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The Barnes and Noble bookstore chain makes a little money from reprinting out of copyright classics like Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz selling them on a table upfront.
Recently, they came up with the idea of “Diverse Editions:” adding new covers of The Diverse.
That would be much praised if they were making movies of classics by white authors and cast nonwhites as stars.
But, to B&N’s surprise, it didn’t work out that way with book covers:
From The Guardian:
‘Fake diversity’: Barnes and Noble cancels race-swapped classic covers
Writers say the move, meant to celebrate Black History Month, does not help improve representation
André Wheeler
Wed 5 Feb 2020 19.28 EST
Barnes and Noble, America’s largest bookseller, has withdrawn a new series of “diverse” classic book covers following a backlash from writers who say it does nothing to address the publishing industry’s underlying diversity problems.
The new “Diverse Editions” series was announced on Tuesday to honor Black History Month and due to hit shelves on Wednesday. The project saw 12 classic young adult novels receive new covers, the protagonists now “culturally diverse”. Frankenstein has brown skin, not green, while a kissing Romeo and Juliet have darker skin tones and kinky hair textures. “For the first time ever, all parents will be able to pick up a book and see themselves in a story,” the company explains on the back cover of the books.
Surly Dorothys of Color
But prominent authors were quick to lambast the company, saying that simply changing the skin color of characters like Romeo and Juliet or Frankenstein is a superficial fix, and that the publishing industry should do more to promote writers of color.
Writers including Roxane Gay, the author of Bad Feminist,
Does Roxane Gay ever time to write anything anymore in between issuing pronunciamentos about how she is offended by the latest crisis?
and The Hate U Give writer Angie Thomas, viewed the covers as a superficial fix to a larger problem. “The only thing you’re disrupting is #BlackHistoryMonth and the literary dignity of communities of color,” David Bowles, a Latinx children’s writer and poet, wrote to Barnes and Noble on Twitter. “So disappointed in you.”
Prominent authors were quick to lambast the company, saying that putting a black Dorothy, from the Wizard of Oz, or a black Frankenstein on the cover wasn’t enough.
“This fake diversity nonsense (where they replace white characters with people of color) is disgusting,” the Hugo-winning fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor wrote. “It is not sincere or a solution. New stories by people of color about people of color is the solution… Stop using us and get out of the way!”
… The decision of which book covers to redesign was made using artificial intelligence to analyze the text from 100 of the most famous titles in western literature, searching the texts to “see if it omitted the ethnicity of primary characters”. The 12 classics found to meet this criteria were: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Moby Dick, Emma, The Secret Garden, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstein, Peter Pan, The Wizard of Oz, The Three Musketeers, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Romeo and Juliet.
The author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, Dumas the Elder, was about 1/4th black.
Also, dark Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is of enigmatic racial background, with the other characters speculating about his ancestry, such as whether he was a “lascar,” a sailor from the Indian Ocean.
So why is it Good to cast nonwhite actors in historical films like the recent one about 16th Century queens where there are black and Chinese playing Scottish aristocrats, but it is Bad to change the race of the covers of classic books?
Because in the Good case, some nonwhites got paid, but in the Bad case, no nonwhites got paid.
It’s all about who gets paid.
I would think that
would be a likely candidate for this treatment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUxe4Tjk6gQ
Crime Statistics and No Punishment
Lord of the Blingz
The Great Gatt
Fahrenheit 420
Fahrenheit 1350
East of Oakland
Machiavelli's The Pimp
The Mugshot of De'Oriean Gray
Where Da Little Women At
The Grape Drank of Wrath
Anaynay Karenin'Dayana
As I Lay Jivin'
The Great Gibsmedat
The Incarceration Rate Also Rises
Othello
To Cap a Muhfuh Bird
Drankula
Alice in Juvenile Detention
Romeo and JuQuanda
Brave New World Star Hip Hop
Blunts of Grass
No need to do the white whale one; you're all smart and funny.
I noticed that the cover of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic that B&N created looked like Dr. Hindu and Mr. Dindu, and once I thought that, I coughed myself into fits and woke up half the household.
“This fake diversity nonsense (where they replace white characters with people of color) is disgusting,” the Hugo-winning fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor wrote. “It is not sincere or a solution. New stories by people of color about people of color is the solution… “
In related news, Disney has announced a film of the play Hamilton, which will soon be shown in theaters. The original cast will be used.
In this case, it’s Lin-Manuel Miranda who gets paid – $75 million for worldwide rights.
Robin the Hood
Funny that they didn’t pick The Diary of Anne Frank.
Doesn't fit a certain agenda like the 1992 documentary The Liberators about allegedly Black American soldiers at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Sub-Saharan Africans are just pawns in the grand scheme of things. It is just more overt these days.
Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104721/
How about they turn Kipling’s “Kim” into an actual transgender character? Now, that would be pretty woke. Conrad’s “The N-Word of Narcissus” should remain unchanged, however.
Well, formatting wise, that’s not what I intended.
Nnedi nneeds to get a life. Get to work on her nnext nnovel. Or return to her roots in Cinncinnnnati.
Funny, when I did a search for her, Google went Zulu on me. Literally.
Nnedi Okorafor =
I fed on okra, Ron.
Oak Red Roof Inn.
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon's self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @the one they call Desanex, @SunBakedSuburb, @Antonius
It’s all about who gets paid.
Don’t blame Russian alt-right incels at pol, there’s plenty of book-buying constituencies who would ignore or counter-react to a pol op, and nobody on this planet even knew this was happening. Probably the thing is that, while black literacy exists and targeted black bestsellers (mostly porn) are a thing, blacks are solidly incurious about books outside that specialization. They surely know that Herr Doktor Viktor Frankenstein is not a brother, no matter what you do with the cover. Also B&N always had a “triage section” of minimally priced impulse buys, gifts, non-book items, “complete guides,” etc, and these house reprints and collections were always in that section. A person could visit B&N regularly and not even see them.
