* Gun violence is like the weather or tides – sometimes you get a storm surge. Those guns just get excited and start shooting at people – what can you do? It’s a double burden – first social unrest due to the death of George Floyd and now this upsurge in violence. Black communities are so unlucky in that they have suffered TWO completely unrelated tragedies in one year. Now let us turn our attention to more pressing issues, such as need to defund the police and not arrest Black people.
* Even worse that that, any attempt to posit a principled general rule, e.g. ” Actors must only play characters of their own race” immediately breaks down. Casting a black guy as Henry VI is not only permitted, it is praiseworthy.
The real New Rule is “WHITE actors must only play characters of their own race but non-whites can play whites.” But you can’t quite come out and say that (just yet) so you need to blow a bunch of rhetorical smoke to obscure what the actual New Rule is and make it sound less explicitly anti-white. For example, you can say “An actor can only play roles in a culture in which he was immersed.” According to this rule, whites can never play blacks but since blacks are immersed in white majority culture it’s okay for them to play whites. This is what she tries in the article, but frankly it is very weak sauce, just a tissue thin cover for reverse racism.
The New Rules really are just old Racist Rules turned on their head (in this and many other instances). In the racist past, whites could play Asians, Arabs, even blacks but Actors of Color could never be cast in white roles. Under the New Rules, whites can only play whites but Actors of Color can take any role . It’s really all who-whom. When whitey was in charge he made the up the rules to favor whites, now that PoC’s are in the ascendancy, the New Rules are going to favor them.
MLK’s vision of a color-blind society is dead, dead, dead. If society is color blind, then it’s impossible to make up rules that favor Black people, who deserve to be favored in order to make up for 400 years of not being favored. Maybe 400 years from now the score will be even but for the next 4 centuries at least, we need to load the dice in favor of Blacks by having special rules just for them and other Peoples of Color.
