#diversity and skin color

[colorism-project]

The Impact of Colorism on Women of Color: A Fireside Chat

Join scholars  Dr. Julie Jung (Moderator), Dr. Lena Sharda, Ms. Simran Anjari, Dr. Patrice Le Goy, and Dr. Donnamaria Culbreth, along with student guest, Ms. Ruchi Gali, for “The Impact of Colorism on Women of Color: A Fireside Chat” at the Ronald E. Hall Conference on Colorism on Friday, August 23, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. CST. Register today! Website: https://colorismconf.com

[cruel-hiraeth]

happy sunday! here’s a cosy little picrew to celebrate 🤍

[teawizard]

No way! Animal Crossing introduced new villagers!

Who would you like to see on your island?

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

[puppetgearing]

hello i am wlw (winners love winning), his name is miknaril parona and hes a rogue elf !!! (fun fact: based on my actual race and class when i first tried dnd !!)

dunme self insert !!!! no self shipping (probably might change in the future) if im being honest, pure platonic shipping cause i have issues and need to be in the same party as laios and everyone else

he's 110 years old, which is (calculated according to this post) 22 in tall man year 👍

[d-1hater]

I love this movie so much

No movie will ever compare and the entire industry needs to get on their level

[raemeh]

there’s a part of me that’s tempted to design/talk about light skinned poc because I swear sometimes it feels like people overreact to characters with light skin with poc features.

[goatpaste]

Begging people to learn the difference between race and ethnicity. Italians can be any race!

italians can be any race!

like!! surprise! sometimes italians arnt white! sometimes someone with brown skin is born in italy lol

[artist-issues]

Once More For the People in the Back:

- Lilo & Stitch is NOT about the evils of colonization.

It’s about a literal alien monster with no home coming to a planet and town where he doesn’t belong and being adopted as one of their own. Even after he destroys everything they love and build. Spin that into a metaphor for how terrible colonization is, if you can.

- Lilo & Stitch is NOT about the hardships people with dark skin inherently face.

It is about the hardships of people who lose family members and have to adjust to loving someone new. Nani is struggling to keep Lilo because she’s an 18 year-old orphan trying to play mom to a little sister who just needs someone to be her friend. She’s losing job opportunities because Lilo is trying to accept a destructive monster into their family with destructive results, not because she has dark skin.

- Lilo & Stitch is NOT about the evils of racism.

Lilo & Stitch is about an alien learning the meaning of family. Lilo explicitly demonstrates a hatred of tourists (not white people, just tourists, because Cobra Bubbles is implied to be a tourist in the same scene.) in one scene and that scene was deleted because it took the focus away from other scenes which made the point of the film more clearly. If a bad light is put on tourism, it’s to emphasize that Lilo has a problem with people leaving—”I remember everyone that leaves; I need someone who won’t run away; You came back; nobody gets left behind.”

And finally, drumroll please: 

-Lilo and Stitch is NOT about celebrating diversity.

Celebrating diversity is a fine message. It’s just not the one Lilo & Stitch is delivering. You’re thinking of Ice Age 4, where all kinds of animals make up a family; or Zootopia, where all all kinds of people can perform different jobs in society.

No. Lilo & Stitch is about what family means, and that is: unconditional love. Loving you at your worst and helping you to be better.

 The fact that the social worker is black, or male, has nothing to do with that main point. The fact that the Grand Councilwoman is female has nothing to do with the main point. The fact that one alien is skinny and one is fat has nothing to do with the main point. The fact that Nani and Lilo have dark skin has nothing to do with the main point—just like the fact that Stitch is blue has nothing to do with the main point.

Those factors might help in a peripheral way—(blue is the color the human brain associates with supernatural creatures; dark skin = Hawaiian = believably being brought up on the philosophy of ‘Ohana) —but you could still change any one of those things and it would remain Lilo & Stitch. 

By contrast, with a film that is actually about celebrating diversity like Ice Age 4, if you change the hedgehog into another mammoth you lose the point of the story. Or in Zootopia, if you make Judy and Nick both bunnies you lose the point of the story. Diversity is a fine point. Whatever. But it’s not the point of Lilo & Stitch. 

FORGET what you are hearing on Twitter in relation to the Live Action Movie. You can say what you want about how much you wish a certain shade of skin were representing the characters you love.

But if, to make your point, you try to argue that the original had ANYTHING to do with specific shades of color, demonstrating colonization and racism evils, or representing the hardships of POCs trying to get a job, you are being disingenuous. Or worse, you’re just tossing the real point of the movie carelessly over one shoulder so you can wedge a cause that it was never championing in where it doesn’t fit.

Try and make your point about how skin color and representation matters all you want, but you can’t honestly do it using the example the original movie set. The point of the original movie is just bigger and better than “skin colors should be given more attention.”

[quackle]

watched wicked last night…. lots of thoughts mostly negative…. mostly because i love the book and unnecessary changes for adaptations that have no reason to be changed hurt my soul. anyway why is my babygirl white he is explicitly described as having dark skin in the novel does gregory maguires writing prowess mean NOTHING to you damn film writers

you know i definitely want to read wicked at some point because my mom has similar thoughts to yours!! (wicked is one of the only books she gaf about lol) i liked the film, thought it was brilliantly made, but then again, i do not have book context to fully formulate a full, wicked-esque review

[alwritey-aphrodite]

Reading YA/TikTok books makes me realize maybe my writing isn’t all that bad if this is getting published…

[kasumingo]

i love that the Purple Dragons had no reaction whatsoever to Dee being a turtle, they just gladly continued to bully him for getting in their way

[porcelainvino]

fandom try to draw diverse and non skinny non light skin people challenge (impossible)

[audhdnight]

I really wonder what goes through some peoples heads to see a post taking about all the reasons someone shouldn’t support a certain author (if they cared about racism or Zionism or literally just had any kind of care for other humans) to then comment “I love her books!! 🥰”

We know. And we know why. Choke.

[certifiedl0serloll]

well well well… look who came home on my second 50/50 win… ty queen..

[saber-monet]

[poseiben]

my two cents on the latest discourse: as someone who has taken race/resistance courses and queer theory classes y'all realize that oppression doesn't exist in a vacuum. you cannot isolate one specific variable to focus on, that's not how life and oppression works. all you are contributing to is dividing the community and isolating yourself, which, in turn, makes you More vulnerable to hate because you have no one to fall back on. what community will support you? you drove them all away.