Cyberia

It's extremely hard to find any information on the 1991 Gregory Hines movie White Lie. I can't find a Wikipedia page on it and YouTube seems to only have the trailer.

Thus I am in no position to fact check my faulty memory, but my memory is that Len Madison, Jr., the main character played by Hines, wants to know what really happened 30 years earlier when his father was lynched.

His interest in what happened isn't exactly warmly welcomed by the people in the place where it occurred. The official story is that his Black father was lynched for raping and brutally beating a White woman.

But he learns that the woman in question was examined by a physician the day after his father was lynched -- confirmed by medical records -- and her wounds were fresh. The story he pieces together is that most likely his father had an affair with a married woman and the husband found out, lynched Madison Sr. and then beat the hell out of his wife the next day, permanently putting her in an asylum or similar, where she still is 30 years later.

Madison Jr. also finds a photo of the group that lynched his father and realizes a politician was in the lynch party and participated in the murder because he was the teenaged son of the woman in question. Madison chooses to keep the man's secret, if I recall correctly it's because the man wants to improve things for Blacks, wants things to change, and his decision to cover it up is part of what the movie title refers to.

I thought this was a wonderful movie. It's a hard movie to watch on a hard subject but it's a bit like The Shawshank Redemption, which did poorly in theaters but is now spoken of as a cult classic and it's not hard to find clips from The Shawshank Redemption on YouTube and articles about it, etc.

Please note that the movie The Shawshank Redemption is from 1994, just three years after this film, though the book it is based on was published in 1982.

I have no idea why this movie has practically been erased from existance but it makes me wonder what really happened in the burning of Black Wall Street in 1921, also known as The Tulsa Race Massacre, which is also claimed to have started with a Black man supposedly "assaulting" a White woman and then the whole thing was largely covered up for a lot of years and largely omitted from local records. 

It makes me wonder what the backstory is that was probably never recorded, even before attempts to eradicate knowledge of it. It makes me wonder how the two knew each other, how well they knew each other, what was the relationship of other people to their relationship, etc.

Odds are good that parts of the plot of the movie White Lie were true for someone, somewhere. Authors of fiction rarely just make it all up whole cloth. They frequently stitch together bits and pieces of private stories they've heard such that it retains believability but protects the privacy of the real people who told them their secrets.

And even in fictionalized form, it seems like no one, Black or White, wants to really deal with the details put forth in the movie White Lie, though it's now supposedly been more than fifty years since anyone was lynched in the US.

I love the exchange in the movie Hidden Figures where a White man tells Katherine Goble she can't attend some meeting because "There's no protocol for women attending." and she replies "There's no protocol for a man circling the Earth either, sir."

I didn't include that reference in a piece I ultimately titled There's no time for us. There's no place for us. on Feminine Character Works. It's tagged Looks and I'm trying to talk about the fact that there's no protocol for a woman joining the Old Boys Club on merit and not merely being there as a bauble on some man's arm and simultaneously talk about the related issue that American women don't really have a model for how to dress for success because our two clothing patterns boil down to "whores" and "married-well wives."

Sinead O'Connor shaved her head when asked by music industry people to sex it up. She wanted to be a singer and get hired for her singing. They wanted her to be a performer and while men can use looks and sex appeal to enhance their music career, women are essentially required to make it on sex appeal.

Men can be someone like Willy Nelson or someone like your typical half-naked rock band front man. All female singers need to be someone like Dolly Parton who states bluntly her stage persona is based on having seen a prostitute that looked like that.

Just like men can be "character actors" or sex symbols but female actors pretty much need to make it on sex appeal. If you're a gal, you need to be conventionally attractive in the extreme or go home.

One of my personal frustrations is that in the course of trying to establish myself as a business person, most people I interacted with, whether on Hacker News or elsewhere, were men and approximately 99.9999999999999% of them seemed to want to either have short term romantic fun or get to know me better in hopes of marrying me, neither of which has any hope of leading to business success for me.

And I don't know how to break that pattern from my end because the clothing industry and all of society give me exactly TWO socially acceptable ways to "dress appropriately as a woman":

1. I can dress sexy and imply I'm up for being short-term fun.

2. I can dress like The First Lady, in other words someone famous and influential because of whom she's married to while filling an unpaid job she was automatically assigned with zero vetting as slave labor because her husband won the election, and imply I'm marriageable material.

Neither of which really socially signals "I'm a serious business person here to do business and that's IT."

And rest assured refusing to dress like either does not improve things. Even in men's t-shirts and sweatpants in Aberdeen, Washington while trying to establish myself as a freelancer I was still seen by most men I interacted with as nothing but a piece of ass while women in power were openly catty and hateful and both hating on me for being younger and therefore automatically "more attractive" and acting like I wasn't deserving of a professional job or professional respect because of how I dressed.

And it made me nuts because they all knew I was dirt poor and attending meetings at local economic development organizations in hopes of networking and proving I had good ideas and did good work to try to improve my income and was dressing that way because I was dirt poor. But, no, they absolutely will not pay me so I can afford to dress better.

So I kind of understand why men on Hacker News seemed to either act "friendly" knowing I was really trying to network and establish business contacts and they were intentionally abusing the situation to get to know a potential future second wife with a socially acceptable pretext or essentially shunned me: 

Because they don't want to harm themselves by having the situation misread as an illicit affair or as promoting my work to try to get sexual favors or something similar. 

But I was extremely open about being dirt poor and even open about being homeless for years and almost everyone there was completely content to simply step over my body in the gutter and be disrespectful and dismissive to my face while I tried to make good faith attempts to talk about sexism and how programmers made good money but writers made dirt and they wanted good writing to discuss on Hacker News but absolutely no method of monetizing your writing was acceptable to them.

They don't want ads on your writing. They don't want paywalls on your writing. They don't want the writing to be in service of promoting your business because that's a stealth ad and conflict of interest. They don't want to leave tips and they don't want to support your Patreon and I was aggressively told repeatedly to STFU and quit my whining and get a real job.

There was absolutely no socially acceptable means to make the point that "You people want slave labor from writers and then whine and cry about how journalism has gone to hell and you can't find good, PhD level writing for FREE with zero conflict of interest for unfathomable reasons."

I spent years trying to point out that this expectation of FREE labor from writers was directly causative of "the internet going to hell." and similar complaints.

It had ZERO impact. 

Just like when I successfully pointed out that "You people tell MEN here that having a lot of karma on Hacker News is evidence of intelligence and competence but refuse to treat ME with ANY respect based on my high karma here." they largely stopped squeeing at men about "Gee, golly, whiz, you must be the awesome sauce because of your high karma." rather than decide to stop openly pissing on me, the only woman on the leaderboard. 

After someone has effed up big-time, they often just keep doing worse and worse things to try to cover it up while feeling entitled to something from their victim.

As I've said previously in other posts, it's absolutely not possible for me to fix this. It simply doesn't work to eat shit and pretend to like it and doing so won't somehow lead to people respecting me or helping me succeed financially.

And human history suggests that if the fate of the universe depended upon it, not a single person on Hacker News would ever admit they were wrong and I deserve better.

And they've already repeatedly proven that if the choice is between not pissing on me anymore and something else, they will choose something else every single time and absolutely nothing I say or do has any power to change that.

I hope all the self-proclaimed Good Catholics high on the leaderboard there who intentionally burned me for simply being female burn in hell for all eternity. Along with the people implicitly agreeing that their behavior is fine.