All three blogs are available. http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/. Does anyone know if any statistics (cited everywhere) are available that compare foreign born blacks to American born, North Africans to sub-Saharan or Native born Hispanics, DACA students and legally admitted students from Central and South America? Also, with the focus now on legacy students, does this include children of lower level elite university employees?
I purposely did not include Asians, Pacific Islanders, Pacific Rim, Middle Easterners, etc as apparently they don't need preferential treatment. And everyone ignores Native Americans.
Affirmative action at colleges is of a piece with the ongoing saga of race relationships in America. I just posted "Othello in Blackface" which focuses on the Hollywood version of the phenomenon.
At what point did art criticism become more about Rousseau than about Rembrandt? That’s a rhetorical question: artists, and those who write about art have long tended toward a left of center bent, but of late much of what passes for criticism does not seem to be about the art at all, or at least not about art as an end in itself or of its structural relationships or how it achieves an emotional effect, but more about what it signifies in terms of a defined version of social consciousness and to what extent art furthers the ultimate triumph of societal perfection.
I came across a piece in the New York Times: ‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and the Problem With Colorblind Casting, by Maya Phillips, July 8, 2020. Now perhaps a bit dated but I think still cogent to my purpose. The following is not intended as a review: I use several of Ms. Phillips’s points as a springboard to a discussion of the angst ridden landscape of contemporary cultural assumptions, and to have read her article is not a prerequisite for following my argument, but rather some general familiarity is sufficient with the current lines of intellectual demarcation in the ongoing debates over affirmative advancement of minorities, the rights of cultural minorities to control over their cultural content, especially as applied to artistic expression, and the responsibilities of artistic expression to the ideal of ‘social justice’.
“Late June brought news that the animated shows ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Family Guy,’ ‘Big Mouth’ and ‘Central Park’ would recast characters of color who have been played by white actors.” I am not sufficiently familiar with those programs to comment on the specifics of those decisions. But my first reaction was, on the face of the essay, to say to myself, how unjust, under the broad mandate of ‘social justice’, to remove talented actors, who have spent years developing elements of character representation, because of their playing roles, in blackvoice, not corresponding to their race—of a nominally anti-racist, but racistic exclusion of their fundamental function, as actors, to portray characters not themselves.
To begin with terminology, there is a difference between “colorblind casting” and casting that makes an artistic point of ethnic, racial, or gender optionality of casting and of ‘color forward’ casting where preference is given to minority actors. For Ms. Phillips’s examples, the disembodied voices behind the animations will be presumed to have been the result of colorblind casting, that casting decisions were made on the basis of the actors’ vocal abilities to enact scripted characters, regardless of their off-mic characteristics. By contrast, the casting of Hamilton, far from colorblind, successfully uses racial dislocation as a conveyance of transcendence, though for Ms. Phillips, the play may be criticized for ignoring the opportunity to expand its conception to encompass an exposition of slavery.
Ms. Phillips suggests that “colorblind” is often a guise for not accepting an obligation to aggressively cast minorities to roles which they might conceivably fit. While such forward leaning, affirmative casting may have good intention (disregarding questions of injustice done to one in the interest of justice for another), in practice such decisions may come down to artistic judgements of who of the available pool of talent best may suit artistic purpose. Exceptional talent is not available to be taken off a shelf, and exceptional is defined by a paucity of equivalencies. If there are equivalents of say Sir Laurence Olivier, whether white or black, at any particular moment, they will likely have previous commitments. And to the argument of the lack of narrative necessity, such as would invite the insertion of a person of color to a role in which the audience would not expect them, there may result a diminishment of verisimilitude. For the artist, verisimilitude, in the service of creation, may trump generalized goals dictated by doctrines of social consciousness. And the creation of a miasma, wherein creative judgement may be stifled by arbitrators of social justice, smacks of a censorship of artistic license, especially when the question is in the form of a negative, as in, “Why could that part not have been played by a person of color?”, requiring a rational justification of an intuitive process. It is possible that social justice may not have been the ultimate aim of the project, which, of course begs the question of why was it not. Which in turn raises the specter of Soviet-like interpretations of art as having a higher social function than as a legitimate end in itself: the assumption that art has a duty corresponding to a predefined social agenda, and the corollary that it is the role of the critic to examine the degree to which the artist meets that criteria, over and above that of being an analyst of what was formerly understood as artistic merit, i.e., the techniques the artist employs to achieve his self-appointed purpose and his degree of success in fulling that purpose, and the extent to which the creation stands as an end in itself. The critic becomes the arbiter of a politically defined version of social utility rather than of artistic merit.
