if sinners (2025) taught me anything, it's that it IS actually always about race.

you can be oppressed, and still promote and maintain the very same systems of oppression onto other marginalized people. being oppressed in one dimension doesn't allow you to be exempt from oppressing in other dimensions. the "villain" of the movie, remmick, being from the time period of the english colonization of ireland, all the while wanting to take a piece of sammie's own culture from him, use him for it. and this plot point coming after remmick witnesses the significance of sammie's playing within his culture, for his ancestors and how it would shape Black culture in the future.

even in today's society, ive noticed that people treat Black people like a commodity. our worth is only as much as other people decide it to be, and that's usually dependent on how much the oppressor can take from us. for example, the controversy of"internet slang" and how it is blatantly just AAVE with a bad disguise on

do you listen to Black musicians? do you watch Black movies? do you engage with Black creators? do you defend the racist tendencies you notice in your friends, in your family, or do you stay silent? do you listen when Black people tell you you've said or done something racist? do you actually care about not being racist, or do you just not want to look like you're racist?

i just think people have a very specific take on what racism is, and that if they're not committing KKK-levels of violence on people, then they're not racist. or if you've experienced oppression in one form, you cannot possibly be engaging with oppression in another form. but the ways in which we interact with other people and the world will always be through the lens of race, because that is simply what it means for oppression to be systemic, especially in the US and our current political climate

anyway 10/10 movie. highly recommend

This whole thread by Dr. Pande ("Squee from the Margins") is on point, and it doesn't let anyone off. It's not just other corners of the fandom, as much as people love to say that they never see racism so they must be doing something right. If you never see it, you probably don't see it when it happens.

Click for the thread.

Context: There is a big Tweet going around that appears to be a pro-Finn tweet. I almost clicked like, then I looked at the thread. The point of the post was -- "DLF is accusing the fandom that wanted Finn to be the lead in the Sequel Trilogy of racism!?"

FALSE.

The StarWars twitter said don't be racist about Reva in the Kenobi series. A lot of fans took that personally, which is a tell. Hit dogs holler, etc.

Don't use Finn as a deflection. The SW fandom has been fucking horrible about Finn since 2014.

Tennis has got to be the most racist sport.

The French Open (derogatory) is the cesspool of tennis anyway, but the officials really fucking hate Black women and are constantly platformed for being sexist, racist, and perpetuating misogynoir.

In 2018 President Bernard Giudicelli of the French Open banned Serena Williams’s medical suit that was custom designed & inspired by Black Panther to prevent the blood clots that almost killed her during her pregnancy due to a pulmonary embolism. He claimed it was “disrespectful” to tennis and “went too far.” (It wasn’t at all, and tons of people pointed out the white players who wore suits just like it with no bans in the past.) Pure racism, misogynoir & body shaming.

A couple days ago, Naomi Osaka received a $15,000 fine because she refused to speak to the French Open press to preserve her mental health. She said she won’t do interviews or press conferences because the French Open and many similar tournaments have zero regard for the player’s mental health.

Naomi is only 23 years old and has been asked degrading questions about her BLM and Stop Asian Hate activism and encouraged to start drama with Serena Williams, who is her idol. She has more than enough reason to not engage with the press for mental health reasons, but she has plenty of history proving that those media interactions are often racist and very damaging to her.

Here is her Twitter post talking about it if you wanna stop by and give her some love and support. What they are allowed to do to specifically Black women is truly disgusting!!

And this kind of problematic portrayals of Asian women is still happening in 21st century in Western Media/Hollywood.

Think of

This is just a small list off the top of my head of an already small list of Asian female characters that exist in Western Media being brutally killed off or sexually assaulted (sometimes both) on screen in the recent years.

See also these:

For those of you who have heard or read my rants about how shitty and politics based the entertainment industry is, it’s no surprise for you to see me say that this is exactly the kinda shit you can always expect to hear about years after in this cult like industry. This is why I no longer make the effort to go into the theater every time a new movie I want to see is released. It’s why I wait until I can see it for free or get it after it leaves the box office. It’s why I no longer buy ancillary merchandise. It is why I take giant dumps on franchise lines and major productions that shell out multiple movies as fast as they can to keep a trend going as long as possible while holding a complete monopoly on that genre of film. I will continue to give as little of my money as possible to these studios who literally force talented individuals to shell out yearly elitist priced dues to just have a CHANCE to work a shitty role on a d list film in a terrible work environment.

You want to support a better alternative to big Hollywood studios? Check out legion M started by Kevin Smith. No the man isn’t perfect but he saw how shit Hollywood was and the blacklists and the total bullshit and decided he didn’t need them anymore.

