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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Did I say writing teams? Did I say actors? Did I say directors? No, I said the FINANCERS. The studio heads. The ones making the final calls about what gets made. Are there some people of color? Some women? Of course. But Executive directors and boards running studios are disproportionately populated by white men. These are the studios that keep saying “More Star Wars! All of it! More superheroes! More Transformers! Reboot reboot remake sequel reboot!”

    They can have hits (like Andor) but they are making decisions that show how little they understand their audience. Black Panther was released in February, the month studios save movies that they don’t care about for since it’s finally done with Oscar season. It was one of the biggest cultural phenomenons at the time and completely by accident.



  • Diversity of experience is different than diversity of qualifications. I should have specified. No one is hiring unqualified individuals simply because they are “diverse”.

    Not caring about color or race is an ideal that I hope we can all reach some day. But right now, the effects of the racism of the past (a time when people cared about color and race in order to give advantages to some at the intentional expense of others) is still very much present. My father was born before Brown v. Board of Ed. My mother was born before the Civil Rights Act. The advantages they had simply by being born white (because of years and years of racist laws and policies) allowed them to get good educations and let me and my sisters, born 20+ years after “we solved racism*” with the civil rights act, to live a life free of poverty. If my parents had been born black, their quality of education would have been different, and the quality of life we enjoyed would have been substantially lower.

    I grew up thinking “no need to worry about race, those racists of the past are all gone and can’t hurt anyone anymore.” But the decisions they made continue to hurt those around today. Even assuming things got better since the 50s, there’s still generational wealth missing from disadvantages communities, wealth that people born then would have been available to pass down to their families today, but they were blocked from obtaining by force of law.

    I sincerely hope you take the time to read this and understand why people want to include diversity as a part of hiring decisions. They are qualified and experienced enough to know that it makes a difference for many reasons.

    *We didn’t actually solve racism


  • Diversity of experience brings diversely of ideas. Why do you think Hollywood has been churning out so much of the same stuff over and over? Because it’s a bunch of old rich white dudes with decades of experience in financing movies calling the shots.

    Having a transportation secretary that grew up in the suburbs, had their first car bought for them by their parents, and has been driving everywhere their whole life is going to bring very car-centric ideas. A transportation secretary that grew up in The Bronx, took the subway and bus growing up, and only got a car when they realized they needed to because the only apartment they could afford was not near a line that could get them to work will bring a very different set of ideas.




  • A judge can rule that a case was unfair due to procedural issues, like that a jury arrived at its decision by evidence that shouldn’t have been admitted in the first place. There are terms in this I’m not familiar with (I only know “runaway jury” from the John Grisham novel…), but that seems to be the basis of throwing this out. I’m sure Legal Eagle will cover something as big and weird as this in the next two weeks or so if you want well-explained legal analysis of the finer points.