Amazingly Predictable: Spider Man's Quest to Stop White Criminals

The wanted poster for the "blond" killer of Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man

Over the past year, I've been working on a fictional story called The Next Man in Hell. It’s a tale of what would happen if someone in our present society decided to take up the mantle of a masked vigilante in our world, taking comic books out of the America of the 1950s, where comics seem to be stuck.(See this piece on The Avengers at VDare and Will "The First 48" be the model?: "The Punisher" gets a TV Show).

Though comics do boast a proud history of heroes resisting tyranny, the cinematic world depicted in Superman Returns, in all of the Christopher Nolan Batman films, in X-Men, The Punisher, Thor, Iron Man, The Avengers, Green Lantern . . . well, they all offer pure escapism when it comes to the casting of villains.

The villains, be they megalomaniac super-villains with extraordinary powers or just your run-of-the-mill street criminal, are almost always white. In the world you and I live in, there are no super-villains; there are just your average, run-of-the-mill thug that depressingly tends to be either Black or brown.

It was my belief that were a vigilante to exist in our world, he would instantly be painted a racist by the media (and the government) and be peremptorily hunted down by the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) (if not first terminated with extreme prejudice) for violating the civil rights of criminals. Yes, a vigilante would be the ultimate racist: an individual engaging in the hate crime of trying to keep a city (or your gated community) safe from crime.

And crime does have a color in America.

But wait: Didn’t we recently see what would happen to someone fighting for justice and the betterment of a community? Isn’t that exactly what happened with the story of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin? That "white Hispanic," George Zimmerman, might just be the next man in hell...

The whole Zimmerman/Martin affair seemed to destroy the concept that a half Black/half Hispanic Spider Man would be allowed to fight crime; Martin became the "hero" in the eyes of the media and government, while Zimmerman was demonized and has been harassed by those same entities that celebrate "Obama's son."

Thus the entire Zimmerman/Martin affair is just a real-world application of the plot from The Next Man in Hell.

On that note, The Amazing Spider-Man swung into theaters on July 3rd, re-booting a franchise that was beginning to prove true the law of diminishing returns (at least in the American market). Just like the Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire version of Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man sticks to the formula of Peter Parker's beloved Uncle Ben being murdered by a blond-haired white criminal. Leif Gantvoort gets to portray the Nordic killer of Uncle Ben this go-around, filling the shoes made famous by Michael Papajohn in the original trilogy.

Indeed, once Andrew Garfield's version of Peter Parker (who plays Spider-Man in this re-boot) tries to avenge the death of Uncle Ben by hunting down the blond-haired baddy, the viewer is treated to the hilarious spectacle of Spider-Man chasing down not one, not two, but at least six different blond-haired thugs in New York City -- all with police records.

Uncle Ben's killer in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy

For these actions of ridding New York City of blond-haired thugs, the police brand Spider-Man  "vigilante." Just as in Raimi's version of Spider-Man, The Amazing Spider-Man shows the Wall-crawler battling an impressive array of white street thugs.

The New York Times published an informative opinion piece on March 14 by Peter Moskos (You Can’t Blame the Police) that seems to paint a portrait of crime in New York City that isn't replicated in the cinematic world of Spider-Man:

It’s not politically correct to say so, but reality isn't politically correct. Over 90 percent of New York City's 536 murder victims last year were black or Hispanic. Just 48 victims were white or Asian. The rate of white homicide in the city (1.18 per 100,000) is incredibly low, even by international standards. The Hispanic rate of homicide in New York City (5.5) is barely above the overall national average (4.8). And yet the black homicide rate remains stubbornly high (17.2), 15 times higher than the white rate. Blacks are one-quarter of the city’s population and two-thirds of murder victims. Black men age 15 to 29 represent less than 3 percent of the city’s population but account for one-third of those murdered. 

Instead of showing a world where the criminals almost always look like the "sons" Barack Obama never had – as they do in the real world you and I live in – the cinematic world of Spider-Man shows us a world where they all look like the "sons" of Mitt Romney and his fellow Mormon believers.

Heather MacDonald from City Journal goes one step further (Distorting the Truth about Crime and Race, March 14, 2010). In discussing the "stop and frisk" program in New York City, she writes:

Here are the crime data that the Times doesn’t want its readers to know: blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city’s population). Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city’s population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown.

So is the world ready for The Next Man in Hell? Judging by the support George Zimmerman has received, that answer is a resounding "yes."

X-Men First Class, Green Lantern, Captain America and Whiteness: Black-Run America and Comic Book Movies

X-Men First Class and its unbearable whiteness

 Over the past 10 years, Hollywood has relied heavily on comic book adaptations to bring people into the glut of state-of-the-art theaters built across the country. Transformers, Harry Potter, Star Wars I - III, James Bond and a few other franchises have been big money-makers for Hollywood studios of late, but comic book movies - and movies based on  Nicholas Sparks books - pace the box-office.

We have pointed out the trend of the white action star being completely phased out from movies, but because comic book characters were largely created in a time when the concept of Black-Run America (BRA) was only in its infancy, your Batman, Green Lantern, Superman, Iron Man, Wolverine, X-Men, Captain America (and all The Avengers), Daredevil, Wonder Woman, etc. are all white. This whiteness upsets a lot of people, including The American Prospect's Gene Demby:

A purple-skinned alien hurtles across the cosmos, bearing a ring that grants its wearer unimaginable power. The alien is mortally wounded, and the ring is seeking its next wearer—the Green Lantern, Earth’s champion—by finding the planet’s most courageous inhabitant.

In a world with billions of people, what are the chances that the ring’s next owner is a white American dude?

Pretty high, apparently. In DC Comics’ Showcase #22, released in 1959, the power ring chose Hal Jordan, a dashing military test pilot modeled on a young Paul Newman. Jordan would become a founding member of the Justice League of America, DC Comics’ flagship superhero team, and one of its most famous characters. And while comics, over time, began to challenge that whiteness, two major films to be released this summer avoid the critiques on race found in the original comics.

In the early days, whiteness was so pervasive in comics that it could actually span the universe: a Kryptonian Superman could crash-land in Kansas and pass as an ordinary white farm boy. In the 1960s, though, comic-book publishers began trying to create nonwhite heroes. As the civil-rights movement came to dominate the national conversation, a young white artist named Neal Adams tried to subtly incorporate black characters into the newspaper strip he was illustrating. “I come out of a time when bigotry was a lot more subtle than it [was] in the days of slavery,” Adams says. “Not for the people who had it working against them but for the people who walked around saying, ‘There’s no problem, right?’” His world in New York City, Adams says, was full of people who did not think of themselves as Southern-style racists.

