‘Orphan Black’ Star Tatiana Maslany On Science Fiction, Class, and Female Anti-Heroines

This Saturday at 9PM, BBC America debuts its second original series, Orphan Black. A science fiction thriller, Orphan Black follows a young woman named Sarah (Tatiana Maslany), who is returning home after ten months away to try to reclaim custody of her daughter, who is being raised by Sarah’s own foster mother, when she witnesses another young woman, Beth, commit suicide at a train station. If that wasn’t unsettling enough, the other woman shares Sarah’s face. And as Sarah, desperate for cash, appropriates the dead woman’s identity, apartment—and as it turns out, the police department review she’s under for an unjustified shooting of a civilian—she learns that she doesn’t just have a twin: there are a disturbing number of other women wearing Sarah’s face.

I spoke to Maslany about the challenge of playing multiple characters in a single show, how viewers relate to unsympathetic female characters, and how science fiction depicts the near future and handles class. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

In Orphan Black, you’ve got a core role playing Sarah, but you have to portray a number of other women as well. Was that one of the things that drew you to the series?

Absolutely…They’re all compelling, they’re all complex, they’re all very different. Sarah was definitely my entry point into the series. What fascianted me about her so much was her extreme flaws that were right out there, her behavior that was completely immoral and self-absorbed, always defending herself. What’s fascinating to me is she’s got that beautiful heart as well. She completely wants to be a mother to her daughter, and every part of her upbringing is saying she can’t do that, and she’s not worthy of that. It’s a really nice tension to play. And to get into all the other characters, each has a different worldview, and that’s how I approached them. How do they see the world? Is it a fearful place? is it fascinating? Do they love people?

Was part of the appeal the opportunity to build audience sympathy for an unlikeable female character? Men get to be anti-heroes far more often.

Yeah, that’s what I love about it. I think, for me, it was unlike any character I’d seen on screeen, any female character especially. She’s not immediately likable. She’s not good or bad. She’s very much an animal of impulse and instinct, of self-preservation and survival. People can relate to that. There’s something glamorous abou people on Breaking Bad or whatever, because I think it tapes into the darker parts of ourselves that we don’t get to experience on a day to day basis, or that society tells us is bad. And I think that’s what’s so compelling about Sarah. We’re all so flawed. we’re all like that. We’re all bad people sometime. It’s a matter of circumstance, it’s a matter of our rsesponse to the world and what it’s told us about who we can be and who we are. She’s really grown up in a world of hostility and violence. I’m happy that she gets to be the protagonist, that her action saren’t condemned.

Do you think that audiences are more comfortable with male anti-heroes because they don’t reflect back on us? None of us are going to cook meth to deal with our own insecurities, but we might be bad friends, or indecisive, or weak, or bad mothers, ways that female characters are often painted as flawed.

It’s way more personal. I think the mother relationship is extremely personal to so many people. I’m not a mother, but I have extreme feelings about it. Whether you’re a mother or not, I think women have an understanding of that relationship. I think, yeah, there’s something interesting in the kind of crone aspects of things, where we see different variations on who I could have been and who I am. It’s an external manifestation of that identity crisis. Whether people can relate to Sarah’s dreams of bein ga mother and not being able to do that, or Alison’s stranglehold on her life, none of it is glamorous, none of it is outside of reality. As much as it’s a sci-fi show, it’s so personal.

What about the role of the foster care system in the show? It’s how Sarah gets close to her foster-brother, and it’s clearly shaped her significantly as a character.

Sarah, also being form the UK and London specifically, and from a working class perspective, you can tell by someone’s accent in the UK where they came form, what school they went to, how they were educated. She was immediately pinopointed as an outsider. To have somebody like that as a protagonist and as someone going through this…She kind of uses that as an entry point….You can relate to the psychology of belonging, or having a place that’s yours. When presented with these other women, there’s a a chance she could belong somewhere, a sense that she could have, in some way, a family. I think she’s resistant to that because she doesn’t have that structure in her life. It’s the reason she can’t stay still with Felix. She has to run away…When she assumes Beth’s life, she sees not as a woman who killed herself, but who had money, a beautiful apartment, a boyfriend, who had her life together on paper…she starts to empathize with Beth. She starts to understand herself better through being Beth and through the complexity of someone else’s life. She could go, she has everything.

