CVK
This article is a couple weeks old, but I thought it would be interesting to put it up on MMW for discussion. The writer posits… well actually he seems a bit confused about what he wants to say. On the one hand, he lists many recent TV shows or films that have dealt with racial issues, including Crash (which of course won the Oscar for Best Picture), Freedomland (pictured), C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, The Three Burials of Melquia des Estrada, Black.White., Something New, and Guess Who. By doing so, he seems to suggest that TV and film are pouncing on race as the hot new issue. But on the other hand, he talks at length about how hard it was for Crash and Freedomland to get made, and states “if there really is a new cinematic interest in racial matters, it’s happening in spite of the big studios.”

Clearly it’s up for debate whether race is the new hot topic in media right now. What we can say for sure is that we really have a long ways to go in the way we handle the topic. As you know, we loved Something New (hear our review here) and thought it was probably the best film we’ve seen recently that deals with interracial relationships in way that actually reflects how things are in 2006. (And how many romantic comedies can you think of that directly discuss the issue of white privilege???) I’m also hoping to watch C.S.A. really soon because that sounds like an awesome film.

But with the exception of those two projects, everything we’ve seen so far is the same old crap. Anyone who’s not a black person or white person either gets completely left out of the story, or is portrayed in ridiculously two-dimensional ways. The idea that race is still a black and white issue only is one that all these projects perpetuate. And of course, race has to be a source of tension and conflict, and must be as polarizing as possible. Oh, and racism only exists when there are racial epithets being thrown around, or if someone’s getting physically harmed.

Projects like CSA and Something New give me hope that more films and TV shows will discuss race in a more realistic, nuanced way. And from the sounds of this review of Eric Byler’s Americanese, which is currently making its way around the festival circuit, it looks like this film will be another gem:

Byler shows us how Raymond’s relationship with his ex-girlfriend Aurora (Allison Sie)—who is Hapa, half-Japanese—is complicated by inherited racist attitudes from her parents: An Asian mother who prefers she partner with a white man and a white father who denies racism even as he discourages his second daughter’s relationship with a Black man.