But Adams drew and submitted an installment of a syndicated comic strip featuring a black doctor and a white ambulance driver in one panel. When he later saw proofs of the strip, he realized that higher-ups had switched the characters’ heads. The higher-ups told him audiences would be confused by a black doctor.

When Adams got to DC Comics, where he worked on the Green Lantern in the early 1970s, he started to push back. “I asked [my editor] what happens if Hal Jordan gets killed,” Adams says. “They tell me they have a backup.” That backup turned out to be a blond gym teacher from the Midwest.

Adams, however, thought that the secondary Green Lantern should be black. So, with his editor’s approval, he and writer Dennis O’Neil created John Stewart, a black architect who would later become the main Green Lantern. (In the early drafts, Adams says, an editor wanted to name the character Lincoln Washington; Adams talked him out of it.) “I’m very proud of that,” he says. “I’m glad that [my editor] was open to it and malleable. But it did have to be explained to him.”

Disingenuous White Liberals (DWLs) have to constantly apologize for America's past whiteness, because regrettably,  that past actually worked quite good compared to the strange country we have now where a space program is scrapped to care for a growing colored underclass.

Hard to believe, but as late as 1964 the United States was 90 percent white. Because of their ubiquity on television and in movies (not to mention college and professional football and basketball) people have been conditioned to believe Black people represent as much as 33 percent of the current population. 

Blacks are but 13 percent of the United States population.

Historically America was a white country with a Black problem. Now, America is a country dedicated to advancing the principles of BRA, and it has a white problem.

Once Black people refused to assimilate to America; now white people refuse to fully submit to BRA.

For those who have been reading comic books and understand that most comic book heroes are white, this presents a huge problem. X-Men: First Class came out last Friday (Sailer reviews it here; James Pinkerton here; and thegrio.com here) and Black people are royally upset that none of the characters in the film were Black:

Ta-Nehesi Coates recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the lack of an African-American presence in the latest X-Men movie. Despite the fact that the X-Men’s story is based on the Civil Rights movement, racism and discrimination, there is no African-American presence in the latest movie at all.
In fact, no X-Men movie has any African-American presence at all. Sure, Storm is African, but not African-American and her struggle does not represent the struggle of overcoming slavery and Jim Crow, though it is still a very real struggle.

DC Comics also has a very small Black presence. They co-opted Milestone’s comic, Static, who was later given a successful TV show for kids, but other than that has a very small presence in the DC Universe.
Even DC’s Classic graphic novel “Watchmen,” despite its historical and social commentary, doesn’t have any African-Americans or even alludes to the Civil Rights movement; despite the fact that it focuses on several social issues of the time, including the Vietnam war, Watergate, the anti-war movement, the atomic bomb and police brutality.

Similarly, DC’s classic Batman novel, “The Dark Night Returns,” deals with several social issues as well, such as the cold war, police brutality, and the prison system; but does not refer to racism or Blacks either.
The recent DC cartoon “Justice League: The New Frontier” which is also a historical piece, set in the 60′s, alludes to an African-American super hero that was killed by the KKK and recently, the white Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, was replaced by an African American, John Stewart, who appears in many recent Justice League cartoons and DC comic books.

The lack of successful Black comic book characters cannot be blamed on DC and Marvel and the companies they work with. Reginald Hudlin produced an excellent TV series on The Black Panther for BET, but they never aired it. It was only seen in Australia and on DVD and digital download.

The lack of successful Black comic book characters is because the free market has shown that comic book readers aren't interested in purchasing stories with melanin-enhanced heroes. Sure you can make Heimdall, Kingpin, and Nick Fury Black for the movies, but attempts to add Black characters to other comics have largely failed.

X-Men First Class did have one Black character called Darwin, and the film resurrected the time-honored tradition of the "Black guy dying first" by killing him off quickly. Set in a highly-stylized 1962, X-Men First Class worked a lot like 2009's Watchmen (set in the mid-1980s) where there is a noticeable lack of Black people in any prominent role.


The fictionalized countries are dedicated to advancement in both films, instead of debasing the overall health of the country in a never-ending quest of Black empowerment. Today J.J. Abrams and Steven Spielberg's  Super 8 comes out, which is basically a homage to The Goonies, E.T., and Indiana Jones. That movie is set in 1979 and looks to have an all-white cast, because any movie set in today's world would be forced to include a cast brimming with diversity (see the inevitable SEALS Team 6 film).

Super 8 is going to make gobs of money, something next weeks Green Lantern will fail to do. In July, Captain America debuts and, with it being set in the 1940s, we believe it will be the sleeper hit of the year. Setting movies in a past untouched with the glorious and enriching diversity of 2011 is an easy way for film producers to appeal to that group of people who still long for Norman Rockwell's America.

Will Smith was perfect for this role!

Everything has to be about racism now and how Black people are constantly discriminated against, so when X-Men First Class failed to sufficiently wallow in white guilt and Black empowerment, The New York Time's Ta-Nehisi Coates went nuts:

But as “First Class” roars to its final climactic scene, it appeals to an insidious suspension of disbelief; the heroic mutants of America, bravely opposing bigotry and fear, are revealed as not so much a spectrum of humankind, but as Eagle Scouts from Mayfield. Thus, “First Class” proves itself not merely an incredible film, but an incredible work of American historical fiction. Here is a period piece for our postracial times — in the era of Ella Baker and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the most powerful adversaries of spectacular apartheid are a team of enlightened white dudes. 

“First Class” is set in 1962. That was the year South Carolina marked the Civil War centennial by returning the Confederate Flag to the State Capitol; the year the University of Mississippi greeted its first black student, James Meredith, with a lethal race riot; the year George Wallace was elected governor of Alabama. 

That was the year a small crowd of Americans gathered at the Lincoln Memorial and commemorated the 100th birthday of the Emancipation Proclamation. Only a single African-American was asked to speak (Thurgood Marshall, added under threat of boycott). In “First Class,” 1962 finds our twin protagonists, Magneto and Professor X, also rallying before the Lincoln Memorial, not for protest or commemoration, but for a game of chess. “First Class” is not blind to societal evils, so much as it works to hold evil at an ocean’s length. The film is rooted in its opposition to the comfortably foreign abomination of Nazism.

Remember when Superman denounced America? We wrote about it here. Within that article we learned how pioneering comic book and television/movie producer Bruce Timm changed the traditionally white Hal Jordan (who is the Green Lantern) to a Black character because the Justice League television show "couldn't be another white people running around saving the world event":

He becomes the only major black character in the Cartoon Network’s (CN) regular lineup and one of the very few in any animated series.

