Marianne Pearl is Black
The American media machine cannot digest Black life, and can only package its semblance of real life in white-face. Apparently, white people cannot stare "Others" in the face, and must tell stories that have their own made-up existence featured. - Black Agenda Report
How hard is it to understand? The woman in the photo and her mother are obviously people of African ancestry, yet Hollywood is having none of it. Marianne Pearl has been white washed, with her full permission. I for one don't care that she doesn't have the confidence or the consciousness to speak up for African people. She doesn't have the right to tell the rest of us that yet another removal from the pages of history is in any way permissible.
It is truly shameful that so many white people cannot bear to see a picture that doesn't have themselves at the center. Even the left succumb to the assumption that only whiteness is normative. David Corn dismisses the casting complaint out of hand.
The recent blog-driven fuss kicked up by the movie A Mighty Heart -- whether casting pale-skinned Angelina Jolie as darker-skinned Afro-Cuban-Dutch Mariane Pearl, the wife of murdered journalist Danny Pearl, was an act of racist dimensions -- seems irrelevant when you consider an important piece of evidence: the movie itself.
The casting outrage is irrelevant? It certainly isn't to the people who are told to keep quiet when their very likeness is erased. In this case Pearl's nationality is the excuse for putting Angelina Jolie in blackface. Sorry, race is the issue, not being Cuban and Dutch and born in France. Pearl should not be portrayed by a white person for the simple reason that she is not white. How hard is that to understand?
