Sunday, July 25
· Recap of the Week – Olympics, Delta variant COVID surges
o After John’s announcement that the show is on track to return to their regular studio in September, we got another surprise: the white void speaks! And it’s voiced by H. Jon Benjamin!
o Great response to Boris Johnson’s incidence on going through with England’s Freedom Day,” lifting all COVID restrictions as cases are surging again – “It’s so disingenuous to frame the decision as either ‘lifting COVID restrictions now’ or ‘never doing it.’”
o Sigh… of course there was a guy, hospitalized with COVID, complaining about vaccination between an “agenda being shoved down our throats.” That incidence agenda? “To get us vaccinated.” – “Yeah, actually, you nailed it in one. Public health officials’ agenda is to get you vaccinated. You know what COVID’s agenda is? To fucking kill you!”
· And Now This – News euphemisms for sex
o In which lots of newscasters talked about the cardboard beds at the Olympics and alluded to the rumors that they were built to discourage sex – plenty of “you know what I mean?” and references to “certain extracurricular activities.”
· Main Story – Housing discrimination
o The opening example of the Bruces, a Black family who had their valuable Manhattan Beach property stripped from them decades ago, was American racism in a nutshell – when the KKK burning a cross on their property didn’t run them out of town, the city turned to the law and used eminent domain to seize the land.
o I loved John’s response to a woman from Manhattan Beach insisting that that “isn’t who [they] are” anymore – “Manhattan Beach’s population is only 0.5% Black. So, even if you are not that community now, you don’t look unlike it.”
o Excellent layout of the racial wealth gap, highlighting how it’s so much worse than people think it is – for every $100 of wealth possessed by the average white family, the average Black family has $13.
o Much of that comes down to access to home ownership – we looked at the multiples times in the 20th century that the federal government acted to make mortgages easier to obtain but specifically barred Black people from these benefits, through things like racial covenants and redlining.
o John hit the nail on the head at the discomfort of a clip featuring a reporter and a local historian trying to discuss what their town’s history of racial covenants means for them today – If two white people are trying to figure out if something is racist, nine times out of ten, it probably is.”
o We also got into various unofficial methods of housing discrimination, such as the practice of block-busting (buying up homes in nice neighborhoods by convincing white homeowners that Black people are starting to move in) and steering (realtors directing white vs. Black clients to different areas based purely on their race.)
o Because home ownership is such an enormous contributor to generational wealth, John pointed out that it’s not simply a matter of outlawing discriminatory practices – “Even if you had a magic wand and could erase every piece of housing discrimination going forward, you still wouldn’t undo the damage that’s been done.”
o The solution? Reparations – For all that detractors like to complain that “no one who perpetuated or was affected by slavery is alive today,” housing discrimination is “quantifiable harm that was done in our lifetimes to people who are still alive.”
o I really appreciated John’s parting observation – “This is a wound that we are actively trying not to heal, and it is hurting real people everyday.”
* * *
New Shang-Chi poster! With any luck, we’ll have a steady stream of content to ride all the way to the release. The poster is pretty busy, as seems typical for MCU stuff, but I like Wenwu looming at the top of it with the Ten Rings on his arms framing Shang-Chi. 1) I just like the look of it. 2) Tony Leung Chiu-wai looks so cool/menacing! And 3) it reinforces the idea that the film itself/Marvel as a whole understands just what a big deal Leung is going to be here. As soon as I found out Leung had been cast as a Marvel villain (well, after I got through my initial round of nerdish flailing,) my biggest thought was, “Less Malekith, more Killmonger.” The MCU has had some awesome baddies as well as some really lackluster ones, and the latter camp has wasted some really talented actors in the process. Leung deserves the best, just in general, and especially in his Hollywood debut. And all the promotional materials so far point to Wenwu being incredibly prominent – as a villain, as Shang-Chi’s dad, as a mystery, as a badass, and beyond. I really hope the film does something special with him. All the footage we’ve seen attests that Leung is gonna tear it up in the action scenes (those Rings! Bestill my geek heart!), and the heavy emphasis on him in the promos hopefully means he’ll get to do the same within the narrative.
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