Executives at CN, which is part of AOL Time Warner’s Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System, said they have sought to have more black characters in general but that they never suggested the Green Lantern character to the making “Justice League.”

Create and producer Bruce Timm, a sort of star in the confined world of superhero TV animation, said he chose a black superhero “so it wasn’t just a bunch of white guys saving the universe every day.”

Timm doesn’t think most viewers will give much thought to Green Lantern’s skin color. But, he added, “I would hope black audiences would watch those and say, ‘There is somebody I can relate to.’

More than 20 percent of the CN’s viewers are black. 

It’s an effort that should be undertaken with sensitivity, said Linda Simensky, the network’s senior vice president of original animation. Cartoon characters are by nature extreme personalities, often ripe for mockery. “You don’t want your first lead African-American character on the network to be shown in a negative light,” she said. 

The selection has irritated some superhero fans. “On one hand they are mad we aren’t using their favorite version of the character,” Timm said. “On the other hand they are accusing of us of being hopelessly P.C. (politically correct).”

Timm please guilty to that last one. “It’s is a P.C. kind of move, but I don’t think it hurts anything.”

A scholarly article was written by Phillip Lamarr Cunningham who asked why are there so few Black supervillains? One Black comic writer who tried to create more Black heroes (and villains) was the late Dwayne McDuffie, who was responsible for the Black Green Lantern:

Milestone was co-founded by Dwayne McDuffie, who was black and would go on to write for a host of titles. He later became a writer for the Cartoon Network’s Justice League, which debuted in the early aughts. The writing staff chose the Stewart version of the Green Lantern specifically because the rest of the show’s superhero cast—which included an Amazon and an alien policewoman who was part hawk—was white. (Except for the Martian guy. He was green.) For a generation of superhero fans weaned on the popular cartoon series, the black Green Lantern has been the only one they’ve ever known. “If you ask a kid who Green Lanterns is, the kid will say it’s John Stewart,” Adams says.

The inclusion of nonwhite characters in the Justice League of America comic raised hackles among fans who thought McDuffie was trying to enforce a quota system on the pages. “The quota arguments … crack me up,” McDuffie said in an interview last year in the documentary Shaft or Sidney Poitier: Black Masculinity in Comic Books. “Which fictional character is losing a job?” (McDuffie died in February due to complications from heart surgery.)

McDuffie’s efforts won’t make it onto the big screen, though. When the big-budget Green Lantern movie rolls out in mid-June, white heartthrob du jour Ryan Reynolds will wield the power ring as Hal Jordan, the original white character. Captain America, another iconic superhero, is getting his own tentpole summer flick, out in July. Like the Green Lantern comic-book character’s story, Captain America’s mythology has been reimagined to explicitly comment on American racism. And like the Green Lantern film, the movie isn’t likely to touch on that critique. News reports from the start of the project said that the moviemakers were going back to the original source material and would hew to early Captain America tradition. Elisabeth Rappe, writing for Moviefone, stated, “I honestly think there would have been riots if they tried to update Captain America, so color me unsurprised by the news.”

The original Cap didn’t challenge much: Introduced in 1941, he was a scrawny, meek military recruit who becomes the only recipient of a super-soldier serum that augments him to the peak of human ability. The character was meant to be a totem of American ingenuity and grit and to drum up support for the war effort. The irony of creating a physically perfect blue-eyed blond guy as a counter to Nazi ideology was apparently lost on everyone.

 Knowing that at the time of World War II - and even today - a large percentage of American's had blue eyes and blond hair, the concept of Steve Rogers/ Captain America being drawn with those physical attributes wasn't that shocking. 

Racialicious can whine all they want to over the lack of Black characters in comics, but the fact is comic book characters that are popular - and worthy of making a movie about - are overwhelmingly white. Hollywood is trying to get rid of the white action star (think Thomas Jane), but comic book movies won't allow that to transpire.

Even though the mutants in X-Men First Class might be gifted with extraordinary powers with Professor X and Magneto having the ability to destroy cities with their mind, Black writers and DWL-enthusiasts constantly pull out the metaphor of the X-Men representing Black people or other oppressed minorities that society shuns.

No Black person, sexual or racial minority has the ability to destroy a city with their mind (a city with a  majority of Black people do however have that ability as Detroit and Birmingham evidence), so trying to have X-Men stand in for minorities makes little sense.

The real reason Black people and DWLs disliked X-Men is because it was too white. The film was drenched in an unbearable whiteness (all the good mutants were white mind you) and in 2011 this isn't possible anymore.

Which is why you'll find more and more movies set in an older America, one untouched by the wonders of diversity and Black-Run America.

Super 8 coming out today is just the beginning. Remember that Black people are being rejected by popular culture, and you'll understand why they are upset about the whiteness inherent in comic book movies.

Fast and the Furious: The changing dynamic of Bad Asses in Film

This article is adapted from Hollywood in Blackface, which comes out Friday.The chapter it comes from is an in-depth discussion of the late 90s - early 2000 action films that worked to de-legitimize the concept of the "white bad ass" hero. In its place is the lovable Angry Black Man (ABM), perfected by Samuel L. Jackson and pathetically imitated by LL Cool J and Ice Cube among others.

Can you spot the "Token White" from Fast Five?

In a review of the poorly received XXX: State of the Union, starring one-time rebel rapper turned family-friendly movie star Ice Cube (isn’t it strange how many gangsta rappers start off as anti-establishment, radical Black Nationalist figures and through metamorphosis become family-friendly actors?: Think Queen Latifah, Ice T, LL Cool J, Mos Def, Ludacris, etc.) Roger Ebert wrote something that confirms what we write about the power of Hollywood to provide and craft positive examples of Black people when society fails to produce them: 

Did I enjoy this movie? Only in a dumb mindless way. It has whatever made the original "XXX" entertaining, but a little less of it. Does it make the slightest sense? Of course not. Its significance has nothing to do with current politics and politicians, the threat of terrorism, and the efficiency of bullet trains. It has everything to do with a seismic shift in popular culture.

Once all action heroes were white. Then they got a black chief of police, who had a big scene where he fired them. Then they got a black partner. Then they were black and had a white partner. Now they are the heroes and don't even need a white guy around, although there is one nerdy white guy in "XXX" who steps in when the plot requires the ineffectual delivery of a wimpy speech. So drastically have things changed that when Ice Cube offers to grab the president and jump off a train and grab a helicopter, all the president can do is look grateful. Oh, and later, in his new State of the Union speech, our nation's leader quotes Tupac, although he doesn't know he does. Well, you can't expect him to know everything.