But she also learns that money doesn’t protect you. Beth may have her life together on paper, but she also killed someone on duty, and is suicidal.

Exactly. But she never would have known that had she seen that life from the outside. It’s kind of an ease, it comes back to the other women she meets. There’s a way that we see people from the outside that lets us define them and not have to touch them. I don’t have to be vulnerable with you, I don’t have to be intimate with you. Sarah, I don’t think she’s been intimate with everyone in the emotional sense. It’s very much about power. That’s another cool thing, coming to know all these other versions of herself. She actually gets to know them. We start to get to see that.

Tell me about the pace at which the sci-fi elements of the show are going to be revealed. Through the first two episodes I was struck by the way the show uses those elements in service of Sarah’s upbringing and self-image, rather than trying to impress us with flashy mythology.

Yeah, to me, it’s a more human way of going at it. We’re following Sarah, who is not part of that world, who does not have any frame of reference for what the sci-fi side of this world is, for what the scientific implications are. She’s seeing it from the human level, which is: “I’m totally lost, I’m confused, who am I?” To me, that’s what I love about it. I never really thought, as much as it is sci-fi show, I always thought of it as a character piece. Unraveling the character within the context of clones. It’s for me about the personal implications and how it changes the women and how it changes the people around them. We have episodes that get more sci-fi heavy and that are more into that zone. But the cool thing is, it’s always about not-too-far-away potential science. It’s like the present day. Cloning has been happening. It’s not a new phenomenon. What it raises in such an interesting way is where science, religion, humanity, what’s in our control, what is not for us to touch?

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South Carolina Republican Suggests GOP Opposes Medicaid Expansion Because Obama Is Black

Confederate flag flying on grounds of South Carolina's state capitol

On Tuesday, the South Carolina House rejected extra Obamacare funding for the state’s Medicaid program. One Republican legislator offered a novel reason for the Republican majority’s decision: the President’s race.

State Rep. Kris Crawford’s comments came during the early stages of the state Medicaid debate in late January. Crawford suggested that it was politically beneficial for Republicans (who run a Statehouse that flew the Confederate flag in front of it as recently as December 2011) to oppose any political initiatives spearheaded by a black man:

Rep. Kris Crawford, a Republican from Florence and also an emergency room doctor, supports the expansion but expects the Republican caucus to vote as a block against the Medicaid expansion.

“The politics are going to overwhelm the policy. It is good politics to oppose the black guy in the White House right now, especially for the Republican Party,” Crawford said.

South Carolina’s voter ID law was blocked last year by the Department of Justice on grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act. The author of the law admitted to receiving, and responding positively to, racist emails in support of the law.

Governor Nikki Haley’s (R) steadfast opposition to the Medicaid expansion is becoming increasingly lonely; a wave of Republican governors have recently accepted federal assistance in providing health care for their poor citizens. South Carolina hospitals, who strongly support the expansion, have gone so far as to ask that their taxes be raised to pay for it.

(HT: David Graham.)

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Biden to mark Black History Month with trip to Selma

Vice President Joe Biden will commemorate Black History Month with a trip to Selma, Ala., where he will participate in the annual ceremonial crossing of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, The Root reported Friday.

The vice president will also attend the Martin and Coretta King Unity Brunch.

The annual bridge crossing is held the first weekend every March to commemorate "Bloody Sunday" — the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala.,  to protest the killing of civil rights protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by an Alabama state trooper. As hundreds of protesters reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge, state troopers fired tear gas into the crowd. Many protesters were badly beaten, and seventeen were hospitalized. 

A second wave of protesters, organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., returned two days later, but a restraining order issued by a federal judge stopped them again from crossing the bridge. Two weeks later, that decision was overturned, and protesters — galvanized by the brutal images from the initial march — proceeded to Birmingham, Ala.  The White House has prioritized outreach to the African-American community in recent days, with President Obama taping three radio interviews with black radio hosts. The president also met Thursday with African-American leaders at the White House for a discussion of the economy, sequestration and education.