Also check out the Jekyll and Hyde one: apparently turning evil means turning Chinese.
GEORGE CARLIN SHOUTING VOICE: HEY! HEY! HEY! DID THEY SKIP JOSEPH CONRAD?
Newsflash: Marxism is anti-intellectual. Logically therefore all Marxists end up as lightweights.
So all of our modern publishing industries are now filled with Marxists and the results are predictable: It’s lightweights all the way down.
Derbyshire’s “blackety blackety black” is a declaration that someone is …a lightweight. But the blackety never stops. Because what else is a lightweight gonna do?
And of course “blackety” is just one flavor of Marxist idiocy. Really it’s “identity identity identity” that is used as a replacement for intellectual output.
This is the real dumbing down. Not of the rabble but of our so-called elites.
According to one fiction novel I’ve read, The Club Dumas, Alexandre Dumas took elements of real historical people to construct his book.
According to the same novel, the authorship of The Three Musketeers is contested by a small number of people. Dumas is said to have had a collaborator, a historical novel writer by the name of Auguste Maquet.
But this was a murder mystery about summoning the devil, so take all of that with a grain of salt.
Perhaps.
But it’s also about the fact that, when it comes to race, whitey is always wrong.
A black Frankenstein on the book cover? Racist and wrong.
No black Frankenstein on the cover? Also racist and wrong.
The point is that some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bxOc--RLtAReplies: @Olorin
But it's also about the fact that, when it comes to race, whitey is always wrong.
A black Frankenstein on the book cover? Racist and wrong.
No black Frankenstein on the cover? Also racist and wrong.
The point is that some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.Replies: @black sea, @Prester John, @Anonymous
Actually, it’s an effective mind game, and I can understand why certain grievance mongers are wont to play it. I mean, if whites are gullible and guilt-ridden enough to buy into it, whose fault is that, really?
People will behave in ways that tend to get them what they want.
In many ways, this is representative of the dereliction of duty by Conservatism Inc wrt culture.
The vast amounts of Con Inc pulp have cross subsidized the money losing Woke printed by the same publishers.
Sure it was. Artificial Intelligence then visited the home of the B&N CEO, and deduced what he/she/zie had had for dinner from the first whiff of the early-evening flatulence.
LOL! Great post Russ. But I don't think it was AI, it was FI.
Disney’s all-Chinese “Mulan” – Diverse and good
Disney/Pixar’s all-Mexican “Coco” – Diverse and good
Disney’s all-Polynesian “Moana” – Diverse and good
Disney’s all White 2013 “Frozen”in 1840s Norway – Oh my G-d totally racist! Bad!
You all do see where this is going, right?
What gets me is that after all the planning and meetings and commissioning of artwork and printing costs … They just cave and spike the project, based solely on a Twitter mini storm, without at least putting the books in a few stores to test market demand. Maybe Twitter isn’t the real world? Maybe mass protests will not materialize?
Covers aside I think pozzing in novels is a lot harder to pull off.
Peter F. Hamilton in his Reality Dysfunction series introduces the greatest physicist in the known Galaxy – an African woman. However since it’s only the written word I’m free to entirely ignore that and pretend she’s not African at all.
Otoh in the same series he introduces a concept that is almost anathema – that it’s been found better to colonise new worlds along ethnic/racial lines rather than the standard multiracial trope in SciFi. So perhaps he thought he was buying some insurance.
Nnedi Okorafor =I fed on okra, Ron.
Oak Red Roof Inn.https://media.iceportal.com/104817/photos/60170198_XXL.jpgReplies: @Lurker, @Hypnotoad666, @Ragno
Winnninng!
Waiting. Still waiting. Competing with Shakespeare is a tall order.
The “literature community” from the English Departments on down, is highly pozzed left.
In many ways, this is representative of the dereliction of duty by Conservatism Inc wrt culture.
The vast amounts of Con Inc pulp have cross subsidized the money losing Woke printed by the same publishers.
Hmmm … I’m trying to visualise the grill that Black Frankenstein would be sporting.
Nnedi Okorafor =I fed on okra, Ron.
Oak Red Roof Inn.https://media.iceportal.com/104817/photos/60170198_XXL.jpgReplies: @Lurker, @Hypnotoad666, @Ragno
So great-selling “Blackety-Black” books are just waiting to be released if only publishers would “get out of the way.”
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon’s self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon's self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @the one they call Desanex, @SunBakedSuburb, @Antonius
Hard to get paid for books you publish with Amazon when the buyer tries to use a stolen credit card.
Those covers for The Wizard are all different. Is this a promo shot? Did they run different batches through the printshop?
Imma so used. Imma so blocked. I’m caught in a bondage movie!!
Okay.
It’s absolutely not for children though.
But you get the ghetto fast.
They should make the whale black, and put Queequeg at the helm.
QueequegButtigieg at the helm.No thanks.
https://americanliterature.com/author/herman-melville/book/moby-dick-or-the-whale/chapter-42-the-whiteness-of-the-whale
And we need a buddy version of Ishmael and his sidekick Queequeg
https://s26162.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/moby-dick-queequeg.jpg
A black Frankenstein should actually appeal to wokesters. The story, after all, is about how a good man turns bad in response to prejudice.
Not that the point is for anyone to actually read these books.
Blackenstein (1973)
What ARE people happy with?
I suppose there is money to be made with stories about blacks as the master race so powerful that reality fixes itself around them etc.
Or The Matrix where the Architect and the Agents are black and anyone not of the machine gang is white. But loses.
Blakkenstein: in the antebellum American south, a sinister plantation owner tries to create a super slave, by reanimating a composite corpse made from the bodies of African slaves. The Creature is shunned by white society (for its beauty, not ugliness) but finding common cause among his fellow slaves, leads an uprising and an exodus of the liberated slaves to a Pacific island, where they found an advanced technological culture.