Ebert beautifully captures what Hollywood has accomplished over the past thirty years, creating Black Fictional Images through film and turning the accepted paradigm of masculinity from actors like Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to actors like Vin Diesel, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Will Smith, and Samuel L. Jackson (who seems to appear in every action film as a mentor of some sorts from XXX, Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Star Wars Episodes I-III and finally to Jumpers).
 

One can never forget that Predator 2 had the eponymous alien hunter being defeated by Roger Murtaugh himself, Danny Glover. Going from Predator, where an elite search and rescue team is decimated by the alien hunter before Arnold puts it down to Danny Glover performing the same act in Los Angeles is a bit of a stretch.
 

Patrick Swayze was originally attached to the role Glover ended up with in Predator 2, but he filmed Point Break instead. Smart move, since that film is one of the last action movies made devoid of any Black Fictionalization: not one Black person has a speaking part in the film.
 

The agenda of movies over the past 25 years has been the gradual demasculization of the white male to the point where 2010s The Other Guys spoofed this concept by having The Rock and Samuel L. Jackson play alpha male cops to Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg’s white-bread nerds:

This buddy cop spoof begins with the triumphant exploits of the NYPD’s coolest cops. In cameos played by Samuel L. Jackson, as the same character he’s done since Pulp Fiction, and Dwayne Johnson, the genial half-Samoan, half-black ex-pro wrestler formerly known as The Rock, the two supercops wreak $12 million in property damage to Manhattan while arresting a smalltime weed dealer. Then Jackson and Johnson take a victory lap around the police station, tossing their unfilled-out paperwork to “The Other Guys,” the precinct’s most pathetic desk jockeys, played by Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, who become the movie’s main characters.

The Other Guys could have been more memorably entitled The White Guys. Much of comedy these days, especially funny TV commercials about doofus dads, gingerly deals with the paradox of a culture in which white guys have seemingly been dethroned from the top of the masculinity pyramid. Yet, the people who have the really good jobs making the movies, TV shows, and ads poking fun at white guys remain, overwhelmingly, white guys like McKay and Ferrell.

Films like Bad Boys, Bad Boys 2 and any Samuel L. Jackson film where he plays his angry Black man stereotype (think Shaft) that somehow now equates to the ultimate manifestation of machismo, have been integral in creating this new dynamic. Perhaps this is why The Expendables was so uninspiring, with the sight of nearly septuagenarian white dudes trying to save the world a reminder of just how powerful the new paradigm of Black masculinity and white pusillanimity in film has become.
 

It is our opinion that this is the reason 2004’s The Punisher starring Thomas Jane performed so mediocre at box office.  Movie fans have been conditioned to only accept Black guys as bad asses (unless they have fantastical super powers, such as Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine or they are superheroes in spandex).
 

Can white guys play the bad ass hero anymore?

The character of The Punisher is just a normal dude out of for revenge; that it did so well in DVD sales, as another vigilante film The Boondock Saints performed, is a sign that a huge market exists for people clamoring for a different type of film. This group has been incredibly marginalized and the only type of actors representing them in film are either foreigners or goofy white dudes like Paul Rudd or Michael Cera. If Shia LaBeouf is the best that Hollywood can give us to replace a guy like Willis, Russell or even Michael Biehn (underrated actor), then fire up that DVD player and prepare to just watch Commando, Escape from New York and Aliens.
 

It’s interesting that Vin Diesel turned down the starring role in XXX: State of the Union, after his role in the first film (XXX) successfully eviscerated the concept of the James Bond-style white superspy as an anachronism in a world where white privilege is fading fast.
 

Diesel, just multiracial to qualify as a token minority to the likes of Racialicious.com, yet white enough to be cast as a World War II era soldier in Saving Private Ryan (remember, the military was still segregated then) knows how to exploit his protean racial identity, as one can see by the phenomenally popular Fast and Furious franchise.
 

Based on a 1998 article glamorizing street racing in the magazine Vibe, the Fast and Furious brand has produced five films that have grossed a cumulative of well over a billion dollars. Sporting a multiracial and exotic cast – as well as Token white bread Paul Walker – Fast and Furious offers an intimate look at the anti-establishment world of car racing.
 

It should be noted that Walker is perfecting the role of white boy sidekick and making a career of it having recently starred in 2010s Takers as a white boy sidekick to Idris Elba’s Alpha male character.

The fine folks over at Thegrio.com praised the latest Fast and Furious (Fast Five), not for its artistic merits, but for its diverse casting:

"I didn't think anybody would ever write a role for me. I didn't fit the bill. I was too multicultural. There was no place for me," was how Vin Diesel explained his early Hollywood reality on an Atlanta set for the Fast Five in October 2010.

Hollywood's "whites only" attitude, especially for leading man roles, is what prompted Diesel to write, produce, direct and star in his 1994 life-as-art frustration short, Multi-Facial about not being black enough or white enough to make the cinematic cut. The short, which landed in the Cannes Film Festival, got Steven Spielberg's attention and the legendary director cast Diesel in a small role in the Oscar-winning Saving Private Ryan. Then, in 2001, Diesel's career got a major jolt with the blockbuster The Fast and the Furious.

A novel approach to the salt-and-pepper buddy flick concept that had successfully paired the likes of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte, The Fast and the Furious, coincidentally built around an article from VIBE magazine about street racing, proved to be no laughing matter. Diesel, who was coming off successful runs in Pitch Black and Boiler Room, was the star power that jump-started the film, with the blue-eyed, blonde Hollywood poster boy Paul Walker following his lead. Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez rounded out the main cast but Asian actor Rick Yune and then hip-hop star Ja Rule did have significant input, not to mention the cars themselves. Actually, The Fast and the Furious was a major wake-up call that Detroit no longer dominated the world auto industry.

When Entertainment Weekly listed its five reasons why, a decade later, this franchise is still viable, they put "The Melting Pot" vibe at the top of the list. "Quick, what do Harry Potter, Spider-Man, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Lord of the Rings, and Christopher Nolan's Batman series have in common?" they asked. And the answer was "White people, white people everywhere!" That's certainly not anything the Fast Five is guilty of.

Set in Brazil, whose economy has been deemed the second fastest growing one next to China, Fast Five's cast is comprised of original stars Diesel, Walker and Brewster as well as Tyrese, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges and Sung Kang, who have been pulled from the other franchises, is more diverse than ever. For added value, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, Diesel's multiracial comrade, has been drafted to play the badass cop vowing to catch the robber by any means necessary. Meanwhile, Reggaeton players Tego Calderón and Don Omar help broaden the base even further in supporting roles.
Reviews of Fast Five largely center around the cars as well as the franchise's transitioning from racing to heist genre but that's not the real story. Fast Five, which has already topped the box office in Australia, the UK, New Zealand and South Korea, should be Hollywood's final initiation into the new multicultural, multiracial, global reality. Since people of color have long dominated the population stats, the world has been a rainbow of flavors for a minute now. The difference is that sunburst reality has become increasingly too powerful to ignore yet Hollywood and other Americans are still just peeking at the memo.