Next week, Obama will attend the dedication of the statue of Rosa Parks being added to Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill.

“To think that a seamstress who was subject to discrimination her entire life ends up in the same hall as some of the titans of American political history, I think says a story about how change comes about in this country," Obama said in an interview with Joe Madison on SiriusXM. "It doesn’t come from the top down— it comes from the bottom up. And she represented better than anybody the kind of strength and determination that so many ordinary Americans show every single day in pursuit of a better country."

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The Obscuring of Black Culture, Or Why I Hate The Fake ‘Harlem Shake’ Meme

The pretender in action

I was confused, and somewhat excited, earlier this week when I first saw a link to a video that purported that the Norwegian Army was captured on video doing the Harlem Shake. Memories flooded back to my time in high school in Flint, MI, and watching my classmates pull off the moves associated with the dance in the darkness of the gym. I clicked, curious to see how a dance associated with Harlem had made its way to Norway after all these years.

That hint of excitement soon gave way to disappointment. Expecting the smooth choreography that I had known, what I was greeted with was a mass of flailing to an electonica song I’d never heard before. The song wasn’t the issue, called “Harlem Shake” and released by Harry Rodrigues, also known as the producer Baauer, last year. No, my problem was with the dancing itself. No unity, no precision, no sense that anything was going on other than pure chaos hiding under the label of a dance that’s existed for years.

That disappointment in turn gave way to dismay when I realized that the Norwegian video was by no means a fluke, but instead just one entry in what has become a meme of global proportions. That meme reached what I can only hope is its breaking point as the anti-debt group “The Can Kicks Back” posted their own version of the video, showing former Former Comptroller General David Walker and former Office of Management and Budget Director Alice Rivlin taking part:

If that truly is the death knell of this meme, I certainly will not miss it once it’s gone.

At first, I was willing to keep my complaints to myself, thinking I was being a buzzkill to the people in the videos who are clearly having a good time filming them for whatever audience they hope to achieve. It soon became clear to me that I wasn’t alone in my annoyance. The Root took a look at the history of the original Harlem Shake in a piece documenting the rise of the meme to the detriment of the classic dance:

Al B, a man who used to dance during breaks at the Entertainer’s Basketball Classic at Rucker Park in Harlem beginning in 1981, has gotten much of the Internet credit for inventing the original Harlem Shake, a dance characterized by wild jerking of the arms and upper body. At one point, it was referred to as the “Albee.”

In a barely comprehensible 2003 interview with basketball website InsideHoops.com, Al B says the dance originated with mummies in Egypt, who shook because they didn’t have freedom to use their limbs. “It was a drunken dance, you know, from the mummies, in the tombs,” he asserted. “That’s what the mummies used to do. They was all wrapped up and taped up. So they couldn’t really move, all they could do was shake.”

VICE also published a piece yesterday by Drew Millard taking the Internet to task for spreading the new meme without recognizing the original Harlem Shake’s cultural significance:

Whenever I look at an Internet full of (mostly) white people doing a bastardized version of a dance that has the same name as another dance (and lest we forget, is named after fucking Harlem), and they’re doing that dance to Trap, a style of EDM that took the name (and some sonic signifiers) of an already-existent style of hip-hop that had a very specific set of sociopolitical implications, and people aren’t finding it at least a little problematic, it makes me feels like I’m taking crazy pills.

The Root article went on to point out that “though the co-opting happened quite by accident, the damage may already be irreversible, as it has been all but stripped of its cultural context and meaning.” Both Millar and The Root are right to be looking at this trend through the lens of race. The Harlem Shake is just the latest data point when it comes to the appropriation of black culture — especially music — and the white-washing that takes place once its conquered.

In the 1950s, rock and roll songs like “Tutti Fruitti” were made acceptable to the mainstream through artists like Pat Boone, depriving their originators of both credit and compensation. While the Harlem Shake entering the consciousness of the mainstream doesn’t have that same stigma of deliberate obscuring of black performers, it definitely helps bury the memory of just where the name came from and what it means to a certain segment of population.

