Is this really a pattern or am I just paranoid?
I was watching the trailer for the upcoming movie “Sinners” and some right-wing comments are saying that the movie is DEI. The movie is new with new and original characters. Isn’t that what they said to do?
You’re not crazy, and it’s not new. The current buzz word is “DEI”, but they’ve been doing the same thing since before any of us were alive. Before DEI it was Woke. Before that it was Critical Race Theory (CRT). Before that it was Social Justice Warriors (SJW). Before that it was Politically Correct (PC). Before that they used terms which are less polite.
Before DEI it was “Diversity Hire”, which is actually kind of funny because the expanded it to be more inclusive!
Don’t forget “affirmative action”, it’s another one they’ll trot out in informal social gatherings (casual dress code, not the white hood) to say what they really mean with a little wiggle room to backpedal if challenged on it.
When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression
It’s also money in it. If you build an influence brand base on racism. Those people are just digging for stuff to make content about.
This is a big part of how it’s become so pervasive lately, although the racists have been complaining about the same thing for a very long time. The internet and influencer culture has allowed them to monetize the outrage in ways that weren’t possible before.
The movie is definitely very Diversity, Equity and Inclusion indeed. More seriously you kinda should realize the moment they use DEI as a pejorative.
You’re not paranoid, it’s a propaganda tactic. DEI, just like CRT, has become a dog whistle for the party loyalists. Then the fringes of the party use that language to label anything they don’t like, it’s doesn’t matter if it’s true or something that has been established for decades. (People my parents age used to be proud to say they got the polio vaccine when they were kids, some of those same people are anti-vax now)
Once a thing has been labeled as DEI, then the major news starts to report on it, “some people say thing X is DEI”. Then if something fails, it’s all DEI’s fault for and becomes another example for the party loyalists.
That behavior also forces people who might not care one way or another into a camp. Ghostbusters 2016 comes to mind there. I enjoyed the work of all of those women on SNL and in other movies. I had no interest in the movie because I just don’t care for remakes of classic movies in the first place but I feel there are always exceptions. My girlfriend wanted to go so we went. It was an average/good movie that got some belly laughs out of me and I enjoyed it overall but that’s where my opinion ended. If I said I enjoyed it with no context, I would be dealing with a bunch of snarky comments and I can either stay silent (passive allowance of their behavior) or I have to defend myself to them. Now I’m wasting my time defending and average/good movie that I don’t really even care about in the end.
My take is that they don’t understand privilege and are used to being catered to because straight white males are the “default setting”.
I remember when I went to my Korean friend’s wedding my wife and I were the only white couple there and it felt strange. I talked to some of my black friends and it turns out that out of place feeling is just typical for them but racist white people fight that uncomfortable feeling
They’re bigots.
You’re not paranoid, it’s a real pattern, and that pattern is racism. Some white people, in their wildest dreams, can’t imagine how a person of color might get a role instead of a white person. It’s not about skill, it’s not about creativity, it’s not about the quality of the film. It’s just blatant racism.
Remember how the little mermaid live action movie started getting shit before it was even released? That was because the lead actor was black, and peoples’ imaginations are so underdeveloped that they couldn’t see that she is legitimately an amazing talent who played the role just as well if not better than any white lady could have. Now, live action Disney remakes are stupid, so maybe that’s not the best example, but it’s all just racism.
The funniest part is people said the actress playing Vanessa had a nicer voice. The voice she used in the film was Hallie Bailey’s voice. Their racist minds heard the same voice come out of a white person and a black person and thought it sounded better from a white person
I’m sure you wouldn’t get outraged if someone made a movie based on a traditional African tale and the main character was white.
so maybe that’s not the best example
No, that’s actually a pretty great example. Mermaids are fictional creatures and do not exist, but in the mind of a racist, if they have a human face it had better be white.
While mermaids are fictional, The Little Mermaid is a story by Hans Christian Andersen where he describes the Little Mermaid with white skin and blue eyes.
I was annoyed where in Avengers, the ancient one was cast as a white woman when the original character was Asian. I would have been extremely pissed if Black Panther was cast with a white actor despite Black Panther being a fictional character.
Yeah but he also described her as blonde didn’t he? At least she’s blonde in most non-disney adaptations. Why was it okay for Disney to make changes to the character and story in 1989 but not now?
I mean, those are portrayals of humans with backgrounds that have some relevance to their character. A mermaid is just a fish lady who cares what they look like the important part is they are part fish
My only complaint was that Ariel doesn’t have the firery red hair she had when I was a kid. But then again, I’m not exactly the target audience anymore, so I don’t really care. Nor have I seen the new movie for that matter. I hear she did a great acting job, though. I just hope she’ll be able to star in something that isn’t the target of the culture war.
Maybe I’m just an oddball, but I’ve stopped caring (too much) about adaptational changes when something goes from book to film. I enjoy them separately as long as they’re both good in their own rights.
