So I was in Wisconsin over the weekend where I was lucky enough to catch a sneak preview of the Pixar film Ratatouille. As you can probably tell by the trailers, Ratatouille is a movie set in Paris about a rat who has a passion for cooking, but is not directly allowed because, well, he is a rat. He partners with a man named Linguini.He cooks though Linguini using an elaborate control system consisting of pulling on various tufts of Linguini’s hair. I’m going to put the rest of this review behind the link (I’m going to try to stay spoiler free, but just in case), but suffice it to say that it gets a solid woo.
So if people have followed my blogging in the past, you probably know of my love for the moleskine. If you check out a lot of my art posts and a chunk of my uncategorized posts, you’ll notice that a good amount of those are sketches that I used to do in one.
Keane Fine does something similar, but his moleskine does not only serve as a sketch book but as a journal, and is a pretty good one as well. You should check out his site. Oh yeah, and wish him a happy birthday
Here’s a couple of excerpts from a writeup of one of the panels at WisCon, a feminist Sci-Fi convention.
Coniraya mentioned Phantom Menace (I think); he remembered being so excited about it, only to go in and be slapped in the face with Jar-Jar Binks, the Japanese-sounding evil traders, and the Jewish-sounding merchant/slaveowner.
Janine asked if Lucas was deliberately being racist; all of us thought no, probably not. Coniraya said that lots of cartoons that Lucas watched probably had the same accents and that Lucas might have just picked it up, but that that was why it was important to examine these things.
I wanted to highlight the first because it’s a really good illustration of the residue of racism that we often pick up in our society that tends to replicate itself throughout popular culture. I also wanted to point out the following cartoon:-
This cartoon has never been released on home video by Warner Bros. because of the racist content and racist stereotypes, but it wasn’t so unusual for its times. The sad part is that it’s not too hard to see some of the same stereotypes in popular media today.
A large woman (whose size is played for laughs) who’s major motivation is to get a man – That’s very much still around, but is probably most recognizable in the recent series “The Parkers“. Especially since for most of the series, the characters’ reactions to the character in question implied that she was unattractive, or otherwise undesirable.
The hyper-sexualized black woman – everywhere. It’s a little harder to distinguish as women in general tend to be portrayed as hyper-sexualized, but one thing that you do notice happening is a white man attracted to a black woman and it is stated/implied that the black woman is simply too much for him sexually. I can’t recall this happening if the races are reversed.
Prince Chawmin is a “Zip Coon” character, a black character who attempts to put on the trappings of proper (read: white) society and fails hilariously. This character is uneducated, uncouth, and in his attempts to fit in exaggerates the things he’s trying to fit into. Though I haven’t watched the series, the short-lived program “Method & Red” seems to exemplify this in the modern day.
And these are just looking at some of the stereotypes of African-Americans. There are very pervasive stereotypes of Asians (nerd, martial artist, Japanese schoolgirl, or wise old man, but will not be anything else), Latinos (hot mama, idiot thug, lazy idiot) and other races and subgroups within the US that show up in media today. We rarely notice them, but they leave residue on us that manifests as it did with Lucas in The Phantom Menace.
This is the reason why racism is often described as a moving walkway problem. If you simply stand still, you will still be carried along. In order to not go where this walkway takes you, you must actively walk backwards. The problem of racism in our society is such that it requires us to be actively anti-racist and work against the individual and the systemic problems of racism.
