The ‘anti-racist’ crowd have resorted to the old politics of racismPosted in Articles, Arts, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2016-03-09 19:46Z by Steven |
The ‘anti-racist’ crowd have resorted to the old politics of racism
The Spectator
2016-03-07
The self-important slayers of ‘cultural appropriation’ have gone too far this time. Clearly they didn’t get a big-enough moral kick from chastising white people who do yoga (on the basis that yoga has ‘roots in Indian culture’), moaning about Beyonce donning a sari (‘how is this different from white folks wearing cornrows?’, the racial police demanded), and fuming about middle-class indie kids who wear Native American headdresses at music festivals (apparently this ‘perpetuates damaging, archaic and racist stereotypes’).
So now they’re turning their fire on a black actress who, in their view, is not black enough to play Nina Simone. Yes, even black people can now be accused of being insufficiently black for certain cultural pursuits.
The actress in question is Zoe Saldana, a fine actress whose curious combination of vulnerability and steeliness has made her the darling of the modern Hollywood blockbuster. She’s one of the best things in the Star Trek reboot movies and she even managed to inject some humanity into James Cameron’s otherwise soulless, eco-miserabilist epic, Avatar. And next she will play Simone, in a big biopic, the trailer for which was released last week.
But the identity-politics mob isn’t happy. Why? Because Saldana is a light-skinned black person, a ‘half black’, as some have foully put it, and she used make-up to make herself as black as Simone…
Read the entire article here.