Um. Wow.

[tielan]

The Global Hierarchy Of Race by Martin Jacques.

Definitely required reading for everyone no matter the colour of their skin or whether or not they're racist. System and individual, privilege and power, politics and personal, written for the public in a simple, easy-to-understand way.

Just...wow.

Comments

[thelana.livejournal.com]

This reminds me a lot of a situation that I muse quite a lot about in regards to Indian cinema. There at the moment, most top female stars earn less than the top male stars, with the argument that stories starring a male star usually make more money than a story centered around a female star (because both men and women flock to the moves of a male star, but not everybody bothers to see a female centered movie).

There was a lot of talk how earlier, 50/60s there was an era of the divas where the female stars were much more important and famous than their male counterpoints. And that era also had a lot of movies about women, particularly tragic women and people watched them. Those movies were usually made by males who adored these divas and wanted to showcase them. But if I compare those movies, even if they have a feminist message, highlighting how women are slighted by the system, their tone is very different from the kinds of movies that women make.

It made me think a lot about the value of translators. That different groups (whether men/women or white/non-white) just have different ways of communicating. That maybe sometimes it needs a man to explain to other men what women mean. Because he can explain what thought process he went through, he can put it into terms that they'll understand.

But that doesn't mean that they can't miss the point (like, it's nice to see movies about the sad tragedy of women/black people/homosexuals, but wouldn't the people who are part of these groups rather see movies NOT about how these groups are cruelly broken by the system, moving us all to tears, but are instead more interested in stories where they survive, get to be happy and find a way to negotiate their lives?). Like, it's a very useful tool but it doesn't really free us from needing to find a way to properly communicate with each other and relate to each other.