Hollywood Gives Oscar to Director who Pushed Tawana Brawley Hoax

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Clockwise from left: Movie poster from Do the Right Thing (director and actor Spike Lee is holding the pizza), 1989 - Tawana Brawley and Al Sharpton, 1988 - The S1W "security team" from the music video "Fight the Power", 1989.

The director is Spike Lee, of course.

He shared the Best Adapted Screenplay award (for BlacKkKlansman, which he directed) with three others.

Though he wasn't exactly happy about winning only that award, feeling that there was some sort of plot or conspiracy to foil him with interracial driving movies. Classy as always, when Green Book won Best Picture (beating out Klansman), he stormed out of his seat, only to return and sulk with his back to the stage.

But in this era of Covington and Jussie Smollett I thought it only fair to point out that Lee was an enthusiastic backer of the Tawana Brawley hoax, I'm not talking about when the accusations were first made (when most people believed them) but more than a year later, after a New York grand jury had found it to be a fraud.

"Tawana Told the Truth", says the graffiti message appearing by surprise as Lee's character walks by. It's one of the most iconic clips from Lee's third film Do the Right Thing.

I'm not saying that that in itself involves pushing the Brawley hoax (but see below). It's just a scene from a movie, after all, in which all the different characters, including blacks, whites and hispanics, famously have their own point of views. Most seem to be racist against other groups, to at least some degree, and there's even a large dollop of racial stereotyping - blacks like to blast music, have a fixation for high-end basketball sneakers and burn down things when they're angry. Whites are insensitive to the diversity requirements of pizza parlor wall decorations and occasionally choke-hold to death black teens. Hispanics like to argue. And so on. On one level, Do the Right Thing is a moral Rashomon. Is there a fair or neutral perspective or are we all just locked in to outlooks that go with our racial identities? Can't we all just not be racist or is that now (in 1989) simply a naive dream? What is the right thing?

This intentional ambiguity and obvious (though odd and in the end depressing) shout out to a certain skewed kind of diversity was largely the reason for the film's success among critics if not audiences. It was different, honest (so they said) and frank. It catapulted Lee into the ranks of major American directors.

But there was another level to the film and its marketing - the effort to bring full-on black militancy into the mainstream. Lee wanted an "anthem" as the movie's theme. Notably, he first imagined using a modern version of the unobjectionably optimistic "Lift Every Voice and Sing". But he soon felt that something stronger was needed. So he turned to Public Enemy, a still somewhat niche band in a still somewhat niche category - black "hip hop" - that had cut its teeth as the opening act for the Beastie Boys, a white band playing to largely white audiences.

The song Public Enemy created as the theme for the film wasn't a Stevie Wonderish hymn to everyone coming together or the worth and excellence of all races but a full-on broadside against Whitey and "accommodation" in general:

Elvis was a hero to most but he
Never meant shit to me you see
Straight up racist that sucker was
Simple and plain
Mother fuck him and John Wayne
'Cause I'm Black and I'm proud
I'm ready and hyped plus I'm amped
Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps
Sample a look back you look and find
Nothing but rednecks for four hundred years if you check

Fight the Power!

You gotta fight the powers that be!

The song "Fight the Power" even dissed the then recent mega-hit "Don't Worry be Happy".

Worry and don't be happy. Especially you, Whitey.

Today, thirty years later, take a bus through the black ghettos of Chicago - Austin, Englewood, West Garfield - and listen to the music blaring from headphones. Or for that matter, note the music playing on the speakers at white hipster gyms.

Stevie Wonder lost.

But I'm digressing a bit. Spike Lee also directed the music video of "Fight the Power". It features Public Enemy performing the song at an outdoor concert/march/rally in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn for what appears to be an almost entirely black audience (most of the few whites are cops). All the tropes are there: the righteous but serious Chuck D, his clownish side-kick Flavor Flav, the Marcus Garvey/Nation of Islam-like soldier dancers, often angry spectators pumping their fists. Jesse Jackson appears in it, as does Al Sharpton who had hitched his star to the Tawana Brawley case.

And there is Miss Brawley herself, appearing a number of times jiggling to the beat in front of the locked-step Marcus Garveyites. She smiles knowingly. They get it, she seems to be thinking while jiggling. We get it. Fight the Power!

