Jesus Wasn't White: biblical epics and whitewashing

Egyptian Mayonaise: (L to R) Christian Bale, John Tuturro, Sigourney Weaver, and Joel Edgerton in Exodus: Gods and Kings

   With “Noah” and “Son of God” released earlier this year and “Exodus: Gods and Kings” scheduled to debut in December, 2014 has been a revitalizing year for the stagnant genre of “Biblical Blockbuster”. Although heavily dramatized these films harken back to a period of cinematic Golden Age epics that are few and far between in today’s market. Similar to this genre throwback, however, they are tangible reminders that since the Golden Age Hollywood has continued the ugly practices of whitewashing and people of color (POC) erasure.

   First let’s examine the historical regions these films are supposed to be set in. While we can’t say for sure where exactly Noah’s Ark would have set sail, we know the 40 day journey ended at Mount Ararat, a mountain in modern day Turkey, so we can safely assume he began somewhere within that general region. Since it is a biographical film about Jesus Christ, we know that Son of God is set in Jerusalem. Finally Exodus we know to be set in the Nile Delta region of Egypt. All three of these films are set in regions populated by historically provable populations of POC. Despite this fact the lead roles in all three movies are filled by white actors and the only POC, absent totally in Noah, are background servants, criminals, villains, and even a demon.

   Some of these films have tried to justify their whitewashing in response to criticism. Ari Handel, co-writer of Noah, responded by saying “From the beginning, we were concerned about casting, the issue of race. What we realized is that this story is functioning at the level of myth, and as a mythical story, the race of the individuals doesn’t matter. They’re supposed to be stand-ins for all people”. This quote is telling of one of the key concepts at play here, White Invisibility. As we’ve discussed in class when a racial group is in an advantageous position they do not have to reflect on the impact their race has on their life on a regular basis. As a result they come to think of themselves as race-less, the default, and as illustrated in the above quote, a universal stand-in. Building further on this misassumption characters are only given a non-white identity when it is used as implicative shorthand, as is seen with Exodus’s association between blackness and inferiority, or Son of God’s connection of blackness and villainy. 

Israeli Wonderbread: Diogo Morgado as Jesus Christ in Son of God

   While the institutionalized discrimination POC actors face as a result of these beliefs is a serious issue, even more damaging is the internalized racism it promotes in its audiences. The underlying themes, that positive religious figures are inherently white and that POC have no place in a religion they may well practice, is a very demoralizing one. As Anthea Butler, an associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, puts it “It’s a world where only white people get saved…This doesn’t look like the world that God created”. Hard data also makes the assertion that the primary potential audience of a religious film would be POC. According to a 2007 Pew Center survey 79% of African American respondents said religion is very important in their lives, and with a breakdown based on faith roughly 85.5% identified as some form of Christian. This lies well above the 56% of the US adult population when examined across racial lines. If the current trend of religious movies continues then hopefully, with a lot of critical analysis, awareness in potential audience members, and a healthy dose of film boycotting, the film industry will start to change their tune on POC representation.

Sources cited:
Scheller, Christine. "Stewardship of Creation: An Interview with "Noah" Screenwriter, Ari Handel." The High Calling. The High Calling, 11 Apr. 2014. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
"A Religious Portrait of African-Americans." Pew Research Centers Religion Public Life Project RSS. Pew Research Centers, 30 Jan. 2009. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.
Lee, Marissa. "Modern Hollywood and the Ancient East." Racebending.com. 31 Mar. 2014. Web. 17 Oct. 2014.

Educational Attainment and Employment Opportunity

In the academic world, the last decade has heard the term “a professional degree is the new undergraduate degree.” This may reign true in a struggling economy with job opportunities becoming both more specialized and scarce by the year. However, this term is implied for the white population. The article “A Black College Student Has the Same Chances as a White High School Dropout, “A recent study done by Young Invincible, a national non-profit aimed at empowering young Americans, revealed a painful reminder of white superiority in the United States. The study, focusing primarily on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as the U.S. Census revealed that African Americans need an extra two years of higher education to reach the same occupational opportunities as their white counterparts.

            The study worked to isolate the effects of race and ethnicity on the probability of obtaining similar jobs. What it revealed was that an African American who has obtained an Associate’s Degree, which requires completion of college courses, will have the same probability of getting a job as a less qualified white person who has a high school diploma. This reveals an unfortunate achievement gap tilted in the white populations favor.