While birthers are wasting their time challenging President Obama's citizenship, the world is literally passing them by. Holding on to the crumbling notion of white supremacy and white privilege is definitely a recipe for destruction. To play in this new world arena, it's essential to realize that not living in the "real" world is just no longer an option.

Movies will continue marginalizing white male actors, while creating manufactured positive images of Black actors that become the new archetype of “cool” for everyone to emulate. Movies with all-white casts aren’t allowed anymore, for as the Thegrio.com alluded to above that would be tantamount to creating a “white privileged” view of the world that is increasingly one of color.

The white action star is a thing of the past; the multiracial action star is the present and the future. It just took marginalizing whites and the manufacturing of positive images of Black people through  film to achieve this result. 

Announcing: "Hollywood in Blackface: Black Images in Film from Night of the Living Dead to Thor"

Available on May 6, 2011

We love movies at Stuff Black People Don't Like. Ever since viewing 1989's Batman (the first movie we can remember seeing at the theater), the power of cinema to convince people of the unimaginable has been an overwhelming concept to us. Seeing a hero come alive through celluloid was an awe-inspiring event that allowed the viewer to suspend disbelief, if ever-so-briefly.

Though no human has ever donned a suit and actively engaged criminals and pursued those who do evil to others with a tenacity that borders on the obsessive, for two hours Tim Burton's film had us convinced it was possible.

With that story on the mind comes the announcement that May 6, 2011 will see the release of Hollywood in Blackface: Black Images in Film from Night of the Living Dead to Thor.

Find out how Hollywood has created Black Fictional Images through film that have helped bolster Black Run America (BRA) in the process by manufacturing positive images of Black people through the roles of Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Bill Cosby, Samuel L. Jackson and a whole host of other Black thespians.

Playing roles in films such as 2012, The Core, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, The Cosby Show, and a whole host of other movies that portray Black characters in vocations that have about as much grounding in reality as a white guy dressing up as a bat and fighting crime, Hollywood in Blackface will go where Donald Bogle's book Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks dared not dread.

You've read about many of the Black Fictional Heroes at this site; prepare for 60 percent new material never before published, including in-depth analysis on Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Samuel L. Jackson, and Denzel Washington's roles. Learn why Disney has spent the past 20 years making films with a cast that would make the United Nations blush.
Learn why all zombies must include an ass-kicking Black zombie killer. Find out why all movies set in medieval Europe must include a Black character, and why the inclusion of a Black Nordic God continues that grand tradition. Learn why Tyler Perry is a far superior film-maker than Spike Lee and prepare to understand why depictions of non-whites as savages is a major no-no (even in fantasy films).

Hollywood in Blackface will contain the ultimate dissection of how films have helped enable the Black Run America (BRA) agenda by conditioning moviegoers of false and wholly incorrect views of Black people in film.

Intersection of Madness: Are Black people being rejected in popular culture?

Has there been a white-out in popular culture?

I'm working on a theory about over-saturation of Black people in sports (NBA and NFL) and the repudiation of Black people by those consuming other forms of entertainment (comics/graphic novels, movies and television, professional wrestling, video games, enjoying the outdoors, skiing, the beach, etc).

People are under the impression that sports equal a meritocracy (which it is not: just ask Peyton Hillis) and that the athletes in the NFL, NBA and at major colleges represent the best available. Though college athletes might not be best students -- and could cost a coach his job for their academic failures -- the perception that Blacks are the best athletes available require a toleration of their off-field antics.

Virtually every other form of entertainment -- outside of music -- amounts to a complete repudiation of Black people. Black comic books and characters have never sold to consumers and have failed to pick up an audience (the ultimate reason why so few Black super-villains exists); despite major pushes from promoters, wrestling fans rarely get behind Black professional wrestlers; movies are lily-white as ever, prompting some to believe that Hollywood discriminates against Black actors (sadly, it is movie-goers who discriminate against films with Black actors by not paying to see them); video games rarely have Black characters (unless it is a sports game and don't get us started on Black zombies); and worse, television can't keep a Black sitcom on air long enough for the narrative to take off (nor do people desire watching fantasy love shows with Black people cast in them).

This is one of the reasons why the uproar over Thor has upset a large segment of the population desiring the creation of a new Black phenomenon in pop culture.

Idris Elba -- whose last film Obsessed was a huge hit among Black people -- has been cast as Heimdall in the upcoming Marvel film Thor and he finds those who question a Nubian playing a Nordic God to be idiots:

"It's so ridiculous," Idris Elba says of Web sites that criticize his ability to play "the whitest of the gods."

When Kenneth Branagh cast Idris Elba as Heimdall in the upcoming summer tentpole Thor, a furious debate erupted among fanboys, with some insisting it was wrong for a black man to play a Nordic god often described as "the whitest of the gods."
Fumed one fan in an online foum: "This PC crap has gone too far! Norse deities are not of an African ethnicity! … It's the principle of the matter. It's about respecting the integrity of the source material, both comics and Norse mythologies."



But the London-born actor (who starred as Stringer Bell in HBO's The Wire; his 2009 film, Obsessed, grossed $68 million domestically) has no patience for the debate.

"It's so ridiculous," he said Feb. 24 at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.

"We have a man [Thor] who has a flying hammer and wears horns on his head. And yet me being an actor of African descent playing a Norse god is unbelievable?" he went on. "I mean, Cleopatra was played by Elizabeth Taylor, and Gandhi was played by Ben Kingsley."

Beyond that artistic defense, though, there is an even more basic reason black actors welcome colorblind casting: There is a ceiling on the amount of business black-themed movies can achieve, so the opportunities for black actors and actresses remain limited unless they can also claim parts in mainstream entertainment.

In the past decade, black actors have been losing ground. In the early 2000s, blacks played 15 percent of roles in film and TV. Today, it has fallen to 13 percent, according to Screen Actors Guild stats.

This past Academy Awards lacked any Black actors, actresses, directors, set designers, costume designers, composer's, illustrators, etc., even nominated for an award.

 We have reached a point where white consumers of sports have been conditioned to believe the only legitimate sports are football and basketball -- because Blacks excel at them -- and sports lacking Black involvement are somehow tainted (see baseball).

Paradoxically, by every conceivable metric consumers spurn Black people in entertainment that doesn't include NFL or NBA stars. Black musical acts might sell on iTunes and zoom up the Billboard charts, but concert goers seem infatuated with white acts.  

