People will sometimes complain that PoC are not adequately represented or positively-represented in Western media, but has anyone pointed out the degree to which PoC are actually overrepresented in positive portrayals in Western media compared to the way they actually behave in real life? Or the degree to which most White people in the West have a completely unwarranted out-group preference towards People of Colour as a result of this continual cultural reinforcement of biases?
I don't want to blogpost, but as an example I was recently forced to watch the film Scream 7 with my girlfriend after not having watched any Hollywood slop in a while (because women love their horrorslop and scream queens), and it reminded me of how ridiculously on-the-nose everything that Western mass media seems to produce is on the topic of race. On top of the shitty tryhard "current" AI plotpoint, it portrays White people in the worst possible light. Every time a White person appears on the screen, they are either stupid, creepy, impotent, self-absorbed or downright crazy (often multiple). White families are almost all dysfunctional, with White women killing their husbands for being "abusive" and then killing their own kids like a suburban soccer mom version of Kronos. The only exception is the MC and her daughter, who are portrayed as girlbosses, because White people are bad but White women are girlbosses who will lead us out of Whiteness into the promised "rainbow coalition" land of racial harmony where we can all sing Kumbuya. The movie's cast is surprisingly White, which I guess shouldn't be surprising since the all of the killers in the Scream franchise are White, and also because horror as a genre is implicitly White in a sense, but there are 3 very visible PoC (in addition to the MC's husband being a White Hispanic police chief, but he's White-passing enough the audience will mostly miss it). Of these PoC characters one is a nerdy, shy alt Black girl who is into a goofy weird nerdy White guy (who gets killed by his own mother for being "too similar to his father"), and two others are Mulatto junior reporters who are not only vastly more competent than the megalomaniacal ambulance-chasing White reporters they work for, but who also constantly make witty takes about how they "are the future."
My girlfriend isn't racist at all and doesn't see the constant on-the-nose racial propaganda, but even she didn't enjoy the movie. Why? It just wasn't very good. I saw other people call the whole Scream franchise tired. One bad thing about having a media apparatus which pretty much only exists to shit out propaganda and curate popular taste according to some agenda is that it enormously hampers human creativity. It isn't just a racial agenda that controls what people can and can't do while making movies - you also can't criticise Israel.
Two Latinas actually got booted off the project to create Scream 7, Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, because Barrera made a post on Twitter standing in solidarity with Palestinian Civilians. This is because Scream 7 was produced by
Spyglass Media Group, which has two Jewish founders (Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum) who came from the Weinstein company (LOL), and
Paramount Pictures, whose co-CEOs are both Jewish (Josh Greenstein and Dana Glowberg), was co-founded by two Eastern European Jews and a White guy and which is due to be chaired by David Ellison, the son of Jewish Larry Ellison who
bought out part of TikTok to force the platform to engage in pro-Israel censorship. American movies suck because American corporate media is stuck in a bizarre culture limbo in which Whites in the West have to be demeaned and shown to be less competent than PoC, while support also has to be given to a genocidal settler state killing PoC in the Middle East (Israel). With an ideological programme this fucked up and disjointed, it's no surprise that Hollywood is forced to reuse intellectual property from over 20 years ago with uncompelling acting and stupid gimmicks to get people to turn up to the box office out of nostalgia. You can pick up any basic art hoe Penguin classic from your local bookstore and get a much more gripping, compelling and entertaining window into the human soul than anything current-year Hollywood is capable of putting out.
To the point, though: the way PoC are represented in Western film is not at all the way the average PoC acts in real life. Firstly, the average African-American or not actually some witty genius spitting out articulate gotchas at comically-stupid White people. In fact, about half of Black high school graduates in the US
are functionally illiterate and innumerate. This is worst in the inner cities, where
for example in Baltimore 77% of high school kids read at an elementary level, and still more read at a kindergarten level. The richest Black families have children who score about as low on SATs as the absolute poorest (sub-$10,000 p/a family income) Whites. They are not, in fact, a superbly-capable group kept down by bumbling and racist White people.
You are also not likely that likely to be murdered by a crazy White person in a Scream mask. FBI crime statistics on homicides by race have become a meme -
in 2019 blacks were 11.4 times more likely to perpetrate interracial homicides in much of America, and despite being like 13% of the population they commit about half of violent crimes, but did you know that
they haven't even given us a full picture of inner-city crime for years now?
One wonders the extent to which this is intentionally obstructing the release of bad-optics data,
much like the US Bureau of Labour Statistics under Trump continually puts out completely bogus job-creation stats which are revised into the negatives by the time they leave the public's attention. My guess is the Biden administration in 2020 deciding to classify most Hispanics as mixed-race rather than White probably had something to do with it. Another downside of living under a regime which prioritises political correctness and saving face above all else is that public statistics almost-invariably become totally useless. America will see late Soviet Union-style problems from this if the current trajectory continues (which it will).
Despite all this bullshit,
White liberals are the only major racial-political group in the USA to perceive other races as being warmer, more trustworthy than Whites.
White conservatives also have weaker in-group bias than any Non-White group in America. This bias also extends to White liberal countries in the USA's orbit, such as Australia, where
voters rank literal dark-skinned Aborigines as being more trustworthy and competent than Whites. If you know anything about Australian Aborigines, I'll let that sink in for a minute.