Hate influencer Chaya Raichik – who goes by “Libs of TikTok” online – is trying to take her show on the road, and it doesn’t appear to be going well.
Raichik gave a speech yesterday at the Indiana Memorial Union at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, alongside Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN).
During her speech, she ranted about “pornographic” books in schools and moved on to her hatred of everything “woke.”
…
Some students started laughing.
“Um, do you have a question? Is something funny?” she asked, apparently not expecting people to find her over-the-top concerns funny.
“How do you define wokeness?” someone in the back asked.
Raichik tried to respond: “Wokeness is the destruction of normalicy [sic] and… And… Um… Uh…” More students started laughing.
“… of our lives,” she said, apparently thinking she was finishing a sentence.
So your conclusion is that its racist to replace a historically red-haired (white person I assume?) character in a fictional story with a black actor? Do I have that right?
No you do not. My conclusion in that regard is that those using the word in that context do so with that meaning in mind.
My personal opinion on racism wasn’t expressed in the reply.
Apologies, I mistakenly assigned ownership to you. Let me try again:
So your conclusion is that those using that word believe it is racist to replace a historically red-haired (white person I assume?) character in a fictional story with a black actor? Do I have that right?
I believe that some of them wholeheartedly do. How many actually do so and how many just use it as an excuse, I can’t tell.
I can respect your analysis of them ,but we’re back to the original challenge. You are having to try to tease out a definition from their own inconstant behavior because they cannot define woke.
Well, that is true. It would seem that each use is subjective to an individual’s own opinion on whether the replacement or the focus is in line with their view of things.
Even if their definition isn’t uniform, when pressed, they can’t enumerate it. They certainly act on it though. To me that’s either bad faith communication (they know and they won’t say) or they wildly lacking in self awareness (they don’t know and act anyway using handwaving to excuse bad behavior).
There’s no doubt bad faith actors are using it for their own purposes and their intended target is the latter kind of person. The lack of self awareness is in my opinion quite common. There’s simply too much to deal with for the average individual on a daily basis to allow ourselves a type of introspection that can clarify who we are and how we act. We are vulnerable to catchy phrases as it is simply too exhausting to analyze every bit of information coming our way, so we accept shallow definitions, we accept a path of superficial righteousness and we accept the paper thin sweetness thrown our way. Only to have it all crumble at a deeper look, taste or thought and leave us helpless.
People are dumb. Intelligence is an exercise. And we have to specialize if we want to achieve something. That means we have flaws to be exploited. And they very much are, in every way.
So I try not to blame the lack of self awareness. Because we all experience it in different ways, of different things. Not knowing is okay. But how many of us can accept that about ourselves or about others? Not many, else the world would be a happier place.
That is an example of what people call woke, yes. Idk about it being racist but I do recall the whole little mermaid movie being called woke because they recasted with a black actress.
Not saying if I support that decision or not, just saying that to me the definition is pretty clear when it comes to race swapping of existing characters.
This is a great example of their problem then. Why can’t they just say that then? If that is “woke” to them why can’t they say:
“In a fictional story about a fictional half human/half fish creature should obviously be white skinned, and making the fictional half human/half fish character played by a black actor is not right.”
Perhaps because their claim is indefensible? Mermaids are fake. There’s no reason the human half of the character is white. Even the white author the fairy tale is based upon never described the mermaids hair or skin color:
“In Andersen’s fairy tale, the Little Mermaid is described as follows: “her skin was as clear and delicate as a rose-leaf, and her eyes as blue as the deepest sea.” And if you’re wondering if Andersen’s Little Mermaid had that signature bright red hair that has become synonymous with mermaids, the answer is unclear.” source
So its not even violating the original story to cast a black actor.
This is where I go back my statement in my original post that they can’t define “woke”. I’ll quote myself from the prior post:
This is basic scrutiny, and their claims crumble.
I wouldn’t say that’s indefensible. It’s making a decision that says it’s better to have an actress with X colored skin instead of Y colored skin, even though it doesn’t add anything to the story.
I don’t expect you to agree, but to me that ruins a movie. It should only be done if it adds to the story, like in house of the dragon where the race swap made the strong boys stand out way more.
Again, I don’t expect you to agree, but please note that just because most conservatives that hold this viewpoint are an idiot doesn’t mean all arguments about this point is idiotic.
Please defend it then. Why does a white skinned actor on a fictional person/beast make it a better movie in any capacity? Or perhaps, why does having a black actor subtract from the story?
Even if your answer is subjective, you should be able to explain your reasoning for it.
As I explained, it doesn’t, which is exactly what my point is. If changing a race of a fictional character doesn’t add to the story, then why would you change it? Why not keep the character the way the fans have come to know them? As in there is more value to keeping true to the original character, regardless of their race.
Changing it sends the message that there is something better/worse about certain races (in general or in the specific story). I don’t support that (unless it adds to the story). Maybe that’s not the message you get when you see race swaps, but I usually question motives behind decisions.
It was already changed once to make it white by Disney. Anderson, the original author, certainly didn’t do that. If you’re opposed to changing it your beef is with Disney for making Arial white when it wasn’t stated she was from even from the beginning.
