Snow

I’m gonna get on my soapbox here cos this is pissing me off.

My mum had the same colouration as me. She was Spanish. If she lived in America she would be described as latina. She lived here so she got things like “sultry” instead.

She loved the original Disney Snow White cartoon. The women looked like her. Rare enough back then. It’s important to see yourself represented, even if it’s just a cartoon.

I work in an objectified profession, and occasionally I’m told things like “you’re too dark to be posh” or “learn Arabic and you’ll never stop working”. I’m not very brown, folks, seriously. But even I have been asked multiple times “no but where are you REALLY from” etc. There’s a certain type of human that thinks that “yep, those Vikings? Peak of evolution, so long as they’ve shaved. And bleached their buttholes.” No point telling them we all came north from Africa and some of us lightened over time. White is right to them and even if they don’t understand it they are angling to Teutonic and scandi origins – northerners generationally bleached by the cold.

So… Snow White is dark haired and dark eyed, and Rachel Zegler fits that casting, but because she’s in America they call her “latina”. She said a few unguarded things, perhaps designed to stir the pot a bit. They were pretty damn innocuous but certain people were looking for a pretext. And the online hate for her has gone off the scale. So many articles desperate to paint the movie as a disaster and to implicate her casting as the main reason it went wrong, even though it won’t be quite as much of a disaster as they want it to be.

Half of them (guys she’s 23?!) are crying about her being “woke” – (which as previously discussed means “threatening as they expose and call out deeply held and carefully nurtured prejudices”) But it all feels amplified. It’s like with Meghan, there’s more to this than just… this. It’s more than just distaste for her not liking Trump and having slightly left wing opinions, not necessarily fully thought through yet, a bit mawkish opinion-as-fact stuff like many of her generation. Like me! But … this is a huge online effort to eradicate any influence and standing that this talented young actress has built for herself. And buried deep beneath it is something really uncomfortable, nothing to do with her politics. “She’s not like us.”

Before the release of the film I saw articles by incels highlighting some downy hair on her back, saying “she’s not feminine”, like they’ve ever actually met a woman face to face. Where are they getting their idea of femininity from? Men like the president. That’s not a very logical route. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

She is being “othered” though, on many levels simultaneously, being clusterbombed with hate, and honestly I think that beneath it all, at the bottom of the filthy well, sporing plague into the discourse, the words: “Snow White.” Listen closely, you hear it whispered on the wind “SHE’S NOT WHITE LIKE I’M WHITE SHE’S DARK SHE’S OTHER HOW DARE SHE BE CALLED SNOW WHITE”. People who can’t see beyond themselves and actually can’t see themselves either.

On forms, I tick Caucasian if it’s the only option that fits me, over here there’s no “latina” option or I would tick that instead. It often lets me put in “Mediterranean” and I will put that if I can. But… Skin colour is just an accident of evolution over time and we literally all started black. Many celts stayed darkish by these people’s standards, all up the west coast from Africa through Spain through Wales to Scotland. Catherine Zeta-Jones never got othered in the industry, but Zegler wears “latina” proudly as she should. This stuff should be meaningless surely by now? But Трамп’s America, the same people who literally don’t give a fuck about art anyway, who are collectively about as intelligent as a bucket of eels – they’re using every story trick possible to demonise her. Most of what she has said is being taken out of context. She’s become a household name and if her mental health can weather this and the industry is smart she will come out punching and will be right at the top and properly platformed in twenty years. But… it’s precarious – this is designed to sink her and I’m not yet sure how robust she is. “Get back in your box, actor, woman, darkie”. The witch-hunt has sunk some remarkable people. It is not about her opinions, not about her acting, not about anything other than the fact that there is a word: “white” and it is in the name of a character, and it keys with deeply held largely idiotic views around loss of territory and master races. The same voices are raging about Doctor Who, Snape, anyone where someone of colour is playing a part, but the edges are blurry when it comes to a “latina” and it looks like people feel they can go into full hate mode and not get found out for being racist because “I just don’t like her, it’s not like she’s black, I’m not a racist. She said things so it’s her fault.”

“I’m Anglo-Saxon,” said a nazi bouncer I met in a country and western bar in The Valley. He tolerated me cos I’m English, but asked me a series of questions that concluded with him determining that I was “latina”. “Calling yourself Anglo-Saxon, that’s going a long way back,” I said. “Hell yeah,” he replied proudly. “You could go back even further, I reckon,” I suggested to him. “You could put your identity back where human civilization began, in Africa.” He didn’t like that, argued it had been debunked, with all the rigour of someone who has read the comments section. Randomly he brought up the Piltdown Man. Dunno where he had picked that up from. It was a hoax. I didn’t push it. He had “- – – – CUT HERE – – – -” tattooed on his neck.

God though I’m getting fed up of the vocal idiocy in America. I finally made sense of why so much of this “flat earth” and “space doesn’t exist” is about and that’s to do with these fundamentalist Christians – the same lot lobbying to get “gay books” out of our libraries.White straight Adam and Eve kinda features here too. I couldn’t work out why people could so wilfully overlook generations of science in favour of a misinterpretation of physics. But God and Jesus, of course, ask us to “be faithful” instead of analytical”. And suddenly you can just believe all sorts of shit cos you’re involved in a community. And a love based religion becomes about preserving your bastion against “other”.

How random. Who could have guessed that it would be a Jewish book of folklore and genealogy plus the half remembered exploits of a Nazarene insurrectionist that snuck through time as the “how to life” manual for so many entitled morons. Could’ve been Gilgamesh, the Iliad… but no, it’s that bible, used as an excuse to not only ignore science but to take a high handed superior tone to anyone that understands geological time and how to test things for yourself and how to read history and science clearly and not just through a prism of confirmation bias. God help us all, cos where America leads we follow. The libraries are already under siege. Urgh.