During one of the finals games, I was stuck having to watch commercials and I saw advertisements for four different movies that really caught my attention. I don't remember the titles of all of them but I noticed a theme. The Black guys were all basically "violent", all of them had guns, (lots of guns). The way it was advertised made it seem like they were pretty "one" note characters too. At least one of them was very much "anti-cop" as they made a point in one commercial to say negative things about the police twice. I don't know why it really caught my attention, but it made me think is this racism? Is this how they persuade us that, that is how we should see Black males? Or is this just the type of thing people want to see, and the color of their skin wasn't really part of it? I guess the other possibility is maybe I just saw what I wanted to see (confirmation bias)...
I was watching one of my favorite movies recently, The Searchers, with John Wayne when I suddenly remembered my niece saying years ago that it portrayed Ameircan Indians in a very negative way. Then I thought about how right she was yet I was still attracted to the movie. I had to filter out the negative aspects and look just for the positives. Yes, I still love the movie but I hate how they portrayed the American Indian. By the way, I forget the exact fraction but I am either 1/16th or 1/8th American Indian and they could have been bad mouthing one of my distant relatives except I'm from a different tribe. Once you start looking for it you can see a lot of racism in old movies.
Well yeah..... my dad used to play "cowboys and Indians" back when he was a kid. That was very common. They were "the bad guys" in a ton of movies back in the 40's and 50's. Hollywood loves to have a universal bad guy. Obviously now it's very very wrong, so they just make the Germans the bad guys in anything they can.
I played cowboys and Indians many many times. We also played cops and robbers. No one ever wanted to be a robber or an Indian although we all had to take turns doing it. ps I once knew a German back in about 1960. He used to love to watch 'Combat'. One time I asked him if they ever showed anything like that in Germany. He said they had similar shows except it was always the Americans sticking their heads up or standing out in the open to get easily shot. The exact opposite of the tv show 'Combat'. We both laughed about that one.
I'm technically an 1/8th native American as well, but I have never really identified myself that way. The other 7/8th's are all pastier than paste heh...
Man, you ain't joking. But it goes both ways. Mid 90s I had a few friends rapping and they had to put on this hard west coast persona and that was definitely NOT who they were as people. They got caught up in the game. It happens.
It probably is, but outside of sports and a couple shows (the office, parks and rec, arrested developement), I'm really not up with the times, or even like the 70's and 80's when it comes to movies and TV. I just was kind of forced into watching commercials because I didn't have the remote, and it really hit me like, wow they seemed to have picked a "role" for Blacks and even when they were the "good guys" of the movie it was still very much like what I would consider the stereotypes of Black men.
Take two dollars and ninety nine cents of your hard earned money, also, an hour and twenty minutes of your hard earned time... And watch this: Oh, and you're welcome.
Townsend doesn't get enough love for that movie. It taught me a lot back in the day. Reinforced me being me and not worrying about how others perceive us.
I loved The Hunger Games. Black folk died in that too. They always kill us off... It's why I agree with Jordan Peele. I've seen that movie 1000x. Give me a black lead that doesn't fucking die...
