Just moments after backing up the footage from the Winbush interview shoot to an external drive my 10-day old MacBook Pro died! In all my years as an Apple user (I go way back to the early days with my Apple ][e) I’ve never experienced such a horrendous FAIL/WTF!!!
It doesn’t help matters that I’m currently in Philadelphia, where there is currently no Apple Store. oh, well…back on the train to Montreal tomorrow. will have to take it in then.
Let this be a lesson to all: always, always, always have a backup solution in place and USE IT. Also, don’t cheap out and buy those POS LaCie drives. Spend a few extra bucks for a G-Drive. Your piece of mind is worth it. I know mine is.
I’m currently sitting in the Green Line Cafe at Locust and South 45th Street in my old neighbourhood of west Philadelphia. I’m here for a few days of R&R after a short but crazy leg of shooting in D.C. and Baltimore last week.
These past two interviews have been two years in the making. It was late November 2007 when I initially contacted Dr. James Loewen and Dr. Raymond Winbush about being in my documentary. At the time, I figured that finding support for a project such as this one would be relatively easy. I assumed that either the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) or the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) would be eager to participate in the production of a documentary taking aim at confronting the lie in our historical narrative that we are a country free of the racial past that embroils our southern neighbours even to this day. I assumed that I would be ready to begin photography as early as Summer 2008. How naive was I!
So here we are, winter 2009. Progress is being made, slowly but surely. Back in March 2009 I was able, with the great help of Randal Martin, to shoot an interview with Dr. Dorothy Williams (who is featured in the first teaser) in Montreal. These two most recent shoots were made with the help of Adam Reuter (camera op) and Michelle Farrell (Absolute Independent Pictures equipment rental) of the Baltimore area. The world of independent filmmaking is built and sustained by the spirit of co-operation and giving and all three of these individual embody this spirit.
Thursday (3 December, 2009), was my shoot with sociologist and historian James W. Loewen. Dr. Loewen is the author of such great books as “ Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong,” “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong,” and “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” (all three of which I consider to be required reading for anyone and everyone interested in social justice issues or just history in general). Scheduling issues resulted in an interview that was shorter than I would have liked—about 25 minutes total of recorded footage—but I am still thrilled to have had the opportunity to sit down with Loewen and get what I did.
On Saturday (5 December, 2009), was my interview with scholar/activist Raymond Winbush. Dr. Winbush is Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University, editor of ”Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations” and author of “Belinda’s Petition: A Concise History of Reparations for the Transatlantic Slave Trade” and “The Warrior Method: A Parent’s Guide to Rearing Healthy Black Boys”. We sat down for about an hour and a quarter for a fantastic and inspiring interview.
I’m going through the interview material over a very large cafe mocha, drinking in every word along with the coffee-choclate blended goodness. The road ahead is still long. Without any real financial support at the moment, I rely on my own financial health (for what it is) to keep things going. I will spend some time over the next few weeks cutting something together to present to the Canadian film industry powers-that-be and hope that it will entice them out of their complacency and inaction. Stay tuned.
I have to admit, back a few years ago when Twitter first hit the scene I was skeptical. My first impression was the same as that of many others: that it was just another silly outlet for vanity, another tool for self absorbed attention-addicts to get their fix. The idea of having to read through what people just ate or from where they were Tweeting (e.g. the toilet) was just too… stupid. I’ll just say it: stupid.
However about a year ago I got hip to a few trending topics for people working in the film and television post-production world: #editingandpost and #postproduction. These quickly proved to be useful tools in relation to my day gig as an editor at a visual effects company. As I started to enter into initial production (the phase I am calling my gathering of interview material) I decided to not only set up this site/blog, but also use Twitter as a means to spread awareness. Through this I started to engage other people on Twitter who post on social justice issues, especially those pertaining to #racism.
It was through this medium that I met Jamaal Ra’Shon Bell from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University. He invited me to be a guest contributor for Race-Talk.org, a new online magazine/blog which aims to “revolutionize thought, communication and activism related to race and equality.” It is very new, having officially launched just this past week, but already has a swath of great articles that I encourage you to go read… NOW!
I am honoured and feel privileged to be offered an opportunity to contribute to such a project.
