Comment by pfisherman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pfisherman | Hacker News Reader

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Re point number 2: The example you give is not really supporting your point, and is pretty much an on the nose example of (cognitive) bias that comes off looking quite hypocritical, and slightly racist (for lack of a less loaded term).

Please do not get your emotions up, I will try to explain. Your comment strongly implies a preference for movies from the past. Hollywood movies were/are notorious for “whitewashing” characters - i.e. using white characters / actors in roles where this would be very implausible according to the internal logic of the story (or history in cases where it applies). Objecting to one but not the other seems extremely hypocritical - there is a lack of consistency / fairness there. And then the question is why the preference for one vs the other?

The more interesting question IMO is whether that preference is something inherent, or the result of years of exposure / programming that has normalized the practice one way - such that you are still able to suspend disbelief - but not the other?

This is what I'm really talking about: this kind of craziness requires a lot of scaffolding and mental gymnastics to explain.

While you live in the states, you're surrounded by it. It's aggressively pushed from everywhere. You can't resist, because disobedience will likely cause harm to you (e.g. losing a job and failure to pay the mortgage).

So you naturally start to believe that it's all true and justified and the only way. I get it.

But if you're outside of your society, outside of the pressure of making everyone accept this, it looks weird, even deranged in many cases. I'm pretty sure it causes and will cause loss of sales outside of the US. It would be carefully hidden and hard to prove, but I don't have to prove it. E.g. I just know that nobody from my friends and family would like to watch such a movie. Yeah, we discuss it and the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers.

It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.

> It's even hard to understand it because we were not involved in the slave trade. And we really can't understand what problems experienced and continue to experience black people in the USA. This is true, but while it is hard to understand, it's much more easier to understand that making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.

It (and this is usually fiction in historical settings, not historical movies, which are different genres, unless you are talking about black people playing black historical figures, which is a weird thing to object to) repairs (or, more accurately, mitigates) the injustice of current, active discrimination and underrepresentation of blacks in the film industry, not some distant historical injustice more closely tied to the slave trade.

> So you naturally start to believe that it's all true and justified

Or you continue to believe what makes sense, but you keep your beliefs private out of fear.

> you live in the states, you're surrounded by it.

When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too (usually much more harshly than in the US). Your assumptions about actors' skin colors are as much influenced by the culture of your country as they are influenced by the US culture in the US, as evidenced by the phrase "the opinion is pretty much universal among my family, my friends, my coworkers." Please don't conflate a view from your culture with nebulous "obvious objectivity".

> making them play main roles in historical movies doesn't repair any injustices made to them.

It does not repair injustices of the past, but it helps fix the injustices of today: non-white actors of today should not be kept out of movies just because of a specific historical setting.

Any historical movie is just a modern interpretation of true events. There is no actor that can be a completely authentic reflection of a historical character. A respectful, non-mocking actor play by a person of different race can be a good reminder of that.

> When you live in a different country, you are surrounded by cultural norms of your country and disobedience is punished too

Yes, it is true. But my country doesn't try to impose its cultural norms all over the world like they are universal truth that should be applied everywhere.

Also, I don't really want to argue whether the society and processes in the US are just or not. It's that they're not interesting to dive into for somebody living in another country.

E.g. I've started reading a sci fi book recently (won't name an author), and stopped after reading like 60 pages most of them describing all kinds of deviate sexual relationships. It's that I want to read the sci fi book, not an encyclopedia about 50 genders and how they mate with each other in all the intricate details.

But I have a feeling that writers and directors in the US are forced to put that in their work. It's like communist system is commonly described: not only you are forbidden to object, you must also constantly demonstrate that you support it.

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