Dr. Blackle and Mr. Whyde: an African chemist in Victorian London devises a formula that transforms him into a Caucasian. He finds that high society, formerly closed to him, is welcoming to his alter ego; even Whyde’s criminality is overlooked and excused. At a scientific gathering he dazzles his colleagues with a brilliant lecture as Whyde, but unexpectedly transforms to Blackle before everyone’s eyes, and is shot dead by police, his research burned. Humanity never has a chance to benefit from his cure for cancer.
Xacticla: a refugee from a troubled land, one of the last of his race, immigrates to turn of the century England, to build a new life. He immediately finds himself persecuted by a secret society representing the Anglo-European patriarchy—made up of upper class Britons, a Dane, and a Texan. He’s chased out of the country and driven to death for the “crime” of being unfailingly attractive to English women. But he has his revenge a century later, when the people he has infected with his foreign blood overwhelm the descendants of his persecutors.
Will it sell?Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @SunBakedSuburb
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon's self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @the one they call Desanex, @SunBakedSuburb, @Antonius
“Stop using us and get out of the way!”
If only Nnedi Okorafor would take her own advice, and stop using white people.
“I am DEI, the great and terrible; who are you and what do you seek”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that I gots to get my money”
So all of our modern publishing industries are now filled with Marxists and the results are predictable: It's lightweights all the way down.
Derbyshire's "blackety blackety black" is a declaration that someone is ...a lightweight. But the blackety never stops. Because what else is a lightweight gonna do?
And of course "blackety" is just one flavor of Marxist idiocy. Really it's "identity identity identity" that is used as a replacement for intellectual output.
This is the real dumbing down. Not of the rabble but of our so-called elites.Replies: @Pericles, @obwandiyag
Lee Kuan Yew:
Is it possible the book seller was trying to get credit for diversity to inattentive observers without actually having to do anything? Maybe this was their motivation:
Instead, it appears they were caught cheating on their diversity taxes.
They should make the whale black, and put
QueequegButtigieg at the helm.The unintended consequence of colorization of achievements by whites is that it inadvertently highlights the paucity of real life examples from the melanin enriched.
Thus, even more rage and demands that works that no one has read replace Shakespeare to make it more difficult to draw this comparison in the future.
We could end up in a world where "everyone knows" that the achievements of Greater Europe were the works of "black folx".
Robbin’ Hood and his surly band of locusts, Stab’Tavious, Ray’Pacious, Preg’Neisha, Kill’Shawn, Phatonya, Trey’Violent and Blue-eye Cuck take from the producers and the keepers of the civilizational flame and give as reparations – which run out entirely as they pillage, after which they turn on and eat each other and civilization begins to rebuild and is destroyed again after we fail to remember history.
Not that the point is for anyone to actually read these books.Replies: @El Dato, @ChrisZ
“Black Frankenstein” sounds like blaxploitation. People aren’t happy with that either.
Blackenstein (1973)
What ARE people happy with?
I suppose there is money to be made with stories about blacks as the master race so powerful that reality fixes itself around them etc.
Or The Matrix where the Architect and the Agents are black and anyone not of the machine gang is white. But loses.
From Moby Dick to Muh Dick?
No thanks.
Who’s got the money? Who’s got the gun?
So asked a young British diplomat, whose name I’ve forgotten, back in the 2000s. He’d been shocked to his core that his government simply rigged up the case for the Iraq 2.0 war. He left the foreign service and wrote a book, two chapters of which were titled with the above questions.
My “inner child” (LOL-I’m in my 60s) wishes a lot of social and political phenomena weren’t clarified by posing and answering those two questions. That’s reality, though. FWIW, the unseen elephants in the room, in my opinion, are Black Supremacism and fear of Black-on-White violence, but it’s just a thought.
How about an update of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ with Tom as a kindly Korean shop owner in South Central LA whose store is burned down during the riots but has his life saved by a powerful Crip shot caller who wants to use Tom’s shop as a front for his drug dealing.
Moby Dick is still a “great white” whale, right?
In the black version of “Moby Dick”, Chapter 42,”The Whiteness of the Whale”, will have to be rewritten to delete passages like “this pre-eminence [of whiteness] applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe”; see
https://americanliterature.com/author/herman-melville/book/moby-dick-or-the-whale/chapter-42-the-whiteness-of-the-whale
And we need a buddy version of Ishmael and his sidekick Queequeg
Not that the point is for anyone to actually read these books.Replies: @El Dato, @ChrisZ
All the classic horror stories are amenable to woke revision:
Blakkenstein: in the antebellum American south, a sinister plantation owner tries to create a super slave, by reanimating a composite corpse made from the bodies of African slaves. The Creature is shunned by white society (for its beauty, not ugliness) but finding common cause among his fellow slaves, leads an uprising and an exodus of the liberated slaves to a Pacific island, where they found an advanced technological culture.
Dr. Blackle and Mr. Whyde: an African chemist in Victorian London devises a formula that transforms him into a Caucasian. He finds that high society, formerly closed to him, is welcoming to his alter ego; even Whyde’s criminality is overlooked and excused. At a scientific gathering he dazzles his colleagues with a brilliant lecture as Whyde, but unexpectedly transforms to Blackle before everyone’s eyes, and is shot dead by police, his research burned. Humanity never has a chance to benefit from his cure for cancer.
Xacticla: a refugee from a troubled land, one of the last of his race, immigrates to turn of the century England, to build a new life. He immediately finds himself persecuted by a secret society representing the Anglo-European patriarchy—made up of upper class Britons, a Dane, and a Texan. He’s chased out of the country and driven to death for the “crime” of being unfailingly attractive to English women. But he has his revenge a century later, when the people he has infected with his foreign blood overwhelm the descendants of his persecutors.
