ass tourists come to my city and mock it for their enjoyment and someone is getting paid to be a racist/classist asshole.
This is disgusting on so many levels.
Good news, everyone — it got cancelled
Dude, I went with my boyfriend to NYC in October (right before the Frankenstorm, actually—the weekend before, we were lucky) and we stayed in the Bronx. I think we were the only white people we saw there, but everyone was extremely friendly and wonderful to us, and we had a great time.
Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite characters in sci-fi ever because he is Luc Besson’s vision of the hetero sex symbol of the future: a flamboyant, emotionally labile man who wears skin-tight leopard print or decks himself in roses, a man who accessorizes with big jewelry and dabbles in cosmetics. And the ladies love him. Everything about him screams “gay” according to our stereotypes, but he’s portrayed as a 100% straight sexual dynamo.
Besson is one of the few directors I’ve seen who actually recognizes that our ideas of sexuality and gender performance might have changed drastically in the future.
(Source: tokiyas, via blissterectomy)
Prince Gumball’s path to the throne was brutal. Fionna wasn’t around during the Sugar Wars; Gumball distracts her by acting super bland and wearing disco pants.
Marshall Lee knows the truth, but as Chaotic Neutral, he just can’t bring himself to give a shit.
ETA: Nhyworks just gave me the amazing pun ‘Game of Scones.’ Brb dying ok.
(via madragingven)
