(1) A special complication arises from the conceit to establishing vocational role models by showing the target audience actors who "look like them" in those roles: flooding film and TV with Black actors also reinforces the message that entertainment careers are more open to Black people than are other kinds of careers, which is one of the oldest and most pernicious "messages" American culture has been sending to Black people this whole time.
(2) Casting is and was always inherently unfair. Woke casting is not more or less fair than casting ever was. What's different about woke casting is not its fairness or unfairness but the fact that it is talked about openly and virtuously, even in the eye of the hurricane. For those thus located, this makes it divisive on a day-to-day, person-to-person level. (I am relating past and ongoing experience here, not conjecture.) So, whatever new society we're birthing this way, it seems the talent won't be sharing in it. Seemingly arbitrary acceptance or rejection is, as it turns out, a far stronger basis for esprit de corps. Arbitrariness is a kind of rugged equality, hardly the ideal kind, but closer to it than what is unfolding right now.
1 comment:
Christopher Lasch
Haven in a Heartless World
(1977)
"the proposition that mind is largely social has the interesting corollary that society is largely mental. Society consists of interpersonal relations, but "persons" are merely the ideas associated with their roles, conveyed to others and then reflected by others back to the self. Society is a mirror, and the "images" it projects, as an early exponent of role theory insisted, are the images "of the social suggestion that has surrounded" a given set of roles. Such a conception of society is completely at variance not only with materialist conceptions but with dialectical views of human growth and development, according to which growth results from conflict; but American sociology has modeled itself, for better or worse, on positivist rather than dialectical theories of society."
(p. 33)
(more)
Post a Comment