Ms. Phillips says, "But however well-intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn’t otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress — even when cast without any regard to their race — can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another. "
Indeed, imagine that a black man might be blindly cast as a criminal, or a Latina as a saucy seductress: a blind criminal leading a blind saucy seductress—It has potential!
Contrary to the trend toward cultural balkanization and the sanctity of those self-defined spaces, everyone, and especially every artist, in the interest of a pluralistic collective in which all may flourish within a nuanced milieu of cultural exchange and integration, should be free to channel their inner black person, inner Jew, inner Crazy Horse, his inner woman (and vice versa). They are all our rightful selves to the extent that we have empathically embraced them and that they are all expressions of our convoluted ancestry, relationships, experiences, and common human nature, i.e., of our integrated selves within the broader cultural milieu.
Everything an actor or a writer does is some form of appropriation or approximation. How can it be wrong for Olivier (yes, in blackface) to play Othello when the character was imagined by a white guy from Stratford in a time and place where blacks hardly existed other than as fictional stereotypes. And if you might grant, for the sake of argument, that there is also justice in choosing the actor solely on the basis of merit, or to the judgement of the author or director of who might best suit his artistic purpose, Olivier, in this case, would look rather unconvincing without his makeup. It would seem not too much of a reach to presume that the director of the London presentation of 1964 was aware of the tension of a white actor in a black role—that it served to underscore the isolation of a foreigner, signified by his blackness, in the white man’s insular world of Elizabethan England, or of the evolving racial complexities of the time of its modern recreation. It is interesting that Olivier, in contemporary promotional photographs, looks the part of a North African Moor more convincingly than other prominent actors of sub-Saharan characteristics who have also successfully played the role. (photo at: C:\Users\James\OneDrive\Pictures\Picture7.png
Or should the author, rather than the actor, not be more soundly blamed for the audacity of his attempt to understand and portray the form of a black man’s character? And that is not the only example of Shakespeare’s audacity of appropriation or of his presumption of knowledge beyond his direct personal experience. He did the same with women, presuming to know Ophelia’s inner feelings or how Lady Macbeth might have ambition and a courage beyond the stipulated boundaries of her sex. And he cast young men to play them. Most of the comedies are dependent on disguise and confusion of sexual roles—much painting of faces. And he used imagination to explore the worlds of those above his own station or beyond his experience; he never went to war or saw the Mediterranean. How would he know the character of a King Lear or understand Hotspur’s sense of honor when himself but an actor and a scribbler? .... (See my site for the rest of the story.)
I haven’t read this yet, but bc of the AA topic now in play, I was reminded to check in on Shelby Steele for some of his wisdom.
I’ve noticed he doesn’t expound too much in discussions during his recent Glenn appearances, but I also noticed that just a word from him hits the bullseye & resounds with me. Like “DEFER”: “Defer, defer, defer!” he lamented, about how white ppl are just deferring too damned often to black ppl’s demands or accusatory narratives, along a racial line, of course. That just said it. Of course, it’s the way he says it too. The genuine disgust, the “c’mon now! It’s way past time to stop this!” attitude wrapped around the particular choice word.
Then there was the last time, w Kmele Foster & R Woodson, on identifying one’s self by their blk race, which he discouraged, as does Kmele. He chose the word “dirty”, and “poison”, to pinpoint the damage done by bringing that into an issue, even a little - a drop of poison that just has to taint it, dirty it up some way, somehow, putting the race card in play. It just does, he insisted. I got it.
Defer, dirty… the words resonate & remain.
However, in the piece I read today, “Affirmative Action: The Price of Preference“ — which Steele wrote 32 yrs ago — he examines AA pretty thoroughly. I found it to be a very good read.
I would hope that David would address the very good point made by another writer as to why, in his opinion, the majority didn't decide both of these cases as falling squarely under the Civil Rights Act as being an example of gross descrimination based solely on race ie. skin color!
All three blogs are available. http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/. Does anyone know if any statistics (cited everywhere) are available that compare foreign born blacks to American born, North Africans to sub-Saharan or Native born Hispanics, DACA students and legally admitted students from Central and South America? Also, with the focus now on legacy students, does this include children of lower level elite university employees?