Don't get us started on books, especially those written by Nicholas Sparks.

You have to laugh that the only way to get a Black actor into a comic book is to hypocritically cast him as the "whitest of the Gods."

I'm sure Hollywood expected no one to notice the casting of a Black guy as a Nordic God, but they did. That people laugh when Afro-centrists claim that Cleopatra was Black -- sorry to burst your bubble Elba, but she wasn't -- is upsetting to Black people desirous of creating myths that are inherently unbelievable.

That the only positive images of Black people come from sports is interesting especially when you realize consumers of popular culture, entertainment, and the activities they seek out for fun and recreation have insignificant and only token Black representation.

Does the over-saturation of Black people in sports make consumers uninterested in watching movies and television shows with Black actors and actresses? Why don't consumers of comics books read Black books? Why don't Black wrestlers attract support in World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)? White guys tolerate rap and hip-hop because white girls like to dance to it, and this fad will ultimately pass. Then again, why is Journey so popular?

And you thought the end of "Knowing" was bad: Wait until "I am Number Four" comes out

I am Number Four - why so many blond people?

Not since the end Knowing has a film had the potential to infuriate Black people like a movie coming out next Friday will.

Okay, so Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was bad. But an incredibly popular young adult (YA) fiction book debuts next on February 18 in theaters that makes the end of Knowing look like a Tyler Perry casting call.

I am Number Four, the first part in a trilogy, will be criticized for having a virtually all-white cast (even worse, a ton of blonds) that the movie Thor thankfully will not have (Hollywood sanitized that Nordic tale by inserting a Black guy to play a Nordic God).

Other YA titles have been turned into lucrative franchises for studios (Harry Potter, Twilight, and the impending release of the Hunger Games trilogy), but I am Number Four has the potential to be universally lambasted for having a cast of nearly all-white characters. All-white and blond too.

You just can't do that anymore in Hollywood, with movies primarily bankrolled that depict white people as the bad guys. The end of Knowing was bad enough, with two white kids being saved from an earth engulfed in solar flares. Their saviors, of course, were incredibly white aliens.


I am Number Four is also a movie about white aliens, but this time the last of their species seeks refuge on earth from another alien civilization bent on wiping out every last trace of that civilizations existence:

Nine infant aliens, who closely resemble humans, flee their home planet, Lorien, to hide on Earth. An invading species, the Mogadorians, have destroyed their planet, and followed them to Earth to hunt them down. Each of the nine aliens is given a guardian and will develop superhuman powers on becoming an adult. Each is assigned a number. These last children of Lorien can be killed only in the sequence of their numbers. Numbers One, Two, and Three have been killed so far.

Number Four (Alex Pettyfer), also named John Smith, moves to Paradise, Ohio, disguised as an American high school student. He makes a friend, Sarah Hart (Dianna Agron), a sweet Midwestern girl who is a photographer. After being on the run his whole life, Number Four falls in love and now has something to stand up and fight for.

Has there ever been a film were the advanced alien civilization was Black?

Michael Bay, a man who has made many movies glorifying Pre-Obama America (watch the opening 10 minutes of Pearl Harbor to see a homage to a nation long gone), is the only man who could dare produce a film that has white aliens representing the last of their destroyed civilization.

Something tells us that a storm is brewing over this casting, much like the war that erupted over a casting call for all-white Hobbits in the upcoming adaptation of The Hobbit:

A casting director was fired from the production of Peter Jackson's upcoming Hobbit films after limiting the search for female hobbit extras to those with "light skin tones" and telling an actress that she was "too dark" for a role in the films, Agence France-Presse reports.

Naz Humphreys, a British woman who has Pakistani heritage, attended a casting call in New Zealand last week for The Hobbit. She waited in line for three hours hoping to be a hobbit, only to be told she had the wrong skin tone.

 The casting director, who was hired as an independent contractor, reportedly told auditioners at the casting call, "We are looking for light-skinned people... It's just the brief. You've got to look like a hobbit."

By filming The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers and Return of the King at the same time, Peter Jackson was able to ensure that irate Black people - mad about an all-white cast - couldn't demand a token Black casting.  I am Number Four will not be spared that same fate, with the other two books unpublished.

The end of Knowing was an upsetting experience for Black people and I am Number Four (which ostensibly is a film made to glorify the Nordic archetype) will offer an encore of that exact same nauseating feeling with a bunch of white aliens running around earth, saving the day yet again.

In Black Run America (BRA) anything that is all white or nearly white is inherently evil. A movie without diversity or awards show without Black people is an odious form of racial exclusion. What's with all these white aliens anyway? Does someone think that The Jetsons could have been a cartoon about another planet?

Trust us, someone is going to complain about I am Number Four. Where are the Black aliens?

I am Number Four is an incredibly racist movie, violating the rules of BRA. There, Stuff Black People Don't Like said it first.

What is Black Fictional Heroes Month?

You knew it coming. Last year for Black History Month we brought you Black Fictional Heroes, an ode to the monumental roles Black people have had in Hollywood that have helped create positive images in the minds of movie goers, television viewers and those who consume vast amounts of popular culture.

A Black Virologist?

Though the real world produces a scarcity of positive examples of Black people (hence Spike Lee’s vain hope of locating Black men to become teachers, when less than 50 percent of Black males even graduate high school), Hollywood has helped craft the ideal (idol?) numinous negro to supplant the continuous  inundation of negative information that emanates from the Black community.

Television gave us The Cosby Effect, a by-product of that wonderfully fictional Black family that Americans invited into their homes on a weekly basis during the 1980s. Though 72 percent of Black children are born to single mothers (an incredibly high percent never makes it past the second trimester), the positive images from Bill Cosby’s sitcom denuded many of the negative stereotypes that white people held regarding Black people. “We’d love to have the Huxtable’s as neighbors,” thought many white people viewing The Cosby Show.

Though patterns of residential living suggest otherwise, The Cosby Effect is real. The power of Black Fictional Heroes is real.

NASA can scour America’s elite colleges for the next top Black engineer to no avail, but Hollywood can cast a Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Cuba Gooding Jr. or Morgan Freeman as a top virologist, mechanical engineer, molecular biologist or even God and viola, you have a fictional representative that millions upon millions will see.

What NASA can’t find, Hollywood and television can easily manufacture. That is the beauty of mass media, fabricating images that can create a massive amount of cognitive dissonance among the viewer. The media will constantly bemoan the lack of real-world Black architects, doctors, dentists, ballerinas, engineers, Nordic Gods, and even wine enthusiasts, but movies and television (even commercials) rarely has a shortage of Black people starring in roles reality simply can’t duplicate.