  The numbers in the graph above reveal the inequality between whites and blacks in the hiring process in regards to education attainment. Where the gap is most dramatic is in those with not high school diploma. Blacks with no high school diploma are nearly 15% less likely to receive employment than whites. The graph however reveals a trend. Possibly of obtaining a job seems to become more equal with the higher amount of education received. Blacks with a high school diploma are about 12% less likely to have a job than whites, while having some college lessens the gap to about 10%, associates about 6%, while bachelors lessens the achievement gap to less than 5%. With the highest professional degree, there is a very small gap at about 2%, showing that in today’s society, the way to lessen inequality in the hiring process for blacks and whites is to stay in school and earn advanced degrees, which is more attainable for whites for a number of different reasons including high school quality, connections, etc…

            Naturally, with employment opportunities being more prevalent for whites, unemployment has a more significant impact on the black population. A study done by the Young Invincible group looked at blacks and whites ages 18-34 during the great recession of 2008, and what they found was revealing of racial inequality. Not taking education into account this time, blacks were 16.6% likely to be unemployed, while whites were less than half that number, falling at a 7.1% unemployment rate.

            The graph below reveals that after the peak of the recession, from November of 2007 to May of 2014, though the numbers seemed to move in tandem with one another, whites maintained a higher percentage of employment,  at times as much as 10%, further showing the favoring of the white population in the achievement gap, even during times of economic failure. 
 

Nike's Undercover Sweatshops

In my previous blog post which included a fairly broad overview of sweatshops, I included a small tidbit about how Nike was one of the major corporations being accused of using extremely cheap labor abroad to benefit their companies, and in this post I am going to look at an article that focuses more on Nike and their allegations of extremely unfair labor.

In the article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2014325/Nike-workers-kicked-slapped-verbally-abused-factories-making-Converse-line-Indonesia.html), the author talks about how workers were beaten, had shoes thrown at them, and were called obscene names at a Nike factory in Indonesia, which Nike later admitted to. What is shocking to me is that true and disgusting information comes out like that, but still you see people wearing the Nike brand everywhere.

Honestly, I own a fair amount of Nike apparel, and that is because when I go to buy it I think things like this is the most comfortable clothing or this is the best clothing to do physical activity in. I don't think about how it is being made or how people are suffering to make these products for me while earning less than minimum wage just because that is not what comes to mind while one is shopping, and I think most people would say the same thing. The article quotes that "the complaints ranged from workweeks that exceeded 60 hours to being forbidden to go to the bathroom." The fact that all these horrible things are happening to hard-working and innocent people is sickening, but what really doesn't sit well with me is that Nike is such a popular company among athletes and people across the world in general. I think that if some people were more educated and knew who was making these products, then they would think twice before buying that new pair of shoes.

On the topic of athletes, people who are the ultimate role model for millions and millions are kids, are wearing this Nike gear and automatically making kids think it's cool to wear this stuff. Little do they know at such a young age that the stuff they are wearing is being manufactured by kids that are the same exact age. But the kids wearing the Nike's are having their parents buy them, while the kids in Indonesia are working to make them so that they can support their own family at ages as young as eight years old. It is shocking to me that such a sleazy operation can not only be so profitable but so prominent and popular in the clothing industry worldwide.

Race and Ethnicity in Sweatshops in the World

Ben Oliveri

9/22/2014

Blog Post 1

Professor McCormack

Sweatshops in the World

The sad and unfortunate truth about sweatshops is that not only do they still exist to this day, but they are becoming more and more prominent. That means more young children working, more families working tirelessly to not even be able to bring food home to their families, and worst off- more cases of death and suicides. As defined by dictionary.com, a sweatshop is “a shop employing workers at low wages, for long hours, and under poor conditions.” Clearly, there is not much that is positive about sweatshops. These horrible institutions somehow continue to exist, and it is scary because giant corporations like Nike and Apple are only increasing their profit margins, but despite this these poor workers continue to earn little to nothing under awful conditions.

