representation.

I have mentioned the humbling and rewarding experience of watching Black Panther become a box office success. I devoured images of people taking the opportunity to embrace aspects of their culture as it is portrayed in this movie and bringing out what they do know about their own culture. But there are other aspects of this movie that make its existence more powerful than other places Black people have been represented in the entertainment realm. That space is what I will explore in this essay.

I am a fan of Wong Fu Productions, a YouTube channel. They make interesting film series about their way of interacting with American culture. Or moreover, it shows how the members of Asian cultures have been integrated into Western society. I enjoy the level of blank slate opportunities that this culture is awarded as most of them choose to come to this country on their own steam. For Black society, we have a unique problem of being used as tools to create this country and needing to change the way the majority view us in the first place.

I think I mentioned how an ex enjoyed Blackploitaion movies and how they made me uncomfortable. But I valued her position on watching them. Most of these movies have a pimp and whore dynamic instead of showing Black people as struggling individuals striving in a family environment. These movies portray my culture's seedy underbelly. And enforce an idea that all Black people offer each other is seediness thus should not be trusted. I abhor that imagery.

My tsunami, being a member of the Asian culture, informed me that he acknowledges the barriers broken in by members of my culture and how he stands in solidarity of it. He knows that he has a unique privilege in the minority experience in America and uses his position to enhance both the culture that paved it and his own culture’s advancements. I love that aspect of him and what holding that stance reveals about him and others in his culture that feel the same way. Individuals that acknowledge that know they share what I tend to think is the Jewish experience- to be Jewish in America is okay as long as you don’t show it. Once you make that distinction, be prepared for racial attacks from bigoted people. But on the other hand, since Jewish people have European skin tones, they get to pass under the White umbrella in most of the systems that America is built on.

It is becoming apart of American anecdotes that we are a country where racism is the norm. We as a nation give people free speech and that includes hate speech in some capacity. And on one hand, I understand this as in order to value the light, one needs to understand the darkness. And there is no one way to look at or perceive a healthy society that meets everyone’s standards of society. But these privileged cultures know that their ease of access is built on fickle foundations of perceived ease. Much like the internment camps of the Japanese Americans or the 9/11 attacks to turn most Americans against anyone in a turban, all it will take is one act for the majority to turn on them. It is the same kind of self-reflection within the majority cultures that their own positions of power are in effect thin should the majorities band together and topple them. Alas, racism stops us from doing a healthy amount of that.

I could go on but more examples are not needed to drive my point home.