This is the idea behind Black Fictional Heroes. We at SBPDL love movies and through viewing hundreds if not thousands of films have come to admire the tenacity of casting directors in Hollywood who continue to perpetuate the idea of Black Fictional Heroes.

When you watch movies (or television and the commercials between programming) you allow your mind to enter a state of “increased suggestibility” that allows the implantation of the numinous negro phenomenon (what we call the Black Fictional Hero) to easily seep into your brain. Though sports provide the bulk of real-world positive examples of Black people, Hollywood works diligently to program the rest through a steady diet of fictional heroes:

Consider this passage from Four Arguments For The Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander:
I asked ... prominent psychologists, partly famous for their work with hypnotism, if they could define the TV experience as hypnotic and, if so, what that meant. I described to each the concrete details of what goes on between viewer and television set: dark room, eyes still, body quiet, looking at light that is flickering different ways, sounds contained to narrow ranges and so on. Dr. Freda Morris (former professor of medical psychology at UCLA and author of several books on hypnosis) said, "It sounds like you are giving a course outline in hypnotic trance induction."


Dr. Ernest Hilgard, who directs Stanford University's research program in hypnosis and the author of the most widely used texts in the field (said), "Sitting quietly, with no sensory inputs aside from the screen, no orientating outside the television set is itself capable of getting people to set aside ordinary reality, allowing the substitution of some other reality the set may offer. You can get so imaginatively involved that alternates temporarily fade away. A hypnotist doesn't have to be interesting. He can use an ordinary voice, and if the effect is to quiet the person, he can invite them into a situation where they can follow his words or actions and then release their imagination along the lines he suggests. Then they drift into hypnosis."


Now, if anyone were really honest about this, how could they say that the typical watching of television doesn't fit the same conditions necessary for hypnosis? Of course, some people will scoff at the idea that hypnosis is anything but Quack Science; for those I suggest researching the Department of the Ministry of Truth as described in George Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty-Four or Soma as referred to in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I suggest researching these two only if I can get those of you who still believe television is good or neutral to turn it off for a moment to bother to pick up and read a book.


The point of this is to show that television is a form of hypnosis. Hypnosis is described as "suspension of the critical factor" which expands on the idea of "increased suggestibility." A person who is hypnotized may accept statements as true that he or she would normally reject…

As I stated in my article (and confirmed by Marie Winn's book The Plug-In Drug) it is not what is on television that is bad, it is not the content that is damaging; it is the mere act of watching television that is harmful. Television is a displacement of time. It is a huge waste of time — in a hypnotic state — that implants other people's messages into the viewer's head.

Think about this: how often do you see movies or television shows where the villain is Black? Though Thug Report showcases the true color of crime, Hollywood would have you believe that only white guys are actively engaging in criminality. Television shows such as Law and Order utilize real-life crimes as plots, yet switch the races from Black culprit to white to ensure that people will watch.

The nightly newscasts that turn into veritable into Thug Report’s is a reality that most people find difficult to live in (though most move flee the problems by moving to whitopia’s), so TV shows and movies constantly manufacture white villains and criminals to root against, while a Black cop becomes the hero.

From the Super Soaker to creating Batman's arsenal

Ask yourself: How many movies or television shows have you ever seen where the Black guy was the villain? In Mission Impossible III, it was teased that Lawrence Fishburne’s character was a rouge member of the IMF, a double-agent for a terrorist cell. Instead, Billy Crudup’s white character was the traitor. To make it worse, he dared suggest Fishburne’s character (Brassel) got the job as head of the IMF because he was an under-qualified Black man, signifying his true immorality:

(Musgrave reveals himself to be the traitor)

Ethan: You told him. You told Davian Lindsey was coming, that's how he knew.

Musgrave: I thought you could get her back. But I wasn't going to let all people, to let Brassel to undo the work I've done. I took action, Ethan. On the behalf of all working families of America, the Army force, the white house. I've had enough of Brassel and his sanctimony. IMF director, he's an affirmative action poster boy. 

One of the lone recent movies where the bad guy is Black happens to be Unbreakable. Mr. Glass, played by Samuel L. Jackson, is a super-villain who pulls off acts of terrorism in a bid to find an unbreakable person.

What other television show or movie made recently has a Black antagonist? Movies where they save the world come out routinely, as do movies with a Black person portraying the President of the United States (funny that most of them are president when the world is ending). Name some that have Black bad guys.

Now come up with movies or television shows that have a Black person portraying the moral compass, always there with sage advice or a brilliant new intention. In the real world, the primary invention we have courtesy of Black people is the Super Soaker. In movies, the inventions of Black people help bring about artificial intelligence and the destruction of the world.

This Web site has documented Black Run America (BRA) for almost two years, a tyrannical ideology that governs every aspect of life in the former United States. It seeks to remove any and all vestiges of a once prosperous nation,and in movies we even see history under attack.

Why else would Morgan Freeman be cast in a Robin Hood movie? Because people believe movies and television are an extension of reality and perceive history to be accurately portrayed in them. Though England had almost no Black people in the nation as little as 50 years ago, it makes perfect sense for Freeman to be in 12th century Britain when you apply logic utilized by Hollywood.

Same goes for a Black person playing a Nordic God in Thor, or even a Greek God in Percy Jackson: The Lighting Thief.

Black people provide an endless comedy of errors in the real-world, though Hollywood and television work overtime to create positive examples of Black people through Black Fictional Heroes and compensate for the reality's deficiencies.

Search the archives for last years inductees and suggest new entrants into this illustrious Hall of Fame. Men like Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Eddie Murphy have done more to create positive examples of Black people through their film roles then any bus boycott or civil rights speech ever could dream of replicating.

We will be highlighting Black Fictional Heroes all month, these men and women who have done more to artificially create the perception of equality through their films and television roles then any of the saints you will learn about during Black history month.

Just remember that Black people are more likely to engage in heroism than whites. Then you'll understand why Black Fictional Heroes month is so important.

Where are the Black people? The 2011 Academy Awards Nominees are Whiter then ever

Perhaps the Oscar should be white instead of gold

Editor’s note: Posts on self-esteem and shame are delayed for one more day.


Everyone loves movies. The escapism offered by viewing a film grants us the opportunity to visit exotic locations and live vicariously through glamorous actors and actresses. Computer Generated Images (CGI) - produced almost entirely by white people - have led to such films as Avatar, the entire Pixar resume of films and countless action movies, allowing directors (almost all white) to utilize scripts (written almost exclusively by white people) that will eventually be scored beautifully by composers (almost all white) while actors and actresses (with few prominent roles going to Black actresses) work their magic in front of the camera.

