Has anybody seen World Trade Center, the new movie directed by Oliver Stone about the last two people to be rescued from the debris of the World Trade Towers after September 11?
I haven’t seen the film, but today I uncovered a shocking (shocking!) piece of information about the real people the movie is based on. The two last people to be rescued were police officers Will Jimeno and John McLoughlin, and one of the people who helped rescue them was ex-Marine Jason Thomas. Here is a picture of the actor who plays Jason Thomas, from Wikipedia:
Here is a picture of Jason Thomas from USA Today:
In case the pictures don’t spell out why I’m enraged, William Mapother is white! Jason Thomas is black! Rage! Rage!
I found this info courtesy of the blog Rachel’s Tavern, and who very eloquently notes that the reason why this particular cross-racial casting is inappropriate is because there are so few postive images of black men in mainstream media. While American movie directors have no problem casting black/latino actors in roles of “bad guys” (see the movie Thirteen for proof of this), when they have the opportunity to show a black man doing something amazing and inarticulably valuable for the U.S.A. on a terrible day, they cast a white man.
You can read Jason Thomas bio on Wikipedia here. The movie production company notes that it made a “mistake” in casting a white actor to portray Thomas, but that it was too late to change the actors by the time they realised their mistake.
Fury! Fury!
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two comments
That's absurd. And sad. I'd be curious to know what people who've seen the movie think of it. I saw a preview and it looked like a mawkish cash-grab to my cynical eye, but someone pointed out to me that it's become quite rare to engage with 9/11 on an emotional, human level, and maybe we need some more of that.
Speaking of awkward race relations, have you heard that the next season of Survivor is going to feature racially segregated tribes? Awesome, guys. It's about time we brought back that dark period in American history.
Posted by Anna
August 29, 2006, 11:23 PM
YES! I did hear about that! I was going to post about it but I figured it would be common knowledge soon enough...
Two things that really horrified me, solely on the topic of the team names was that:
a) There's the African, Asian and Latino teams, and then there's the White team. Hello? Could they not have called it the European-American team? Yeah, maybe that sounds silly, but does African-American sound any less silly? Because if they're going to emphasise the fact that people of colour come from elsewhere, why not emphasise the fact that white people ALSO come from somewhere else too??
b) The Asian team seems to be primarily (or totally?) composed of people who look East Asian. Apparently the people who put Survivor together haven't looked at a map and noticed that countries like, say, Sri Lanka, Russia, Syria, and yes even Iraq are in Asia...
On second thoughts, maybe the reason why I didn't blog about this was because I was too busy screaming into pillows to get to my computer...
Posted by thea
August 30, 2006, 6:06 PM
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