I love Zoe Saldana’s work. I’ve seen some of her movies more than once and really enjoy what she brings to the screen. As an actress I respect her process, but I also know that there are many actresses out there, known or not, who would be great as my mother. The one actress that I’ve had in my heart for a very long time, whose work I’m familiar with already, is Kimberly Elise. Many people have spoken to me about Viola. I love her look. I love her energy. Both of the actresses that I’ve mentioned are women of color, are women with beautiful, luscious lips and wide noses, and who know their craft. I also have no problem introducing someone we’ve never heard of before who can play my mother. How does someone just decide to do a story about someone and completely bypass family? Completely bypass her representatives? … I talked with [the director, Cynthia Mort] once, about a year and a half ago. It was very emotional for me to just get on the phone with her because there were so many questions in my mind… I asked her if her mother was still alive. I asked her if she still had a good relationship with her mother and she sounded like a really nice lady. She really, really believes in what she’s doing. I do remember saying to her that if any of us tried to take the story of Bing Crosby or, Dean Martin, or Frank Sinatra, or Elvis Presley and turn it into something that was a tall tale based on something that never happened, I doubt that we’d get very far. My mother’s life was tragic enough. My mother suffered enough. Her life is full of enough wonderful and tragic true things to make a hit movie. You don’t have to embellish her story.
Tag: blackface
Wait wait wait, Jar Jar Binks is annoying, but I’ve never heard people say he’s racist. I’m not disagreeing, I just want to know how he’s supposed to be racist.
When I was a child, I read a Boondocks strip starring Jar Jar Binks. Unsure of what the joke was, because the strip had him talking exactly like he did in the movie, I asked my father. He explained that the joke was that many people viewed Jar Jar Binks as a racist stereotype. I was very confused and asked him what he meant.
The next day, my dad sat me down and had me watch a movie starring Stepin Fetchit, as well as an episode of Amos n Andy, and several blackface minstrel performances. The common thread in all of them was that at least one character had an identical voice, identical body language, and near-identical mannerisms to Jar Jar Binks.
Some of them even added “-sa” as a suffix to seemingly random words. When I asked my dad why they kept doing that, my dad told me to notice who they were talking to when they said “yessa” or “nosa” or “mesa” or “yousa.” As it turns out, they only seemed to do this when talking to a white man, and they weren’t saying “-sa,” they were saying “sir.”
I wish I could find the clips my dad showed me again, because they’re pretty damning, but all I can do is give you the Boondocks strip that originally piqued my interest by combining blackface minstrels’ mannerisms with Jar Jar’s mannerisms and demonstrating that they are indistinguishable from one another:
Note: Both George Lucas and Ahmed Best, the actor who played Jar Jar Binks have claimed Jar Jar isn’t a racist caricature. On a related note, George Lucas and Ahmed Best are capable of being wrong.
Yeah I doubt he intended it but intent here is subsumed by the result
It may have been unconsciously racist, but it was not coincidentally racist. The odds that George Lucas independently invented a character that is identical to a blackface stock character are about the same that someone would write a song that is word-for-word and note-for-note identical to Bohemian Rhapsody without ever having heard it.
Like, even if we assume that it was totally unintentional, the best-case scenario is that they heard Bohemian Rhapsody, forgot it, and then unwittingly pulled it from their subconscious, believing it to be an original composition, and the worst-case is that they were jut hoping nobody would notice their song is just Bohemian Rhapsody.
LemonGrenade 