This was well-after virtually all of white America and most of black America knew she was a fraud and had attempted to frame, by name, a number of innocent men.

Well, maybe Lee was saying, you know, we all have different perspectives.

Brawley and most other principles of the hoax, including Sharpton, would later be sued and forced to pay damages.

What did Spike Lee explicitly say about the case? Years later in 2001 he would comment:

No one is ever going to find out what the true story is, but I still find it hard to believe that Tawana Brawley, at that age, would have covered herself with feces and thrown herself in a garbage bag.

Actually, according to numerous official and unofficial sources, now accepted by almost everyone, that's exactly what she did.

But here is Lee again, this time in a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone:

Do you still believe Tawana told the truth?

Well, I don’t think the story has really come out. One day we’ll find out what really happened.

One is pretty sure that Lee does indeed "know" what happened, but saying it would not be to fight the power.

Stoking grievance, anger and racial hatred is hip. And it also makes money. Truth or even peace be damned.

Thirty years later, where has it gotten us?

What does Spike Lee care? He doesn't have to live in Austin.

****************

Watch the music video to "Fight the Power". Or watch it again if you've already seen it. By the way, the featured "ghetto" is now gentrified with renovated multi-million dollar brownstones inhabited by white lawyers and hedge-fund managers.

The video is a bit of a Rorschach test, I think. It will either inspire you to fight the power (or pump some iron at your hipster gym), or it will make you sad.

The Pope's Racist New Video

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Africans have a certain joie de vivre. God bless their little hearts.

This blog previously noted the odd absence or rarity of black people in many of the Pope Videos, as well as the cringeworthy stereotypes - one video features a white family swimming in a nice pool vs. a black family wearing grass skirts and standing in front of a hut (the father is clutching a spear).

The new Pope Video features mostly black people.

Black people fighting each other.

The video condemns the "fratricidal wars" in Africa, and asks Christians in Africa to "give prophetic witness to reconciliation, justice, and peace.”

That Christians anywhere should always bear such witness is obviously a given.

But, believe it or not, the continent of Africa is actually a more peaceful place than it has been at any time in recent history.

The four most horrific wars, in terms of the number of casualties, of the last 50 years were fought in Africa, and that continent also played host to the worst incident of genocide in a generation.

Those conflicts came into being due to a variety of different causes, and involved a number of different ideologies and motives, including Marxism, anti-colonialism, Islam, ethnic differences and outright bloody non-ideological competition to capture or hold onto government power.

• 2nd Congo War (1998-2003) - 2.5 to 5.5 million dead
• Biafra (1967-1970) - 1 to 3 million dead
• Ethiopian Civil War (1974-1991) - 500,000 to 1.5 million dead
• Angolan Civil War (1975-2002) - 500,000 dead
• Rwandan Genocide (1994) - 500,000 to 1 million dead

See, black people are pretty violent.

Almost as violent as white people.

Though the Asians have often given both of them a run.

Thankfully, those African wars are now in the past.

But, as we all know, Africa is currently far from peaceful.

What the Pope did not mention is that the common denominator of most of the current wars, civil wars and terrorist insurgencies in Africa is radical Islam. The growing or ongoing conflicts in North Africa, North-West Africa, Nigeria and Somalia all pit Islamic rebels and terrorists against non-Muslim, mixed religion or more "moderate" Muslim governments. And perhaps the most prominent conflict to not include a large Muslim element - the civil war in South Sudan - grew out of hostilities initiated by Islamic forces.

• The Muslim Brotherhood and now ISIS in Egypt
• Al Qaeda and ISIS in Libya, Tunisia and Algeria
• Al Qaeda, ISIS and Muslim rebels in Mali, Mauritania and the Central African Republic
• Boko Haram in Nigeria, Northern Cameroon, Niger and Chad
• Al Shabaab in Somalia and Kenya

If Islamist fighters across Africa were to suddenly throw down their arms and renounce their claims to forcibly impose Sharia (or, a much more likely alternative, were, by some miracle, to be simultaneously defeated), Africa would experience an almost unprecedented era of relative peace.

Would there still be violent conflicts in Africa, as well as the threat of new ones? Of course. Unfortunately, even just victories over evil ideologies - the defeat of the Nazis in WW2 and of Soviet Marxism in the Cold War being among the most famous examples - don't guarantee permanent justice and peace. New evils will always arise.