Case in point: when searching on Google for “Harlem Shake” today, only one link is to a page not talking solely about the meme, a Vulture collection of music videos from the early to mid-2000s featuring the dance, hoping to preserve its memory. At a time in the world when the primary way of learning about new information comes via a quick Google, this is paramount to a destruction of history.

There are certainly times when the leaking of black culture into the mainstream produces a synergy that in some ways exceeds the previous product. The introduction of jazz, rock and roll, and rap into the mainstream by white artists eventually helped promote black artists and propel them into the public consciousness in a way that may not have been possible otherwise, resulting in a better product that was able to reach more people.

That clearly is not what’s happening here, though. Jadakiss and Eve weren’t exactly flying below the public’s radar in 2001 when they helped popularize the dance. Instead, the dilution promoted by this meme does nothing to advance the music, the dance, or the culture of the original. I’m highly doubtful that there’s anyone out there who would be willing to look me in the eye and tell me that this is a better piece of performance than this.

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RNC chairman, in outreach effort, to powwow with black leaders in Atlanta

Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus will meet with black community leaders in Atlanta, Ga. on Thursday to discuss how the GOP can more effectively appeal to minority voters, RNC spokesman Ryan Mahoney confirmed to The Hill on Wednesday.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution, which first reported the meeting, described it as a “quiet, private therapy session” to which the press and top state legislators would not be invited. However, Mahoney said there was no effort to avoid publicizing the event. While the meeting itself will be closed-door, the RNC will hold a press availability afterwards.

“It’s part of a growth and opportunity project in which Priebus is going across the country listening to input from different groups on how we can build and grow the GOP to win future elections,” Mahoney said. “It’s a diverse group of African Americans from across the state. We’ve got youth leaders, community leaders, small business owners - we tried to gather a group together that would provide some good input.”

President Obama won 93 percent of the black vote, 71 percent of the Hispanic vote and 73 percent of the Asian vote in the 2012 election, provoking many Republicans to re-examine their message and policies as they relate to minorities.

Mahoney said Thursday’s event is one of many nationwide meetings Priebus will conduct in the coming months.

At the RNC winter meeting in Charlotte, N.C., last month, Priebus made minority outreach the focus of his speech.

“I’m no math whiz; I’m an attorney. But I don’t need a calculator to know we need to win more votes,” he said. “We have to find more supporters. We have to go places we haven’t been, and we have to invite new people to join us … On the local and state level, we have many success stories in states like Texas and Florida — where Republicans are winning in minority communities. Let’s learn from them, highlight them, celebrate them, and apply those lessons nationwide.”

Priebus also argued that the GOP needs to highlight to the public that Hispanics and blacks have been disproportionately hurt “in the Obama economy.”

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From ‘Precious’ To ‘Fruitvale’ And ‘Blue Caprice,’ Sundance As Showcase For Black Stars

This post discusses plot points from Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, both of which are based on true events.

Before The Weinstein Company bought 26-year-old writer-director Ryan Coogler’s debut feature Fruitvale, an examination of the 24 hours that lead up to the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale BART station on New Year’s Eve in 2008, Mike Fleming Jr. wrote on Deadline that “The feeling from buyers I’ve spoken to who’ve seen it is that Fruitvale has the potential to be one of those festival pictures that come out of nowhere — like Precious and Beasts Of The Southern Wild — to capture audience and critical acclaim.”

What Fleming didn’t note in his post is that Fruitvale, Precious, and Beasts Of The Southern Wild all star African-American actors, and both Fruitvale and Precious, which was directed by Lee Daniels, were directed by African-American men. Sundance has gotten more buzz this festival for the number of films in its narrative feature competition that were directed by women. But it’s equally important to note the festival’s role in creating buzz for films about African-American characters that translate into distribution deals and profits: Precious made $47.6 million domestically on a production budget of $10 million, while the even lower-budget Beasts has made $11.5 million on a $1.8 million production budget.

