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Go woke, get rich: why rightwing hate campaigns don’t affect the box office
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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But the right-wing hate campaign has affected the box office, giving the movie some massive publicity. I wouldn't have even heard about the movie if it weren't for this controversy (I'm a bit saturated lately so I don't keep up with barely any new media).
This phenomenon doesn't only happen in that direction, lots of people cried out racism because of a white Cleopatra. So when is it acceptable to race-bend a character or historical figure and when is it not?
PS: the real Cleopatra (of the Ptolemaic dynasty) was actually white.
You wouldn't have heard about the big practical set full IMAX movie made by the Oppenheimer/Interstellar/Dark Knight director?
I only heard about it because it's been getting news recently. I know the idiots are upset about something, but that's about it. I go out of my way to not be advertised to. 🤷🏼♂️
We live in an age where people hear about breaking news via memes. You don't have to see literal ads in order to hear about something.
But, I guess if all you've heard about it is that people are outraged then it just goes to show the power of conservative media being able to push its message past your filter.
To be fair I've not seen it advertised anywhere and only heard about it because a Youtuber mentioned it was coming out this year in a video a while back and I made a mental note I wanted to watch it. I went to see it the opening weekend without even realising it was the opening weekend! I just saw it listed when looking what was on at the cinema.
I haven't even seen an ad, trailer, review, or article about it that doesn't has to do with the Musk and company drama, yet.
It's entirely based on the culture at the time. Not just the tolerance of racial diversity in media, or the definition of "whiteness," but also education about the source material.
Greeks aren't white, Western Europeans. Not even like Slavs from just north of there. They're as white as Turks and Egyptians and Southern Italians. Italians were lynched in the South in 1891. Show these racist fucks a picture of the Greek national football team, and then the Mexican, Egyptian, Isreali, or Algerian national team, and have them bet $20,000 they can guess them right. Same goes for TV news anchors in those places, I would imagine.
Anyone calling Greeks "white" is thinking of Renaissance paintings where Jesus was also blonde haired and blue-eyed.
Being white is a social concept. See: Italians or Irish past history in the usa.
Exactly. The definition and its application are entirely subjective.
And Spaniards and the Portugese, who are indisputably Western European. So the only part of your comment that's true is that Greece isn't in western Europe. It's in southeastern Europe.
The white/black dichotomy is idiotic since, along the black/white continuum, humans are a clinal population, regardless of which phenotypic feature you might use: skin color, hair texture, nose breadth, whatever.
It kind of worked in the American south slave society because the middle of the spectrum was unrepresented there. But it was always bullshit.
Because they were Catholics, most likely, or just foreigners. The Klan hated both. But if you look at the immigration records on Ellis Island, for Italians, the "White" checkbox for race was always selected. Same for Jews. Same for the Irish. Most of the "X weren't considered white" assertions are ahistorical. There was often virulent prejudice, but there were more causes for xenophobia than just "race" was supposed to mean back then.
Yeah, my point is that even once you get outside the "acceptable" side of Europe for racists, everyone on the Med looks the same if you don't know the really subtle traits between smaller ethnic groups.
The reasons for numerous Italian lynchings are equally numerous. And equally sketchy and stupid. That's my point there, is that being marked "white" on paper does not confer the same benefit as being perceived as "white" in a community. 20% of reported lynchings in the American South were not black people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Italian_Americans
If we're going to be pedantic about the historical definitions of whiteness, than it should be noted that the concept of race (and especially of "whiteness") didn't exist back then. You were either Greek (preferably from one of the more respectable city-states), or a barbarian.
Cleopatra was Greek, and would've looked roughly like a Greek person today, which people do generally consider white in America today. Hell, even plenty of Turks call themselves white these days, and it's not like you could tell the difference at a glance anyways.
Exactly, that's my point. Race is a stupid concept.
White people are typically shocked that there are ethnic groups in Africa, and it's not all just "assorted blacks." And that they don't really all get along.
Meanwhile, I once explained the Balkan wars to people I worked with in West Africa. One of them genuinely asked "What? Why? They're all white!"
Or rather, it did, sort of, but it had very different baggage than it has now. The ancient Greeks knew about Ethiopians, and described their physical appearance. They also distinguished Greeks from one another by hair color and skin tone: Achilles was blond (or maybe red-haired-- classical Greek color terms are unclear); Odysseus dark-skinned (for a Greek). "White-armed" (famously applied to Helen) was a desirable womanly attribute, more because it implied the woman wasn't doing work outside in the sun. But we don't know if "white" meant like milk, or just not tanned as much as a peasant.
Turkey's unusual, since the urbanites are mainly Mediterranean-looking, but some of the peasants from the hinterland look lighter-skinned and sometimes blond and blue-eyed.
If you look at old paintings, the orginal generation of Turkish invaders looked very much like Mongols (there are quite a few portraits-- the Turks back then were Muslim but didn't observe the modern prohibition on making pictures of people-- the Sultans liked to hire Venetian portrait painters). Since then, they're intermarried with the locals to such an extent that their appearance is just like the pre-Ottoman-invasion population of Asia Minor.