4

There's No Diversity In Interracial Relationships

Most of my friends from my teenage years were racist bastards, and one of the most glaring examples of this was their Kafkaesque view of interracial relationships. I say Kafkaesque because it makes me look well-read, and because they didn't personally want nor like dating outside of their race, but applauded minorities who did. One of my old friends once said "Got yourself a white girl!" to a black acquaintance who was getting married, congratulating him like he had won the race lottery.

Whiteness is still held up as a grand carnival prize you can walk out with, as long as you have enough model minority tokens to exchange. This type of thinking is mirrored in Hollywood, as the most common portrayals of interracial love are black/white. Lakeview Terrace, Rome & Jewel, Save The Last Dance, Everything Everything, Black Or White, Guess Who, The Mountain Between Us, and countless more all had either black man / white woman or white man / black woman relationships.

I'm not saying these movies are in the wrong. On the contrary, I think we should have a lot more interracial dating, because you get the bonus of pissing off neo-Nazis. But I'm pro-all-interracial. Show us more diversity, like Asian/black, Latino/Asian, Middle-Eastern/black, etc. If you don't, you create an underlying assumption that whiteness always has to be present in everything, that it's the crucial dough in a recipe that can have any other race slapped in as flavor.

At its worst, this props up white men and women as the ultimate objects of affection for minorities to win. Take 2017's critical darling The Big Sick, a movie about a Pakistani-American man who falls head over heels for a white American woman. It's been widely praised, but it's also been criticized for stereotyping all its nonwhite women and not giving them any depth. Because who cares about a bunch of undateable South Asian women?

I've learned the hard way about how white skin is generally at the top of the beauty standard hierarchy, and that hierarchy is reinforced in the entertainment we consume. White women are frequently presented as the ultimate goal for men of color to achieve, and I used to think the same way. I held up white women as the most desirable because that's what everyone, including my family, told me. It's like head lice -- you don't know you have it until someone combs through your bad habits in shock and horror. And if a black guy like me can develop shitty attitudes toward interracial relations, then it absolutely happens to your friendly neighbor who swears he loves black people because he likes both LeBron and Kanye.

3

Black Stories Don't Get Funding Unless The Director Is White

Back in 2013, Spike Lee ran a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund Da Sweet Blood Of Jesus, which is exactly as crazy as it sounds. The steep asking price of $1.25 million, along with his unconventional choice in funding method, created controversy, with accusations that Lee was greedily taking money from other artists.

2

Black Actors Still Get Typecast, Just In New Ways

Being typecast in real life is kind of like its film counterpart. It's rough trying to be a weird black person when you're constantly put into narrow little boxes of identity. Growing up, I couldn't so much as listen to indie folk music without getting a few white looks of surprise, to the point where enjoying Fleet Foxes was like having a black superpower.

When typecasting happens in film, it feels like a conscious decision done with the intent of making sure that your characters of color are true to black-on-white crime statistics ... which are actually false as fuck. For black male actors, this means being the gangster thug villain 64 percent of the time, despite only representing 34 percent of all real-life gangs. It's a surprising statistic that mostly goes unnoticed, but once you know about it, you start seeing it everywhere, like a racist Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

Take Netflix's Daredevil. No matter how hyped up it was, or how good it might be, the whole thing was ruined when I saw that early in the first episode, some black guy kidnaps white women, then gets the stuffing beat out of him by righteous white fury. To me, that screams "Stay away," that my race isn't going to be taken seriously or will only be some fist sandwich for an otherwise-white narrative.

The typecasting of black women is even worse. They're expected to live up to white standards of beauty, and they're often given roles based on how well they conform, to the point where light-skinned actresses are given preference in black movies. There's been some criticism toward Dear White People for making caricatures of its darker-skinned female characters while giving a lighter-skinned black woman the lead. Straight Outta Compton also caught heat for its racist casting call, which created a grading scale based on the attractiveness of certain black women. Lighter-skinned women were graded as A and B, while darker-skinned women "with a weave" were Cs and Ds. I guess D stood for "Daaamn, that's pretty fuckin' racist!"

And it's not like movies are pulling from huge pools of beloved women of color. Every few years we tend to get a Zoe Saldana, like an African American Halley's Comet. A decade ago, it was Halle Berry, then Rosario Dawson, and now Saldana, all rolled out for a limited time only until it's time to swap them out for a fresh face. It's hard to not get disheartened when actors of color are basically the racial equivalent of McRibs and Shamrock Shakes.

You might remember the Zoe Saldana Nina Simone controversy, when some people were outraged that a light-skinned black woman with less prominent African American features was cast as Nina Simone, who was pretty much the complete opposite. I was upset, because I saw myself in Simone, as someone whose blackness is universally underappreciated and passed over in favor of whiteness. Some of my white friends didn't get it. They believe in the job going to the person best suited for it. But if the best people are black, they often don't get the job.

1

White Audiences Only Like Black Stories When They're Safe

After being black for a while, you start to pick up on how white people respond to racism. Discussions about race tend to go down easier if they're told in a way that doesn't necessarily implicate white people or imply that they have any inherent responsibility. Better yet, if it makes them feel good, then it's probably going to be acknowledged. That's where film comes in.

As I mentioned earlier, the most celebrated black movies usually deal with some troubled part of white history. Your standard Oscar buffet will include slavery, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, or any other racist institution that was phased out through some law getting passed. But a good chunk of movies about historical racism are whitewashed as fuck.

I'm using whitewash to mean "feel-good for whites," because it's hard to get white people to watch a movie that makes them feel like shit. Usually this involves either inserting a white savior into the plot, so as to remind whites that "Whitey ain't always evil, yo," or downplaying the racism to Disney levels of self-awareness. 42, the Jackie Robinson biopic, took on racism through cartoonishly racist side villains. The rival manager serves this function, but is soon thwarted through Jackie's sheer determination. Even Jackie's own racist teammates eventually grow to love him, and the film ends on a happy note. That doesn't challenge racism in any substantial way. White audiences walk away thinking that we've closed a dark chapter of American history forever, except we didn't. Robinson was just one part of a much larger, much uglier story that's not white-audience-friendly.

That's why it's so difficult to explain racism effectively. You have to doll it up, make it look cute and harmless ... or at the very least, give it a happy ending. People who aren't accustomed to talking about new and strange concepts like institutionalized privilege are going to have a much harder time accepting that everything in their life revolves around some kind of oppression, especially when they thought they'd just be shoving popcorn into their mouths for two hours while being told how awesome non-caricature-racist white people helped fix all of society's ills.

Take Hidden Figures. It's supposed to be about three African American women and their triumph in a white-male-dominated world, but it felt the need to make Kevin Costner's character just as vital to that story. I can see why they did that; it's easier to communicate to white people through a character who looks like them. But it softens the blow. Or there's Race, which tried to push an uplifting message about overcoming racism if you work hard enough and are Jesse Owens, but ended up absolving white people of any guilt or responsibility for creating the system that forced Owens to prove himself in the first place. And sometimes if you're a black person on the wrong side of things, like I was, it can weirdly comforting to have these things told to you from the perspective of white people, because white trust is automatic and inherent. But this often comes at the expense of the characters of color.

The movies with black people that get acknowledged are often the ones that deal with history in the safest, most palatable ways. I always treat movies about racism with skepticism, because I never know if white people are praising them for being challenging or if it's just another case of "We used to be racist, but now we're not. Go humans!" That's not inspirational; that's porn for white people.

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