Two of the best movies I saw at this year’s festival, Fruitvale and Blue Caprice, an examination of the growth of a fictionalized version of the relationship between Beltway Snipers John Allen Muhammad (Isaiah Washington) and Lee Boyd Malvo (Tequan Richmond), directed by Kanye West collaborator Alexandre Moors, fell into that category. To a certain extent, they’re formally similar chronicles of deaths foretold. Both begin with footage of the real-world events they explore, Blue Caprice with a montage of news footage of Muhammad and Malvo’s killing spree, and Fruitvale with cell phone video of Grant’s shooting on the BART platform. But from there, they become complementary movies on separate paths. If Fruitvale is about how prejudicial suspicion of black men can inject deadly violence into a specific life at random, Blue Caprice explores how two men build a highly specific and fatal future.

In Fruitvale, Oscar (an exceptional Michael B. Jordan) is year out of prison and almost compulsively on the make, a young man attempting to close the gap between his considerable charm and his lack of discipline. As the movie begins, he’s just talked his girlfriend and the mother of his daughter, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) into taking him back after he cheated on her, though he’s less successful in talking the grocery store manager who fired him for lateness into giving him back his job, even when he tries to manipulate the man’s emotions and white liberalism, asking him “You want me selling dope, Brad?” At the store, he flirts with Katie (Ahna O’Reilly), a young white woman who’s gotten herself bollixed up trying to pick fish to fry for her boyfriend for a New Year’s Eve dinner. “It sounds like he’s black,” Oscar teases her, before putting her on the phone with his Grandma Bonnie, who sets Katie straight. When he finally comes clean to Sophina about losing his job, he does it two steps, first telling her that he’s unemployed, and finally admitting that he’s been so for several weeks. In between that admission and ditching a stash of marijuana he intended to sell to make the month’s rent, Oscar’s in a precarious, but hopeful position: he’s made some moves away from both dishonesty and criminality, but hasn’t started to look for legal employment or started to feel a serious pinch. As he tells Sophina, who explained to him of her New Year’s resolution to cut carbs that it takes 30 days to form a habit, he needs to “just not fuck up” for a month.

There’s a marvelous specificity to Oscar and his family and friends—one that illustrates the kind of character shading Hollywood products give up when they embrace colorblindness as a false token of progressivism—set against the more general forces that produce Oscar’s death. “Don’t get me no fake-ass card with no white people on it,” Oscar’s sister Chantay (Destiny Ekwueme) warns him as they prepare to celebrate their mother’s (Octavia Spencer) birthday. “Get me a black card.” Oscar, ham that he is, finds a card with a photograph of a middle-aged white woman on it, just to tweak her. In a flashback to his time in prison, Oscar dreams of getting his daughter into one of the Bay Area’s bilingual schools so she can learn Spanish and use it with Sophina’s family. At the birthday dinner, one of Oscar’s relatives jokes that, though he’s a lifelong Raiders fan, he’ll root for the Steelers in the upcoming Super Bowl because of their “black uniforms, black players, black coach. He even has a black wife.” On the BART on the way into the city for the New Year’s fireworks display, a ride that turns into a raucous party in the subway car, one of Oscar’s friends gets complimented by half of an African-American lesbian couple with whom the group is sharing a blunt. “I like your dreads,” the woman tells him. “I like your everything,” he tells her back. “We gay,” she informs him, fending off the pass. “That’s a coincidence,” the man recovers. “We gay, too…Oscar, ain’t we gay?”

But just because we’ve come to know Oscar as a specific, compelling person doesn’t mean that he can’t be reduced, in a violent instant and by the prejudices of powerful people, to an anonymous and amorphous threat. Given that we know Oscar’s death is approaching, there’s a terrible weight to Oscar’s mother’s suggestion that he take the BART rather than driving in case he wants to drink, to Sophina’s insistence that the couple go out for the evening even though Oscar points out they could count down the waning year at home. Coogler stages the final moments of Oscar’s life with great detail, from a run-in with an old prison adversary that produces a scuffle on the BART, to Oscar’s taking cell phone photos of the badge numbers of the officers who detain him and his friends (though not his white former enemy), to the white officer who reacts badly when he thinks Oscar’s called him a nigger. As Oscar is detained, shot, and begins to bleed to death on the BART platform, we can only react like Katie, who runs into Oscar on the train, and films his murder, screaming at the officers who push her back into the car to stop her. Our witness to his humanity is not enough to counter bias paired with deadly force. Fruitvale may be a movie that makes white audiences—and the overwhelmingly white audience with whom I saw Fruitvale cried audibly into the Q&A period—feel good about their liberalism, but it also questions how useful that sympathy is unmoored from profound changes in policy and society.

