You are focusing on the wrong thing. Our nation made slaves of human beings for generations, and then, when slavery was abolished, practised viscious discrimination against them. As recently as 100 years ago, thousands of lynchings were taking place. Recent government "welfare"Mprograms helped break uo black families, because the assistance wans't available if there was a man in the home. We also excluded Chinese people from citizenship, and put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.
There may well be elements of workeness that are overdone or seem silly, but we have a very real undone task f dealing with the deep, horrible racisim that has been so promindent in our society and blighted so many lives.
all this is obviously true, and in this essay i am indeed not focusing on racism. whether racism justifies or is in any way addressed by what i am actually focusing on is an open question.
My point is that ongoing racisim and its intergenerational effects is a the real problem. Attacks on "wokeism" to some degree represent avoidence of the real problem. The biggest problem we have is Trumpism, which is product not of wokeism, but of racism.
I read the book reviews and the TV (Showtime) reviews. The author, Amor Towles, wrote a book about a character that is confined in a room at a luxury hotel. The author got the idea from recognizing the same hotel guests year-over-year, at a hotel he stayed at while being employed as an investment consultant, who would travel a great deal for his firm, and return to his same hotel every year for business.
“Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities meeting with clients and prospects. In 2009, while arriving at my hotel in Geneva (for the eighth year in a row), I recognized some of the people lingering in the lobby from the year before. It was as if they had never left. Upstairs in my room, I began playing with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel. Thinking that he should be there by force, rather than by choice, my mind immediately leapt to Russia—where house arrest has existed since the time of the Tsars. In the next few days, I sketched out most of the key events of A Gentleman in Moscow; over the next few years, I built a detailed outline; then in 2013, I retired from my day job and began writing the book.” wrote Towles
The author had a fascination with Russian culture & architecture, and how that if a Russian aristocrat were accused of a crime, they didn’t go to prison, the elite class were sentenced to house arrest in a room in a hotel.
It was a kaleidoscope of the author’s previous curiosity where Towles had seen the same hotel guests while traveling out of town, plus wanting to have the romance of the Russian culture, and going thru multiple edits and rewrites (on his novel) he layered and crafted a story like someone piecing together a quilt.
When asked if any of the characters in the novel were based on real people, author Amor Towles answered,
“None of the novel’s central characters are based on historical figures, or on people that I have known. That said, I have pick-pocketed my own life for loose change to include in the book.”
The author admitted that he didn’t do extensive research the historical details. One book review said “A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything. There's fantastical romance, politics, espionage, parenthood, and poetry.”
Towle’s book fans aren’t distracted by the voice accents or ethnic diversity, because it’s a romantic thriller to them, and the audio/visual is in the reader’s imagination.
According to IMDB, the Showtime TV Mini Series (8 episodes: 55-minutes each) has a TV-14 rating, and the Series Casting crew of Julie Harkin & Nathan Toth both haven’t had very many projects with high reviews.
In reading the various movie reviews of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ people either loved the romance, the costumes, the actors and the cinematography, or they hated it.
An estimable tenet of liberalism is equality of opportunity. Best person should get the job. Equality of outcome is a deplorable tenet of "woke" and clearly (and dementedly) incompatible with "true colo(u)rblindness".
I agree with this, as a liberal, but I concede a little to progressivism in that the uneven playing field has so severely disadvantaged so many as to perhaps need some corrective mechanism. Defining 'the best person' without ANY regard to this seems wrong, and will certainly amplify charges that the system is somehow rigged. Indeed, the ignoring of this problem is what led to the progressive overreach which now threatens to drown us all in a reactionary backlash.
Why is this casting labeled a “liberal dream”. Do you know for a fact if those who selected the actors were all “liberal” or what motivated them to cast who they casted in these roles? My assumption is just because the black actors were casts, then the writer assumes the reason could only be because of someone being “liberal” or worse yet “woke” which right-wingers love to denigrate as a conspiracy to make them more aware of prejudice and discrimination which they oppose.
No, Morris, I just mean that one might muse about whether it aligns with the liberal dream -- utopian perhaps -- of true colorblindness, where one would no more notice race than height or hair color or anything else irrelevant. Of course you're right that conservatives conflate wokeness with liberalism to scare centrists and independents into their camp. Quite effectively, I might add.
I think the concept of being awake to deeply ingrained biases that are part of the warp and weft of this country is a good thing. Remedying the impacts of racism, sexism, classism both historical and current is right and necessary. I’m just not sure revising history and historical fiction actually contributes to that.
