Canadian Politics Today

You can relate to it, but if you were a young black person, you wouldn't just relate to it, you'd *feel* it.

I do 'feel it' but admittedly not in the same way as a young black person would.  The point is that the 'feeling' of the achievement is separate from the 'feeling' of experiencing the art.  You can be brought to tears that Wonder Woman or Black Panther was made and still think the movie itself isn't that great.

When I was young, Japanese-Canadian hockey star Paul Kariya was a big deal for my Chinese-Canadian friends. They didn't know or care much about hockey, but it was tremendously exciting for them to know that someone who looked like them was a real star in the white-man's game.  That a white guy could become a big star in the NHL is probably not very exciting for white guys at large, because pretty much every big star in the NHL is a white guy, but there's probably still lots of boys out there playing street hockey imagining that they're Conor McDavid or Austin Matthews.  And for a while, at least, there were Asian kids playing street hockey imagining they were Paul Kariya.   And playing basketball imagining they were Yao Ming.   And I'm sure that a lot of short white Canadian kids were playing basketball imagining they were Steve Nash too.

Yes, yes I'm a liberal remember ?  I'm all about the little guy/gal/nonbinary getting "in".  You don't need to explain this to me.

Perhaps it's a "separate experience" because you relate to it but don't actually *feel* it.  Perhaps these films are exciting for people who aren't you because they give people who aren't you an experience that you've taken for granted your whole life.

Ibid.

Perhaps you never found discarded fluorescent light tubes in the alley and grabbed one and held it like a sword and said "I'M A BEN KENOBI!!!" and had a a sword fight with your friends.  Or similar.  My little brother did. I got to be Count Dooku or Darth Maul, of course, because the hero of the story was always the white male.  I was always the villainous foil, first of all because mostly I was just indulging my little brother, and secondly because the hero is always the white male.  And even though I knew better than to have sword-fights with breakable glass "light-sabers", I played along because it made my little brother feel good to imagine himself as Jedi Knight Ben Kenobi.  There was never a Kim Kenobi in Star Wars when I was a kid. I never got to be the hero in our imaginary Star Wars adventure.

Not true.  I used to *love* the Flash Gordon type movies when I was a boy.  Then I grew up.  Most sci-fi and superhero films are pure garbage but the odd one is still ok:

The first Superman (Christopher Reeve), a few Terminator movies, two Star Warses, two Aliens, Batman Begins....

Why indeed.  And yet it seems like when Hollywood sets out to entertain black people we get two extremes.  It's either historical epics-- 12 Years A Slave, Selma, Malcolm X,  etc etc etc, or low-brow Tyler Perry comedies.   There's a substantially large void in between.

The former type is mostly for white people, and the latter for ... who knows.  Straight Outta Compton was good enough.  There are enough good black film makers to make commercial movies for a black audience.

"WTF"?


 -k

I posted in the Podcast Culture thread.