`           To put it into perspective of how much these companies are making and how little the workers are making at the same time, I want to share a fact that I read from an article back when I took an economics course that was about sweatshops. The shop of the National Football League, where most football fans buy their equipment, charges very expensive prices for their apparel because it is considered authentic gear. This authentic gear is manufactured in sweatshops, mostly in Asia and Africa, by young children working twelve hours a day. The NFL shop is selling Nike's licensed team jackets for $139.99 each, which is equivalent to two months’ pay for a Nike sweatshop worker located in Cambodia.[i] These big name companies choose to employ laborers in countries like China, Cambodia, Indonesia, and many African countries because it is significantly cheaper to have them work for the company rather than having American employees. Where race comes into play is when you look at where a majority of these sweatshops are located- many are countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. Not coincidentally, these are countries that are stricken with poverty, so it makes sense economically for companies to employ workers from these poor nations, since a really bad job is better than no job at all and starving.

            Sweatshops and the people running them are truly disgusting and it is shocking that they are still a huge part of society. If I had to compare them to something we have discussed in class, I would say it is an extremely severe form of institutional discrimination. We defined institutional discrimination as the denial of rights or opportunities that result from the normal operations of society. These people are not only being denied the normal rights and operations of society, but they are being degraded to working ridiculously long in factories with unsafe conditions and terrible bosses who are relentless towards the workers and have absolutely no care for their personal well-being. It is also an example of stratification because it is a part of structured social inequality- and the bizarre part of it all is that it is being structured by huge corporations that are already making huge profits and could clearly afford to pay these workers more.

            In developing countries, an estimated 250 million children in between the ages of 5-14 are sweatshop laborers. Furthermore, a study showed that doubling the salary of sweatshop workers would only increase the consumer cost of an item by 1.8%, while consumers would be willing to pay 15% more to know a product did not come from a sweatshop.[ii]  For more shocking statistics on sweatshops, please visit https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-sweatshops.

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[i] Iacobucci, Liz. "People's World." Race to the Bottom for Sweatshop Workers » Peoplesworld. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.

[ii] "11 Facts About Sweatshops." DoSomething.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Sept. 2014.

Race and the 2012 Presidential Election

The 2008 Presidential election was one that rewrote history. The United States of America had together elected the first African American to hold the highest seat in the land. As a republic founded on democratic principles it is understandable to hear the opinions of unhappy voters. However, in 2012 the people of the United States had decided again and elected Barack Obama to a second term in the oval office. Many Republicans complained about reverse racism, the idea that minorities would vote for a minority to take office, but regardless of motives, Obama is once again president. In this blog post I will take a look at how the minority vote actually affected the 2012 election.

To begin it is important to look at how the shift in voting eligibility for certain demographics has changed. Since the 2004 election, between Republican candidate and current President George W. Bush vs. Democratic candidate John Kerry,  white eligibility for the election has decreased by nearly 5% which has been acquired by minorities such as hispanics and blacks. The eligibility to vote affects how many individuals from a certain demographic can vote which is crucial to examine if we are looking at an election that was supposedly based on race.

However, if we take a look at the turnout rates per demographic we see that for the first time there was a larger black turnout to the polling station over any other demographic (see chart below).

This is an interesting statistic because it is the first time in history that the black vote percentage surpassed the white vote percentage. In 1868 and 1870 when the 14th and 15th amendments had been passed, blacks had been subjected to fear and their inalienable right had been taken away from them. These fear tactics and racism prevented proper results. In 1965, when the Voting Rights Act was signed, was when voting equality was mandated, but that didn't prevent some regions from continuing their racist tactics.

Back to the 2012 election, 81% of whites voted for Obama because they felt a connection to Obama from a working class position. 93% of African Americans voted for Obama and although many say it is due to race it can be contributed to loyalty to the democratic party since 88% voted for Kerry in 2004. 71% of Latinos voted for Obama because of their agreement with Obamacare and the President's stance on undocumented immigrants.

As we head into mid-term elections next month, we will start to see how congress shapes up and the race for President will commence shortly after. Individuals will begin to announce their candidacy and the people of the US will back their personal favorite. We will see how race continues to potentially affect the elections. Interestingly enough, Asian-Americans are presumed to make a big difference in the upcoming 2016 election. No one can make an accurate prediction now but only time will tell.

http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/05/10-election-2012-minority-voter-turnout-frey

http://racerelations.about.com/od/diversitymatters/a/How-Minority-Groups-Helped-Obama-Win-Second-Term.htm

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/12/19/3082371/racial-voter-suppression-study/

Race in Film, Theatre, and Television: Starting with the Basics

"[E]ven the most seemingly benign TV programs articulate the relationship between race and power, either explicitly or through implication."