Will it sell?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3uL0MAgHog
Did I mention CreativeForge is a Polish game studio?
Contact Jordan Peele; he's always looking for white stories to invert.
Does B&N really want to equate Frankenstein’s monster with blackness?
Well, ok then.
Even a high-functioning retard like John Mellencamp can get paid!
John Mellencamp supports Mike Bloomberg in ad about ‘Small Town’ America
https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/02/05/mike-bloomberg-ad-features-indiana-born-john-mellencamps-small-town/4668425002/
My advice to Mr. Mellencamp-
Don’t visit any small towns. Ever.
“Because in the Good case, some nonwhites got paid, but in the Bad case, no nonwhites got paid.
It’s all about who gets paid.”
Steve, thanks. Insights like these are why I habitually read your columns.
This in the NY Times today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/georgetown-reparations.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
I guess the trillions of $ that the US has spent on welfare and “urban renewal” and other stuff in the last 50 years which has made American blacks the richest blacks on earth doesn’t count as reparations.
Georgetown’s sin was apparently selling its slaves for cash. Apparently if they had kept them and worked them to death this would have been OK, but selling them entitles their descendants to reparations according to Woke Logic.
I understand that Elizabeth Warren now claims that one of her ancestors was among this group and wants to be included in the gibmedats.
So rather than continue to promise you have organic ways of improving blacks' lives, it's just a promise to take the other guys' stuff and give it to them. It's really more about punishment than any real expectation that it would mean permanent change in outcomes. Even TNC when advocating for reparations says he doesn't think it would work - but he's in favor of it anyway as atonement.
Also check out the Jekyll and Hyde one: apparently turning evil means turning Chinese.
GEORGE CARLIN SHOUTING VOICE: HEY! HEY! HEY! DID THEY SKIP JOSEPH CONRAD?Replies: @SFG
They had some fun reprints of obscure stuff, I have to say. There was a nice book on the medieval underworld I still have somewhere which I’m sure was based on some guy’s thesis.
“In other news, the planned invasion by the Islamic Confederacy of the planet of New Israel was cut short by a lack of funds…”
I have to say, this was one of Steve’s better insights for me. A lot of the original ‘cultural appropriation’ hullabaloo was over white people playing rock-n-roll based on rhythm & blues and making a lot more money and not crediting the original composers and singers. That made some sense, but metastasized into hounding random white people for having a Mexican restaurant.
If you put aside the ideology and follow the money, you can learn quite a bit.
I agree that they caved way too fast but printing is only a minor cost in the book publishing industry. People thought that when publishers switched to ebooks that the price of books would come down substantially but it turns out that the ink and paper is only a small part of the price of a book compared to the amount of $ that publishers spend taking each other out to lunch at expensive NY restaurants. You can buy a ream of copy paper (enough paper for maybe half a dozen or more paperback books) for a couple of $.
“Toto, I’ve got a feeling we’re not in Africa anymore…”
I guess the trillions of $ that the US has spent on welfare and "urban renewal" and other stuff in the last 50 years which has made American blacks the richest blacks on earth doesn't count as reparations.Georgetown's sin was apparently selling its slaves for cash. Apparently if they had kept them and worked them to death this would have been OK, but selling them entitles their descendants to reparations according to Woke Logic. I understand that Elizabeth Warren now claims that one of her ancestors was among this group and wants to be included in the gibmedats.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Arclight, @Adam Smith
Ahaaa! See, that’s the problem. You don’t piss off the IRS. Georgetown’s business office should have sold these slaves under the table, one every couple of weeks.
I’ll tell you who also won’t get paid, Steve. That would be Barnes & Noble. What white parent in his right mind would buy one of these books with a silly cover like that? I sure wouldn’t. Maybe I’d still buy a chocolate croissant and gun magazine at the little shop, though.
This is related to the push for diversity ‘behind the camera’. The most egregious example is on the head of Ryan Reynolds.
During the filming of Deadpool 2, there was a scene to be filmed involving Zazie Beetz character on a motorcycle that involved some stunts. Zazie Beetz is a very light-skinned half black (And represented a race-swap of the character she was playing) but there weren’t any female motorcycle stuntwomen of any black ancestry the production could find, but that’s fine, it happens all the time in Hollywood, many white actors have Asian stunt doubles and vice versa. They got a hold of one of the best stuntwoman in Hollywood, Melissa Stubbs to do the stunt.
Then Ryan Reynolds heard this (I don’t know if he had also been party to race-swapping Beetz character in the first place but he was apparently the senior producer) and insisted that they get a black stunt woman. So they thought outside the box and found a pro black female motorcycle racer, Joi Harris. She didn’t look very much like Zazie Beetz (Ie, they might have to lighten her skin with a cream or in post production like they’d have to darken the white stunt woman and she’d still have to wear a giant afro wig.) and crucially had no real stunt experience but she was still black and she was used to doing dangerous things on motorcycles for a living, so close enough they thought.
Well the stunt coordinator told Ryan Reynolds that she wasn’t up to it since she didn’t have the correct experience and that the stunt was too dangerous and she was in unreasonable danger. She failed every time they tried in practice sessions and nearly hurt herself very severely. Reynolds was repeatedly told this by the stunt coordinators and brushed them off each time.
The day comes of the first attempt to shoot the scene and something goes wrong. Joi Harris smashes her head at high speed into a nearby office building’s plate glass. She died soon afterward.
So Ryan Reynolds basically killed a black woman on his set by ignoring the safety concerns of his own stunt coordinators and placing an untrained person in mortal danger. That is culpable manslaughter in my books but he faced no sanctions or recriminations and went on merrily promoting his film like nothing happened. Death by diversity.