I purposely did not include Asians, Pacific Islanders, Pacific Rim, Middle Easterners, etc as apparently they don't need preferential treatment. And everyone ignores Native Americans.
Affirmative action at colleges is of a piece with the ongoing saga of race relationships in America. I just posted "Othello in Blackface" which focuses on the Hollywood version of the phenomenon.
At what point did art criticism become more about Rousseau than about Rembrandt? That’s a rhetorical question: artists, and those who write about art have long tended toward a left of center bent, but of late much of what passes for criticism does not seem to be about the art at all, or at least not about art as an end in itself or of its structural relationships or how it achieves an emotional effect, but more about what it signifies in terms of a defined version of social consciousness and to what extent art furthers the ultimate triumph of societal perfection.
I came across a piece in the New York Times: ‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and the Problem With Colorblind Casting, by Maya Phillips, July 8, 2020. Now perhaps a bit dated but I think still cogent to my purpose. The following is not intended as a review: I use several of Ms. Phillips’s points as a springboard to a discussion of the angst ridden landscape of contemporary cultural assumptions, and to have read her article is not a prerequisite for following my argument, but rather some general familiarity is sufficient with the current lines of intellectual demarcation in the ongoing debates over affirmative advancement of minorities, the rights of cultural minorities to control over their cultural content, especially as applied to artistic expression, and the responsibilities of artistic expression to the ideal of ‘social justice’.
“Late June brought news that the animated shows ‘The Simpsons,’ ‘Family Guy,’ ‘Big Mouth’ and ‘Central Park’ would recast characters of color who have been played by white actors.” I am not sufficiently familiar with those programs to comment on the specifics of those decisions. But my first reaction was, on the face of the essay, to say to myself, how unjust, under the broad mandate of ‘social justice’, to remove talented actors, who have spent years developing elements of character representation, because of their playing roles, in blackvoice, not corresponding to their race—of a nominally anti-racist, but racistic exclusion of their fundamental function, as actors, to portray characters not themselves.
To begin with terminology, there is a difference between “colorblind casting” and casting that makes an artistic point of ethnic, racial, or gender optionality of casting and of ‘color forward’ casting where preference is given to minority actors. For Ms. Phillips’s examples, the disembodied voices behind the animations will be presumed to have been the result of colorblind casting, that casting decisions were made on the basis of the actors’ vocal abilities to enact scripted characters, regardless of their off-mic characteristics. By contrast, the casting of Hamilton, far from colorblind, successfully uses racial dislocation as a conveyance of transcendence, though for Ms. Phillips, the play may be criticized for ignoring the opportunity to expand its conception to encompass an exposition of slavery.
Ms. Phillips suggests that “colorblind” is often a guise for not accepting an obligation to aggressively cast minorities to roles which they might conceivably fit. While such forward leaning, affirmative casting may have good intention (disregarding questions of injustice done to one in the interest of justice for another), in practice such decisions may come down to artistic judgements of who of the available pool of talent best may suit artistic purpose. Exceptional talent is not available to be taken off a shelf, and exceptional is defined by a paucity of equivalencies. If there are equivalents of say Sir Laurence Olivier, whether white or black, at any particular moment, they will likely have previous commitments. And to the argument of the lack of narrative necessity, such as would invite the insertion of a person of color to a role in which the audience would not expect them, there may result a diminishment of verisimilitude. For the artist, verisimilitude, in the service of creation, may trump generalized goals dictated by doctrines of social consciousness. And the creation of a miasma, wherein creative judgement may be stifled by arbitrators of social justice, smacks of a censorship of artistic license, especially when the question is in the form of a negative, as in, “Why could that part not have been played by a person of color?”, requiring a rational justification of an intuitive process. It is possible that social justice may not have been the ultimate aim of the project, which, of course begs the question of why was it not. Which in turn raises the specter of Soviet-like interpretations of art as having a higher social function than as a legitimate end in itself: the assumption that art has a duty corresponding to a predefined social agenda, and the corollary that it is the role of the critic to examine the degree to which the artist meets that criteria, over and above that of being an analyst of what was formerly understood as artistic merit, i.e., the techniques the artist employs to achieve his self-appointed purpose and his degree of success in fulling that purpose, and the extent to which the creation stands as an end in itself. The critic becomes the arbiter of a politically defined version of social utility rather than of artistic merit.