-Hamamoto (Holtzman, 209)

The representation of races in film, television, and theatre, among other forms of media, has been a topic of much discussion for decades. More recently, however, the worry of misrepresenting or offending certain races is a relevant topic in popular culture, for hundreds of movies, plays, and television shows are produced a year with all sorts of different races "represented." For movies, it is particularly easy to spread masses of information (be it true or false or somewhere in between). They are influential pieces of media because “the expansive reach of movies makes them a particularly important site for examining popular constructions of race relation in U.S. society." (Hughey, 546) Because of this outreach, the way a race is represented in a film or TV show can give different perspectives/insights/knowledge that have questionable amounts of fact or history surrounding them. Not only considering the power of providing said information, but how a race is portrayed can be beneficial or detrimental to the race outside the film, in the real world.

The question that arises is how does one tactfully and truthfully represent an entire race as a whole in the media without the performance being presumptuous, crass, quoting a race or even reinforcing stereotypical representations? Due to it's nature and outreach as mentioned before, it is particularly difficult when considering the making of movies, for "the popularity of movies as a source of entertainment and cultural expression means that they reach further than many other discursive movies." (Hughey, 547) Movies and television shows spread all over the world nowadays thanks to the wonders of technology. Each form of media can be heard in a different language so that it's not remaining only for those who speak one certain language. The problem with this availability of media is that sometimes when races are misrepresented, people who don't know any better, including children can fall into the trap of believing that these representations are reflections of real life.

What makes media that is watched so different from literature and radio, is that there are actual beings set to portray characters and people. Doctor Felix-Lois Regnault believed " not only that film could furnish documents for the study of race, but also that by capturing the physical form in motion, film [as well as live theatre and television programs] could serve as an unimpeachable scientific index of race." (Rony, 74) What the Doctor claimed was that in having people actually represent a race or person of a particular race, you are essentially providing the audience with a scientific representation in the flesh. This brings us to the start of adding race in film.

"Cinema appears to bring the past and that which is culturally distant closer"

-Fatimah Rony (Rony, 9)

This quote from above highlights an enormous issue with the cinema. Just because a film is set in the past or is a history-based film, does not in any way ensure that hard facts are coming out of it's content when considering race. Film when it first came out, was primarily designed to appeal to white, middle-class families. Going to the movies was an enjoyable outing, where one could have the potential of learning something new about people from other lands, or from a time long ago. Not only that, however, but these white middle-classed families went to see representations of themselves. As Fatimah Rony said in her book entitled The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, "We turn to the movies to find images of ourselves and find ourselves reflected in the eyes of others." (Rony, 4) If this is so, then how on earth do people feel when their race is wrongly portrayed? Shouldn't every race be able to see themselves in film without the portrayal skewing how a race truly is? And how can one justifiably quote an entire race in one human being?  

This topic of how to approach race in film, television, and theatre is one that ties heavily into our work in class. Stereotypes need to be broken, and the blindness in which we broach the subject of race in film a lot of the time needs to be brought to light. Different races have every right and deserve to be represented in a way that they are proud of, or at least in a way that is truthful. When looking at the race and ethnicity of an actor/actress and their portrayal of a race, hundreds of questions can come up, but the question at the foreground of the portrayal should be, "Does this representation speak the truth." I look to further my research on the subject by examining recent films and television shows, as well as comparing them to past works. I also look to answer the question of "Is there a way that film-makers, directors, writers, etc. can approach the production of a form of visual media where race is represented correctly?"

Hughey, Matthew W. "Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes In" Magical Negro" Films." Academia.edu. Mississippi State University, n.d. Web. 21 Sept. 2014.

Holtzman, Linda. Media messages : what film, television, and popular music teach us about race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Armonk, N.Y: M.E. Sharpe, 2000. Print.

Gormley, Paul. The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Intellect Books, UK 2005. Print.

Rony, Fatimah T. The third eye : race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Print.