Upworthy: Things that matter

Every time I get on Facebook I am faced with a different story about our world. The Facebook page Upworthy is an organization which is run by a group of people that take ideas or stories that the average person sends to them and posts them on their profile. These stories all have one thing in common, they all were chosen because they mean something. There are sometimes happy stories, or sad stories. There are angering stories and cheerful stories. Well, the story I want to share for this week's blog is one called If Classic Movies Were Recast With Black People, Would They Still Be Classic.

It isn't really a story simply because it has only one paragraph and the rest are pictures of classic movies that featured white actors and are changed for black actors. The reason this post caught my attention is because it is so bold in making this point. This entire week in class we spoke about identity and about racism, sexism, agism, marginalization, ethnicity, and many other big topics. Then last class we discussed about intersectionality and how we can have an advantage of something while also having a disadvantage of another thing. This post mentions some of the movies we discussed in class and asks the bold question of what it would be like if the actors were not the majority but rather the minority. Would people still consider them classics? Or would the fact that the actors are not the viewers same color affect their perception of the story plot? These are things that many ask now because as we try to move forward with deleting racism from our world, the fact is there are still many things that prove racism is still alive.

In McIntosh's article, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack, on page 2 she mentions one of the privileges being that if she turns “on the television or opens the front page of the paper [she will] see people of her race widely and positively represented.” Well this was the case back in the day and can still be argued today. So with the privilege mentioned above, people of the dominant race do not realize that by changing the color of the actor of a famous movie really does affect their reaction. For example, when we talked about the Hunger Games in class and how people's reactions to Rue's ethnicity was very racist. We must continue to work together in order to see less racism and all other isms in our world.  

Links:

To the story: http://www.upworthy.com/if-classic-movies-were-cast-with-black-people-would-they-still-be-classic?c=ufb2

To website of Upworthy: http://www.upworthy.com