Ms. Phillips says, "But however well-intentioned, there are complications that come with works that aim to use colorblind casting to highlight people of color who wouldn’t otherwise be represented. Creators may cast blind, thinking their job done, failing to consider that a black man cast as a criminal or a Latina woman cast as a saucy seductress — even when cast without any regard to their race — can still be problematic. One kind of blindness can lead to another. "
Indeed, imagine that a black man might be blindly cast as a criminal, or a Latina as a saucy seductress: a blind criminal leading a blind saucy seductress—It has potential!
Contrary to the trend toward cultural balkanization and the sanctity of those self-defined spaces, everyone, and especially every artist, in the interest of a pluralistic collective in which all may flourish within a nuanced milieu of cultural exchange and integration, should be free to channel their inner black person, inner Jew, inner Crazy Horse, his inner woman (and vice versa). They are all our rightful selves to the extent that we have empathically embraced them and that they are all expressions of our convoluted ancestry, relationships, experiences, and common human nature, i.e., of our integrated selves within the broader cultural milieu.
Everything an actor or a writer does is some form of appropriation or approximation. How can it be wrong for Olivier (yes, in blackface) to play Othello when the character was imagined by a white guy from Stratford in a time and place where blacks hardly existed other than as fictional stereotypes. And if you might grant, for the sake of argument, that there is also justice in choosing the actor solely on the basis of merit, or to the judgement of the author or director of who might best suit his artistic purpose, Olivier, in this case, would look rather unconvincing without his makeup. It would seem not too much of a reach to presume that the director of the London presentation of 1964 was aware of the tension of a white actor in a black role—that it served to underscore the isolation of a foreigner, signified by his blackness, in the white man’s insular world of Elizabethan England, or of the evolving racial complexities of the time of its modern recreation. It is interesting that Olivier, in contemporary promotional photographs, looks the part of a North African Moor more convincingly than other prominent actors of sub-Saharan characteristics who have also successfully played the role. (photo at: C:\Users\James\OneDrive\Pictures\Picture7.png
Or should the author, rather than the actor, not be more soundly blamed for the audacity of his attempt to understand and portray the form of a black man’s character? And that is not the only example of Shakespeare’s audacity of appropriation or of his presumption of knowledge beyond his direct personal experience. He did the same with women, presuming to know Ophelia’s inner feelings or how Lady Macbeth might have ambition and a courage beyond the stipulated boundaries of her sex. And he cast young men to play them. Most of the comedies are dependent on disguise and confusion of sexual roles—much painting of faces. And he used imagination to explore the worlds of those above his own station or beyond his experience; he never went to war or saw the Mediterranean. How would he know the character of a King Lear or understand Hotspur’s sense of honor when himself but an actor and a scribbler? .... (See my site for the rest of the story.)
I haven’t read this yet, but bc of the AA topic now in play, I was reminded to check in on Shelby Steele for some of his wisdom.
I’ve noticed he doesn’t expound too much in discussions during his recent Glenn appearances, but I also noticed that just a word from him hits the bullseye & resounds with me. Like “DEFER”: “Defer, defer, defer!” he lamented, about how white ppl are just deferring too damned often to black ppl’s demands or accusatory narratives, along a racial line, of course. That just said it. Of course, it’s the way he says it too. The genuine disgust, the “c’mon now! It’s way past time to stop this!” attitude wrapped around the particular choice word.
Then there was the last time, w Kmele Foster & R Woodson, on identifying one’s self by their blk race, which he discouraged, as does Kmele. He chose the word “dirty”, and “poison”, to pinpoint the damage done by bringing that into an issue, even a little - a drop of poison that just has to taint it, dirty it up some way, somehow, putting the race card in play. It just does, he insisted. I got it.
Defer, dirty… the words resonate & remain.
However, in the piece I read today, “Affirmative Action: The Price of Preference“ — which Steele wrote 32 yrs ago — he examines AA pretty thoroughly. I found it to be a very good read.
https://whatsoproudlywehail.org/curriculum/the-american-calendar/affirmative-action-the-price-of-preference
Good read.
I would hope that David would address the very good point made by another writer as to why, in his opinion, the majority didn't decide both of these cases as falling squarely under the Civil Rights Act as being an example of gross descrimination based solely on race ie. skin color!
I like both of David’s posts. To the point and fair. I am looking forward to #3
Available. http://historyunfolding.blogspot.com/
The. Chief Justice is of necessity a politician to form consensus. He must also defend the court and its decisions to the nation.
John Roberts is a politician at heart. I simply cannot square his ACA opinion with this one. At least the leftist are consistently wrong.