Originally posted under a similar title yesterday, as a brief fly-by, I've revised the original piece and posted this version as a separate diary.
The article The Annie Of Tomorrow Has The Same Hard Knocks, But Different Hair brings up some interesting elements for consideration pertaining to race, culture, and stereotypes. It selects one element of the new Annie movie - specifically, hair - and offers some thoughts on the considerations made in order to update the iconic story of the inspirational, adventurous orphan.
Follow me below the fold for more.
Sometimes, changing up cultural iconography is a good thing: it demystifies and unites, and updates mythologies, making them more relevant in the contemporary context: socially, culturally, cross-culturally, etc.
These types of updates and adaptations are the sort that are needed in the world today - they can help clear away some of the embedded micro-aggressions and racism, while opening up opportunities for people to see each other more as part of the larger family of humanity and less as isolated, independent islands of differentiation.
For example, one change to the traditional story incorporates careful thought about the cultural perceptions and significance of baldness:
The cultural politics of hair might also explain why this movie's Daddy Warbucks wears a hairpiece. [...snip...] The original Daddy Warbucks is famously bald. But black baldness, says Francis, means something different than white baldness.
In another example, changing up some imagery can take a basic, straightforward interaction between a maternal influence and a child into a significant, subtle example of an expanding cultural understanding of common humanity that supersedes race:
There's something else subtle but important going on, Rooks says, during a moment when you see Stacks' lovely white assistant/love interest, Grace Farrell (Rose Byrne), taking care of Annie's hair.
[...snip...]
Farrell is not Annie's mother, but she is a maternal figure. And seeing a white woman comfortable with — and enjoying — making an African-American girl's hair look good is significant, Rooks says.
Presenting new imagery, changing up and modernizing characters and characterizations, and introducing example of interactions that aren't commonly found in traditional mainstream tv and film helps destabilize the foundations in which dominant culture preconceptions embed racism, micro-aggressions, and other propaganda used to protect and preserve that culture's dominant role.
Rattling the old foundations and erecting new ones will move us forward, together, to reduce - and eventually eliminate - those dangerously toxic elements.
We're still seeing racism - raw, open, unadulterated, unabashed - in our culture today, mixed with a variety of other ills: homophobia, misogyny, genocidal tendencies...the list, unfortunately, is both long and broad. Yes, we're also seeing more awareness, and more people recognizing and calling out such bullshit.
More people - individually, not just in groups - are standing up, speaking up, speaking out to confront all forms of hate speech & ignorance as they occur.
With the expansion of smart devices and the Internet, and the pervasiveness of social media, awareness spreads like wildfire. The messages of the intelligent and civilized folks mix with the messages of the imbeciles, haters and idiots - sh!t-storms and flurries of activity and viral surges of tidbits flash in the collective brainpan, yet (in my opinion) the logic and reality has a leg up on the flailing ravings of the lunatic fringe.
I think we're winning the war. It's still too often a bloody, violent war in the real-world, supplemented by the raging, bloodless, incorporeal online realm, and yet it's a war where the tides are turning.
Knowledge and awareness aren't being successfully suppressed and ignored. More often, people are reaching back and re-discovering history, and attempts to write / re-write and control it, and shedding light on items sanitized, suppressed, or blatantly ignored.
Cultural "norms" are being updated to incorporate real-world, cross-cultural examples of simple, everyday realities that gently push aside and overwrite the embedded cultural racism and micro-aggressions that the dominant culture and its preservationists strive to limit.
I think there's hope. And I think there are, can be, should be more examples of "hope" introduced into our culture, helping set the new foundations, expectations and awareness of generations to come.
What do you think?
References