If Fruitvale is about what happens when a specific black man is rendered anonymous and unkillable, Blue Caprice is about what happens when a man becomes convinced that he is uniquely persecuted, and turns his rage against women onto society as a whole for the sins of enabling what he sees as women’s perfidy. When we meet Lee (Richmond), his mother’s just left him alone in Antigua so she can move to the United States. It’s a decision that leaves the deeply withdrawn Lee wandering around an empty house, accumulating a sink full of dirty dishes and draining the contents of their refrigerator, and eventually following a handsome man and his three children. Lee’s loneliness is so profound, and the image of a functional father so powerful that Lee literally walks into ocean water he can’t swim in to attract the man’s attention: unmet needs for rescue and care turn into an almost predatory instinct.

But it’s clear almost as soon as he’s invited into their home that Lee’s rescuer, John (Washington) hasn’t restored him to normalcy. “Remember, you guys are on a special vacation with Papa,” John tells his children. “And if Mama comes, you couldn’t see Papa anymore. Is that what you want, for Papa to get in trouble?” As it becomes clear, John’s a custodial kidnapper, and when his children are taken from him (events that happen off-screen in a nine-month time lapse), he brings Lee to Washington State with him in their place, claiming him as his son, and a fulfillment of John’s own need for someone to worship him, and to validate his consuming rage at the fact his children were taken from him, and a restraining order placed against him.

“I used to live here. People used to live here,” John tells Lee on a tour of his old neighborhood in Washington. “Some people turned into vampires…Sucked me dry…There are some evil people in this world…That’s what they do. They take your kids away. They say I kidnapped my kids. How can I kidnap my own kids?” Lee tells his mentor that “Vampires can’t die. Sorry. They aren’t people.” But even though he appears to be pushing back against John, Lee’s demonstrating the extent to which he’s being absorbed into John’s worldview: John is persecuted, and his enemies are both inhuman and difficult to dispatch or dismiss. It’s a vision of the world that escalates over time. “I can’t take her to court,” John tells Lee of his ex-wife, who keeps evading him. “Not that it would do any good. They never give custody to the father.” Shopping in a supermarket, John turns his rage on a wider aperture, preaching to Lee that “They think all of this is permanent…All it would take is a little push. Only a few bodies. Five or six a day for thirty days. Random targets. Not random targets. They think it’s men? Do a woman. Think it’s women? Kill a kid. Think it’s kids, kill a pregnant woman. Kill a cop.”

And John requires Lee to demonstrate his fidelity to that worldview. “Bitch wants to call me a liar. She’s a liar. They’re all liars,” John rants after his girlfriend catches him stealing her jewelry and kicks both him and Lee out of the house. “I brought you here. I gave you all this. It’s not enough to just say the words. You have to prove it. Do you love me? Then you have to do something for me.” The “something” Lee chooses to do is deeply informed by John’s misogyny and paranoia.

After that, when they prepare to expand their campaign beyond the site of John’s personal grievances, they try to buy arms from a white dealer (The Wire‘s Leo Fitzpatrick), who mistakes their complaints for racial ones. “I’m not down for your cause, this Black Panther shit,” he warns John and Lee. But African-American men are as capable of generalized misogyny and and messianic fantasies as white ones are. John dreams of extending his plan, telling Lee “We’ll pick a spot up in the woods in Canada. Find other kids like you, train them…Send them into other cities to do what we did…The beauty is, even if we lose, we wake people up. We still win.” He’s as particular in his hatreds as Oscar Grant is in his loves and hopes.

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Low-Income Black Youth Are More Likely To Consume Calories From Sugary Drinks

Black youth are nearly twice as likely as their white counterparts to take in large quantities of their daily calories from sugary drinks, according to a new study examining American beverage consumption. Low-income children of all racial backgrounds also tend to drink almost twice as many sugary beverages as wealthier Americans do.

