I graze a bit on NPR, mostly to find material. Let’s just say it’s a “target rich environment”.
The network has a couple of shows – chock full of vaguely-black sounding accents and topics, slathered over the same progressivized-for-your-protection content they provide the other 162 hours a week, shows like “It’s Been a Minute” and “The Takeaway”, that seem to try to address, not so much the “black” audience, but NPR’s huge, relentlessly white progressive audience, apparently to make them feel, if not “more authentic”, at least a little less guilty.
But I’m here to bring the guilt back.
In recent months, I’ve heard 2-3 shows on the relentlessly woke networks – interviewing the stars of the movie “The Woman King”, an “afrocentric feminist” story about a sub-Saharan kingdom’s unit of female warriors.
The movie – and the gushy, smarmy, self-congratulatory interviews – gabble and prate on and on about female power and empowerment and inspiration and enough word salad to unstop a cement colon.
What doesn’t get mentioned? The real life “warrior women’s” main military and economic justification; procuring slaves to sell. They were a revenue-generation tool for the Dahomey monarchy.
Go ahead. Tell me where the slavery talk is. I’ll wait.
National Review’s Armond White – one of modern media’s most intellectually consistent and rigorous film critics, and incidentally a black man – was not amused:
Historical fraudulence is a problem, but the reasons behind it are what cause alarm. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood and screenwriters Dana Stevens and Maria Bello gainsay Dahomey’s role in the slave trade, trivializing the complications of that original sin. Instead, they offer another Millennial gender-flip, conceived to further sexual confusion via racial frustration and feminist anger.
This approach cannot be taken seriously because, like Black Panther and The Lion King, The Woman King is juvenile. The film’s comic-book premise treats black audiences like children. That adolescent kick over hair-pulling catfights is extended into an almost laughable, pseudo-political history lesson pitting women against men…Thus, she gives us Dahomey as Wakanda, a made-up history for uninformed viewers who feel so “unseen” that they can be robbed and conned again.
But let’s not bury the lede here.
NPR, and Hollywood.
Erasing Slavery.
It’d be so cool if NPR engaged with the proles. I’ve got so many questions.
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