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Marissa Sammy on Star Trek: Into Whiteness.

perfect commentary which parallels what Rawles was saying earlier about the possibility of Moriarty being a person of color: 

• “…The actual issue is that black people aren’t often allowed to play full and complete characters, and an antagonist who isn’t unintelligent, thuggish cannon fodder is just as much of a rarity for black men as the stubbly hero who saves the world or wtfever. “
• “…The stereotype in no way intersects with brilliant geniuses who choose to step outside of the boundaries of society in order to exercise their intellect while having no concern for lesser beings.
  
  Or to break it down further: the problematic stereotype regarding black people is that of being, in essence, subhuman. Characters of the Moriarty (and Holmes) archetype are rooted in being superhuman.”

You see? It’s more complicated than “people of color get typecast as villains.”

Black people get typecast as an extremely specific type of villain - they’re thugs, brutish and animalistic. South Asian actors are similarly typecast as scary oppressive (usually coded Muslim) terrorists.

But when your villain is of the superhuman archetype? When they’re brooding antiheroes, when they’re nuanced, when they’re multi-faceted?

They’re white.

(And check out this post on the glorification of white criminality in shows like Dexter, Breaking Bad, Weeds, Boardwalk Empire, The Sopranos, etc.)

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I (bossymarmalade that is) wrote this article for Racebending because my sister asked me to, I didn’t expect it to resonate outside of that! What a wonderful thing to pop onto tumblr and find, omg <3 to you all for the support and your fantastic thinky additions)

Laura Hudson writes about the shotage of women characters in Star Wars fore Wired.com in her article “Leia is not enough:  Star Wars and the woman problem in Hollywood.”

“Science fiction in particular has always offered a vision of the world not myopically limited by the world as it exists, but liberated by the power of imagination. Perhaps more than any genre of storytelling, it has no excuse to exclude women for so-called practical reasons — especially when it has every reason to imagine a world where they are just as heroic, exceptional, and well-represented as men.”

(via racebending)

The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins. (via tapiocanaif)

I highly suggest anyone who is interested in film and film history to watch this (available on netflix instant in the US), especially for people of color who are into film because Cousins does a pretty great job actually at putting a lot of white westerner filmmakers down to their size and enhancing the importance of non-westerner filmmakers from around the world and POC filmmmakers like Charles Burnett and the LA Rebellion scene.

Just a sample of what he covers, he talks in-depth about Forough Farrokhzad and how Iran is the only country to have a woman be the founder of the country’s cinema, Teinosuke Kinugasa and his landmark silent film A Page of Madness, classic Chinese cinema and Ruan Lingyu, classic 1950s Bollywood that reminds the artistic achievements of Guru Dutt as well as the beginning prominence of parallel cinema by Satyajit Ray and then later goes on to specifically emphasize Ritwik Ghatak (who should have near the praise that Ray does but doesn’t), Ousmane Sembene and later the brilliant output of African cinema especially in the 1970s with the likes of Mambety and Haile Gerima’s films, Cinema Novo including Glauber Rocha, and even dedicates an entire episode to non-western cinema in the ’90s. Cousins also goes into Charles Burnett and the LA Rebellion Scene and helps in giving their fair due, something that shouldn’t have happened considering the absolutely brilliant films they made. 

(via swintons)