I loved Hamilton, I think because it felt transformative, and it made me think about the founding of the US in a different, more immediate way. But I also remember seeing the touring company in San Francisco, and hearing a kid in back of me ask his mom if people were really had Afros back then. I wondered if there might eventually be a generation of kids who thought the portrayals were racially accurate. And I didn’t want white American to get a pass for their actual racism.
Bridgerton doesn’t feel transformative to me- it feels diversity-washed. The foundation of most romances set in the Regency is the the rigid class structure and the wholesale fantasy that marriage among the well born was romantic instead of transactional, and that women were free to choose their partners and their life paths. To insert yet more fantasy with fake diversity is beyond my brain’s ability to contort itself. Again, I don’t like that a time that basically sucked for most of the population is suddenly both decency and diversity-washed.
I’d much rather see new stories where the societies are organically diverse. There were screams of outrage from obsessed fans over diversifying the characters in Rings of Power, but having an ethnically diverse cast doesn’t alter the story. Maybe that’s because we haven’t read the history of Numenor or the Southlands and found foundational racism in every element, so there’s no reason to surprised by black dwarves or elves. No matter where Tolkien drew his inspiration, Middle earth requires our participation to exist and take form, and we can do that however works for us.
I want my history to be as honest as possible and I guess I want my historical fiction to be as well. The past comes with a lot of human ugliness. That ugliness has directly influenced our lives today. Erasing some of it won’t help us create a better reality, it will only blur our understanding of why we need to.
Everyone is missing the most important point: you are creating a history where people of color had privilege.
Many shows now, for example, are remaking history in England where black and brown people appear as living proof that those societies were more fair than they actually were. In fact, the great wealth of Britain during its most storied time as an empire came from--among others--black slaves on sugar plantations.
This isn't just a matter of inaccuracy; it's immoral to paint a false record of history. The justification for the civil rights movement itself is based on the cruelty of history. Do you want to undermine that? How about showing the Jim Crow South as a place where young, black men were welcome to date white girls--instead of being lynched by the white girl's friends and neighbors?
If you want to give people of color jobs as actors, how about making films that are appropriate to their history? There are great stories out there--from every continent.
I'm grateful for this column and bringing the issue to light. I hope more and more people begin to talk about it, but not as "woke"--as the integrity of real, lived history that deserves to be handed down accurately.
You are focusing on the wrong thing. Our nation made slaves of human beings for generations, and then, when slavery was abolished, practised viscious discrimination against them. As recently as 100 years ago, thousands of lynchings were taking place. Recent government "welfare"Mprograms helped break uo black families, because the assistance wans't available if there was a man in the home. We also excluded Chinese people from citizenship, and put Japanese Americans in concentration camps.
There may well be elements of workeness that are overdone or seem silly, but we have a very real undone task f dealing with the deep, horrible racisim that has been so promindent in our society and blighted so many lives.
all this is obviously true, and in this essay i am indeed not focusing on racism. whether racism justifies or is in any way addressed by what i am actually focusing on is an open question.
My point is that ongoing racisim and its intergenerational effects is a the real problem. Attacks on "wokeism" to some degree represent avoidence of the real problem. The biggest problem we have is Trumpism, which is product not of wokeism, but of racism.
I read the book reviews and the TV (Showtime) reviews. The author, Amor Towles, wrote a book about a character that is confined in a room at a luxury hotel. The author got the idea from recognizing the same hotel guests year-over-year, at a hotel he stayed at while being employed as an investment consultant, who would travel a great deal for his firm, and return to his same hotel every year for business.
“Every year, I would spend weeks at a time in the hotels of distant cities meeting with clients and prospects. In 2009, while arriving at my hotel in Geneva (for the eighth year in a row), I recognized some of the people lingering in the lobby from the year before. It was as if they had never left. Upstairs in my room, I began playing with the idea of a novel in which a man is stuck in a grand hotel. Thinking that he should be there by force, rather than by choice, my mind immediately leapt to Russia—where house arrest has existed since the time of the Tsars. In the next few days, I sketched out most of the key events of A Gentleman in Moscow; over the next few years, I built a detailed outline; then in 2013, I retired from my day job and began writing the book.” wrote Towles
The author had a fascination with Russian culture & architecture, and how that if a Russian aristocrat were accused of a crime, they didn’t go to prison, the elite class were sentenced to house arrest in a room in a hotel.
It was a kaleidoscope of the author’s previous curiosity where Towles had seen the same hotel guests while traveling out of town, plus wanting to have the romance of the Russian culture, and going thru multiple edits and rewrites (on his novel) he layered and crafted a story like someone piecing together a quilt.
When asked if any of the characters in the novel were based on real people, author Amor Towles answered,
“None of the novel’s central characters are based on historical figures, or on people that I have known. That said, I have pick-pocketed my own life for loose change to include in the book.”
