Morgan Freeman

I'm personally disappointed in Morgan Freeman due to his appearance in some trashy commercial for Elon Musk's ridiculous miracle cure for Alzheimer's.

I always respected his work and the dignity to brought to roles about people with hard lives. Like Harrison Ford, he was older when he broke into the big time acting wise. Hollywood films have been enriched by having these people who haven't been sniffing their own farts in Hollywood their entire lives.

Similarly, Viggo Mortensen was something like 27 when he decided to go into acting and in his forties when he got his big break as Aragorn. I doubt he would have made such a good Aragorn if he had been more of a Hollywood insider.

It's HARD to provide GOOD role models for downtrodden people. 

People sometimes want to make up nonsense and cast them in fictional roles to pretend their lives are better than they are.

Hattie McDaniel played the maid, Mammy, in the legendary and culturally influential 1939 movie Gone with the Wind, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, becoming the first Black American to win an Oscar.

Hattie McDaniel was widely criticized for portraying maids. Her response to that was , "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one".

That common expression "Another day, another dollar." that you probably think sounds RIDICULOUS originated at a time when a dollar a day was a common wage for working stiffs. And she absolutely meant that because she did, at times, actually work as a MAID.

Nichelle Nichols, the actress who broke ground for African Americans by portraying Uhura on Star Trek was considering quitting the role because it was basically a secretary in space. She changed her mind when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her he only allowed his children to watch Star Trek because of her presence as a member of the bridge crew running the ship and not merely a throw away red shirter destined to die before the episode ends.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite movies. And Morgan Freeman plays my favorite character in that movie, a man nicknamed Red (presumably short for his last name, Redding).

And this clip is my favorite scene from that movie. If you haven't seen the movie, without context, it may not seem that impactful.

I like that scene for a lot of reasons.

I like it for the high level social observation that this is a stupid game with stupid assigned roles we are forced to play due to larger forces in society.

I like because Red refuses to play the game.

I like it because it's not the first time in the movie he's interviewed for possible parole and this time he has his self respect and understands he can't really control their decisions and though it has substantial consequences for him personally, he doesn't really know this guy and the decision made largely has nothing to do with him.

I like it for being a movie clip that illustrates philosophical ideas usually given in some kind of anecdotal form, like some Asian story about a man who serves tea and is facing a duel to the death but focuses entirely on serving the tea when asked to do so and this leads to his would be assassin asking him to become his teacher instead.

Given my openness about the abuse I endured as a child, perhaps some people would imagine my favorite part is when Andy Dufresne's abuser gets beaten so badly he gets shipped out to a hospital with an expectation that he will never walk again or eat solid food again. 

No, I don't really like that part of the movie. To me, that's just more ugliness from an ugly system full of ugly people who are all too happy to hurt someone and doing it for a good cause amounts to a good excuse.

I grew up in the Deep South, a region where some parts are half African American. When I was eleven, my best friend was a Black girl because she was smart like me. 

My parents were less racist than most of the people around me. We somewhat often had people at our house who were Black or Korean or part Cherokee. 

I learned the hard way at age eleven that wasn't normal when and where I grew up when I was invited to a party for the SMART kids in my class only to learn at the last minute that didn't include MY best friend because she was the wrong skin color.

I have NEVER gotten over being put in that position where I ended up attending a party I was only interested in hoping to spend time with her away from school only to learn WHEN they picked me up she wouldn't be there.

I still feel icky about being ELEVEN years old and INFORMED "You're coming to a White Supremacist party and you should feel privileged we allow you there."

I didn't enjoy the party. None of those people were my friends. I never did fit in with mist White Southerners. I've NEVER had ANY opportunity to wash off how disgusted I was at being railroaded into going swimming with White Supremacist mother fuckers with zero goddamned ethics who LIED to me when they told me the party was for the SMART kids in my class and NOT "but only the WHITE ones."

I'm not really WHITE. I'm part Cherokee and my mother was an olive skinned German immigrant whose ethnicity I don't really know the details of.

Because she was born in Germany in the thirties and never spoke of her ancestry in a way that explained why a woman with striking pale blue eyes had skin the same color as many light skinned African Americans, which is the REASON her pale blue eyes were so striking: because they contracted starkly with her perpetually tanned olive skin.

Though I haven't seen any good color photos of the man, I'm guessing that's probably why Frank Sinatra was dubbed Ol' Blue Eyes: Because he was ITALIAN and had blue eyes and most likely they were especially striking due to him having a relatively dark complexion.

My research for writing on Native Influence suggests that like Spaniards, Italians are probably less pasty white than most Europeans due to being part African and part Middle Eastern.

In the racist Deep South where I grew up, most likely Spanish and Italian aren't REALLY accepted as White due to failing the one drop rule.

My mother NEVER spoke of her ancestry. In Nazi Germany, people DIED for being the wrong ethnicity.

But it's possible that in addition to being part Cherokee, I may also fail the one drop rule. It's possible my mother wasn't REALLY Caucasian and knew it and was Passing.

And perhaps that's a factor in her enormous discomfort when, as a girl, I told her the artist's impression of Lucy looked like her because of the high cheek bones.

I have a history of privately consuming Black music videos and movies with Black characters and I know full well I'm unwelcome in their world, but that's part of the culture of my world as someone who grew up in the South, even if I am the wrong skin color to be allowed to publicly admit to enjoying such things without it going weird places like people imagine I'm somehow being abusive because I'm not one of them.

I've never found the clip I want. There's an episode of Kung Fu, the TV series with David Carradine, where there's an old feud between her White father and some other White man and he has a Chinese wife and half Chinese daughter and when Dad says something about "They're not like us." the mixed race daughter says "I am not like us."

I don't fit in ANYWHERE. I NEVER have. That line resonates with me and sums up how I feel about my relationship to White Americans who just never seem to really click with me. 

I've long quietly been a huge fan of Morgan Freeman and I feel PERSONALLY betrayed and deeply disappointed to see him as a sell out, far more than I do about the White male actors in that awful commercial.

We all know White men have money because that's what they value the MOST and other things be DAMNED. So it's not a big deal to see evidence that White men I may have imagined were better than that aren't.

The avarice and wanton destruction of Patriarchal heteronormative colonizer WHITE Christian culture GAVE us the shit for profit medical care system POLITELY MURDERING people like me because the Hippocratic Oath of first, do no harm long ago morphed into a hypocritical oath where the real reason most doctors BECOME doctors is for the high pay and social status associated with it while they dismiss people like me as an inconvenience for making them FEEL bad about being unable to fix me and their goal is to shut me up for their emotional comfort rather than try to find solutions to my expected slow, gruesome demise that makes crucifixion look quick and pleasant.