It’s starting to feel like summer, and that means summer movies! We start this week’s diversity linkup with a post from Feministing pointing out the whitewashing of Jennifer Lopez in The Back-Up Plan.
Speaking of beautiful women of color, the newly-crowned Miss USA is a Lebanese American immigrant, Rima Fakih! It’s not clear if she’s the first Arab American or the first immigrant to win, but it is a movement toward a society in which all little girls can dream of being crowned for their beauty. Of course, we’re not there yet.
And maybe one of the reasons for the backlash against her is a tendency among many white people to assume that gains for people of color come at the expense of white folk. Writing before the pageant, Stuff White People Do explores this idea:
So when white advantages recede and non-white chances move closer to even, the white people who complain about that mostly do so, I think, because they’re not seeing and understanding white privilege. They’re also not seeing the racism that resulted in that privilege, and still results in it; they seem to believe that the racial playing field is already level. If that’s true, then when non-whites gain and whites seem to lose as a result, those whites who complain about that don’t do so because they realize that their racial group is losing ill-gotten gains. They instead complain because they think they’re being cheated.
Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias asks, What If They Gave a Terrorist Attack And Nobody Noticed? after a homemade pipe bomb exploded in a Florida mosque, highlighting the difference in the reaction to this and to the attempted bombing in Time Square.
And lastly, what would I do without Google? I learn of the existence of many holidays in our wide, diverse world through Google Doodles. Did you know that last Sunday was Teacher’s Day in Korea?
Happy belated Korean Teacher’s Day, and thanks for letting us know, Google!