At the time there was a particularly big push in the media about ‘diversity behind the camera’. I don’t know if the exact stunt was later filmed with the original stuntwoman or not.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/deadpool-2-motorcycle-death-leaves-stunt-community-asking-tough-questions-1030044
I love the ‘tough questions’. It’s always so complicated with ‘diversity’. In the end Reynolds and his wife got into trouble with SJWs for having a wedding at a former Gone With The Wind type plantation.
Somebody was sacrificed for the Cult.
"I mean, you know. Is this morally right?"
YES.
Somebody dared to offend the Cult.
"I mean, you know. Is this morally right?"
NO.
This is followed by much dancing and yodeling around a golden calf, and a few cancelings at the stake.Replies: @Altai
It had a terrible opening weekend and is projected to lose $30 - 40 million.
https://deadline.com/2020/02/rhythm-section-box-office-bomb-blake-lively-paramount-james-bond-007-1202849211/
But this was a murder mystery about summoning the devil, so take all of that with a grain of salt.Replies: @Anonymous, @syonredux
You say this only because he was a mulatto.
I guess the trillions of $ that the US has spent on welfare and "urban renewal" and other stuff in the last 50 years which has made American blacks the richest blacks on earth doesn't count as reparations.Georgetown's sin was apparently selling its slaves for cash. Apparently if they had kept them and worked them to death this would have been OK, but selling them entitles their descendants to reparations according to Woke Logic. I understand that Elizabeth Warren now claims that one of her ancestors was among this group and wants to be included in the gibmedats.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Arclight, @Adam Smith
Basically it’s an admission that after 50 years (or more) of having nearly uncontested control of the country’s largest cities, public policy, academia, etc., progressives have not been able to meaningfully move the needle in pursuit of making blacks equal to whites in terms of education, income, and cultural behavior.
So rather than continue to promise you have organic ways of improving blacks’ lives, it’s just a promise to take the other guys’ stuff and give it to them. It’s really more about punishment than any real expectation that it would mean permanent change in outcomes. Even TNC when advocating for reparations says he doesn’t think it would work – but he’s in favor of it anyway as atonement.
But it's also about the fact that, when it comes to race, whitey is always wrong.
A black Frankenstein on the book cover? Racist and wrong.
No black Frankenstein on the cover? Also racist and wrong.
The point is that some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.Replies: @black sea, @Prester John, @Anonymous
And Mary W. Shelley, Shakespeare etal wrote the stories–not somebody named “Shamika Jackson” or “Kwame Jones.”
But this was a murder mystery about summoning the devil, so take all of that with a grain of salt.Replies: @Anonymous, @syonredux
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Maquet
As Arclight says, having these fictional supergenius black women only makes blacks look worse because on some level people are aware of how far real life falls short of these propagandistic accounts. And it shows a pathetic insecurity. Jews and Asians don’t feel it necessary to invent fictional Jewish and Asian sprinters and cornerbacks to make up for their non-existence in real life.
“but he’s in favor of it anyway as atonement”
Well what about the descendants of all those white men killed in the Civil War (over 600,000 of them)…Can they at least get the discounted rate when they have to pay their share of reparations???
The groundbreaking film about a Frankenstein of color, made in the 1970’s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKgcLOOW-3YReplies: @SunBakedSuburb
During the filming of Deadpool 2, there was a scene to be filmed involving Zazie Beetz character on a motorcycle that involved some stunts. Zazie Beetz is a very light-skinned half black (And represented a race-swap of the character she was playing) but there weren't any female motorcycle stuntwomen of any black ancestry the production could find, but that's fine, it happens all the time in Hollywood, many white actors have Asian stunt doubles and vice versa. They got a hold of one of the best stuntwoman in Hollywood, Melissa Stubbs to do the stunt.
Then Ryan Reynolds heard this (I don't know if he had also been party to race-swapping Beetz character in the first place but he was apparently the senior producer) and insisted that they get a black stunt woman. So they thought outside the box and found a pro black female motorcycle racer, Joi Harris. She didn't look very much like Zazie Beetz (Ie, they might have to lighten her skin with a cream or in post production like they'd have to darken the white stunt woman and she'd still have to wear a giant afro wig.) and crucially had no real stunt experience but she was still black and she was used to doing dangerous things on motorcycles for a living, so close enough they thought.
Well the stunt coordinator told Ryan Reynolds that she wasn't up to it since she didn't have the correct experience and that the stunt was too dangerous and she was in unreasonable danger. She failed every time they tried in practice sessions and nearly hurt herself very severely. Reynolds was repeatedly told this by the stunt coordinators and brushed them off each time.
The day comes of the first attempt to shoot the scene and something goes wrong. Joi Harris smashes her head at high speed into a nearby office building's plate glass. She died soon afterward.
So Ryan Reynolds basically killed a black woman on his set by ignoring the safety concerns of his own stunt coordinators and placing an untrained person in mortal danger. That is culpable manslaughter in my books but he faced no sanctions or recriminations and went on merrily promoting his film like nothing happened. Death by diversity.
At the time there was a particularly big push in the media about 'diversity behind the camera'. I don't know if the exact stunt was later filmed with the original stuntwoman or not.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/deadpool-2-motorcycle-death-leaves-stunt-community-asking-tough-questions-1030044
I love the 'tough questions'. It's always so complicated with 'diversity'. In the end Reynolds and his wife got into trouble with SJWs for having a wedding at a former Gone With The Wind type plantation.Replies: @El Dato, @Jim Don Bob
The question may be tough, but the answers are easy.
Somebody was sacrificed for the Cult.
“I mean, you know. Is this morally right?”
YES.
Somebody dared to offend the Cult.
“I mean, you know. Is this morally right?”
NO.
This is followed by much dancing and yodeling around a golden calf, and a few cancelings at the stake.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWeyY_yYox0&t=1m43s
A Black Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz?
Wow, that’s innovative!