Watching movies (and television), one would imagine the United States still has a population that is 90 percent white, as it did in the mid-1960s. Though token Black characters appear in movies cast as characters without historical equals (sometimes in situations that have no historical precedent or basis in fact), Hollywood remains an institution teemed in an astounding whiteness.

Traditionally the embodiment of the most progressive, Stuff White People Like (SWPL), Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) mindset and agenda, Hollywood is tragically stuck in a situation where they must market their movies to the rest of America. Because of the scholastic shortcomings and ineptitude of Black people, vocations such as director, screenwriter, producer, composer and the small armies of support staff that work on the production of  films are overwhelming white.

You aren't handed jobs in life, you earn them, which is a contradictory concept to our entitled Black friends. 

Whenever a Black director, screenwriter, composer, actor or actress comes along and woes Hollywood, critics (most of whom are white and rabidly DWL) and the American public, they will be pushed to the moon, regardless of their portfolio.

It is a constant, deafening refrain come awards season when Hollywood gathers to congratulate itself for producing vapid films of questionable merit and shockingly little entertainment value that the monster of enforced, codified diversity rears its ugly, ever-expanding head.

Hollywood films and television shows preach an undying devotion to the tenets of diversity (glorifying every racial group – save white people - and normalizing every sexual orientation, life-style, etc.) and never fail to pay homage to the concept of Black Run America (BRA), but when Oscar season comes around (and the Emmy’s) few Black people are ever nominated and the Academy Awards voters will be forever castigated if they fail to bestow the  Oscar upon that Black person who is nominated.

Take this CNN article, “Where’s the Diversity at the Oscars?” which laments the paucity of Black faces up for awards. Isn’t it 2011, not 1951? Where is the progressivism? Certainly not the cabinet of the new Republican Ohio governor, but you’re telling us that a Gabrielle Sidibe film couldn’t be found precious enough to be nominated?

Black actresses have a tough time finding roles that will win them acclaim. It’s been nine years since Black history was made at the 2002 Oscars, when Halle Berry and Denzel Washington both won Oscars. Other than that year, the past 70 years of the Oscars have been nearly monochromatic in their whiteness, with a few token Blacks winning every now and then to maintain the mirage of diversity.

What does that CNN article say?:

After the Academy Awards ceremony in 2010, there was a great deal of hope that the glass ceiling had finally been shattered in Hollywood.
"The Kathryn Bigelow" effect was coined by some industry observers who believed that her win for "The Hurt Locker," the first Oscar for a woman director, would open doors of opportunity for females behind the camera. The riveting film "Precious" yielded a best supporting actress win for African-American performer Mo'Nique, and the first ever statuette for an African-American screenwriter in the best adapted screenplay category went to Geoffrey Fletcher.

But that was last year.

This year there was a decided dearth of diversity in the Oscar nominations. There are no women or people of color among the director nominees, and the acting nominees are all white. Javier Bardem, who is up for best actor for his role in "Biutiful,' is a Spaniard and therefore European.

Which raises the question: Why in an era of ever increasing diversity among movie audiences is that not being reflected among the nominees for Hollywood's most prestigious award? Where are the diverse faces both in front of and behind the cameras?


It's a complex issue that involves both supply and demand. 

But historically far fewer meaty dramatic roles, which are beloved by the academy, have been written for or awarded to actors of color, and women behind the camera are greatly outnumbered by men.

"The stories that we would really like to tell usually don't get greenlit," said Rocky Seker, a former creative developer for a director with Sony Pictures and now a film curator who runs Invisible Woman ... Black Cinema at Large. "We're just not taken seriously. It's all a moneymaking issue."


Both groups also find it difficult to break into the big-budget Hollywood films that garner the attention to carry the momentum needed for nominations. Seker said she often comes across wonderfully made black independent films that just aren't able to get big-studio backing or distribution deals.


While Debra Granik and Lisa Cholodenko have both received critical acclaim for their turns as directors of "Winter's Bone" and "The Kids Are All Right," respectively, their films did not enjoy the same media attention as "Black Swan" or "The Social Network," whose male directors were nominated. (Granik and Cholodenko both were nominated for their screenwriting efforts.)


Cathy Schulman is a producer of the Oscar-winning film "Crash" and president of Women In Film, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing sexual equality in filmmaking. She said that when there are 10 nominations for best film, but only five director nominees, invariably it means someone will be slighted.


"On the one hand, I am very encouraged to see that there are women sprinkled throughout most of the categories, with the continued strength as we've seen before in art direction, in music and in other areas that we have consistently seen a strength in," Schulman said. "What does disappoint is the lack of women in the writer, director, producer roles and some of the other key departments like cinematography and editorial, though there is one woman, Pamela Martin, who has been nominated for editorial (for "The Fighter") and that is certainly well-deserved."


Martha Lauzen, executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, said, "There are lots of reasons at both the individual level as well as the industry level that converge to suppress diversity both on the screen and behind the scenes."


Lauzen added, "The film industry does not exist in a vacuum; it is part of a larger culture, and our attitudes about gender and race are extremely deeply held. Those attitudes don't change overnight or with an Oscar win."

Hollywood and television have the ability to completely shape public opinion, steering debates on key issues any which way they desire. It is movies and television (plus sports) that have provided the bulk of positive (wholly fictional) examples of Black people, and it is through this medium that beloved stars like Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington and Jamie Foxx have become household names.

We have reached a point in Black Run America (BRA) where we have been trained to see Black people prominently in movies, television and sports, so that when they don’t appear racism is only acceptable culprit. The absence of Black people in any situation, whether it be vocation, avocation, awards ceremony or in academia can only be attributed to racism.

This is how the DWL mind thinks and increasingly all minds in America.

That the Oscars lack any Black nominees for Best Actor and Actress, Supporting Actor and Actresses, Director or for any discernable characters in Best Picture translates to unrepentant racism on the part of an entire industry that has been solely dedicated the complete, methodical destruction of anything resembling Pre-Obama America for the past 50 years (just take a look at Black Fictional Heroes).

Here at Stuff Black People Don’t Like, we don’t hide the fact that we love movies. It is obvious that movies and television have provided ample opportunities to promote agendas that would never, ever be accepted without careful behavioral modification placed in the story-lines (just check out White Dog if you don't believe us).

It’s just fitting that an entire industry is now thrown under the proverbial bus for not placating Black actors and actresses and the spattering of Black directors, screenwriters, producers, composers, animators, special effects designers, etc., enough.

A beast of monumental proportions has been unleashed in America. Black Run America (BRA) has made us so dependent on Black people that anytime a dearth of them are present, we feel racism is the only logical explanation for this situation.