You can also look for films made by Terrance Zdunich and Daren Bousman who work within the union but don’t mingle with Hollywood big wigs thanks to being out and out rejected by them.

Seriously. Enough making these assholes rich. Support indie films.

So, let me get this straight, you saw a post made in the wake of the Atlanta Spa Shootings, in the midst of anti-Asian hate crimes, the post about racialized misogyny that Asian women face daily... and decided that this is a great post to hop onto to promote your fave white guys in the industry? 

i don’t know how to tell you people that you should care about racism not because you’re invested in media created by people of color but because you care about people of color period

And this kind of problematic portrayals of Asian women is still happening in 21st century in Western Media/Hollywood.

Think of

This is just a small list off the top of my head of an already small list of Asian female characters that exist in Western Media being brutally killed off or sexually assaulted (sometimes both) on screen in the recent years.

See also these:

(via Сhristine Liwag Dixon on Twitter @ cmliwagdixon)

logging onto twitter dot com and this is one of the first trending headlines i see.

like... as someone who has followed katie’s career and of course been drawn to cho chang’s character for the last decade and a half, this isn’t news to me at all. katie got so much hate by fans for just being harry potter’s love interest. imagine how much that hate blew up when the movie version of ootp made her out to be the one that snitched on dumbledore’s army. i’m glad that katie was on a podcast where she felt comfortable enough to openly share her experience and i hope that her doing so is an indication that she hasn’t internalized the abuse and the trash people were writing about and toward her.

anyway, katie leung deserved and still deserves so much better than studios and publicists willing to feed her to the wolves and gaslight her to keep their own image clean! she deserved and still deserves so much better than racist and misogynistic hp fans who also somehow haven’t learned to distinguish a character from the actor!!

(here’s the variety article)

I would also add that white girls and young white women in the online fandom were the ones who hated Katie/Cho the most. I don’t even care about the HP franchise, but  I still see grown up, adult white women from the HP fandom hating on Cho in the unrelated to HP fandom tags. 

John Boyega went from thinking he wouldn't have a career after fighting racism to a Golden Globe Winner

I've talked on what happened with John Boyega and Disney Lucasfilm a lot. Maybe because even for myself, I'm not over it either, but because I want to make sure everyone knows this story. They know what happened. It's why I've basically dedicated most of my Tumblr, YouTube Channel, and Twitter to talking about this.

This may be the last time though just because unless more comes out publicly, I think there's not much else I can say on this and I'd like to start covering what happening with Ray Fisher at Warner Bros

But one last time, let me explain what happened with John Boyega and how a this Golden Globe win something so earned and proof that being a good man who fights for what's right and a great actor who never stops, is what has given John the career he deserves.

Back in 2014, it was announced that John Boyega would be the male lead of the Sequel Trilogy

John Boyega had been announced as the male lead of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy after the IP had been purchased by Disney. The casting process was a hard one for John Boyega since Disney Lucasfilm wanted to cast a white actor, but JJ Abrams had fought against Disney Lucasfilm and after 8 different auditions, John was finally cast as Finn. A big part of what got John the role, beyond his powerhouse acting chops and JJ Abrams fighting for him, was that his chemistry test with Daisy Ridley, the actress that been chosen to pay Rey, had been the only one that Daisy herself had liked. Daisy, being cast after her first audition. Meanwhile Adam Driver, who would go on to play the sequel trilogy's antagonist had been hand picked by Kathleen Kennedy.

Some time later, the marketing for the first film in the Sequel Trilogy, The Force Awakens (2015) had started and well the internet reacted as well as you'd think it would back in the mid 2010's

Despite the racial backlash and a call to boycott, The Force Awakens broke all box office records and to this day, still holds the record for highest grossing film in North America of all time.

Sadly though, Disney Lucasfilm chose to go a different direction...a direction that sidelined him.

The TLDR being he was Black and they didn't want a Black male lead.

For more detailed breakdowns, here are two different videos I made on the subject.

This one is 40 mins and its a detailed breakdown of John Boyega's experiences throughout the sequels.

But if you want a shorter breakdown that just covers why he was sidelined and how it damaged his character, here's a shorter 23 min video

From John Boyega's own words, Disney Lucasfilm based his experience in Star Wars off of his race and at the time of the second film in the ST, The Last Jedi (2017) it was a re-ordered character hierarchy that saw John now pushed into a supporting character role.

The trilogy ended, with a wet flop, as we all know. Months of re-shoots re-writes from Disney Lucasfilm had turned the final film, The Rise of Skywalker (2019) into a studio mess that saw John Boyega once again on the short end of the stick.

