We should be nice to gbajiFollow

Rue was a girl of color in the book, too. Not specifically black, I guess, but dark-skinned. What a weird thing to complain about.

Yeah, there's the Trayvon Martin stuff too.

I haven't read the book yet, but from what the blog said, she describes Rue and the other kid from the same zone as having "dark brown skin." If I had read that before seeing the movie, I'm almost positive that I would have known that they weren't white. My sister did read the book before seeing the movie, and she said she wasn't expecting them to be black, but she could tell that they were supposed to be people of color and that it didn't bother her any that the characters ended up being black in the movie.

The particular Twitter quotes were:









The first one bothers me the most, but they're all pretty bad. Apparently all four people got attacked by people on Twitter so badly though, that their accounts got deleted. Either by themselves or whoever runs Twitter. So that made me feel a little bit better.

It's kind of funny, cause if you think about it, there is a decent chance that all (or many of) the twitter posts are trolls, and now everyone is getting angry about it.

Yeah Digg, that was the main reason that first quote bothered me so much. What, a black little girl can't be innocent? A little girl is still a little girl, and she can be innocent no matter what color her skin is. I think the fact that this individual pictured Rue with blond hair is particularly telling. In their eyes, Rue was white in skin tone and in hair color. Not that people consciously associate hair color with how pure a person is in modern times, but in Shakespeare's time they certainly did. We still do have a tendency to associate white with purity (hence the whole white wedding crap).

Agreed. Even though they said that hate themselves for it, it's just terrible.

I assumed the black birds were grackles because grackles are assholes.

I hadn't thought of it that way. I know close to nothing about Twitter or what the culture vibe is like, because the whole hash tag thing and the layout confused me when I signed up, and I've never used it since.

Regardless, the only complaint I've read about the movie that seemed halfway sane was that it too slavishly followed the book. One reviewer called it "stenography in light", which I thought was pretty funny. I'll wait until I see it to pass judgment. The books were a fun read.

And yeah, "satiny dark skin" reads "black" to me. Grackles think these people are aSSholes.

Not from what I can tell. I saw the original tweet, and his account is more or less just normal stuff for people he knows. Possible it was trolling, but no good reason to suspect it was.

[EDIT]
IIRC, the poster actually deleted said tweet and messaged the tumblr blogger (who had been compiling images of all of them) to remove it, because he realized that it was really just him being super ignorant. The twitter account has since been taken down.

Generally, if you are going to troll like that, you do so anonymously.

Edited, Mar 29th 2012 12:50am by idiggory

I've had my own revelation of a deep well of prejudice I didn't even know I had, so I'm actually inclined to approve of the third tweet. The tweeter might not be in a good position, but it sounds like they have gained some self knowledge, and that's always a good thing.

I was surprised and shocked with myself one day to realise I actually had a deep prejudice. A decade before 9/11 I did a semester of Islam Studies. I learned a lot about their history, culture, art, architecture and religious philosophy. I met the Sufi sect, and Rumi. From early on, Muslims had a rule that you don't sleep with your feet pointing towards Mecca, it's disrespectful to God. Rumi said: Show me a place where God is not, and I'll sleep with my feet pointing that way. He was not only intelligent about metaphysics, he was a fantastic poet. Anyway, during that semester, I realised, that although I prided myself on my open mind, and non prejudice, I DID pre judge Muslim culture because the things I knew most about it and concentrated on were the female genital mutilation (which I thought was only a Muslim thing, I did not know that most Christians and Jews in North Africa and the Middle East practised it) and the enforced wearing of the burka in fundamentalist nations.

Edited, Mar 29th 2012 4:47am by Aripyanfar

/shrug

You judge, whether you realize it or not, based on what you hear and on what you, personally, see. Obviously you hear a lot of information of mixed reliability, and you only see the public culture. An open mind is a mind that acknowledges its own limitations and is willing to accommodate new information.

I knew the part about female genital mutilation being culturally confined, largely, to north and west Africa. I didn't know the part about not sleeping with your feet to the east. And I've often thought that burqas would be freeing, in a way.

My son is so white you can see through him. His hair is white and he has bright blue eyes.

He is the devil himself.

People are stupid.