But standing back from the current conflicts in Africa and merely labeling them all "fratricide" is grossly ignorant at best and racist at worst.

As if they were all caused by arms merchants.

Or, you know, the untamed impulses of those primitive darkies.

Though in that same video, the Pope does claim that Africans also have a certain "joie de vivre."

I'm not making that up.

And here's another thing I'm not making up - the words of then Archbishop Bergoglio, speaking on the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War:

We come to pray for all who have fallen, sons of the homeland who went out to defend their mother, the homeland, and to reclaim what is theirs, that is of the homeland, and it was usurped.

White people often fight good wars, you see. Or, at least, white Argentinians do.

How Affirmative Action Turned Kendrex White Into a Killer

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Yesterday, 21-year-old University of Texas at Austin junior Kendrex White went on a stabbing spree, attacking at least four students, killing one of them.

But yeah me and [deleted] were eating at cilantros truck at a long picnic table. Then at the end of the table some guy comes up in a bandana and stabs the knife into the table and looks all of us in the eye. I thought it was just some theatrical stunt or something tbh..He pulls the knife out without saying anything and turns around to slash some guy in the back of the neck. The slash victim grans the back of his neck and yells (people look at him and I await some "gotcha statement). But then....The attacker walks to another guy and stands him in like the kidney region in his back. Some guy yells run and we all bold to mccombs.

By most accounts White had previously seemed normal and even "nice," although he had appeared a bit stressed or depressed recently. His Twitter account is filled with friendly tweets and jokes. It's true that there are frequent links to gangsta videos and memes, along with many uses of the word "nigga," but I assume this is fairly standard among his peers - most of them are retweets that had obviously been making the rounds. There are also many links to Bible quotes about love.

A pinned tweet, put up last year, is a gangsta GIF - "Nigga be you, fuck to be cool." Underneath, is the last tweet he made, a few hours before the attack. It reads "Yahushua," the preferred name for God among certain Christian/Jewish sects, some of them quasi-black supremacist.

According to his Twitter profile, White was a biology major and pre-med who hoped to become a doctor. He was a member of the Black Health Professionals Organization.

The University of Texas is the US News and World Report 56th ranked school in the country, and according to one source, has the 2nd most competitive undergraduate program in Texas.

White had no business attending UT.

I'm basing that partly on an online Prezi presentation he made as a freshman or sophomore. The presentation was put up on July 9, 2015, the last day of classes for the first Summer course term at UT. It was titled "The controversy of Racism and Police brutality in America."

Before they take it down, I'm going to reprint it here, in full:

The video shows black parents giving their black children "The Talk" about the police

This video was taken down. I have no idea of its original contents.

A few commentators have already pointed to the presentation, with its references to racism, police profiling and the Ferguson riots, to argue that White was being indoctrinated to hate the police or white people, etc. But my purpose is not to argue that. Pretty much all American college students these days are victims of this sort of indoctrination attempt. Many are influenced by it; some see through it; others ignore it or play along to get good grades or whatever. It's simply a fact of contemporary college life.

Rather, I want to draw attention to how childlike, crude and simple White's "Prezi" was. Given the date, I assume it was some sort of final presentation for the class. And I assume (though I don't know this) that it earned him a passing grade. He went on to complete his sophomore year and then begin his junior year.

That it was a final presentation for a freshman or sophomore class at a relatively high-ranked college is grotesque. It would have been out of place as a freshman high-school presentation.

My almost six-year-old daughter could almost have put it together. Your young son or daughter could have, too.

And by grotesque, I'm not criticizing White for it - even though we now know he turned into a murderer - but rather I'm referring to his teachers, who condescendingly demanded and expected so little from their Affirmative Action students in the guise of "helping" them.

So, Kendrex White had no business studying at UT, let alone being a pre-med there. I assume that eventually, after wasting three years of his life on the supposed doctor track, he himself realized this. He wasn't going to make it.

But why? Who did this to him? Why did they lead him on and then pull the rug out? Why were other students, white students, perhaps, apparently succeeding when he had failed?

He'd fix that. Someone would pay.

Or so goes one theory. I think it's largely true.

Do not misunderstand. Most of us, experience major disappointments in life, and sometimes we believe, rightly or wrongly, that they were a result of unfairness or injustice towards us. But most of us don't go on murderous stabbing sprees to make up for them. Kendrex White is fully responsible for what he did.

