S3 E15: “Green Book” and “Black Panther” in China, why storytelling matters

This is a very special episode and the second of our 3-part conversation about Black Lives Matter. Longtime listeners of Loud Murmurs know that we have talked about “Black Panther” and “Green Book” when they first came out—about white savior complex in “Green Book” and the significance of Black futurism in “Black Panther.” But we want to bring back the two movies that are familiar to our listeners, and use them as an opportunity to have a conversation about race and racism in China, with the help of our guests. In this episode, Juan and Diaodiao invited Esham and Joshua to join us. Esham (Twitter: @eshammacauley) is a first-gen African immigrant raised in the U.S. but has roots in West Africa, the Middle East, and Scandinavia. Joshua (Instagram: @joshytaughtyou) grew up on the south side of Chicago and currently works at a tech company in Shenzhen. Both of them have studied in China. In this episode, they talk candidly about racist encounters they’ve had being Black men in China and how they make sense of Hollywood’s reckoning with its decades of racism as part of the ongoing BLM movement in the U.S. A common argument is that “racism doesn’t exist in China because most Chinese people have never met a Black person.” In reality, hundreds of thousands of Black people currently live and work in China. Their experience decidedly differs from that of white expats. One doesn’t have to look so hard to find blatantly racist and hateful speech on Weibo today. Sooner or later, we need to have a tough conversation about anti-Black racism in China. In this episode: What do our guests think about “Green Book” and “Black Panther” and their different reception in China? What similarities did Joshua find between “The Wandering Earth” and “Black Panther”?How has “respectability politics'' shaped our two guests' lives growing up? What does “respectability politics” look like in China? What is their experience with racism in China and can we categorize those encounters as “innocent ignorance”?Why are American movies and TV shows we grew up watching in China so white? The importance of letting people tell their own stories about racism.Find Loud Murmurs in the iTunes podcast store, Google Play, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts (e.g. Pocket Casts, Overcast)! Please subscribe, enjoy, and feel free to drop us a note and leave us a review. RSS feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/258327.rss Itunes: https://apple.co/2VAVf0Z Google play: goo.gl/KjRYPN Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2IWNuRB Pocket Cast: http://pca.st/nLid Overcast: https://bit.ly/2SL7MNJ Please consider supporting us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/loudmurmurs. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/loudmurmurs)

Om Podcasten

Loud Murmurs is a Mandarin-Chinese podcast about American pop culture, brought to you by four bilingual and bi-cultural women in the U.S. and their friends. We discuss movies, TV, documentaries, and the social, political issues reflected on by a piece of pop culture work. Too often, race, gender and other political and cultural issues are the subtext in pop culture. We seek to make the subtext explicit, question it and challenge it. The show is now in its third season, updated biweekly. We have interviewed guests ranging from science fiction writers, comedians, to scholars and journalists. Our goal is to make the most thought-provoking Chinese podcast about American pop culture. 小声喧哗是一档以女性视角来观察和批判影视文本如何塑造世界的播客。《小声喧哗》Loud Murmurs, 是一档以女性视角来观察和批判影视文本如何塑造世界的播客。文化和审美的自觉认同从来都是隐含在创造者对世界的想象中，而这样的想象催生出许多充满偏见的创造动机。这样的创造动机渗透在我们日复一日热爱的欧美电影中，美剧里，渗透在我们对于事物的认知中。今天，我们想要去挑战它。紧跟影视热点和时事的同时，保持了双周频率的持续输出。在制作节目时，小声喧哗经常邀请学者和影评人参与我们的节目，使节目的观点更加多元化和专业。小声喧哗致力在中文世界，做最好的流行文化播客。