Alien and Predator movies reinforce anti-Black racism
Discussion
How Hollywood’s ‘Alien’ and ‘Predator’ movies reinforce anti-Black racism
If you like the Alien and/or Predator films, you're probably a racist. Sorry.
article said:
...we are dealing with a culture of domination. It is a culture that thrives on the sexualized demonization of Black people. Two examples of this are Ridley Scott’s Alien, which comports with the trope of Black women as alien breeders and Predator, written by brothers Jim and John Thomas, that riffs on images of Black men as dreadlocked, violent and superhuman.
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Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, with its vicious and endlessly breeding carbon black alien mother, came at the height of neoliberal experiment and in the U.S. especially, an all-out assault on Black people. In the context of anti-Black culture, the film signifies the Black woman as an unkillable and ceaselessly breeding alien who threatened the body politic.
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In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern.
Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history
Source: https://theconversation.com/how-hollywoods-alien-a......
Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, with its vicious and endlessly breeding carbon black alien mother, came at the height of neoliberal experiment and in the U.S. especially, an all-out assault on Black people. In the context of anti-Black culture, the film signifies the Black woman as an unkillable and ceaselessly breeding alien who threatened the body politic.
...
In the context of racially charged white anxieties about immigration and social order, the historical demonization of Black men is a trope, a stereotype, that easily maps onto cinematic typecasting. The 1987 Hollywood film that launched the Predator franchise fits this pattern.
Predator depicted a Black, dreadlocked, large and super-virile male in a way that converged white art with white political history
If you like the Alien and/or Predator films, you're probably a racist. Sorry.
ks.
I do think theres something in the Predator design that reflects the archetype cited by the author of that page. I always thought so even as a kid (Predator 2 kind of ramped this up as well being set in LA among a yardie drug war)
How deliberate is it though, and is it damaging really?
The alien/ black woman one is clutching at straws
How deliberate is it though, and is it damaging really?
The alien/ black woman one is clutching at straws
KAgantua said:
The alien/ black woman one is clutching at straws
Especially when they reference "Ridley Scott" - his Alien film was a single ("gender-neutral") alien. And in his recent prequel films the aliens are white (some of the time at least).It was James Cameron's AlienS that introduced the "Queen" concept. Thinking about it, he cast a white woman as the very-tanned latina-badass "Private Vasquez", so maybe he is a massive racist? BOYCOTT TITANIC!
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