In the next following months, John Boyega would speak out against many of the creative choices made in the sequels, something that got him LOTS of backlash by angry Star Wars fans that were calling for his career to be over and him to be canceled. John responded with a video pushing back against them.

Then later in 2020, John Boyega went out to take a stand against Police brutality and systematic racism during the Black Lives Matter Protests

John would later in the year of 2020 go on to speak with GQ and speak out against Disney Lucasfilm's racist treatment of not just him, but of how badly they treated fellow co-stars Kelly Marie Tran, Naomi Ackie, and Oscar Isaac. Further proving that it was the lives of others, other POC of color like himself, that John was fighting for.

It was during all this that John Boyega had lamented that his career could likely be over after all this. He had taken a stand against racism on two fronts, Disney, who own a good deal of the entertainment industry, and police brutality. For a Black man in the film industry, this fear is honestly a real one.

But fate has a funny way of rewarding the noble and kind hearted folks of the world. Not always, we all know that's not always the case, but for once, it was. John Boyega didn't lose his career. In fact, many saw his fighting spirit and saw his bravery, saw that he wasn't going to lay down and let anyone suffer if he could fight.

The year is 2021 now and John Boyega has won the Golden Globe for his role in Small Axe, a story that ironically touches on racism and police corruption.

Its been an interesting journey for John Boyega. From a kid being able to live his dreams and be cast in Star Wars to a man fighting against racial injustice both in the world and in the entertainment industry, John's story is one for history books of our generation.

Whatever future John Boyega has in this world, I truly wish him the best and I'm thankful that someone like him exists to be a role model for so many people, regardless of where they come from or what they look like.

Native American protest is an element of film history that has largely been ignored by film historians, even though racist depictions were consistently called out by Indigenous activists since 1911.

I finally sat down and finished what I set out to do months ago and wrote an article on how white fandom has misused and abused the term “coding” to suggest their favorite white characters are meant to be seen as people of color.

Trigger Warnings: Racism, a little bit of fatphobia, and some ableism (in the screenshots).

Not to hop onto a topic unneededly, and if this is too much lmk and I’ll delete it, but imo one player in this weird weird fannish blame-shifting must be that (mostly American) white English-speakers who these kinds of films are made by and for, and who often manage to dominate fandom trends,

have no cultural context for different white cultures interacting with each other in a hostile, oppressive, warring or financially imbalanced way. (This is not to say ‘European fans have no racism’ I hope it’s clear I’m talking about a different thing here.)

The average 'kylo is poc-coded’ white USAmerican must think that family issues, emotional constipation, anger and warfare are only conflicts that 'people of colour’ (as some sort of multicultural monoculture umbrella) have and could ever face? I don’t understand how else those features would make him, in their eyes, represent the experience of a person of colour.

The average 'loki is poc coded’ white USAmerican must have no context of white peoples warring, loathing, or conquering their white, culturally similar neighbours without a thought of race, because that doesn’t fit the US history’s racial narratives - so anyone just 'different’ becomes 'poc different’.

And I’m not saying it’s an excuse - what’s going on in the tweets the article quotes is genuinely baffling and gross. Or that conflicts, wars and oppressive rule between, say if we go a Thor-adjacent route, Denmark over Iceland and Norway, or Sweden and Russia both over Finland and Estonia, is comparable to black American slavery or indigenous American experiences.

But that’s exactly the kind of understood difference that is missing from the fandom wank described in the article.

(And that’s much of what the article portrays very clearly, just maybe not going into speculating on the whys in the same words.)

Nope. Not comparable. Not in any way or form. Slavery and genocide of indigenous people is ENTIRELY different topic and should not be compared to ethnic discriminations / national wars and xenophobic oppressions within one race. I’m not an American, so I’m well aware of the xenophobic ethnic wars etc. happening between European countries and nations through centuries. The history is horrible, and no one is downplaying that. 

That being said, there are much deeper levels of dehumanization on which slavery of Black Americans and the genocide of indigenous people (not just in America, but also in Australia, New Zealand) operated on. White Europeans, who love to hop onto posts about racism and imply that racism is only the US problem, by bringing out the history of their own countries the ethnic wars/oppressions etc., don’t understand the difference between racism and nationalism/ ethnic xenophobia.

If someone wants to talk about ethnic discrimination in Europe they should do it, but not by hopping onto a post about racism.

UPD: Seems like there’s been a misunderstanding of  @pieniharmaakani words. 

The rest of the point still stands though.