You don't want to make the white kids feel bad.
white revisionist histories, my uncreative confession, and remember where you came from
¿What you heard?
“You don’t want to make the white kids feel bad,” countered another tour guide trainee.
I don’t? I thought.
“Neighborhoods naturally change,” she mansplained.
But K-Town became K-Town because the wealthy white people who used to live there left. The white people left because of white flight. White flight happened because of redlining, racism, and the Watts Riots.
Nothing natural about any of that.
She suggested that, instead, I could just say that the previous residents moved out of K-Town because freeway construction made it easier to get to The Valley.
:/
Freeway construction that displaced the minority communities that white Angelenos were running away from.
White folk sure do be telling some far-out fairytales to make themselves sleep without white guilt at night.
What you doin’?!
I have done a truly terrible thing. I have created a SPREADSHEET!
I hope Artists At Work doesn’t take away my nametag because of this. Anyone asking ChatGPT for Google Sheets shortcuts is truly unworthy of being called a creative person.
But! In my defense! I am only doing this for the sake of art.
I am systematizing my art work since the truth of Aisha Been Leimert Park is that it isn’t just about one neighborhood. It’s about two — Leimert and Altadena. And it doesn’t just activate one storytelling process. It uses three — ethnography, journalism, and film.
Combining all this together, unfortunately, means quantifying my ethnographic encounters with rows and columns to remind me who I still need to do journalism on to help me figure out who I ultimately want to film.
What you seen??
SCOOBY-DOO! MYSTERY INCORPORATED (2010-2013) is so beloved by Scooby-Doo Reddit and by IMDb but not by me. At first, I offered only a light critique, but now that I have finished the show, I can declare that this is not good television.
Despite the throwbacks easter-egged throughout, Mystery Incorporated forgets its origins. Scooby-Doo was genesis-ed out of the crucifixion of programs parents deemed too violent, so the first Scooby was staunchly MLK about its content.
It was designed to avoid trigger warnings like the one I now feel obliged to give you for this clip (along with a spoiler alert!) from the penultimate episode of Mystery Incorporated. In it, an unarmed teenage girl is machine-gunned to death by SS-styled battle droids controlled by a sadistic, scar-faced, one-eyed, German parrot.
I resonate with what you wrote. It makes me wonder how many other stories are subtly reshaped, like a tricky Pilate move. So insightful!