This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
[Disclaimer: I think that this post maybe too low-effort for Culture war thread but other ones don't look appropriate to me]
Can you do too much noticing?
Fallout series released not too long ago and as a fan of games I was reasonably interested, especially after mostly good reviews came in. But while it has quite many political themes I will not talk about them, instead I will focus on some much less important and meaningful thing - casting and specifically race of the actors. Generally I don't want to spoil myself too much, so I ignore teasers, trailers and, of course full-blown reviews, even if they promise to contain no spoilers at all. So at the time right before series release I knew two facts about it, which were gathered from two old stills: protagonist is a woman vault dweller and there was also ghoul sheriff character. Yesterday when I finally had enough free time to comfortably marathon watch it(my preferred way), I saw a third one with a black character that was a member of BoS and my first thought was: "Oh, so it's mc's love interest". And I was right, like I was with similar predictions many times before.
I can easily see how the white woman/black man pairing become so wide-spread in recent years. You don't any conspiracies from 4chan white nationalists imagination, just brutal logic of the modern social justice thought. If you're making action movie, you need an action hero, obviously it should be a woman to combat harmful stereotypes. You can add some other traits: disability, PoC status, mental illness; but most often being a woman is enough for mc so we just return to default, white and pretty. Then you need to add some diversity in main cast, who is the most diverse and minoritiest of them all? - Black people, specifically African Americans. And we already have a woman, why not this one be a man. And if the cast is small or filled with mentors, monsters, villains and characters too young for romance, why not pair up the first two that we designed?
In many ways this is continuation of my previous post because anytime I notice one of the signs of this ideology dominant among American media creators and therefore their creations I feel robbed of enjoying perfectly adequate television because I for some reason decided to read about American politics. While being blissfully ignorant I thought that African Americans constituted at least a quarter if not the third of US population and movie demographics seemed absolutely normal in this light. I, like majority of Eastern Europeans don't have anything to dislike about people of African descent, those few who do live here are students or children of students, are not part of some diaspora and assimilate quite well(though obviously people will look differently at the black Ivan, or Stefan, but it's curious look, without animosity). I compared this feeling to watching soviet-made movies as an American businessman at the time of the Cold War(which of course vanishingly small number of them actually did). You notice propaganda against small bourgeoise like you, but why would it matter if USSR is very far away and communists that you know about are all educated intellectuals obviously against any kind of violence?
One thing that I don't understand is why nobody "inside the kitchen" don't notice how weird their attempts at propaganda seem. I think there wouldn't be so many far rightists in hypothetical America where there is much less to notice. IMHO, Hollywood elites aren't black supremacists and majority of them don't consider themselves in someway being against white race, they are true believers, who try to promote DiversityTM in their media because they think that it will make its viewers better people. My guess is that they do notice, but because of the implication of noticing being bad in itself, there is no one to say: "maybe better make him Asian this time".
I don't think most people think "white woman protagonist with black man love interest" is "propaganda." Like, propaganda for what? Would it be propaganda if they were both white? If it was an asian woman and a white man? What is the non-propaganda interracial pairing? What makes such a pairing not propaganda?
Like anything interracial pairing can be a propaganda or not depending on the context. In the American context there is widespread effort to reduce prevalence of white men in media with the goal of representation and making viewers less racist(in the vein of studies that showed that growing up in more diverse schools leads to being more inclusive). You can of course expect interracial pairs in US media without this factor, America is racially diverse and there are quite many interracial unions, but they are vastly overrepresented in media. I didn't write this in the OP because I thought that here most of the people already know about this.
Was it bad when whites and white men were over-represented in media? Did that make it difficult for you to enjoy a piece of media?
Were they overrepresented? I'm sure they were at various points in time, but I'm not sure how much of that was intentional versus the realities of working with the materials on hand.
There is an interesting question as to what exactly constitutes overrepresentation here. If the average USer is white, and I make products targeting that average, then that could entail making films with just white people and never black people. It would be fair to say black people are not represented under that dynamic, but I'm not quite covinced it's fair to say whites would therefore have too much representation. Not that I wouldn't wouldn't find this hypothetical phenomenon somewhat offputting and worth correcting for to some degree.
If I recall films from the 90s to the 10s, I think the average filmgoer saw representation in aggregate that was more proportional to their lived experience. Yes, a lot of movie leads were white. But you still saw occasional movies from Denzel, Sam Jackson, Will Smith, Snipes, and so on. Movies and performances that weren't really coded 'black' and were intended for average peoples' consumption. Depending on where you are, this pattern probably lines up everywhere from your childhood upbringing to your office personnel: mostly white, and a few black people. And while you weren't blind to their skin color, there was a sense that it was wrong to approach them in those terms.
So while you may not have gotten a complete balanced breakfast of diversity and inclusion in any one given film, you probably did get it through a dozen or more films throughout the year. Nobody's wires gets tripped because this pattern matches to more Americans' lives than not. People get cynical - rightly so, I'd argue - when the images they regularly see on their screen is consistently discrepant with their realities. And it's especially repellent when it is clearly being done as a kind of moral mandate. When so many current media products individually reflect this kind of template diversity, you start to wonder what's up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link