Over the last several days, there has been a lot of noise over the release (via North Korea\’s hacking of Sony Pictures\’ material) of an exchange between Sony\’s head, Amy Pascal, and producer Scott Rudin, in which they speculate on President Obama\’s taste in movies.
After Pascal was invited to attend a breakfast with Mr. Obama in November which was organized by filmmaker Jeffrey Katzenberg, she emailed Rudin, asking “What should I ask the President at this stupid Jeffrey breakfast”?
Here is the exchange which ensued:
RUDIN:Would he like to finance some movies.
PASCAL: I doubt it. Should Iask him if he liked DJANGO?
RUDIN: 12 YEARS [ASlave].
PASCAL:Or the butler. Or think like a man?
RUDIN: Ride-along. I bet helikes Kevin Hart.
As you may be aware, all the movies these two mentioned have Black themes and Kevin Hart is Black.
So is the noise justified?
The answer, in a word, is yes. But not because anything racist is said about President Obama himself; nothing is.
The racism comes in because Pascal and Rudin make it clear that they do not see President Obama as a man per se, they see him as a Black man. They box him into a racial niche.
It is the equivalent of someone finding out that Pascal and Rudin are Jewish, then assuming their preferred breakfast is bagels and lox, herring and whitefish salad.
Whether they do or don\’t like these foods is incidental: the problem is that the person making such an assumption would have skipped by every other element of their being, and zeroed in on their religion.
It means that they are seen not as individual human beings with their own set of values and tastes, but as Jews. One of “them”.
Just like Pascal and Rudin, (and, no doubt, many many other Hollywood types) see Barack Obama.
That said, however, can we be honest enough to admit that, though lamentable, this kind of profiling is nothing new at all? That it is done by a great many people, regardless of their color or religion?
I remember once being asked who my favorite male pop singer was. I mentioned that I wavered between Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole – and then got the surprised response that it didn\’t make sense because Sinatra was White and Cole was Black.
See, If I mentioned Nat Cole, I was supposed to compare him only to Black singers like Billy Eckstine, and Joe Williams, while Sinatra was supposed to be compared only to White singers like Tony Bennett and Vic Damone. Cole wasn\’t a person, he was a Black. Sinatra wasn\’t a person, he was a White.
As I have said so many times in here, the straightest line to prejudice, intolerance and hatred is seeing people as components of groups instead of as the individuals we all are.
And you can be sure that in Hollywood – preachy, leftward, self-impressed, holier-than-thou Hollywood – it is just as easy to find people with these prejudices, intolerances and hatreds as anywhere else.