Someone should make a movie.
I have known that for some time, but only more recently did I learn that Pushkin had a black great-grandfather:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin
In Brazil, of course many literary authors are black or mixed race. The greatest of them is Machado de Assis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis
For those who like comics, it may be interesting to learn that Krazy Kat’s author George Herriman was also partly black:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman
>from the first whiff of the early-evening flatulence.
LOL! Great post Russ. But I don’t think it was AI, it was FI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bxOc--RLtAReplies: @anon
I’ll see your Blackenstein and raise you – vampire of color Blacula!
So all of our modern publishing industries are now filled with Marxists and the results are predictable: It's lightweights all the way down.
Derbyshire's "blackety blackety black" is a declaration that someone is ...a lightweight. But the blackety never stops. Because what else is a lightweight gonna do?
And of course "blackety" is just one flavor of Marxist idiocy. Really it's "identity identity identity" that is used as a replacement for intellectual output.
This is the real dumbing down. Not of the rabble but of our so-called elites.Replies: @Pericles, @obwandiyag
A dumb person calling other people dumb. This is a very common psychological malady. Get help.
Hahaha!
Never judge a book/bro by its/his cover/color.
Also, the word enigmatic. as well as the word niggardly, should be avoided around the genetically challenged.
just about every NPR listening white liberal would.
Disney/Pixar's all-Mexican "Coco" - Diverse and good
Disney's all-Polynesian "Moana" - Diverse and good
Disney's all White 2013 "Frozen"in 1840s Norway - Oh my G-d totally racist! Bad!
You all do see where this is going, right?Replies: @Altai
Don’t forget that despite being entirely in English (Albeit with Chinese accents), they chose an actress born in mainland China (In Wuhan funnily enough) to play Mulan (And almost entirely mainland Chinese cast with just one actual Chinese-American as one of the lead Hun) who lived in the US long enough (From ages 10-15) to get naturalised but left again to live in China. Predictably when the issue of the Hong Kong protests came up, she had the same political values of the average mainland Chinese not that of US celebrities, causing Disney some bad optics. I guess the magic paper of her passport didn’t take.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Yifei#Controversy
She’s been scarce ever since, not showing up at press events to promote the film. I wonder if she is currently in the US or if she’ll manage to get out of China in time to promote the film or if the quarantine will be Disney’s excuse to sideline her from any Western pressers who might ask uncomfortable questions.
>Because in the Good case, some nonwhites got paid, but in the Bad case, no nonwhites got paid.
B&N’s apology indicates that the covers were ‘designed by artists hailing from different ethnicities and backgrounds,’ so this might be a case of authors being more important than mere artists #BlackArtistLivesMatter
Funny that they didn’t pick The Diary of Anne Frank.
Doesn’t fit a certain agenda like the 1992 documentary The Liberators about allegedly Black American soldiers at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Sub-Saharan Africans are just pawns in the grand scheme of things. It is just more overt these days.
Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104721/
I said it because he was mentioned by name in the post.
Breaking News
New Front in World War Hair Opens
Colorado to looks to pass hair discrimination bill the ‘Crown’ act:
https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/bill-that-seeks-to-ban-hair-discrimination-in-colorado-passes-state-committee
Blakkenstein: in the antebellum American south, a sinister plantation owner tries to create a super slave, by reanimating a composite corpse made from the bodies of African slaves. The Creature is shunned by white society (for its beauty, not ugliness) but finding common cause among his fellow slaves, leads an uprising and an exodus of the liberated slaves to a Pacific island, where they found an advanced technological culture.
Dr. Blackle and Mr. Whyde: an African chemist in Victorian London devises a formula that transforms him into a Caucasian. He finds that high society, formerly closed to him, is welcoming to his alter ego; even Whyde’s criminality is overlooked and excused. At a scientific gathering he dazzles his colleagues with a brilliant lecture as Whyde, but unexpectedly transforms to Blackle before everyone’s eyes, and is shot dead by police, his research burned. Humanity never has a chance to benefit from his cure for cancer.
Xacticla: a refugee from a troubled land, one of the last of his race, immigrates to turn of the century England, to build a new life. He immediately finds himself persecuted by a secret society representing the Anglo-European patriarchy—made up of upper class Britons, a Dane, and a Texan. He’s chased out of the country and driven to death for the “crime” of being unfailingly attractive to English women. But he has his revenge a century later, when the people he has infected with his foreign blood overwhelm the descendants of his persecutors.
Will it sell?Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @SunBakedSuburb
Too late, CreativeForge Games already did that storyline:
Did I mention CreativeForge is a Polish game studio?
I wouldn’t want to trip down the Yellow Brick Road with that sullen dusky Dorothy but that’s just me.
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon's self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @the one they call Desanex, @SunBakedSuburb, @Antonius
The primary purchasers of Tee-Hee’s tomes are whites who live in Silver Lake and Brooklyn. Blacks use pictograms for non-verbal communication.
The biggest tangible cost for publishing a book (of the non coffee table type) is shipping it all over the country.
Somebody was sacrificed for the Cult.
"I mean, you know. Is this morally right?"
YES.
Somebody dared to offend the Cult.
"I mean, you know. Is this morally right?"
NO.
This is followed by much dancing and yodeling around a golden calf, and a few cancelings at the stake.Replies: @Altai
It looks like they did film the scenes with the white stuntwoman in dark makeup in the end. (But the black stuntwoman would have to had significant light makeup or her skin lightened in post production. Both women had to wear a giant afro wig)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKgcLOOW-3YReplies: @SunBakedSuburb
Dracula turns William Marshall into Blacula. Blacula decamps for LA where he scores a guest-starring role on Star Trek. From Transylvania to the studios of Desilu, Blacula has quite an adventure.