But I think that what he did is an example - an extreme example, of course - of what Affirmative Action does to many black Americans. The title of my post was meant to be provocative. I obviously don't believe that Affirmative Action generally turns black people into mass stabbers. But in this case, it just might have.

And it has nothing to do with the color of anyone's skin per se, but everything to do with an institutionalized system that sets a certain class of people - in this case, people who happen to have certain skin color - up for failure.

Imagine that at every turn, you were given a sort of break, always advanced ahead of where your abilities or attainments would have otherwise placed you. If you noticed that your peers were constantly outperforming you (as they naturally would if you were always put into a competitive category above where you should have been) you are told, implicitly or explicitly, that this is only temporary. Perhaps the standard measurements underestimate you, for one reason or another. Or perhaps there's something else - racism? - that's making you consistently fall short of your peers. Now imagine that you come to a point where you aren't given that break - you finally have to take the tough biology course where they can't just waive you through - or take some sort of standardized test - the MCAT's, perhaps. So, you fail. Not because you're inherently stupid to lazy or anything like that, but because the whole way along people who claimed to be helping you were consistently mismatching you by placing you where you didn't belong, or at least, didn't belong yet.

I think you would be frustrated, perhaps even angry. I certainly would be.

Over forty years ago, the economist Thomas Sowell argued that Affirmative Action caused black students to be consistently mismatched at all levels. Among other things, he looked at the abnormally high dropout rates of blacks at elite schools, including Berkeley. Sowell's point was not that black students were inherently likelier to drop out of school, but that the phenomenon was the natural result of policies that systematically placed them, so too speak, over their heads. Those students who scored 350 on their SAT's were placed in schools that were at the 500 level. Those that scored 500 went to schools at the 650 level, and so on.

Now, of course, the process can continue, sometimes almost indefinitely. A mismatch doesn't always mean failure, and you can often continue to the next stage. But in many cases - though certainly not all - things will catch up. You graduate but then can't cut it in law school. Or you make it through law school but can't cut it at the law firm.

And again remember, not cutting it law school simply means not cutting it at the level of law school you shouldn't have been admitted to in the first place, given your abilities. You might have done just fine, one step down.

Indeed, if they hadn't tried to "help" you, you might have been a successful lawyer from a 20th ranked law school. Instead, you're a failure at Harvard.

Or you could have excelled at community college, and then perhaps have gone on from there. Instead you're a washout at UT.

Affirmative Action has been one of the greatest disasters of modern liberal social engineering, not because it's unfair to whites - although in a sense it is - but because it's unfair and damaging, tragically so, for so many blacks.

To say nothing of how it damages race relations as a whole.

It would be wrong to now call Kendrex White a victim - the victims yesterday were obviously the innocent people he attacked - but let's just say that others who probably went through similar experiences to what he went through, and who didn't convert their frustrations into violence, might have a bit of a claim.

And again, it doesn't have to turn out badly. Read Michelle Obama's turgid and awkward senior thesis at Princeton. It also appears wildly out of place - if a bit better than the work of a child, it's not exactly what one would expect from an Ivy League pre-law student. Michelle Robinson would fail out of a couple law firms before meeting her husband and living happily ever after. And, of course, Barack Obama would partly parlay his Affirmative Action breaks into winning the highest office in the country. So, yeah, sometimes Affirmative action works.

It didn't with Kendrex White.

Kendrex White's teachers, and their fellow Affirmative Action enablers will of course never blame themselves. Who needs to, when you can always blame "racism."

Or Donald Trump.

Race, Genes and Running

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Dennis Kimetto, fastest slow-twitch man in the world

One of the most notable phenomena in competitive running over the last one or two generations has been the dominance of African runners or runners of African descent.

While it is still politically incorrect to say it in many quarters, it is now incontrovertible that the explanation is largely genetic. Disagreement on this, at least by informed sources, is ideological, not scientific.

But this tells only half the story. Among black runners, those of West African descent (henceforth, "West Africans") dominate sprinting or short-distance races while East Africans or those of East African descent (henceforth, "East Africans") dominate long-distance events. Indeed, the "split" between the two groups is almost total. No East Africans have made it into the ranks of elite sprinters, while no West Africans have made it into the ranks of elite long-distance runners. While both groups obviously have black skin, they are quite different genetically. 