The author admitted that he didn’t do extensive research the historical details. One book review said “A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything. There's fantastical romance, politics, espionage, parenthood, and poetry.”
Towle’s book fans aren’t distracted by the voice accents or ethnic diversity, because it’s a romantic thriller to them, and the audio/visual is in the reader’s imagination.
According to IMDB, the Showtime TV Mini Series (8 episodes: 55-minutes each) has a TV-14 rating, and the Series Casting crew of Julie Harkin & Nathan Toth both haven’t had very many projects with high reviews.
In reading the various movie reviews of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ people either loved the romance, the costumes, the actors and the cinematography, or they hated it.
Source: Amor Towles
https://search.app/2mUbpj83GiSBj8wT8
An estimable tenet of liberalism is equality of opportunity. Best person should get the job. Equality of outcome is a deplorable tenet of "woke" and clearly (and dementedly) incompatible with "true colo(u)rblindness".
I agree with this, as a liberal, but I concede a little to progressivism in that the uneven playing field has so severely disadvantaged so many as to perhaps need some corrective mechanism. Defining 'the best person' without ANY regard to this seems wrong, and will certainly amplify charges that the system is somehow rigged. Indeed, the ignoring of this problem is what led to the progressive overreach which now threatens to drown us all in a reactionary backlash.
Why is this casting labeled a “liberal dream”. Do you know for a fact if those who selected the actors were all “liberal” or what motivated them to cast who they casted in these roles? My assumption is just because the black actors were casts, then the writer assumes the reason could only be because of someone being “liberal” or worse yet “woke” which right-wingers love to denigrate as a conspiracy to make them more aware of prejudice and discrimination which they oppose.
No, Morris, I just mean that one might muse about whether it aligns with the liberal dream -- utopian perhaps -- of true colorblindness, where one would no more notice race than height or hair color or anything else irrelevant. Of course you're right that conservatives conflate wokeness with liberalism to scare centrists and independents into their camp. Quite effectively, I might add.
I have the same experience watching these shows
I think the concept of being awake to deeply ingrained biases that are part of the warp and weft of this country is a good thing. Remedying the impacts of racism, sexism, classism both historical and current is right and necessary. I’m just not sure revising history and historical fiction actually contributes to that.
I loved Hamilton, I think because it felt transformative, and it made me think about the founding of the US in a different, more immediate way. But I also remember seeing the touring company in San Francisco, and hearing a kid in back of me ask his mom if people were really had Afros back then. I wondered if there might eventually be a generation of kids who thought the portrayals were racially accurate. And I didn’t want white American to get a pass for their actual racism.
Bridgerton doesn’t feel transformative to me- it feels diversity-washed. The foundation of most romances set in the Regency is the the rigid class structure and the wholesale fantasy that marriage among the well born was romantic instead of transactional, and that women were free to choose their partners and their life paths. To insert yet more fantasy with fake diversity is beyond my brain’s ability to contort itself. Again, I don’t like that a time that basically sucked for most of the population is suddenly both decency and diversity-washed.
I’d much rather see new stories where the societies are organically diverse. There were screams of outrage from obsessed fans over diversifying the characters in Rings of Power, but having an ethnically diverse cast doesn’t alter the story. Maybe that’s because we haven’t read the history of Numenor or the Southlands and found foundational racism in every element, so there’s no reason to surprised by black dwarves or elves. No matter where Tolkien drew his inspiration, Middle earth requires our participation to exist and take form, and we can do that however works for us.
I want my history to be as honest as possible and I guess I want my historical fiction to be as well. The past comes with a lot of human ugliness. That ugliness has directly influenced our lives today. Erasing some of it won’t help us create a better reality, it will only blur our understanding of why we need to.
Wow. There are so many more important things in life than pulling apart the race and gender of actors in movies, in my opinion.
Everyone is missing the most important point: you are creating a history where people of color had privilege.
Many shows now, for example, are remaking history in England where black and brown people appear as living proof that those societies were more fair than they actually were. In fact, the great wealth of Britain during its most storied time as an empire came from--among others--black slaves on sugar plantations.
This isn't just a matter of inaccuracy; it's immoral to paint a false record of history. The justification for the civil rights movement itself is based on the cruelty of history. Do you want to undermine that? How about showing the Jim Crow South as a place where young, black men were welcome to date white girls--instead of being lynched by the white girl's friends and neighbors?
If you want to give people of color jobs as actors, how about making films that are appropriate to their history? There are great stories out there--from every continent.
I'm grateful for this column and bringing the issue to light. I hope more and more people begin to talk about it, but not as "woke"--as the integrity of real, lived history that deserves to be handed down accurately.