01/27/2016
Steve Sailer’s TakiMag column The Oscar Grouches deals the the racial resentments and feelings of entitlement behind the #OscarsSoWhite phenomenon.
For one thing, this is between whites and blacks — "no Hispanic actor or actress born in the 50 states has been nominated for anything since 1993, but virtually nobody has noticed. The last American-born actor or actress of more than half East Asian descent was Pat Morita in 1984’s The Karate Kid."
Blacks have been actually winning in more or less their exact proportion of the population, the problem being that most people don’t understand statistics or probability.
From 1985 onward, blacks have been well represented among the four acting categories, with twelve of the last 124 winners and 46 of the last 620 acting nominations going to blacks. (Blacks winning twelve statues in 46 nominations is slightly more than the expected nine victories, but the sample size is too small to worry about.)
We don’t have the "color-blind" society that reformers hoped for during the Civil Rights era — everybody is more conscious of race than before — but there’s one group you're safe in criticizing:
To cover up this trend toward racialism, the one group you are allowed to criticize — whites — is demonized ever more vociferously for its racism — past, present, or imaginary.For instance, black director Spike Lee is denouncing the Academy Awards for being “lily white.” Granted, when it comes to being ethnocentric, Spike is slightly to the right of Shaka Zulu. But he’s racist against whites, so that makes Spike a hero. In 2016, principles don’t matter; just whose side you’re on.
One pragmatic question is whether it’s best to permit one’s group to be defamed without career retaliation. Personally, I’m in favor of free expression, the more the better.
But recall what happened to Spike the one time he let slip that his widely admired animosity toward whites is actually focused heavily on Jewish whites. His 1990 movie starring Denzel Washington as a jazz musician, Mo’ Better Blues, featured John and Nicholas Turturro as Moe and Josh Flatbush, stereotypical Jewish entertainment managers who exploit black talent. Spike was thumped hard in The New York Times, forcing him to reply at length in an op-ed under the I’ve-stopped-beating-my-wife headline: “I Am Not an Anti-Semite.” His previously fabulous career tailed off. His 1992 Malcolm X, the kind of well-crafted, socially conscious epic biopic typically showered with Academy Award nominations, didn’t earn Spike the expected Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay nominations, and most of his feature movies since then have been a mess.
A quarter of a century later, Spike has learned a valuable lesson: You can’t get in trouble for anti-whitism because it isn’t even a word.
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