And yes, this is Great Debates material, I believe.
I had a discussion with an online acquaintance a while back. Or rather, she posted a rant, and I felt compelled to respond, and I was left wondering how any reasonable person could hold the position that she put forth.
Piracy! Specifically, the Somali pirates. People condemn them for their actions. But! American movie-going audiences love Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Why the disparity? Racism!
Her position is that people approve of the pirate lead character in a Disney movie primarily because he’s white, and disapprove of Somali pirates because they’re black.
Does anyone here think the same? MY position for the record is : fiction vs. nonfiction. Fake crimes and real crimes. Of course people like the lead character of a Disney movie, despite an implied criminal career involving murder and robbery. Because his crimes are all fake, and all we really see is him scheming and conniving and getting into goofy pratfalls. He’s safe. It wouldn’t matter if Johnny Depp played him, or Cuba Gooding Jr. He’s socially engineered to be charming.
Uh…fake pirates are sexy. And fun. Honestly, in those movies when did you ever see anyone actually rape anybody, or plunder in a way that didn’t hilariously amuse?
Fake pirates are no better than thieves and worse in many ways because they take their prisoners/booty at gun (cannon) point. They’re criminals. It’s not remotely a color thing.
Hell, we romanticize hired killers in fiction, really, all levels of criminal scum - is that a black/white thing, too?
You’re right and your friend is wrong. People love movies about dashing criminals, and before movies, they loved stories about them - Robin Hood, anybody? - and some criminals were popular heroes. They tend to be much less forgiving of real criminals.
I agree with the others. Even fantasies about rape do not constitute a desire to be raped in reality. A common theme in movies is good versus evil, and in most cases (especially with Disney movies), good wins out. It is also often the case, in my experience, that even ordinarily “evil” characters will be imbued with some form of inherent goodness that mitigates their bad deeds, and leaves audiences with a sense of “One could hardly blame him.” (The movie Slingblade comes to mind.) Real violence, on the other hand, is met with quite a different reaction, and it is not, I think, for most people a matter of race.
Said acquaintance is, in my opinion, always stuck in knee-jerk reactionary mode and looking for things to condemn ‘white, cis-gendered straight males’ for.
The only tenuous link to racism I can cobble together is that some of the economic conditions that lead to Somali pirates existing are the result of European colonialism, but I see that matter as entirely separate from ‘how we judge the pirates now’.
Yeah. If she were comparing US attitudes toward Somali pirates and toward, say, the IRA, she’d have slightly more of a case. Still not a very good one, but a little more of a case.
Ask her how much general approval from the public she’s heard of the Posse Comitatus in the US. Or how many people approve of the actual Mafia. Or, if you want to get into a quintessentially white group that robs helpless people of their money, how many people approve of AIG.
Alternately, note with her how popular Omar from The Wire is with white people, and ask her to explain that. His character is pretty similar to Jack Sparrow in a lot of ways: a wacky trickster outlaw. He’s just slightly more realistic, I’d say, but he has a lot of salient similarities.
Look, I don’t like gory horror movies, but a lot of people do. Does this mean that all of those people are totally cool with having serial killers slaughtering scores of people at a time in the most horrific manners possible? That they’d like to watch, or engage in that sort of thing themselves?
No?
Well then maybe people can watch Pirate/Mafia/Thief/Scumbag movies without actually thinking that those people would be cool to have around in real life.
Movie Pirate = Fantasy = A few hours entertainment = Cool.
Real Pirate = Reality = Real People getting killed and hurt = NOT Cool.
According to some people, yes. If a person disapproves of your choice of entertainment, naturally you are unable to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
LHOD : I can no longer talk to her - the inherent contradictions she kept presenting overwhelmed my ability to maintain civil discourse. But if I ever run into a similar situation, I will try to remember the example of Omar.
I ask that all of you please refrain from making comments on LiveJournal to her - I have no desire to antagonize her further. She and I scrapped quite a bit on racism and sexism issues.
It’s not racist to hate the actions of a group of people who murder, kidnap and steal. The Somali pirates are (IMO) terrorists, albeit on the high seas. What happens in movies (and I cannot stress this enough) is not real. People know it is not real. Comparing the two is apples and mangoes.
I think its more to do with romantic notions of the past, particularly OUR past.
I’m sure 16th century pirates were just as brutal as their mordern counter parts. But we like to romanticize our past so we come up with this myth of swashbuckling pirates, when the reality was far more hum-drum.
Similarly with the US civil war, which has plenty in common with modern civil wars in terms of atrocities, yet we view it as a heroic struggle, whereas modern civil wars are viewed as humanitarian calamities.
The pirates are not terrorists. They are pirates. Terrorists are not just people using violence in ways that you don’t like. Terrorists use violence to inspire fear in a population to get the population to give the terrorists more power. Pirates are armed robbers on water.
