The Wokeness of a Day of Unreasonable Conversation Goes Comatose
On a Monday in late March of this year (2019), Proper Daley of the Getty Center introduced their brand new annual event “A Day of Unreasonable Conversation,” which has the laudable goal of creating more authentic representation of under represented minorities in film and television. Among this years panel which included actresses Amy Landekar, Micheala Watkins and Sophia Bush as well as show runners Sarah Gertrude Shapiro and Jenji Kohan, was New York Magazine columnist, Andrew Sullivan. Addressing how Hollywood treats the “other side” (specifically non-coastal elites which would be most of the country so even more specifically working class white people), Sullivan had this to say:
“The people who are already insecure about losing their job switch on the TV, look at the newspaper and hear they are being described as bigots, racists, and they resent it, and the one thing I would urge you people who do this type of content is try and complete the idea of ‘the other’ being in the room because they can hear what you are saying.”
One of those reporting on this event and Sullivan’s comments was The Hollywood Reporter who framed Sullivan’s continuing comments as “doubling down,” and which drew “audible gasps.” What Sullivan continued to say that caused these gasps and The Hollywood Reporter to frame his opinion as resolute risk taking was; “Don’t tell them everything is good. That you deserve it and you are all basically slaveholders under their skin, blah blah blah which is what Hollywood is saying to them every second of the day.”
Sullivan, in my opinion is being hyperbolic but there is nothing risky about what he is saying unless we are going to just finally accept that leftist Hollywood is bat-shit crazy and can’t be reasoned with at all. First, and to be clear, Hollywood does not spend every second of every day smearing working class white peoples as covert racists who pine for the days when slavery was legal. While the show has been off the air for a few years now, Parks and Recreation created one of the funniest and mightily accurate representation of the middle class white libertarian male, Ron Swanson. The Ron Swanson’s are, however, few and far between a bevy of poorly drafted straw men who “represent” the “other side.”
Secondly, and in fairness to Hollywood at large, their pool of writers often do the same to their side, creating poorly drafted straw men making absurd arguments in defense of indefensible ideas. Yet, just because I think Sullivan was exaggerating the circumstances doesn’t mean his point isn’t valid. Shows like Madame Secretary are proudly left leaning filled with earnest Democrats who only want to serve the public good. On “the other side” of that show, however, are right leaning Republican trolls who’s stances on policy are almost always written as vacuous ideas put out only to defend or conserve the patriarchy, hierarchy, the rich or whatever other evil thing the writers can think of.
Rural people are too often, if not to the degree Sullivan claims, portrayed as country hayseeds seemingly incapable of grasping nuanced and complex ideas. It appears this happens because too many screenwriters for Hollywood live in a bubble. The Hollywood Reporter notes that during Andrew Sullivan’s discussion and female writer in the audience asked “how one should weigh the grievances of the white working class, against those of inner city African-Americans, who face racism and bigotry on an institutional level.”
This is the coma that wokeness sends people into. To be woke one must not only acknowledge past indecencies and horrific acts, but must also find a culprits within the heirs or seeming heirs of those who committed these shameful acts. To be woke means to ignore any genuine gains made in stemming the tides of racism and to instead sea a raging sea of it cascading upon the shores and inland’s of this nation. For the woke, the problem of racism is as bad as it ever was, or to some even worse.
Wokeness seems to demand victims and culprits exist at all times and that minority groups or woke approved aggrieved groups must be “weighed against” the unapproved aggrieved groups that are viewed as the culprits. It always must be one group pitted against the other highlighting the differences between them in an unironically stark black and white. They become so comatose in their woke state they can’t even seem to consider that commonalities between the two groups and how each of them can help the other heal and overcome the scarred wounds of past atrocities.
Of course, Hollywood also has a penchant for lauding films that glibly do show the commonalities as shameless and unearned pats on their collective backs for how far they have come. Driving Miss Daisy is one such film put out in the same year Spike Lee put out Do the Right Thing. Where Driving Miss Daisy won the Oscar for best picture, the much better and no doubt more agitating Do the Right Thing was not even nominated and completely ignored.