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“Django” Both Flash Point, Free-for-All (Journalisms Training w/ Josh)

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For Every Virtue, an Opponent Finds a Vice

Al Jazeera Expands Reach With Purchase of Current TV

Is “White Knuckle” Like “Flesh” Colored Bandages?

Short Takes

For Every Virtue, an Opponent Finds a Vice

“Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ has become embroiled in the second major controversy of awards season,” Steve Pone wrote Wednesday for the Wrap. “The director’s liberal use of the N-word, and his temerity in tackling the issue of slavery, has drawn fire from some prominent African-Americans and impassioned defenses from others.

“Like the turmoil stirred up by the depiction of CIA-sponsored torture in Kathryn Bigelow‘s ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ the ‘Django’ fuss has been caused by a filmmaker tackling a hot-button issue — though Tarantino’s use of slavery as the backdrop for a joke-filled, Spaghetti-Western-style revenge fantasy is light years removed from Bigelow’s dead-serious depiction of the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

“Spike Lee bashed it sight unseen. Antoine Fuqua defended it, also before seeing it. Louis Farrakhan said it was designed to prepare America for a race war. Samuel L. Jackson wouldn’t be drawn into a discussion unless his (white) interviewer used the N-word.

“The movie has become both a flash point and a free-for-all, and the issue is particularly sensitive among African-American viewers — not a large audience for the film, but a key one for principals like Jamie Foxx, who plays the title role.

” ‘If this movie does what it does and black people hate it, that doesn’t do nothing for me,’ Foxx said on BET. ‘Because I feel like the reason I exist is the black audience.’ “

Black writers were of several minds. Every point raised in a given discussion — that “it’s only a movie,” that it’s really a love story, that it’s like a cartoon, that the use of the ‘n’ word is historically accurate — found someone taking an opposing position.

On Facebook Wednesday, Darren Sands, 29, a digital producer/reporter at Black Enterprise, garnered amens when he wrote, “Django commentary by most of the black intelligentsia cannot, for all of its brains and gifts of critical analysis, fathom a fantastical film with an artistic license … so the analysis comes off as drivel; baseless assumptions about what is lost on our conscience and about what is acceptable and accurate about a bygone era that we must hold dear lest we embarrass our ancestors. Please. At worst, it’s grandstanding for attention. At best, it’s not knowing how to have a good time at the movies.”

By contrast, in a piece posted Wednesday in the New Yorker, Jelani Cobb, 43, recalled teaching a course on American history at Moscow State University and being confronted by Russian students questioning Tarantino’s portrayal of World War II in “Inglourious Basterds.”

“.. . The movie’s lines between fantasy and the actual myopic perspectives on history were so hazy that the audience wasn’t asked to suspend disbelief, they were asked to suspend conscience,” wrote Cobb, director of the Institute of African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “With ‘Django Unchained,’ Tarantino’s tale of vengeful ex-slave, what happened in Russia is happening here.

“. . .The film’s defenders are quick to point out that ‘Django’ is not about history. But that’s almost like arguing that fiction is not reality — it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter.

“. . . It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this. The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution. Nearly two hundred thousand black men, most of them former slaves, enlisted in the Union Army in order to accomplish en masse precisely what Django attempts to do alone: risk death in order to free those whom they loved. Tarantino’s attempt to craft a hero who stands apart from the other men — black and white — of his time is not a riff on history, it’s a riff on the mythology we’ve mistaken for history.”

Al Jazeera Expands Reach With Purchase of Current TV

“Current TV, the small cable news channel that was co-founded by former vice president Al Gore, has been sold to Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based media company,” Joe Flint reported Wednesday for the Los Angeles Times.

“The acquisition gives Al Jazeera, which is funded by the Qatar government, the opportunity to establish a footprint in the United States, where it already has an English-language version of its Qatar service — called Al Jazeera English — but only limited reach.

“Just buying Current does not guarantee instant distribution, however. Time Warner Cable, which offered Current in roughly 10 million of its homes, is dropping the channel. Without Time Warner Cable, which is the largest distributor in New York City and Los Angeles, Current TV is in only about 50 million homes.”

Is “White Knuckle” Like “Flesh” Colored Bandages?

The front page of Saturday’s Washington Post carried a subtle reminder that the inventors of the English language — and today’s arbiters — have a certain skin tone as a frame of reference.

“Street racers put their terror on tape,” it said, followed by “White-knuckle stunts by D.C. area group ‘a tragedy waiting to happen.’

“What’s a “white knuckle”? Yahoo’s Answer site gives this as the “best answer”: “The act of clenching your hand shuts off the blood flow to your knuckles, so they turn white. You clench your hand on a steering wheel or roller coaster bar when you are scared. So, white knuckles = scared.“

But what if your skin isn’t the shade that turns white? It could put you in the same category as those who are “tickled pink,” but not really, become “red-faced,” or once were given “flesh” colored Band-Aids that didn’t match their particular flesh.

Last year during Black History Month, Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer of the Chicago Tribune compiled “10 things you might not know about skin color.”

“Crayola once had a color called ‘flesh,’ which was the color of Caucasian flesh,” they noted as their second point. “After complaints from civil rights activists, ‘flesh’ became ‘peach’ in 1962. A similar controversy involved ‘Indian red.’ Crayola said the color was based on a pigment found near India, but some thought it was a slur against native Americans, so the company solicited consumer suggestions for a new name. Among the ideas: ‘baseball-mitt brown’ and ‘crab claw red.’ But ‘chestnut’ was chosen in 1999.”

Journal-isms asked Liz Spayd, a managing editor at the Post, about the “white knuckle” headline. She replied by email, “..i think of ‘white knuckled’ as a common term for something that pumps up anxiety and fear. i’ve never heard the concern you raise about it.”

Crayola didn’t give up on crayons that mimicked skin tones; it adapted to a multicultural world. Its website now says, “Crayola Large Multicultural Crayons come in an assortment of skin hues that give a child a realistic palette for coloring their world. These thick crayons are easy to grip — perfect for little hands. The crayon colors are: black, sepia, peach, apricot, white, tan, mahogany and burnt sienna. Each crayon is 4″ long and 7?16″ in diameter.“

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