Blakkenstein: in the antebellum American south, a sinister plantation owner tries to create a super slave, by reanimating a composite corpse made from the bodies of African slaves. The Creature is shunned by white society (for its beauty, not ugliness) but finding common cause among his fellow slaves, leads an uprising and an exodus of the liberated slaves to a Pacific island, where they found an advanced technological culture.
Dr. Blackle and Mr. Whyde: an African chemist in Victorian London devises a formula that transforms him into a Caucasian. He finds that high society, formerly closed to him, is welcoming to his alter ego; even Whyde’s criminality is overlooked and excused. At a scientific gathering he dazzles his colleagues with a brilliant lecture as Whyde, but unexpectedly transforms to Blackle before everyone’s eyes, and is shot dead by police, his research burned. Humanity never has a chance to benefit from his cure for cancer.
Xacticla: a refugee from a troubled land, one of the last of his race, immigrates to turn of the century England, to build a new life. He immediately finds himself persecuted by a secret society representing the Anglo-European patriarchy—made up of upper class Britons, a Dane, and a Texan. He’s chased out of the country and driven to death for the “crime” of being unfailingly attractive to English women. But he has his revenge a century later, when the people he has infected with his foreign blood overwhelm the descendants of his persecutors.
Will it sell?Replies: @The Wild Geese Howard, @SunBakedSuburb
“Will it sell?”
Contact Jordan Peele; he’s always looking for white stories to invert.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pushkin
In Brazil, of course many literary authors are black or mixed race. The greatest of them is Machado de Assis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machado_de_Assis
For those who like comics, it may be interesting to learn that Krazy Kat's author George Herriman was also partly black:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_HerrimanReplies: @captflee
Second the motion regarding Machado de Assis! Lord knows, H. Bloom thought the world of him. Largely an autodidact, the output of the man,for the period in which he lived and worked, is stunning.
The eternal question:
I see you posted this on the fourth anniversary of his death. Coincidence?Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Twodees Partain
During the filming of Deadpool 2, there was a scene to be filmed involving Zazie Beetz character on a motorcycle that involved some stunts. Zazie Beetz is a very light-skinned half black (And represented a race-swap of the character she was playing) but there weren't any female motorcycle stuntwomen of any black ancestry the production could find, but that's fine, it happens all the time in Hollywood, many white actors have Asian stunt doubles and vice versa. They got a hold of one of the best stuntwoman in Hollywood, Melissa Stubbs to do the stunt.
Then Ryan Reynolds heard this (I don't know if he had also been party to race-swapping Beetz character in the first place but he was apparently the senior producer) and insisted that they get a black stunt woman. So they thought outside the box and found a pro black female motorcycle racer, Joi Harris. She didn't look very much like Zazie Beetz (Ie, they might have to lighten her skin with a cream or in post production like they'd have to darken the white stunt woman and she'd still have to wear a giant afro wig.) and crucially had no real stunt experience but she was still black and she was used to doing dangerous things on motorcycles for a living, so close enough they thought.
Well the stunt coordinator told Ryan Reynolds that she wasn't up to it since she didn't have the correct experience and that the stunt was too dangerous and she was in unreasonable danger. She failed every time they tried in practice sessions and nearly hurt herself very severely. Reynolds was repeatedly told this by the stunt coordinators and brushed them off each time.
The day comes of the first attempt to shoot the scene and something goes wrong. Joi Harris smashes her head at high speed into a nearby office building's plate glass. She died soon afterward.
So Ryan Reynolds basically killed a black woman on his set by ignoring the safety concerns of his own stunt coordinators and placing an untrained person in mortal danger. That is culpable manslaughter in my books but he faced no sanctions or recriminations and went on merrily promoting his film like nothing happened. Death by diversity.
At the time there was a particularly big push in the media about 'diversity behind the camera'. I don't know if the exact stunt was later filmed with the original stuntwoman or not.
www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/deadpool-2-motorcycle-death-leaves-stunt-community-asking-tough-questions-1030044
I love the 'tough questions'. It's always so complicated with 'diversity'. In the end Reynolds and his wife got into trouble with SJWs for having a wedding at a former Gone With The Wind type plantation.Replies: @El Dato, @Jim Don Bob
Speaking of Ryan Reynolds, I just saw Rhythm Section which stars his wife Blake Lively. She is pretty good, but the movie is 30 minutes too long and ultimately makes no sense.
It had a terrible opening weekend and is projected to lose $30 – 40 million.
https://deadline.com/2020/02/rhythm-section-box-office-bomb-blake-lively-paramount-james-bond-007-1202849211/
It’s not his time. He’s being kept for the one after next: We finish the Transgender Show, then comes Pedophiles R Us then Kim gets his big shot with BeastiFila The Movie,=.
Nnedi Okorafor =I fed on okra, Ron.
Oak Red Roof Inn.https://media.iceportal.com/104817/photos/60170198_XXL.jpgReplies: @Lurker, @Hypnotoad666, @Ragno
Though her books are “selling” via the new methods of simulating popularity with readers – in which blue-haired woke librarians make sure their shelves are stocked with The Author’s book; anyone desirous of breaking into the field has little choice but to buy, read and cheer, not necessarily in that order; ditto those published authors whose own wobbly footing as brand names, and problematic whiteness, require constant ideological loyalty tests; and of course, schoolchldren are simply assigned the books for class (the brighter ones will immediately read the many cues, visual and otherwise, like a phosphorescent breadcrumb trail) – I have yet to encounter anyone who’s actually read one of his own free will, paid for with his own lucre. Or retained anything from the book five minutes after finishing one, if they did.
I left out the final puzzle-piece for the most fortunate Token Wokes…..the add-water-and-mix instant sale to HULU or NETFLIX or (if God is good) HBO, which ends up doing most if not all of the heavy lifting of selling the actual physical books to actual, physical readers (meaning not the presold kind). This is how popular bestsellers which few have read and even fewer like….are now born.
