The Chris Moeller Archives

#boycottssowhite

In 1988, a young Irish-American hood named Mark Wahlberg targeted a middle-aged Vietnamese man named Thanh Lam in a violent, physical attack on the streets of South Boston. The attack with a wooden stick caused an extensive hospitalization and permanent blindness for the victim. While knocking him unconscious, Wahlberg called the man a "Vietnam fucking shit." This attack had been preceded by instances of Wahlberg harassing African-American children, pelting them with rocks and shouting racial epithets.

Remember this historical account throughout the coming weeks as you read about how the Nate Parker film, The Birth of a Nation, which chronicles the Nat Turner-led slave revolt in Virginia in 1831, is the subject of a boycott and slips out of the lead as the front-runner for Oscar's Best Picture. The Birth of a Nation has a predominately-black cast and crew, including its director, and in case you were wondering, is very purposefully named after the infamously-racist D.W. Griffith-directed silent film that depicted black men as the rapists of white women, the Ku Klux Klan as their chivalrous protectors, was responsible for allowing that real-life terrorist group to grow again in popularity into the 1920's, and is almost exactly 100 years older than its successor.

By all rights, the new Birth of a Nation should be the motion picture event of this year, the film that highlights the long, heroic struggle to rid this nation of the tenants of white supremacy. But a supposedly-separate publicity campaign threatens to railroad the picture. Parker, you see, was charged with rape on the campus of Penn State University when he was a sophomore student in 1999. He was acquitted of the charges, however, a friend was convicted in the same alleged event-- a decision later overturned, and the alleged victim subsequently committed suicide.

There is not currently, nor has there ever been, an organized Hollywood boycott or backlash against the films of Mark Wahlberg, now a two-decade-plus veteran of some of Hollywood's most profitable motion pictures, as well as very few unprofitable ones. Forbes estimates that his annual salary is $32 million. Wahlberg did time for the crime outlined above after he was convicted, but only 45 days of his sentence were ever served, indicative of a sentencing disparity that certainly is more striking to read about today than it was in the early 1990s. Wahlberg has admitted that he's never sought out his victim to apologize or make amends. He has, instead, moved through the state of California to have the felony pardoned. He has expressed to the media that he doesn't "have a problem going to sleep at night" ever since he "started doing good and doing right by other people," which apparently to him means returning to Catholic mass on a regular basis and banking gobs of money.

Conversely, Parker’s alleged crime, whether one is comfortable with this reality or not, is a he-said, she-said, and he was exonerated by a court of law and continues to maintain his innocence. What I’m interested in is the industry's double standard. In a business in which two consecutive years have passed without a person of color being nominated for an Oscar for an on-screen role, and one in which nearly the entire lot of technicians and behind-the-scenes people are white, this propaganda assault against the market viability of a potentially-monumental historical picture made by and about African-Americans seems like an entirely capricious controversy. Somebody’s going to have to explain to me why Parker's past justifiably pleads for a boycott, but Wahlberg's doesn't and never has.

What I see is actually the reverse of the need for a Parker boycott-- highlighted by an acquittal in his case, and a conviction in the other. In an industry, and a nation, that thrives on inflamed passions, that particular conceit of "the black man as dangerous predator” still manages to rise to the top of the list of internal safety threats, as it did when Nat Turner and his insurrectionists rebelled against their slavers in 1831, and as it did when D.W. Griffith's film opened in theaters a century ago.

posted by CM @ 8:29 PM