Food for thought

[lovely_fatima]

A friend of mine pointed me towards this article:

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar

The money quote:

"Think of it this way. Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege....When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it's only

Comments

[astaraelweeper]

The article makes good points. Actually, David Brooks' column in today's New York Times is on the same topic. Not that David Brooks saying something is more likely to make me believe it, because he's fundamentally inconsistent. (Which is why he's worth reading, in part. You don't know what he's going to say.)

Maybe we want stories about separate races of aliens--no humans involved--coming into contact, so that neither side is recognizably "white" or "dominant" (it's hard to separate those). Getting beyond a white-centric world, to a place where European/western cultures are just one set among many (which they should be--it's white as the default/savior that makes things offensive), would help. With all sides alien, we might be able to see that we are all aliens in each other's worlds, and that there is no categorical default. (Besides, it would mean twice as many awesome special effects.)

I should mention that it would be good to see human/alien stories from just the aliens' perspective, complete with the reality of

[lovely_fatima]

Brooks' article was well stated. I like his way of phrasing things. :)

[chinook_wind]

This is exactly how I feel about the movie and what I've been saying to people about it since I saw it. I was deeply disturbed by the overt and implicit messages of that movie. Even the Na'vi actors were non-white, and it showed -- especially to someone with anthropology training, who can recognize the physical differences in facial structure, or anyone who pays attention to life at all. Grrrr.