writerly ways
And here is the last (for now) of the planned race and writing posts I had planned. I meant to do this one last fall but time is a bitch. As I type it right now I’m coming off a weekend of ‘fans’ atting Black actors bashing them to their faces for participating in BLM storylines if you can imagine that. I can’t even imagine the balls on someone to do this. Some are directly referencing the story lines and others are just bashing their talent and whatever else you can imagine. What is it about social media that makes you think you can be THIS offensive?
Anyhow this summer and fall I came across two crime shows that are decent popcorn entertainment if you ignore the fact that there is a definite White Savior trope going on. Curiously enough they have similar names Death in Paradise & Almost Paradise.
The latter is a Christian Kane vehicle set in the Philippines (which is half the reason I’m watching it) Kane plays Alex Walker ex-DEA who has PTSD so badly he’s nearly had a heart attack a couple of times. He liked the Filipino island of Cebu (saw it on a case) and moved there to run a gift shop. He’s perpetually broke and keeps getting drawn into crimes. The chief is more interested with being on the news and politics but the two detectives Ernesto and Kai are at least competent. You get the idea they could solve the cases if Kane’s White butt wasn’t there but it is and he almost always solves the case for them. (only one season so far)
The former is an extremely popular British-French crime series that has been running for 10 seasons, set in a fiction Caribbean island that’s been under French and British control. The first detective we meet is the fish out of water trope, a middle aged White dude, always in a three piece suit in spite of the heat forever moaning about the lack of good tea, British food and pubs. He was sent there to solve the murder of another British detective (You get the idea that this is still an English colony). It’s a popular tourist place. All the other cops are of African descent. In ten years there has been four detectives sent, each and every one of them a White male. Are there no female or Black cops in all of the UK. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were equals but they aren’t. The British detective is the lead. They do have him paired with a Black female cop (at least in the first 6 seasons which is what I’ve seen) . Then there’s Dwayne, the somewhat lazy cop more interested in a good time (which leans a bit into other negative Black Islander tropes).
As I said both are decent popcorn fare tinged with this trope. It’s not quite as bad in Almost Paradise but in Death in Paradise it’s more blatant (though it’s almost a bit harder to take this one serious because of the Hercule Poirot ending on every case, where they round up all the suspects and walk through who did it. I just think there would be just as much to offer from the show if they had made at least one of the British detectives a PoC. Sometimes they really doubled down on the White Savior trope like in a S1 episode when the detective was too sick to even stand, they sent away the Black female detective and brought in a White female one to lead the uniformed cops of color. Sigh.
So I guess what I’m saying is take care when you’re writing a diverse class that you’re not undoing what you’re trying to accomplish.
Have some writing links from around the world
go here. because how I have to link in one journal is not translating to LJ. OMG I HATE this.
Okay I'm not including Betty's links tonight. I'll try tomorrow. This working in rich text is killing me. I might contact them to see why I can't get HTML to do paragraphs. Maybe I suddenly have to HTML them by hand when I never had to for years and years. I don't have spoons for this tonight. Sorry everyone.
Anyhow this summer and fall I came across two crime shows that are decent popcorn entertainment if you ignore the fact that there is a definite White Savior trope going on. Curiously enough they have similar names Death in Paradise & Almost Paradise.
The latter is a Christian Kane vehicle set in the Philippines (which is half the reason I’m watching it) Kane plays Alex Walker ex-DEA who has PTSD so badly he’s nearly had a heart attack a couple of times. He liked the Filipino island of Cebu (saw it on a case) and moved there to run a gift shop. He’s perpetually broke and keeps getting drawn into crimes. The chief is more interested with being on the news and politics but the two detectives Ernesto and Kai are at least competent. You get the idea they could solve the cases if Kane’s White butt wasn’t there but it is and he almost always solves the case for them. (only one season so far)
The former is an extremely popular British-French crime series that has been running for 10 seasons, set in a fiction Caribbean island that’s been under French and British control. The first detective we meet is the fish out of water trope, a middle aged White dude, always in a three piece suit in spite of the heat forever moaning about the lack of good tea, British food and pubs. He was sent there to solve the murder of another British detective (You get the idea that this is still an English colony). It’s a popular tourist place. All the other cops are of African descent. In ten years there has been four detectives sent, each and every one of them a White male. Are there no female or Black cops in all of the UK. It wouldn’t be so bad if they were equals but they aren’t. The British detective is the lead. They do have him paired with a Black female cop (at least in the first 6 seasons which is what I’ve seen) . Then there’s Dwayne, the somewhat lazy cop more interested in a good time (which leans a bit into other negative Black Islander tropes).
As I said both are decent popcorn fare tinged with this trope. It’s not quite as bad in Almost Paradise but in Death in Paradise it’s more blatant (though it’s almost a bit harder to take this one serious because of the Hercule Poirot ending on every case, where they round up all the suspects and walk through who did it. I just think there would be just as much to offer from the show if they had made at least one of the British detectives a PoC. Sometimes they really doubled down on the White Savior trope like in a S1 episode when the detective was too sick to even stand, they sent away the Black female detective and brought in a White female one to lead the uniformed cops of color. Sigh.
So I guess what I’m saying is take care when you’re writing a diverse class that you’re not undoing what you’re trying to accomplish.
Have some writing links from around the world
go here. because how I have to link in one journal is not translating to LJ. OMG I HATE this.
Okay I'm not including Betty's links tonight. I'll try tomorrow. This working in rich text is killing me. I might contact them to see why I can't get HTML to do paragraphs. Maybe I suddenly have to HTML them by hand when I never had to for years and years. I don't have spoons for this tonight. Sorry everyone.