> Why deprive all the non-white people of their agency? If a non-white culture wants content that better communicates their lived experience, they should produce it themselves
Historically, in the US, they were not allowed to produce it themselves. So many decades went by where they were in fact deprived of their agency.
Not only that, but they were deprived of political, financial and economic agency as well, which means today, they are generally less wealthy, since they missed on decades of opportunities for wealth accumulation.
So in order to produce it themselves today, capital is required, especially if we're talking about big budget production.
The woke argument is that, it seems that some effort from white investors should be made to invest some of their capital to non-white artists, as retribution for all those years where they had their agency taken away.
That's different than the corporatist take, which is simply to appear progressive by checking some diversity boxes in order to get more sales, or protect their brand from backlash or bad press. I reckon that, and it's possible LOTR is of this kind of attempt.
So my question is, do you feel this retribution maybe actually comes with a hidden price? White capital somehow can compromise the work and have clauses that hurt the creative output and maybe ends up making the content worse. Do you feel it isn't necessary? Or do you feel it's a good thing that should help support and kickstart better quality non-white content?
By the way, as I understand, this capital doesn't need to come straight up as budget for a movie production, though it can, but I think it can also be as scholarship, financial aid, talent programs, etc. which can all focus more on non-white artists. It can also be done simply by opening up more roles for non-white artists, which does imply that some characters which maybe were meant to be white or which had non-specified gender/race needs to be made non-white, in order to create more job opportunities for non-white actors for example.
> And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks.
Does it suck any more/less than similar non BIPOC/LGBT content though? I personally don't feel like it does. I feel there's a similar likelihood of content sucking, no matter if it's trying for diversity, is promoting or made by BIPOC/LGBT or if it isn't. The only difference is there's simply more non-BIPOC/LGBT content being made, so it ends up there's more good content that make it past all the crap.
If for any 10 movies, only 1 is actually good, you'd need a lot more attempt at BIPOC/LGPT movies to get some good ones no?