Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Not by intent

Brittney Cooper wrote about the Oscar Best Picture mixup for Cosmopolitan. This is the incident where La La Land was announced as the winner of this Oscar when Moonlight was the actual winner. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting company that counts the ballots and handles the award envelopes, apologized for handing the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty.

Cooper understands no harm was intended, that everyone involved handled it gracefully. Even so, she says, the mess feeds the narrative that the white movie lost to the black movie, that gains in recognition of blacks comes at the expense of whites. Such a narrative wouldn’t be out there if Moonlight had been named properly from the start.

A great deal of racism happens not by intent. But it harms anyway.

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