Race and Pirates
I ended up buying Beverly Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?", despite already having borrowed it from the library because a) I wanted something to read in line while I waited to get a seat for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and b) I want to financially support books like these and authors who tackle the subject of
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It didn't hurt to have Anamaria in the first movie, just like it doesn't hurt to have Tia Dalma, a character whose influence you've chosen to ignore throughout this entire debate, in the second one.
So now your complaining that the movie WASN'T male chauvanistic enough? Can't you just be happy that one minority group was allowed to have semi-decent representation? Even though in the first movie Elizabeth had to barter herself like some prize mare? The continued mentions of how unlucky females are? The whores and the usage of them? It's an accepted fact that anyone with Jack Sparrow would be weird, and therefore far more accepting than others would be.
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I have difficulties just typing "The movie is incredibly racist," and I have to keep thinking about how I routinely notice the portrayal of women in nearly everything I read and watch (the movie is not as deeply sexist as it is racist; thankfully, Elizabeth gets to do stuff. But it is still very male). I have to keep thinking that for me, noticing sexism is ok, that pointing it out in my LJ is standard. And I have to keep thinking that I need to do the same about race, even though posting things like this frighten me because of the reaction to the Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM.
As noted above, the representation of women could have been discussed, but was not as that was not the subject of the post. The subject of the post was the representation of race.
You write:
I think saying only racism means that when people think of such things, they think of racism first, even though there are TONS more problems in the world than skin color. There's homophobia, there's anti-Semitism, etc, etc. Tons of things that have gotten people killed over all of human history. By focusing only on racism you can't help anyone--until people can think of all forms of prejudice as bad then there's always going to be racism.
No one is saying that other forms of prejudice are acceptable. It's just that other forms of prejudice are not the subject of this particular post. If any single post were to discuss every form of prejudice known to man, it would be five hundred pages long. If it avoided going into specific details and merely said "all prejudice is bad," then it would be impossible to talk about the specific issues in a specific movie-- which is what this particular post is about.
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When you make a post, the comments won't follow your post to the letter. They will divurge. Your post, as well as the comments following, did. That, of course, is the nature of making any high profile post on livejournal.
We got off topic pretty early on in this thread, I was never talking solely about racism, because in my mind all prejudice is one. In my mind, separating them into categories hurts humanity just as much as having racism can, because it means that you can tell someone one type of prejudice isn't as bad as the other.
I'll stop posting now, though, because this was obviously a thinly veiled attempt to stop this thread. I read fandom wank, I know the signs.
Ciao.
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