Owledge

Self-fulfilling movie cast racism

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referring to this:

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=4991235

(Is Hollywood Whitewashing Ethnic Roles?)

 

So main movie actors are cast of an ethnicity that deviates from the original material. Why? The explanation is always that the producers don't want to fail and they 'know' that the audience won't accept ethnicities for the protagonist. This is at least a very convenient way of being afraid and blaming someone else, and maybe even outright racism. Because, by behaving like that, the producers are perpetuating those beliefs in the movies and thus influencing the audience in that way.

 

This reminded me of an experience I had a while ago which is just as messed up:

 

At a McDonald's restaurant I realized they had the especially hot "Western Sauce", sold under-the-counter. I wondered why it's not on the menu, whether it's because it's too hot, although that would still be weird, but I noticed that hot sauces openly advertised in Germany are everything but hot.

The manager was complaining about how the sauce tends to spoil, because they don't sell a lot of it, and thus they don't order it often. I pointed out that of course they won't sell much of it if it's not listed on the menu as the other sauces are. He then said they used to have it on there a long time ago, but it didn't sell well, so they removed it. I could hardly graps the madness of that line of thought. I said, maybe people's taste has changed the last years, and if it's not on the menu, people won't know that it is sold, and he replied: 'Oh, people know we have the sauce!'

 

In my view this shows how much modern society is in the grip of madness without realizing it, and those self-fulfilling belief systems are preventing social evolution all over the place.

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