Considering the fact that sugar-filled drinks have been conclusively linked to an increased risk for obesity, the study’s results reveal some of the racial and economic disparities within the nation’s obesity epidemic. “Some groups may be more at risk for soda, others may be more at risk for fruit drinks, all of which … have the same sugar base that contributes to obesity and disease,” one of the study’s co-authors, health policy researcher Lisa Powell, explained.

This particular study didn’t try to figure out why that’s the case, although Powell did suggest to Reuters that “cultural norms” and cost could both be factors. But other studies have examined the links between race, class, and nutrition — and research has confirmed that access to healthy food is divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. Even aside from cost barriers, lower-income Americans tend to live in neighborhoods that lack healthy, high-quality food in nearby grocery stores, and they often struggle to access the transportation they need to go grocery shopping. The fast food industry also contributes to nutrition disparities by targeting its marketing to low-income communities.

It’s not clear whether the soda industry is also disproportionately targeting low-income or minority groups, but it wouldn’t be the first beverage sector to try. Alcohol advertising has been proven to particularly target black youth, even despite the fact that African-American teens tend to drink less alcohol than youths from other racial groups.

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Black Wealth, Racial Disparities In Movies, And Why We Don’t Have A Harriet Tubman Biopic

Writing about Harriet Tubman, who’s been a subject of his in recent days, Ta-Nehisi Coates took up a subject near to my own heart, the lack of support for biopics about people of color. And he identifies an important point about one of the hurdles for getting such movies made:

Moreover, movie-making is risky and expensive. Any discussion of the lack of a Harriet Tubman biopic should begin with the shameful fact that median white wealth in this country stands at $110,000 and median black wealth stands at around $5,000. It would be nice to think that this gap reflected choices cultural and otherwise, instead of the fact that for most this country’s history its governing policy was to produce failure in black communities, and most of its citizens supported such policies. It would be nice if Hollywood were more moral and forward-thinking than its consumer base. But I would not wait around for such a day.

It’s absolutely true that there isn’t an African-American or Latino equivalent of Megan Ellison, the daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, and the head of Annapurna Pictures. In 2012 alone, Ellison gave us two movies that I think would have been hard-pressed to be financed by more conventional production companies, and certainly not at the length and pacing that they’ve made it into theaters, Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Part of what makes Ellison important is not just that she can afford to finance pictures like these in the first place, but that she can afford to lose money on some of them. That’s actually the most necessary criteria to get truly daring movies made, because it means there’s space to focus on a figure who isn’t necessarily a four-quadrant subject, to approach someone who might be broadly fascinating from a novel perspective, as Anderson did with the founder of Scientology in The Master, to give a filmmaker the space they need to tell a story with nuance and completeness, or to accept an unusual arc that doesn’t hit the emotional beats of a conventional three-act structure.

George Lucas, at least with Red Tails, showed that he was prepared to spend $58 million—which doesn’t actually count as an enormous amount of money for an action movie anymore—to tell an under-explored historical story. But that’s not the same thing as spending money repeatedly, or pulling together other groups of investors to commit to a series of projects aimed at building an audience for a different kind of movie.

And at the end of the day, financing the production of a movie is only half the battle. Movies need to find distributors who will put them in theaters, or to find video on demand placement. Advertising costs, which aren’t built into production budgets, are enormous—Reuters estimated in 2010 that studios were spending between 55 and 58 cents for every dollar they spent on movie production and release costs on marketing. That’s a daunting hurdle for movies that are being made and distributed outside of that system: word of mouth about a movie’s excellence or importance go only so far when they’re up against reams of television spots, wrapped buses, and giant billboards.

With, say, a Harriet Tubman biopic (if such a movie could get made without Zoe Saldana in the starring role, and without being turned into a ludicrous action picture), it would be nice to get the movie made in the first place, but the real goal should be to get that film in front of a whole bunch of people. And it takes more than some rich people and some visionaries to achieve that. It takes an infrastructure that’s willing to take risks and absorb losses with people like Ellison because they want to be in business with those rich people and those visionaries, and to be associated with the critical buzz and awards that can come from working with those people, even if the financial returns aren’t there. Black wealth is part of the equation. But the infrastructure part of the lift is heavy, too.

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