Amazing movie; even the wife (she likes science and I like sci-fi) was impressed!
Throwing in a controversial question: why do Black people have such better PR over brown people?
Does being a model minority make us ever so (slightly) boring?
Either way #wakanda4ever. As an interesting aside I used to live next to Wakanda (in Uganda) for a little while.
Maybe Black Panther is less about black people and more about an amazing movie (your wife is right about that) and beautiful intelligent honorable people. Most humans are drawn to and inspired by that.
Quite apart from the movie, post modernists have long disliked Asian cultures and civilizations; and made major efforts to deconstruct, delegitimize and interpret them in the worst possible ways. Asian post modernists being worse than western post modernists.
Post Modernists killed 60 million people in China, tried to destroy all the ancient libraries. They tried to portray Taoism (which is similar to Sanathana Dharma in many ways), Buddhism, Confucianism as oppressive, exploitative, immoral, ammoral, hegemonic atrocity technologies.
This continues today in westernized global academia. [By contrast Kant, Voltaire and enlightenment scholars revered ancient Chinese culture.]
The economic miracle in Asia has further angered post modernists. It is fashionable in academic circles (albeit not yet the general public) to blame Asians for poor people around the world and the “rape” of Africa and the Arab world (since Asians are the largest investors with, owners of and traders with Africans and Arabs). Gotten into some debates myself . . . they probably quietly thought I was some racist Asian.
America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand have a special problem because their citizens of Asian heritage substantially outperform Caucasians in terms of income, wealth, divorce rates, out of wedlock births, rates of committing crimes, incarceration rates, academic performance, etc. These countries already have a massive problem with anti Jewish bigotry and increasingly some of that anti Jewish hatred is being directed at citizens of Asian heritage. Asians are becoming the new Jews. 🙁
The UK is still better, because Asians don’t outperform Caucasians yet on average . . . but that it is coming to the UK too. “Asian” in the UK means South Asian. Most Pakistani and Bangladeshi (not sure about Afghans) actually underperform caucasions by most socio economic indicators. I haven’t seen good data sets on Indians-suspect they outperform caucasions–but fortunately society hasn’t caught on yet.
Zachary, I wish Asians were merely “boring”. The reality is harsher. Do you remember the anti immigrant LA riots in 1992? 45% of the shops attacked were owned by Korean Americans. Almost all the damaged shops were owned by Asian or Latino immigrant communities. Almost no caucasion or black owned businesses were attacked. Most of the people killed were Asian Americans or Latino Americans, although at least one high profile caucasion was also killed. The sad truth is that much of the caucasion US media quietly rooted for and encouraged the attackers. Fortunately in LA itself most African Americans strongly condemned the rioters and made it clear that they wanted nothing to do with them; reaching out and apologizing to Asian Americans and Latino Americans. LA African Americans tried to protect Asian Americans and Latino Americans from attackers. Most LA African Americans castigated the press for portraying LA as unsafe or anti business, for fear businesses would avoid African American communities in LA . . . which sadly happened. There was a huge difference between how LA locals viewed the LA riots and the national media.
We are now finding evidence that most of the extreme white nationalist and extreme black lives matter social media chatter is a psychological operation by Russia. Asian Americans and Latino Americans are being greatly hurt by this too.
In the world as a whole, there is probably more anti Jewish bigotry than there is against any other group. But number 2 would be against people of African heritage. Arabia, Latin America, Asia and Europe all have a challenge with this. I would argue that people of African ancestry don’t have the best PR globally–despite the very positive portrayal in the Black Panther–and suffer a lot of global bigotry.
Who is number 3? Not sure. Maybe liberal muslims and muslim minorities. But most people don’t intentionally target them. They are attacked by Islamists, post modernists and useful idiots (I would put dumb nonmuslims who don’t understand the difference between islamists and liberal/minority muslims in this category as well as well intentioned people who attack “islamophobia” while not having a clue). Since the useful idiots aren’t actually anti liberal/minority muslim . . . and would be their allies if they had half a brain; do they count? Are minority/liberal muslims the third largest target of bigotry? Not sure.
Who is target number 3 for global bigotry? Some other candidates are eastern culture, civilization, religion spirituality. Another would be Kurds. Some might say evangelical Christians, though I am not so sure.
Many Americans and Europeans complain about being hated; but this is exaggerated. Most people in the rest of the world still idolize Americans and Europeans and want to move to America or Europe. What is with fair skin worship?
I thought the movie was underwhelming in terms of its action scenes. The story reminded me of Baahubali (brother usurping another brother’s throne), but the tension in Baahubali (Devasena’s right to choose her husband) was developed better than the racism angle in Black Panther.
I also found the implication that a pure monarchy with a king, and no evident democratic structures can become rich and technologically advanced revisionist and ahistorical. But that is a point few seem to understand these days.
I like monarchies lol