West Africans have generally competed for Nigeria, Great Britain, Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, Canada and the United States. East Africans have generally competed for Kenya and Ethiopia. There are a few other countries involved and exceptions such as ex-pats, etc.

Here are some interesting facts and figures:

• In the last eight Olympic games, 71 of the 72 runners in the 100 meter finals have been West Africans (I believe one was from Fiji). Their dominance has been almost complete.
• Out of the top all-time 125 times for the marathon (26.2 miles), East Africans have 121 spots and North Africans (all from Morocco) 3. The sole "white" athlete to clock a top 125 performance - Ryan Hall, recording a 2:04:58 time at the 2011 Boston Marathon - participated in a bizarre weather race where the runners had a huge tailwind for the entire course (Hall was fourth behind three East Africans). The world record for the men's marathon was set by Kenyan Dennis Kimetto, running a 2:02:57 at Berlin in 2014.
• Recently, white athletes have perhaps started to make small inroads in the long-distance category - Galen Rupp's Silver medal in the 2012 Olympic 10,000 meters being the most conspicuous examples.
• West African dominance is nowhere near as great in the 110 meter hurdles. I have yet to see a satisfactory explanation for this.
• In women's races, Africans have dominated but not as completely. In this year's Olympic women's marathon, white and Asian runners took five of the top ten spots, though they won no medals. The non-East African group featured three Americans, one Belorussian and one North Korean. 14 of the top 25 women's marathon times have been run by East Africans. Although, notably, the world record and indeed the fastest three times were run by a white athlete - Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain.    

I'm not going to go into a long and boring explanation as to why genetics is determinative here. But the numbers above are very suggestive, and counter-theories quickly break down. For example, those arguing for a "cultural" explanation need to account for how, say, a champion sprinting culture seems to track athletes of West African descent (and only athletes of West African descent) in wildly different countries and societies - the Caribbean, North America, Europe and West Africa itself.

Let me now make three crucial points:

First, genetic distributions are just that, distributions. To say that East Africans may be genetically "superior" in long-distance running is to make a claim about statistical averages and merely means you are likely to find a higher than normal set of runners that have, say, the potential to run a Marathon in under 2:10:00 among East Africans than for other groups. It's perfectly possible that a white runner might end up being an international marathon champion. But of course, since the set is smaller, the odds are lower.

Second, genetics determines potential, not ultimate performance. Potential must always be met with proper training. The fact that white runners used to dominate (more than one or two generations ago) can almost certainly be ascribed to East African countries previously failing to have the resources to adequately train or field teams that could compete internationally (and hand in hand with that, fewer athletes from Kenya or Ethiopia even realized that they might have international potential). This changed in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Third, ascribing running potential to genetics does not take away from the deserved honor or praise for the individual athletes. All Olympic athletes were gifted with "good" genes for their particular sports. But they complemented their biological luck with smart and hard-work. Michael Phelps has a perfect swimmers body - an anatomically unusual body in many ways - but he had to train for years to take proper advantage of it.

What do we mean by good genes for runners?

Obviously, there is no one "sprinter's gene" or "marathoner's gene." Rather, genetic endowments give one a certain "package." These days, international running is so competitive that one must have top scores in every element of the package to race at an elite level.

What goes into such a package?

Some of it is visually obvious. Sprinters often look like lean football players. They have large chests, large biceps and large thighs - all for pumping over short distances. Long distance runners have smaller thighs (though thickly-muscled ones) and their upper bodies are often almost emaciated. For long-distance runners, what you have above the waist - whether fat or muscle - is often worse than meaningless. It's just excess weight.

For women, who almost always have much less bulky muscles, the difference is less pronounced. It's always been interesting to me how some female long-distance runners (though not all) almost look a bit chunky. And I should say that as a male long-distance runner who has often been over my ideal running weight, this fact annoys me.

What you can't see, however, is also important. Look at a picture of a muscle. Everyone has a combination of white and red (or fast-twitch and slow-twitch) muscle fibers in their muscles, a combination that is mostly genetic. Whites give you temporary explosive power; reds give you sustained power. If you have more fast-twitch fibers, then you're a sprinter and quite honestly have virtually no potential to excel at long-distance running. If you have more slow-twitch fibers, then you're a long-distance runner and will never be able to sprint very well. This is pretty much an iron law and it partly explains why, say, some of your friends like "jogging" or running 5Ks and some don't.

