domain:reddit.com
yellowgreenred
4m ago
I just got around to reading last month's post about Noticing the increase in interracial relationships we're seeing on screen. @George_E_Hale was mercilessly piled on for supposedly feigning ignorance, innocently asking "what's the big deal?", and claiming that the white woman and black man pairing is not a new phenomenon. Given that I'm also in the camp of "what's the big deal" and "yes, there has obviously been an increase in such representation, but I'm not sure it's as dramatic as painted by most users", I thought I'd investigate all this is a bit more.
First, I looked at the most popular romance/romantic comedy flicks from last year. Disclaimer: I have only seen one of these (Past Lives), the list was compiled from various "best romance movies of 2023" articles, these are only films produced by Hollywood, and I determined the races of the on-screen couples by consulting the movie poster and/or a written summary. Therefore, it's very possible I missed a subplot in a movie that contained further interracial or interracial relationships, and because the list may be not a representative sample, I may be over-or under-counting the number of interracial relationships. Anyway, the list:
- Shotgun Wedding - Jennifer Lopez and white guy.
- One True Loves - Mixed race Asian-American (Chinese father & white mother) was married to a white guy who was presumed dead after a helicopter crash. Some years later, she becomes enagaged to Asian-American hunk Simu Liu only to find out that her husband is still alive. She ends picking the hunky Asian.
- Love Again - Indian woman who happens to be Nick Jonas' wife and white guy.
- Past Lives - Asian woman and white guy, but there is another Asian man in the picture who she might be in love with. Ends up staying with the white guy in the end. I'm not doing justice to a really great movie.
- The Perfect Find - Black woman and black man.
- Happiness for Beginners - White woman and white man.
- Red, White & Royal Blue - Ethnically ambiguous gay man and white gay man.
- Love in Taipei - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Bottoms - Diverse group of lesbians and Marshawn Lynch.
- Love at First Sight - White woman and white man.
- What Happens Later - White woman and white man.
- Anyone But You - White woman and white man.
- Shortcomings - Asian woman and Asian man.
- Rye Lane - Black woman and black man.
- Your Place or Mine - White woman and white man, might contain a subplot featuring black man.
- Prom Pact - Mixed Asian-American and white man.
- Beautiful Disaster - White woman and white man.
- Ghosted - Ana de Armas and Chris Evans.
- A Tourist's Guide to Love - White woman and Asian man.
- You Hurt My Feelings - White woman and white man.
- The List - White woman and Hispanic man wherein the Hispanic dude sleeps with someone on a "free pass list" and then the white woman cucks him by sleeping with a white guy, I think? Having trouble figuring out the plot for this one.
- After Everything - White woman and white man.
- The Other Zoey - White woman and white man.
- Somebody I Used to Know - Alison Brie and black man.
- No Hard Feelings - Jennifer Lawrence with white man (kid).
- Challengers - Zendaya has sex with two white guys.
TV shows would take too long to go through, but just eye-balling the posters on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't see any immediately obvious black man and white woman pairings, though I do see a several white man/non-white woman.
I am aware that most of the complaints are about an increased in interracial relationships in advertising. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any research that quantifies this increase. There is one story from 2021 that quotes a professor who says "70% of interracial commercials from the past four years show a white man with a Black woman", which is the inverse of this pairing in real life. If true, this wouldn't be surprising: WM/BW is less controversial than BM/WM. As I was looking into this, I was reminded of that rather infamous Cheerios commercial featuring a white mom and a black dad. Turns out the original intent was not to make the family multiracial:
This wasn’t storyboarded as a multiracial family,” said Doug Martin, chief brand officer for General Mills and in 2013 associate director of Cheerios brand marketing. “With kids, the most important thing is getting the right actor, and this girl (Colbert) just blew everyone away, so we chose the kid first. With kids, sometimes you get a kid that’s one way off camera and on camera you get something totally different, so getting the right kid is key. And Gracie, she’s biracial, so then we went about casting adult actors that would be a match for her."
Also turns out that her parents mirror the races for the mom and dad in the commercial.
Finally, a note on the left's "desire, intent and efforts to reduce and ideally ultimately eliminate white ethnicities". It seems to me that if anyone should be concerned about their racial group "disappearing", it should be black Americans given their numerical disadvantage. If the black-white interracial marriage rate were to significantly increase, we would see a corresponding decrease in people who look "black", even by American standards. The best recent example I can think of Isaiah Hartenstein. No one would ever mistake him as anything other than white, just like no one would would ever mistake his father as anything other than black. Black Americans already have an average of 20% European admixture, so generationally, it wouldn't even take that long. Is this the answer to all our racial woes?
All this makes me wonder if the conversation we're having here is being played out on other forums except it's black women discussing how they're often cast alongside a white man love interest.
sun_the_second
5m ago
What kind of rituals do you think were there for confirming "eligibility", and what was the cutoff point? Are we talking "bullet ant mittens"?
It is my impression that many obviously "ineligible" (by modern and premodern standards) men successfully reproduced in the premodern era, because opportunities for women to be anyone but a wife were either incredibly scarce or worse than a subpar husband.
FistfullOfCrows
19m ago
Make it so legislators get their names tied to the laws and if struck down they can't propose any new ones themselves. Make the culpability directly tied to the legislator, no aides.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
59m ago
a serious possibility of civil war
America has shockingly little threat of civil unrest for a 333 million strong country that is globally hegemonic. It’s our endless catastrophizing against potential unrest (an example of hyper-defense) which leads to our civic equanimity. When some people made vague gestures toward the possibility of legitimate civil unrest on January 6th, which was never actually a threat, their punishments and social shame were maximal simply as a way to deter even future gesturing.
“There’s no realistic white nationalist movement in the country” could very well be due to the propaganda against it for more than a decade. In other words, it is as much evidence against my point as for my point. The “unite the right” event was catastrophized in the media specifically to destroy the threat of similar rallies; Nick Fuentes was de-person’d, forbidden to fly and having his bank accounts cancelled, not to mention banned by all social media giants. Literally, anti white nationalism was a major news plot point for years during the beginnings of Trump admin.
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