I'm attending the Comic Con tour at Sacramento. It's all very nerdy and kind of over the top to me. Josh is having fun, though, so I guess it's worth it.
I went to the film festival that showcases local filmmakers and their films. They had a special panel by a professor and two of her students from Sac State. The professor discussed Star Trek and its multi-racial characters since she, the professor, was biracial. One of the students analyzed the recent Black Panther (2011) animated series from the standpoint of how inferior black males are usually portrayed in media. The other student looked at the first two Alien movies and how they blended gender, 'queer' gender roles.
Of course, the first two talks were much more interesting to me than the latter. Yet it got me to thinking. In the Black Panther series, they gave a new history for a subset of blacks. One that didn't involve poverty or slavery or oppression. On the other hand, in the Star Trek series, blacks weren't given a new identity. They were just kind of had the same backgrounds as we've had for years and years or had the same culture as whites. No attempt was made to give them a different ethnic background. They didn't have a distinct culture from other humans.
The aliens on the hand were very diverse and kind of stood in for different ethnicities. It's still disappointing that blacks couldn't have their own culture to be celebrated just as the multitude of aliens did.
I went to the film festival that showcases local filmmakers and their films. They had a special panel by a professor and two of her students from Sac State. The professor discussed Star Trek and its multi-racial characters since she, the professor, was biracial. One of the students analyzed the recent Black Panther (2011) animated series from the standpoint of how inferior black males are usually portrayed in media. The other student looked at the first two Alien movies and how they blended gender, 'queer' gender roles.
Of course, the first two talks were much more interesting to me than the latter. Yet it got me to thinking. In the Black Panther series, they gave a new history for a subset of blacks. One that didn't involve poverty or slavery or oppression. On the other hand, in the Star Trek series, blacks weren't given a new identity. They were just kind of had the same backgrounds as we've had for years and years or had the same culture as whites. No attempt was made to give them a different ethnic background. They didn't have a distinct culture from other humans.
The aliens on the hand were very diverse and kind of stood in for different ethnicities. It's still disappointing that blacks couldn't have their own culture to be celebrated just as the multitude of aliens did.
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