Of course, certain sports demand a basic competence in both. Bruce Jenner did well enough on average in both categories to win the Olympic decathlon. But whatever his muscle composition (fast-twitch vs slow-twitch - I suspect he was a fast-twitch man), he would never have had the potential to be an Olympic champion in both sprinting and long-distance running.

What length differentiates sprinting from long-distance? The answer is a distance somewhere between 400 and 800 meters. Champion 100 meter runners have often been champion 400 meter runners. 800 meter athletes have been competitive in long-distance races from the mile to the marathon. But as far as I know, no 400 meter runners have ever excelled at 800 meters, and vice versa.

It would be fascinating to see a 600 meter race with the football players competing against the emaciated skeletons. Though, oddly, these races are rare. Appropriately, the last 200 meters of the 800 is often referred to as the "shadow" or "death zone" part of the race. You can go all out for a bit more than 400 meters, but that won't get you to the finish line. You have to have the proper "gas" to complete the last lap.

Other important factors for long-distance running include your V02 max - the efficiency at which your body converts oxygen to blood back into your muscles. V02 max is important but not all-important. Studies have shown that elite East Africans have good V02 max ratings - as any long-distance runners would - but ratings not significantly higher than, say, top whites or Asians. Lance Armstrong has an extremely high V02 max, as one might expect, but he only managed to clock a 2:59:36 in his first marathon - good for an amateur - but far short of elite level. One of the top endurance athletes of all time only managed to beat my best marathon time by 6 minutes! (To be fair, Armstrong ran a 2:46:43 the next year.)

Which brings us to body type and form. (Armstrong's cyclist's body differs significantly from a runner's body and will be inferior for running, even compared with that of amateurs such as myself.) In body type and form, East Africans also seem to have a large advantage for running. One East African observer wrote:

A group of us were sitting watching a local competition one day . . . A British runner was over here in Kenya running against us. We noticed first the big difference in leg structure; his legs were like oak tree trunks whereas ours were like willows. When we jumped we floated over; when he jumped it was a major upheaval (quoted in The Lore of Running by Tim Noakes, p. 442).

Again, this only really comes to the fore in elite competition where all parts of the "package" must be close to optimum.

As the reader can tell, I find the whole subject fascinating, though I hope it doesn't seem obsessively so.

One final caveat is this. Your genetic endowment obviously cannot be changed. But you do have control over how you make use of it. Among other things, you may discover modes of training that will render your particular distribution more useful to you, perhaps overcoming whatever small disadvantages you might have against others. This is why it's not surprising to me that the era of almost complete East African dominance might be coming to an end (or at least a partial end), as non-East Africans get even more scientific about their training. Though, of course, the East Africans are also getting more scientific...

And here's a last thought about race. Or should I say "racism"? In the United States, it's often looked upon as "racist" to dwell on genetic differences between races. But  at least as far as athletic performance goes, to me, non-genetic theories can often seem just as "racist," if not more so than any other.

For example, it is still occasionally alleged that Kenyans are faster because they had to run to school as kids. As if everyone in Africa lived in huts miles away from the nearest one-room schoolhouse run by missionaries or whatever. It took years for any earnestly non-racist Western theorist to actually ask any Kenyan athletes whether this was really true. One just laughed:

The school was right next to my home. I never would have run there. What do you think I am, crazy?    

The Pope Videos: Where are the Black People?

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Happy white family

The fourth Pope Video, called Small Farmers, is now out.

It's a minute and a half of quasi-Marxist bilge.

But that's not what I'm going to write about today. Rather I'm going to consider a question that occurred to me while reading the Bear's short review of the fourth Pope Video:

The supporting actor is a middle-aged white farmer with a hoe and one donkey.

That got me thinking. Up to two-thirds of the people in these videos are white (counting what are sometimes called "Hispanics" as white--I hope that doesn't offend) though in each of the videos there is a noticeable attempt to also include a wide diversity of other races and cultures. So there are Central and South Americans, North Americans, Europeans, Arabs, Indians, Tibetans or Burmese, South-East Asians, Chinese, Japanese and so on.