No there isn’t. Many of the historical characters in fiction in our western culture can be traced back to our racist past. Keeping that pattern merely reinforces that exclusion. This is especially true where it adds no value to keep it exclusively white. An even more extreme version of this is historical white actors playing minority characters playing up obvious racial stereotypes. A great example of this is Mickey Rooney playing the Japanese character of Yunioshi in the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If there was a reboot made of this movie today, would you argue that another white actor should play the Yunioshi simply because Rooney, a white man, played the character in the original telling? The author of the novella, Truman Capote, certainly didn’t say the Yunioshi character was a white man pretending to be a racial trope of a Japanese man.
Thats a really strange take to me. I could use nearly the exact words in my argument to support having other race actors play the parts. You’re arguing the fake creature a mermaid’s human half should stay white because it would be worse to have a black actor playing that part.
Not even a little bit. Did it upset you when the Broadway actor Leslie Odom Jr. played the part of Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical Hamilton? The historical figure of Burr was a real person and objectively white, but Odom Jr, a black man, played him on stage. Did you find that inappropriate or importantly un-authentic?
I think this is the crux of our disagreement, which is a good sign because it means our disagreement is due to us having different values than one party having bad logic.
To me, seeing the same character looking as similar as possible to the original version I watched (so in this case, Disney’s little mermaid cartoon, not what it was based on) has a lot of value, to me and my enjoyment.
I can fully understand if that has no value to you, but that means our values are different. For you to understand my perspective, you have to use logic (which you are) and my values (which your not).
I agree with this statement, but we need to go just a bit further. If we introduce empathy into the equation, we consider more than just our own views. Do the values we each have work to suppress or subtract others that don’t have a voice? At what point does our mild inconvenience or discomfort become a drastic harm to others?
When I first heard about Disney casting a black actor for the live version of the movie it struct me strange and unfamiliar. However, with just a bit more consideration I realized that, while it was different, it didn’t change anything in the story. Further having a black actor meant that Disney was able to open up the role to vastly more actors which means we could be getting a better performance because the limitations of skin color were removed. Further, one of the largest lessons learned in our society from the original Star Trek TV series in the 60s was the representation matters. Men and women of different races and ethnicity were able to connect and aspire to the characters because they saw themselves represented on screen with (mostly) equal footing. I see the same opportunity here with the Little Mermaid reboot.
Why does our minor short term discomfort or unfamiliarity with a children’s movie remake mean we deny others that leg up to work in the movie industry and for viewers to be seen represented?
I mean I would sort of agree that most of the time it doesn’t really add to the story that much, or, isn’t that valuable, because mostly, from what I’ve seen, people would much rather have their own stories with their own heroes and role models that are natively written to be their same race. I.e. people like miles morales, people care much less about the little mermaid. It’s less valuable, you’re kind of, partially right to decry it as being surface level, pandering stuff.
At the same time, I would say that the upside people see generally about these stories is really just that they can see and associate themselves with the role models. This is especially important for kids, who are going to be more prone to relating with things on a surface level, I think, but I think it’s probably important, in general, to be able to see role models of a variety of skin tones, cultures, whatever, in your media. If I’m remembering, there are actually studies on this sort of thing, that increased diversity in media consumption can decrease racism, though, I’m not sure to what extent that’s correlational. I think it was pretty directly causal in the studies I’d seen, but I could be misremembering, I don’t really know shit, I’m just a dude.
I think my main disagreement with your point is that I don’t really think it’s taking away anything from the story to do a race swap. It’s pretty much strictly neutral, to possibly good. I think this is outweighed by the quality and disadvantages of doing a stupid live-action adaptation of a previously existing work in general, though, at least as far as artistic merit goes. I straight up don’t think I understand the position that, say, changing the little mermaid to be black, implies that black people are, say, better than ginger people, or something to that extent? That ginger people are nonexistent? Hear ye on this theory: Perhaps it is the case that, when adaptations of common works are remade, side characters tend to be ginger specifically because they are side characters. Gingers with obviously freckled faces tend to get slotted into side-roles because they don’t conform to the classical standards of “whiteness” as much. Obviously, if I were to do a very cheap, stupid re-adaptation of that work, I’d race-swap the side characters, over the main character. This isn’t really true of the little mermaid, but you can see that this logic holds for a lot of other works that people tend to complain about, when they complain about race-swapping. It’s possible that it’s not so much a specific decision, as a kind of, cynical marketing decision. I mean, you can even see this straight up just in the idea of re-adapting existing works, rather than creating new works that just involve black writers, or what have you.
I’m glad you mentioned miles morales and that your familiar with those movies. Imo into the spider verse movies are truly outstanding works of art. The characters’ race does not feel forced at all given how it’s a new character and it adds to the story.
So this is my overarching point. If you want to have relatively representative characters in the media, do the god damn hard work and come up with great original stories and characters. Doing a half assed design by committee style race swaps backfires because it pisses a lot of the fans off.
The reason why I’m pointing this out on lemmy of all places is to point out there is “woke” nonsense and then there is corporate pandering to audiences while forgoing on quality. It’s rainbow capitalism and not calling it out gives conservative actual ammunition.