Yeah, same. Take Foundation, for example. I absolutely love the books. And I think the TV adaption is pretty good too. Sure, they’re wildly different, but I’m fairly sure being true to the books simply wouldn’t work on the screen as there would be way too many characters and each syb-plor would be way too short. Adaptational changes are needed for a story to translate between formats.
Well that and they view race as so fundamental to someone’s identity that if they’re portrayed with another skin color it fundamentally changes the character.
Racism
BUT
Not just regular “I don’t like minorities” racism, it’s nefarious, entrenched, institutional racism. Representation normalizes concepts of equality. Media without representation has long benefitted cultural white hegemony wherein white men are always the heroes and saviors, and minorities are the villains.
When minorities can also be the hero, it reduces the dominance of white men in culture. When anybody can be the hero, white men are no longer the default hero class.
There’s plenty of mature, self-actualized white men who celebrate representation and equality. The immature, emotionally stunted white men are very angsty over slowly losing their culture dominance.
A minority in a major role challenges the unspoken norm that culture is for white Americans. When anything challenges these norms, conservatives decry the “politics” in movies, video games, etc. But having a white person in the role is also political, in that it reinforces those norms. It’s just politics that they agree with, so they don’t notice it as political. It’s just How Things Should Be.
It isn’t complicated: they’re racists and bigots. Their leaders figured out it’s much easier to control people when you unify them against a group of Others. People aren’t born racist, but they are tribal. And it’s easy to twist that affinity for one’s own group into evil and profit.
To add on to what others have said:
It is also part of the white supremacist manual* and we have seen it for decades. It used to be that people would “joke” about how their thoughts aren’t “politically correct” before they say something. But mostly it was the idea of accusing people who care about… anything of being a “social justice warrior” and so forth.
The idea being that you make people react with “Ugh, not again” rather than “Yup, that is fucked”. It equates both sides and encourages people to become “apolitical” because they are privileged enough to not have to actually care.
And that is more or less it now. The idea is that if any character has even a hint of melanin, all the usual chuds will lose their god damned minds and try to destroy it. And yeah, everyone hates asmongold et al. But they also hate the people who “take the bait”. And the studios rapidly learn that it will mostly hurt their sales to have anything but the whitest of white cis men as heroes and the whitest of white big titty girls as damsels.
Then EVERYONE is happy. The devs/film makers/whatever don’t have to worry about death threats (hmm. Do you think that best friend might be Jewish? Better play it safe and still threaten to hunt down and rape that guy’s daughter). The people who care about basic humanity don’t have to say anything. And the chuds get to live their fantasies. And everyone else doesn’t have to hear it and can “just enjoy something”. Well, unless they don’t want to be a white dude. But who wouldn’t want to be a white dude, am I right?
It is REALLY REALLY fucking annoying and I strongly encourage people support (that may mean subscribing to) outlets that give a shit.
*: couple decades back there was a pretty major “leak” of a neo nazi handbook for how to indoctrinate people. And it is terrifying how often the same tactics are used. It is probably on archive dot org somewhere?
As other people have already mentioned: No, you are not paranoid. The pattern that you recognise is fake outrage or ragebait.
If you have some time to spare and are curiously about how the right-wing outrage machine works, I can highly recommend the video essay “Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage” by Shaun. His videos can be a little dry, but he goes to great lengths to pick apart a single example (the video game Stellar Blade) and how the right-wing first embraced the game (in the name of their fight against “wokeism, DEI,…”), only to then do a full about-face when the game did not turn out exactly as they had envisioned (and claim that the game was full of “wokeism, DEI,…”).
It’s a long video, but it does a very good job to expose the mix of unsubstantiated claims, copy-pasted accusations and ultimately fake outrage that underlies right-wing behavior these days.
That is a cool list you dug up. I wish our clients would make it easier for all of us to identify these duplicates more easily.
As an aside: Social media polls provide a powerful, real-time tool for gauging public sentiment and refining messaging strategies.
Bless.
“No stupid questions” should only apply to questions, not thinly veiled attempts at polarizing conversations.
I fucking hate the rise of the alt-right more than most, but one of the reasons for that hate is the bad faith bullshit they get up to in pushing their agenda. I have no interest in combating them with bad faith bullshit of our own.
Anyone whining about dei is basically saying “I fucking hate n***ers!” In a way that society told them was ok. Just basically replace that slur, or DEI in general, with any other slur for the person of color in question. Sometimes it’s also directed at women, cause they also hate women
Prejudice is never as clever as the people who find it confusing
Sinners has black characters?! FFS, it’s set in 1930s Mississippi, there weren’t, and still aren’t, any black people there!
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not, but black people comprised a sizable amount of the population of Mississippi, predating the Civil War and through mid-20th century, as it’s a large cotton plantation state.