But where are the black people?

Or to put it another way, where are the Africans or people of African descent?

Africans and people of African descent do, after all, make up a sizable percentage of the world's population as well as comprising a sizable portion of the world's Catholics (and probably an even more sizable portion of the world's practicing Catholics).

But in more than six minutes of video that includes well over a hundred human figures, only two of the figures are black. It's a little boy and girl playing on what looks like a cheap metal bed in what could be some sort of shack. The clip lasts no more than two seconds.

(There is also one drawing of an African family, but in truth it might have been better not to have included that. See below for why.)

Now, I'm not one of those who believes you must have a mathematically proportionate representation of races in everything you do. But one of the underlying messages of the entire Pope Video series is the value of ethnic and cultural diversity. The whole thing is infused with a We are the World/UNESCO/United Colors of Benetton vibe that's impossible to miss. That makes the near-complete absence of black people all the more weird. Indeed, the more you think about it, the more incredibly weird it becomes.

Where is the footage of African farmers nobly toiling (Video 4) or African urbanites coughing up pollution created by capitalism (Video 2) or African families just hanging out (Video 3) or maybe even an African Muslim or Catholic or two? (Video 1).

They don't exist, apparently.

For the fun of it, I actually made a list, starting at the first scene of the first Pope Video and proceeding through the rest. Everyone who appears is counted (and that includes off-camera voices and faces and even some children's drawings). But to be fair, no one is counted more than once, even if they reappeared.

If you've gotten this far, take a look. I think it's quite interesting.

People Featured in the Pope Videos So Far

Argentinian Buddhist (white)
Argentinian Muslim (middle-eastern)
Argentinian Catholic (white)
Argentinian Jew (white)
Pope (white)
Burmese (?) Buddhists (asian)
Eastern Orthodox prelate (white)
Argentinian Jew (white)
Argentinian/European little girl (white)
Argentinian/European little boy (white)
Bicyclist wearing Respro mask (white or asian)
Muslim (?) man (middle-eastern)
Elderly Argentinian/European (white)
Turbaned man (asian)
Chinese woman (asian)
Irish/Scandinavian etc. woman (white)
White hand brushing flowers (white)
Argentinian/European yuppy (white)
Two white hands exchanging a clover (white)
Pony tailed person staring into sea (white or asian)
Argentinian/European face staring into sea (white)
White feet dangling over dock (white)
Indian mother and two sons (asian)
Two African children laughing over book on cheap bed in shack (black)
Argentinian/Southern European family on nice couch (white)
Argentinian/European father and son swimming (white)
Argentinian/European little girl (white)
Her arguing parents (white)
Her brother (white)
Drawing of Spanish family (white)
Drawing of family in front of mountains (white)
Drawing of family, including father with extremely long legs (asian or white)
Drawing of family near tree and lake (white)
More abstract drawing of family (indeterminate)
Drawing of African family in front of grass hut with father holding spear (black)
I'm not making this up.
Drawing of Arab family in desert (middle-eastern)
Drawing of happy family with red cheeks (white)
Campesino older man (white)
Campesino older woman (white)
Four campesinos (white)
Chinese/South East Asian rice farmers (asian)
Farmer with boots, gloves and head covering (indeterminate)
Pakistani or Indian farmer (middle-eastern or asian)
Tired small farmer (white)
Frenetic capitalists on floor of New York City Stock Exchange (white)
Central American migrant farm workers (?) (white)
Japanese (?) farmer (asian)
Old Arab man (middle-eastern)
One or two additional farmers (white)

Happy black family

Against the rainbow of ethnic diversity presented above, the lack of black people stands out. Maybe they're hiding in the hut.

What does it all mean? How could someone on the political left (which, let's admit it, the Pope quite obviously is) forget about black people? How could someone who many believe cares so much about people in general and the poor and downtrodden in particular, effectively ignore 20% of the world's population including many of its most poor and downtrodden, especially those on the African continent? Or to flip it, why didn't they include more black people just, you know, hanging out--sitting on couches or swimming in pools or running on beaches. Don't black people like to do those things too?

Am I alleging that the Pope and/or his Argentinian video production company is in some sense racist, at least in terms of ignoring black people or shuffling them off to the side or just not considering them to be as interesting, photogenic or important as other people?

Yes.