‘Noah’ Blockbuster Has Almost Everything Going For It, Except Diversity

by | Apr 7, 2014 | Entertainment, Feature | 6 comments

c. 2014 Religion News Service

(RNS) The new “Noah” movie has everything you’d expect in a biblical blockbuster.

RNS-NOAH-FILM aBig Hollywood stars. Extravagant special effects. An apocalyptic flood. There’s even a few rock monsters for good measure.

But the Rev. Wil Gafney sees something missing: a hint of ethnic diversity.

“In this version of Noah, black people do not exist,” she said.

While much of the conversation about the “Noah” film has focused on theology and the degree to which it strays from the biblical text, few people seem to notice the all-white cast, said Gafney, an Episcopal priest and associate professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

That’s worrisome, she said, especially at a time when the United States is becoming more and more multiethic.

“I hoped that at least there would be some beige people in the movie,” she said. “But there was no one visibly of color.”

Add to that the so-called “Curse of Ham,” a troubling Bible passage from Genesis. It tells how Noah settled down after the flood and planted a vineyard. One night he got drunk and his son Ham saw him naked, a taboo in the ancient world.

Noah curses his son Ham, and Ham’s descendants, including his son Canaan. That Bible passage, also known as the “Curse of Canaan,” was originally understood to justify the subjection of the Canaanites to the Israelites. In later centuries, the narrative was interpreted as an explanation for black skin, and in the United States, as a biblical justification for slavery. White Christian slaveholders argued that Africans were descendants of Ham, and therefore cursed by God.

The new film strays from the Genesis account of the confrontation between Ham and Noah, said Gafney, so there’s no curse.

Instead, she said, the movie simply erases people of color from the story.

Efrem Smith, president of Los Angeles-based World Impact, a Christian nonprofit, and author of “The Post-Black and Post-White Church,” sees “Noah” as part of a pattern.

In the past, biblical epics such as the 1956 classic “The Ten Commandments” featured white actors playing Moses and Pharaoh. Smith said that he’d hoped for something more authentic in this movie.

“When it come to films on Bible stories and biblical figures, we are going back to the days of Charlton Heston,” he said.

Smith said he respects pastors that encourage people to see the film. But he wished they’d been a bit more critical of it, especially on the issue of race.

The Bible, he said, is the most multicultural piece of literature that most people will ever read. So a film about the Bible should reflect that diversity, he said.

But recent films about Bible characters, such as “Noah,” “Son of God,” and a planned version of the Exodus story starring Christian Bale, star white actors in leading roles.

Smith finds that disappointing.

“We need sensitivity from our evangelical brothers and sisters about how white images of Bible figures have impacted people of color in the past,” he said. “We are too comfortable with a white biblical narrative.”

Nashville, Tenn.-based writer and speaker Trillia Newbell, author of “United: Captured by God’s Vision for Diversity,” also was concerned about the lack of diversity in “Noah.”

Seeing Jesus or Noah or other biblical characters portrayed by white actors has consequences.

“It shapes how you read the Bible,” she said. “Every time you pick up the Bible, those are the images you see.”

The Rev. Enoch Fuzz of Corinthian Missionary Baptist Church in Nashville, said too many Christians don’t pay attention when it comes to diversity. It’s like a blind spot, he said.

“We want heaven to be a place of diversity — and then we don’t see it when it is missing here on earth,” said Fuzz.

Some of his pastor friends had encouraged him to see “Noah,” in hopes of getting people to talk about the Bible. But he’d decided to skip it, because of the lack of diversity in the cast.

Anthea Butler, a blogger and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said the filmmakers seemed to treat the story of Noah more like a science fiction story such as “The Lord of the Rings” than a retelling of a biblical tale.

That may explain why the cast doesn’t fit the movie’s setting in the Middle East, she said.

But their casting decisions send a troubling message, she said.

“It’s a world where only white people get saved,” Butler said. “This doesn’t look like the world that God created.”

Butler suspects that filmmakers may have made a major marketing error.

A new report from the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture found that African-Americans are the most likely to read the Bible. So they care about Bible stories and may be turned off by this new “Noah” movie.

“Black women carry their Bibles around and read them all the time,” she said. “And they cannot see themselves in this movie.”

She had some advice for Hollywood producers looking for the next biblical blockbuster.

“If someone wants to make a ton of money right now, they should go out and remake ‘The Queen of Sheba.’”

Copyright 2014 Religion News Service. All rights reserved. No part of this transmission may be reproduced without written permission.

The School-to-Prison Pipeline Starts in Preschool

by | Apr 7, 2014 | Feature, Headline News | 1 comment

Who knew that the school to prison pipeline started at pre-school?

That is the overarching message that some have taken away from a recent Department of Justice report indicating that even though black students represent 18% of preschool enrollment 42% of them have been suspended once, and 48% suspended more than once. It was also discovered that black and Hispanic schoolchildren are more quickly referred to law enforcement.

The report from the Civil Right Division’s Educational Opportunities Section analyzing its 2011 to 2012 Civil Rights Data Collection database discovered that even though African-American students made up just under one in five preschoolers enrolled during the 2011-2012 school year, they accounted for nearly half of all preschool students who faced more than one out-of-school suspension. And for many the punishment is dished out beyond the principal’s office.

“This critical report shows that racial disparities in school discipline policies are not only well-documented among older students, but actually begin during preschool,” Attorney General Eric Holder said at an event presenting the findings at J.O.  Wilson Elementary School in Washington, DC. “Every data point represents a life impacted and a future potentially diverted or derailed.  This Administration is moving aggressively to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline in order to ensure that all of our young people have equal educational opportunities.”

The findings came from analysis of a comprehensive collection of data from 97,000 of the nation’s public schools in 16,500 school districts and representing 49 million students that the Justice Department recently started assessing and extracting data from to determine trends.

A press release about the data linked it to the prison pipeline, noting that the “data  reveals particular concern around discipline for our nation’s young men and boys of color, who are disproportionately affected by suspensions and zero-tolerance policies in schools,” also noting that “suspended students are less likely to graduate on time and more likely to be suspended again. They are also more likely to repeat a grade, drop out, and become involved in the juvenile justice system.”

The pre-school research shows that clearly there is less patience for excited outbursts, a child speaking out of turn or rattling off endlessly to make a point. Black children are punished, put out the class and reprimanded for conduct that may be a natural and incidental to exploratory play and expression. When warnings, parent-teacher meetings, taking away recess and other benefits are options, kicking a child out of enrichment opportunities can be a dangerous thing.

This report came a couple months after another analysis found that participants advanced the age of a child they were told committed a felony, even police.  A Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study, released on February 24th found  “when asked to identify the age of a young boy that committed a felony, participants in a study routinely overestimated the age of black children far more than they did white kids. Worse: Cops did it, too,” a piece in The Wire summarized.

So something about black children cause people to see them as older than they are and by default expect a different set of actions and reactions from them.  We saw this in the Michael Dunn murder trial for the murder of teen Jordan Davis. Dunn said he thought the SUV full of black teens he said was threatening him were older adult men. He shot at them anticipating that they were capable of a lot worse than just usual teen trash talking.

Clearly, these studies reveal a deeper level of pathology assigned to black children that can have wide-ranging impact on them to the point they’d lose out on enrichment activities, become stigmatized and face harsh consequences.

Although some try to isolate the challenges in urban communities to those within them solely, the findings from these analyses reveal that there are institutional and societal influences and factors that add a layer to the uphill battle of surviving a life with less resources, support and opportunities.

Hopefully the information will be used to implement real, measurable change.