Her hogging of the various sf and fantasy awards, among other SJW scribes, proved to be the last straw for many longtime readers and genre devotees, launching the protest campaigns Sad (later Rabid) Puppies. These took place during this past decade, so there’s no need to recount what the mainstream/shitlib reaction to them was; happily, one result was that almost no one pays attention to the Hugo and Nebula awards any longer.
But it's also about the fact that, when it comes to race, whitey is always wrong.
A black Frankenstein on the book cover? Racist and wrong.
No black Frankenstein on the cover? Also racist and wrong.
The point is that some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.Replies: @black sea, @Prester John, @Anonymous
Bring back Blaxploitation.
Blackenstein
The Blunchblack of Blotre Blame
You know, Black Dracula is now a Congressman!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwFE-bfZjIE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfOpu1eoDpo
You would think that they would have more issues with making the horrible monster that terrorizes the town BLACK, rather than that the book is written by a white writer (Frankenstein).
Even the woke POC are feeling tired of the excesses of woke whites! “Exploiting their images” LOL
Does it make me a bad person that I hope Disney loses 300 million before they close the books on this venture?
And then Roxane Gay could play the part.
Thus, even more rage and demands that works that no one has read replace Shakespeare to make it more difficult to draw this comparison in the future.Replies: @ogunsiron
Except that at some point, people have been lying for so long that no one young remembers what was once true.
We could end up in a world where “everyone knows” that the achievements of Greater Europe were the works of “black folx”.
You nailed it. It’s all about the money. No one batted an eyelid when the rich and powerful actors were getting paid for this garbage.
Edward James Olmos, Rosie Perez, Jimmy Smits, Denzel Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, Margaret Cho, Carlos Mencia, George Takei, Paul Rodriguez, Gladys Knight, Samuel L. Jackson, (((Alan Dershowitz))), Dionne Warwick, Tyra Banks, Sandra Oh….
Those are the people of colour being denied a payche—er…a voice for their lived experiences as coloured persons….
i’d really like Steve to do a deep dive on the way the drag queen story stuff is (partly) about redistributing tax revenue to supremely intersectional freaks. It’s clever.
We’re talking about a different demographic here, A.E.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLghL9V9QTN0jTgA1qrhWrBCB_Ln4xlVlB
“THUG NOTES: Classic Literature. Original Gangster.”
The only thing you’re disrupting is #BlackHistoryMonth and the literary dignity of communities of color,” David Bowles, a Latinx children’s writer and poet, wrote to Barnes and Noble on Twitter. “So disappointed in you.”
David Bowles is busy these days policing the culture:
David Bowles, a Chicano writer and professor, called American Dirt “harmful, appropriating, inaccurate, trauma-porn melodrama” in a withering review. He also took issue with the use of Spanish words in the dialogue, writing, “Actual examples of Spanish are wooden and odd, as if generated by Google Translate and then smoothed slightly by a line editor.”
https://medium.com/@davidbowles/non-mexican-crap-ff3b48a873b5
Please do not talk to yourself in the comments it is embarrasing.
Has Ms. Okorafor heard about Amazon's self-publishing ebook option? Is she also aware that blacks buy approximately 0.1% of the retail books sold in America.Replies: @Redneck farmer, @the one they call Desanex, @SunBakedSuburb, @Antonius
As high as that. Who would have thought that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and all those cerebral talking heads on cnn and msnbc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nNjk4q_FGgReplies: @ben tillman
And I always thought the eternal question was, Dead or Airplane? Speaking of Dan Hicks, I still listen to The Amazing Charlatans, if you can believe it.
I see you posted this on the fourth anniversary of his death. Coincidence?
Crime and Dindu Nuffins
Crime Statistics and No Punishment
Lord of the Blingz
The Great Gatt
Fahrenheit 420
Fahrenheit 1350
East of Oakland
Machiavelli’s The Pimp
The Mugshot of De’Oriean Gray
Where Da Little Women At
The Grape Drank of Wrath
Anaynay Karenin’Dayana
As I Lay Jivin’
The Great Gibsmedat
The Incarceration Rate Also Rises
Othello
To Cap a Muhfuh Bird
Drankula
Alice in Juvenile Detention
Romeo and JuQuanda
Brave New World Star Hip Hop
Blunts of Grass
No need to do the white whale one; you’re all smart and funny.
I noticed that the cover of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic that B&N created looked like Dr. Hindu and Mr. Dindu, and once I thought that, I coughed myself into fits and woke up half the household.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bxOc--RLtAReplies: @Olorin
Blackula
Blackenstein
The Blunchblack of Blotre Blame
You know, Black Dracula is now a Congressman!
I see you posted this on the fourth anniversary of his death. Coincidence?Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Twodees Partain
Airplane. After Bathing at Baxter’s is still an amazing record. I was never able to listen to the Dead no matter how high I was.
I see you posted this on the fourth anniversary of his death. Coincidence?Replies: @Jim Don Bob, @Twodees Partain
Yes, it was a coincidence. Did Dan Hicks die? I didn’t even know he’d been sick.
Why pitchforks?
Did the illustrator even read the book?
I guess the trillions of $ that the US has spent on welfare and "urban renewal" and other stuff in the last 50 years which has made American blacks the richest blacks on earth doesn't count as reparations.Georgetown's sin was apparently selling its slaves for cash. Apparently if they had kept them and worked them to death this would have been OK, but selling them entitles their descendants to reparations according to Woke Logic. I understand that Elizabeth Warren now claims that one of her ancestors was among this group and wants to be included in the gibmedats.Replies: @Achmed E. Newman, @Arclight, @Adam Smith
Same “who got paid” phenomenon, just for teenage girls on Instagram.
White teenage girl steals black teenage girl’s dance. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/style/the-original-renegade.html
S