Comments on: Annie is Black!

By: Ave.MariaLewis

Ave.MariaLewis — Fri, 02 May 2014 05:22:18 +0000

What was said about the movie doesn’t surprise me. When I heard that she was going to be black I knew it had to come, nothing a minority does in this nation that gets notice, can go without racial implications and jokes to follow. What does bother me is how they suggested the name be changed, or that racism goes both ways. In movies like Tropic Thunder, or the current debate that everyone in a movie about Egypt is going to be white, or even how Noah was white in the last remake of Noah’s arc, we never hear whites say “well that’s wrong why didn’t they get a black guy, or middle eastern person, etc” In fact when the roles are reversed and its a white person playing a black part its acceptable. It baffles me honestly, people in our society and in our world still find ways to associate black with being bad (as you said) and then say it isn’t racist.

By: cmr3991

cmr3991 — Fri, 02 May 2014 00:25:12 +0000

Without doing any research on the topic, I wonder what the reasoning behind casting black female as Annie is? She could easily have been the best actress to audition and earned the role solely on talent, which would be awesome because it would really show that even though they knew Annie has always been played by a white female, they were prepared to cast the best actress regardless of race. The reason why I bring this up is because you sometimes here about productions, movies, cartoons, shows, etc. casting black people in main character roles as a way of saying “hey look we’re not racist over here!”. This can definitely be seen as an example of color blind ideology “we don’t see race” and also supports the claim that many Americans are desperate to not seem racist. There was a comic hero a while back called the Green Lantern who was a white male and had a ring that gave him special powers. At one point the ring, and the title of “Green Lantern”, was passed on to a black male for so called “diversity” reasons, as an attempt to avoid criticism that they were making all of their characters white and not seem racist to the public. Hopefully a black girl being cast as Annie is a step towards ending this type of racist behavior.

By: Tatianap

Tatianap — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 04:26:22 +0000

I, like you, was not surprised by the comments about Annie. I saw multiple comments like the ones posted here and some even more disturbing ones. This happens every time a Black person plays someone that was originally written as white; ignorant white people talk to social media and either say overtly racist remarks or make excuses for why it’s “not supposed to be” like that. It’s ridiculous. I find it even more ridiculous that people call casting of a movie reverse racism because it really doesn’t work that way. These comments show how people really don’t understand terms or racial interactions that affect us every day.