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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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I highly doubt Clint Eastwood was trying to hint at white replacement in Gran Turino. By reducing everything to white and not-white, I think you're missing some nuance in terms of dying urban white ethnic communities, romanticism for the glory days of blue collar Midwestern America, what the real meaning of American values is, etc etc.

It's honestly a very conservative movie and there's plenty in it that doesn't just skirt boundaries today, but outright leaps over them. For example, Clint gets out of his beat up old American truck to point a gun at a bunch of young black men -- acting like stereotypical hoods, of course -- then subsequently chastises a young white kid for acting black (although not in so many words). It's also the last movie I've seen to feature what used to be a super common phenomenon of blue collar American men calling each other very offensive slurs as a term of endearment/form of screwing around for fun. It actually is still decently common in the right circles, it would just never be portrayed positively or innocently in a movie anymore.

I guess it can be confused as a movie for Great Replacement messaging, but only because the replacement has already happened in a lot of American urban areas. Clint represents a relic of a piece of America that is already gone, it just happens to pattern match to modern fears.

Edit: To add on a bit more....

I think Gran Turino is ultimately about how the last generation of American immigrants has some important things to pass on to the current generation of American immigrants. It is absolutely positive on American values and, indeed, the thing that the movie portrays the Hmong as superior to Clint's own family at is exactly that: family. It doesn't really make Clint seem worse than the Hmong, just Clint's family, who have gotten selfish and stopped caring about their father (ignoring and dismissing him, to the degree of wanting to stick him in a home and forget about him).

It still portrays everything about those values in Clint as, if not superior to what the Hmong family has, at least having some important things to pass on to the Hmong children about being Americans. Clint's actual children have abandoned that aspect of their heritage and so he passes it on to someone who will have it, instead.

Apparently a lot of critics saw this in Knives Out, where the wealthy WASP author leaves his estate to his diligent South American nurse instead of his spoilt kids.

Of course, that interpretation only makes sense of you subscribe to the American view that Spanish people are their own race instead of just another European ethnic group...

South Americans are heavily mixed with natives, hence most of them are no longer white.

That's true in some countries but not others, the average person in Argentina is very much not mestizo.

And Ana de Armas (born in Cuba) who plays the nurse certainly isn't. She's as European as Mitt Romney.

She's a fair skinned Latina, not white. Whiteness is about pure European heritage. Biracial people that pass as white are still not white, for example.

Mitt Romney is white, as far as I know none of his ancestors are non-European or descended from Europeans. Does he have a Mexican grandpa I'm not aware of?

I don't think pretty much anyone in actual Europe would actually think of Ana de Armas as anything other than white.

I think we should retvrn to Ben Franklin's terminology and establish that even Swedes are swarthy, to say nothing of Spaniards, leaving only Anglos as truly white (and truly European, for some extra absurdity).

This will let us move on to more interesting and consequential distinctions.

Simply excluding peninsular people narrows things well enough doesn't it?

Do you see how people might get skeptical of "European identity" when European identitarians suddenly introduce arbitrary limits on what is "real Europe"?

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