Posted on 06/18/2021 3:41:21 AM PDT by Kaslin
Few movie stars have been more exalted than Tom Hanks. You'd never expect a guy with his nice-guy branding to get a strong slap in the face in the political arena. But Hanks penned a "guest essay" for The New York Times lecturing on racism, which opened him up for a shaming from the left.
On June 4, Hanks boasted about how he bores people at parties with his historical knowledge but lamented growing up in the schools of Oakland and never hearing a word about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. It was "systematically ignored, perhaps because it was regarded as too honest, too painful a lesson for our young white ears."
He admitted they were taught about slavery and Harriet Tubman, Crispus Attucks, George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn't a "whitewash."
Hanks sounded like a liberal who makes documentaries for CNN: "When people hear about systemic racism in America, just the use of those words draws the ire of those white people who insist that since July 4, 1776, we have all been free, we were all created equally, that any American can become president and catch a cab in Midtown Manhattan no matter the color of our skin, that, yes, American progress toward justice for all can be slow but remains relentless. Tell that to the century-old survivors of Tulsa and their offspring."
Talk about constructing a straw man! Almost no white American who reveres the Fourth of July and feels proud about our racial progress since the Civil War or the Civil Rights Act suggests our history was all sunshine and roses and racial harmony.
Then Hanks was lined up for the dunk tank. On June 13, NPR television critic Eric Deggans penned a piece for their website titled "Tom Hanks Is A Non-Racist. It's Time For Him To Be Anti-Racist." Deggans proclaimed that he liked Hanks and his work ... but as a subhead warned, "He's built a career playing righteous white men."
Deggans wrote, "I know the toughest thing for some white Americans -- especially those who consider themselves advocates against racism -- is to admit how they were personally and specifically connected to the elevation of white culture over other cultures." He complained Hanks has "built a sizable part of his career on stories about American white men 'doing the right thing.'"
Somehow, making movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Apollo 13" and "Forrest Gump" is aggressively defined as a malignant whiteness-elevating conspiracy: "Baby boomer filmmakers have made fortunes amplifying ideas of white American exceptionalism and heroism." Now Hanks needs to make amends and be an "anti-racist" and acknowledge Hollywood's responsibility "now lies with helping dismantle and broaden the ideas they helped cement in the American mind."
When conservatives mocked Deggans for hammering this "systemic racism" anvil -- that it's never enough for white people to be "non-racist"; you have to be "anti-racist" with soul-cleansing, leftist-pleasing activism -- his NPR colleagues rallied around his sermon.
No one should expect NPR would allow an opposing point of view or an actual debate. Instead, on the June 15 edition of the hilariously titled "All Things Considered" newscast, they offered Deggans five minutes to expand on his Hanks-bashing thesis.
This underlines how NPR takes our tax dollars and uses them to enforce an ideological hard line that shames Hollywood and its liberal titans as insufficiently woke. NPR exists to "dismantle ideas" that whites in Hollywood "helped cement in the American mind." Does that sound like journalism or activism comes first in "public broadcasting"?
More brainless Townhall drek.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. A person who makes his living pretending to be someone else gets called out for not pretending hard enough to be woke.
Did Hanks write this while enjoying sunny Greece?
Nobody’s even listening anymore.
Newark NJ just installed a sculpture of George Floyd in front of city hall; my town across the river still has its Columbus statue. Assimilation failed, and now we just live in different worlds; we have our republic, they have their tribalism.
Life is like a box of chocolates. Some have nuts in them. Some are nuttier than others.
It always amazes me when the Left eat their own.
Forrest Gump and his wife were superstars of the Left when they had COVID down under last year, and were the poster children for mask shaming.
Oh how far the mighty have fallen.
Other wise No.
Tom Hanks
I have no idea what gave you the idea that he could have written an op-ed about himself.
also: did you even read the op-ed? Obviously Not g
Tom Hanks, take yo beatin'.
Well, he could start taking rolls as ‘people of color’ but then he would be slapped for ‘cultural appropriation’.
When you slide down the slimy slope of woke, you enter a lose/lose situation.
Methinks you are correct. Me? I really do not want to live near or around or with the leftest anymore.
At near 80, it’s too late to immigrate, so I will simply keep reloading and wait.
Gee, Tom. Ever hear of the Chicago massacre of 2018, or the Chicago massacre of 2019? or 20? or 21?
“...NPR takes our tax dollars and uses them to enforce an ideological hard line...”
Yes, as does public television. For the last year, they have had numerous “documentaries” about Tulsa, about “racism” in general, and “black history”.
Well, he did star in “Philadelphia”, so I guess this gives him a pass with the LGBTXYZ crowd. But maybe not, since they probably view it as though he took the role away from an actual gay man.
Basically a re-enactment of the Chicago massacre every weekend.
I passed that spot at least twice a day when the Big A was the mayor. Worked at 970 broad. I never believed a drug user and bum would be so honored. A proper statue of him would be in a garbage truck hauled away. I was born in newark to boot. I hope for you the Passaic river remains a boundary!!
(The enemy of the people is the media.)
Enemedia
So he thought he inoculated himself with that statement? Nahhhh...
The woke media will go after him anyway!! Appeasement never works
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