I think for this movie they would have to be 100% white passing for it to work. Nobody would bat an eye at Rashida Jones or Megan Markle at that juke joint. I didn’t realize Anya Taylor-Jones ancestry and nationality were so convoluted.
I was thinking of the mid-credits scene of Stack and Mary surprising the now-aged Sammie at his club. They were portrayed as winners—attractive, happy, thriving. That’s what I meant by “glamorized”—I wasn’t thinking so much of Remmick and his ‘converts.’
I agree that the topic of assimilation is treated in the film, and in an intriguing manner.
That’s not what I took from that scene - what I took is that they were jealous of their cousin Sammie as an old man, because he was able to live a full and rich life with real human connection. As vampires, they were incapable of that but longed for it. They didn’t at all seem happy to me.
I think an interesting aspect of the movie Sinners (not the main point of the plot or even a minor point) is that a black marrying into a white family isn’t as big a deal these days as it was in 1932. Some of the characters in Sinners were astonished that an apparently white woman might walk into a black nightclub. They were a little more satisfied when they discovered that she was one-eighth black, since in those days, especially in the South, many people thought that even “a drop of black blood” made you a black. Now people might be surprised that Archie and Lilibet are sixth and seventh in the order of succession for the British throne, but they accept that it is true. (Yes, it’s extremely unlikely that either of them will get the throne.) And, of course, a man with a white mother born in the U.S. and a black father born in Africa became president of the U.S. in 2008. Indeed, it was a man with a first name of Arabic origin and a middle name which was the same as that of an Iranian president who was eventually executed for crimes against humanity.
Iraqi
Sorry, you’re right.
Another thing is that in British, unlike American, society, social class has always had the potential to outrank race as a factor in discrimination. Look at all those scions of South Asian royalty and wealthy “white Mughal” mixed-race descendants mingling with aristocratic white boys at elite Victorian public schools, where the most lily-white of, e.g., pure Anglo-Saxon farm laborers’ sons would never have crossed the threshold.
If Meghan Markle had been, say, a hereditary princess of some wealthy little Indian princely state dating back to Mughal aristocracy or something, I think her elevation to UK Royal personage status would have seemed much less racially “anomalous” to many people than it did in her actual circumstances as an American commoner.
Anomalous? What about when when Edward VIII (or that’s what his title would have been) dated Wallis Simpson, who was an American commoner and who would have to be twice-divorced before she could marry him? Their romantic relationship began in 1934. Edward VIII’s father, George V, died in 1936. The British kept putting off the coronation ceremony (which they often do for months). Finally Edward VIII succumbed to pressure and announced that he would abdicate, so he didn’t become king.
AIUI, the Edward/Wallis relationship was indeed widely viewed as extremely anomalous, not to mention a national scandal.
The attitude of “eh let royals marry who they want like anyone else” is a very recent (and still not universal) phenomenon. Heck, I’m old enough to remember the public discussion about the “suitability” criteria applied to Lady Diana Spencer when she got engaged to Prince Charles.
Something that happens twice is not anomalous. Knowing about the relationship of Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson means that there’s nothing that surprising about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. People just said, “Oh, another one of these American woman seducing a British royal.”
One interesting thing is that all through the twentieth century that were lots of American woman from rich families marrying men from the British aristocracy. Lots of British families who owned mansions with a fairly large block of country land around them had discovered that they were close to bankruptcy. They introduced a male member of the family to one of the rich young American women who had come for a vacation in the U.K. When this couple married, it meant that the British family didn’t go bankrupt and the American family had a relative with a British title.
In the television series Downton Abbey, Elizabeth McGovern played a character like those rich American women marrying into British aristocracy. Interestingly, she is vaguely like that in real life. She didn’t marry into aristocracy, but she did marry a British man and has lived in the U.K. ever since. For those of you who don’t remember her early roles, she was sort of one of the so-called Brat Pack.
I think a lot of this was happening in the 19th Century, like Winston Churchill’s mother.
I just researched this and it appears that it happened mostly during the late 19th century and the early 20th century.
Hmm, I’m not familiar with that definition of “anomalous” as meaning literally “unique”, and I think its more recognized sense of “deviating from what is standard, normal or expected” is more useful in this context.
It has long been “standard, normal and expected” for UK royals, especially those in the direct line of succession, to marry non-divorced non-commoners, including royal relatives, members of foreign royal families, and other aristocrats. Yes, that’s been changing over time, but that doesn’t mean that as soon as the former King Edward married Wallis Simpson everybody just shrugged and said “oh okay, now royals marrying divorced and/or commoner spouses isn’t anomalous anymore, NBD”. It remained quite a BD for a long time.
There are few foreign royal families in which one can find suitable matches and even the number of aristocrats is lower than earlier.
Another possibility is Aubrey Plaza, who said that she is 31% Irish, 30% Spanish, 9.9% West African, 7% Native American, and 0.6% Ashkenazi Jewish when she was talking to Seth Meyers on his talk show. That only adds up to 78.5%. According to her Wikipedia entry, she’s also partly of Basque ancestry. It also says that her Native American ancestry is Taino, which are the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles. On Drew Barrymore’s talk show, she said she is 5% Siberian. That still only adds up to 83.5%. Aubrey Plaza apparently jokes around a lot in interviews, so it’s your choice as to what to believe.