An interesting study made by the people at OkCupid examines the correlation between first-contact attempts and responses. According to them, “it was immediately obvious that the sender’s race was a huge factor.” I’m not going to dissect the data here, it’s an interesting post that is well worth the read. One thing I found particularly is their data on attitudes towards interacial dating:
UPDATE (9/12/09): I have asked McDonald’s UK corporate office to comment on the policy outlined in the above notice. I’ll post their response when/if they issue one.
UPDATE (9/13/09): I’m starting to wonder if this is actually a clever hoax. First, there is no date on the document. Second, is a the use of the word “decent” when they really mean “descent”. Possibly just a typo, either way it is worth noting.
For the third time this year, I have made a failed attempt to create a Page for this documentary film on the social networking site Facebook. It fails because it appears there is something offensive in the title “A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada.”
So my attempt to create the page has failed three times now. After each failure, I followed the “Customer Support team” link because I did, in fact, believe that they were in error to automatically bar my efforts to create a legitimate Page to promote a legitimate film. Twice before this have I filled out their little form, which includes little space for comment. I never heard from the Facebook support team before, and I seriously doubt I will this time.
You may be thinking, “if the word ’slavery’ is causing the issue, why not shorten the Page title to just ‘A Past, Denied’?” It’s a simple and fair question to ask. My answer is also fair and simple: I shouldn’t have to.
Whatever Facebook’s issue is with the title of my film, they should speak up and say what it is.
Last week the story emerged that a white man from South Africa was granted refugee status by the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board. The claimant is Brandon Huntley, a 31 year-old former carnival worker who now lives in Ottawa. Huntly alleges that “whites are targeted by black criminals in South Africa and that the government does nothing to protect them.” He said he was “attacked six or seven times by black South Africans and that those beatings left him with scars on his stomach, right eye, right side of the body and hands.”
William Davis, the chair of the tribunal—which operates independently at an arm’s length from the federal government—says that he believes Huntley would “stand out like a ’sore thumb’ due to his colour in any part of (South Africa)” and that he finds “the claimant was a victim because of his race (white South African) rather than a victim of criminality.” The African National Congress, the current majority party in the South African government, has denounced the ruling as a “racist move.”
Body Dysmorphic Disorder, as the Mayo Clinic puts it, is a “type of chronic mental illness in which you can’t stop thinking about a flaw with your appearance.” It’s a compulsive disorder that shouldn’t be confused with common vanity. People with body dysmorphic disorder—which is also known as dysmorphophobia (fear of having a deformity)—suffer a compulsive belief that they have an abnormality or defect in their appearance. It manifests in different ways, from anxiety and depression to eating disorders, excessive cosmetic surgery and self mutilation. Its causes can be biochemical, hereditary and/or environmental.
When we hear stories about it in the media, it is usually surrounding the issues of women suffering eating disorders vis-a-vis the daily bombardment of images and messages in the media and popular culture espousing a certain aesthetic standard for women. The message they receive is that “beauty looks like this; and if you don’t look like this, then you are not beautiful.”
It’s been only two days since word went out on Twitter about the Microsoft promo that had a white man’s head superimposed ontop of a black man in what has been widely criticised as mostly a bad Photoshop job. It has been reported on by online news outlets including The Huffington Post and Engadget. Microsoft was predictably quick to offer the basic “we’re-sorry-we-don’t-know-what-happened-we’ll-look-into-it” apology. CNN reported on Microsoft’s “Mea Culpa”, which you may watch here:
Two things all three of these pieces have in common are 1) that emphasis is paid more to the shoddy attention to detail in the creation of the ad (using an Apple MacBook, mediocre Photoshopping) rather than racist implications; and 2) they all missed a very important detail about the black man’s hand.
I’ve already gone over the racism implied by the action of replacing the black man’s head with that of a white man, so I’ll focus on what no one else has: the hand. The same statement keeps coming up all over the place, basically that “they forgot to Photoshop out the black guy’s hand!” But did they? Take a look again…
Look closer.
His hand has been visibly (and may I say, quite obviously) lightened from about the wrist up. There is still a part of the man’s arm sticking out of the sleeve that indicates his true complexion. The hand has been lightened in both versions.
Don't let the MacBook, wrong lighting and mediocre compositing job distract you. The real story is still the racist implication.
Thanks to Bill from Attention 101 for the YouTube link.
