Typical

So because Trump threatened to end federal funding for Covid testing sites, a bunch of Texas officials panicked and wanted that funding continued. That's all well and good, but Governor Abbott talked about how Texas is going through a severe crisis now. Even though he's the fucking one who pushed forward with reopening quickly, and he's been steadily claiming that the higher infection rates were just due to higher testing. He and the Lt. Governor even scolded local cities and counties for trying to enforce tighter stay-at-home restrictions. So now we end up with huge spikes in infections, and our hospitals will be overloaded. Fucking dumbass hypocrites! You're the ones who made this crisis, not the Black Lives Matter protestors.

Meanwhile, some animated shows wisely decided to stop having the white actors play black and biracial parts, and the Bojack creator reiterated his mea culpa bout casting Alison Brie as Diane Nguyen. Bastard knew that he was doing yellowface and felt guilty about it, but never stopped. Then he never had Vietnamese writers on staff, even after he realized the problem of ignoring her race. Stop whitewashing characters or relying on that stupid "cast the best actress for the part" colorblindness. Nobody believes white people who misguidedly talk about about "I don't see race." It's there. It's always there, no matter how you try to minimize the issue.

Also, apparently a surprising number of sitcoms had blackface episodes, which they now are ashamedly removing. Even if their intent in these episodes was satire, the fact that they kept going to the well again and again shows comic writers getting into lazy tropes and feeling morally superior about being avant-garde and defiant against "political correctness." How about you just be human? How about you think about your white privilege, sitting in a room of mostly white writers congratulating yourselves for not being as bad as "the real racists"? They'd rather get a tone-deaf laugh than be sensitive to their ignorance.

I did in the past enjoy Tropic Thunder, with RDJ as an Australian actor in blackface. Their defense has always been that it was done ironically to lampoon a crazy, pretentious, method actor who thinks that this is "what they're allowed to do on occasion." But if you have to go that far to explain the joke, doesn't that defeat the purpose a little? And isn't the excuse of "my black friends told me it was okay," a little too similar to "I'm not racist; I have black friends"?

I think about it a little like how Asian parts still get cast with white actors, and fucking Scarlett Johansson defiantly claimed that she's such an awesome actress that she should be allowed to play anybody and anything, ignoring the fact that Asian women aren't allowed to play anybody and anything. There's barely anything written for us that's a lead role. It's the theft we mind, stealing what few things even belong to us. That's what made Crazy Rich Asians such an important film, and what made Disney casting Mulan correctly so meaningful. Typical Hollywood would have rewritten Rachel Chu as a white woman, or written a white savior/love interest into Mulan. It's so rare that they let us have the whole experience without watering it down with a white point of view. Typical Hollywood is what that Bojack creator did to Diane Nguyen, trying so hard to not play to stereotypes that he erased her race, made her culture invisible. At least he owned up to his mistakes, however belatedly.