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Amazon's Woke Smokescreen
Substack ^ | Bari Weiss

Posted on 06/29/2021 9:01:16 AM PDT by MtnClimber

The new inclusion policy put out by Amazon Studios offers entries on "womxn" and "acquired limb difference." Meantime, the company's drivers urinate in bottles.

A few years ago, my friend Dan Ahdoot was auditioning for a sitcom on Fox. And things were looking good; he’d heard from his agent that he made it to the last round. Then, he got a call from one of the creators of the show, a friend of his who was calling to say sorry: Dan wasn’t going to get the part. The reason, he said, was that he wasn’t “diverse.”

Dan is Iranian. He has photos of his parents in Tehran before the revolution and the eyebrows to prove it. (Don’t worry, I asked Dan if I could objectify him.) But Fox apparently didn’t see Iran as “diverse.”

Given that Dan is not just Jewish but also Persian and therefore in possession of more than the usual amount of chutzpah, he then thought to ask: What about Afghanistan? Was Iran’s neighbor sufficiently diverse?

The showrunner said he’d find out and give him a call back.

In the meantime, Dan says he hopped onto his Wikipedia page and inserted a little edit: He was now an “Iranian Afghan Jew,” despite the fact that nobody in Dan’s lineage is from, nor has ever visited, Afghanistan.

The showrunner called back and pronounced that, according to the poobahs over at Fox, Afghanistan was indeed diverse.

I thought of this story when I read Amazon Studios’ new inclusion policy, vaunted by stenographers in the mainstream media. It announces a goal, by 2024, of having 50% of creative roles in its movies and shows filled by women or people of color. In addition, the studio promises to try to cast actors whose identity — “gender, gender identity, nationality, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability” — matches that of the characters they play. One wonders how Ariel from “The Little Mermaid” or the sea monster from “The Shape of Water” would be slotted. And God save the intern who has to racially code “Beauty and the Beast.”

By now, this is a familiar story: Amazon is turning the making of TV and film into the same woke numbers game played at every other elite institution. (Exhibit A: Sixty-eight percent of the students admitted to Princeton’s class of 2025 self-identify as “people of color.”)

I decided to read through Amazon Studios’ Inclusion Playbook, designed “to help disrupt the biases that occur across the lifecycle of a series or movie, from the first inkling of a concept to viewers streaming the content on Prime Video.” The playbook directed me to a factsheet that promised to help improve my familiarity with all things diverse and inclusive.

There I encountered entries on things like: acquired limb difference (otherwise known as “amputation”). There’s an entry on mean girls, which, I learned, was a “stereotype of girls and young women characterizing them as socially aggressive and unkind” —characterizations that, apparently, not only “enforce the bad behavior” but “fail to address the larger social issues girls and women face like insecurity, lack of confidence, and pressure to fit the ‘feminine beauty ideal.’” Someone please relay that to Tina Fey.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Society
KEYWORDS: communism; wokeism

1 posted on 06/29/2021 9:01:16 AM PDT by MtnClimber
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To: MtnClimber

I cannot fully grasp how mentally disturbed these wokeists must be.


2 posted on 06/29/2021 9:01:28 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of Colorado scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page.)
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To: MtnClimber

Their brains are burning, stinking, toxic dumpster fires.


3 posted on 06/29/2021 9:15:04 AM PDT by Noumenon (The Second Amendment exists primarily to deal with those who just won't take no for an answer. KTF)
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To: MtnClimber

“Meantime, the company’s drivers urinate in bottles.”


It would be hard to do for a woman, but maybe easier for a “womxn.”


4 posted on 06/29/2021 9:55:03 AM PDT by JGPhila
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To: MtnClimber

We used to pride ourselves on being a melting pot. Now we are being forced to see each *ingredient* in that pot. We are not to meld together and let our flavors get to know each other anymore. We are to remain distinct and separate.

Have you ever eaten a spoonful of stew or chili before the flavors have melded? Doesn’t taste all that great. It may be edible but it isn’t delicious. Give it time and all those wonderful individual flavors make the whole pot something fantastic.

Our country could use the melting pot analogy again. It IS who Americans are! E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.


5 posted on 06/29/2021 9:57:35 AM PDT by FamiliarFace
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To: FamiliarFace

We’ve never been a melting pot. More like a relish tray.


6 posted on 06/29/2021 11:16:14 AM PDT by bgill
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To: MtnClimber
I decided to read through Amazon Studios’ Inclusion Playbook...

Here it is:

https://dei.amazonstudios.com/inclusion-playbook/

They've moved well past the old "Blacks deserve more than whites, women deserve more than men, gays deserve more than straights." They've turned bigotry into an art form.

7 posted on 06/29/2021 12:24:23 PM PDT by TChad (The MSM, having nuked its own credibility, is now bombing the rubble.)
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To: MtnClimber

As long as White characters are only played by White actors, then fine. No more black Orphan Annies and so forth.


8 posted on 06/29/2021 12:28:35 PM PDT by meowmeow (In Loving Memory of Our Dear Viking Kitty (1987-2006))
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