Posted on 06/08/2003 10:24:03 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
Conclusion of article:
In the workshops, the actors were encouraged to probe their own experiences and feelings about race, no matter how buried, and some of what was uncovered has made its way into the script.
"It took tremendous courage to be in those sessions," he said. "The actors had to exhume a lot of suppressed stuff. Luckily we had two very good facilitators along the way."
Schwimmer catapulted to stardom on NBC's "Friends," the decidedly whitebread sitcom that only began to introduce a black character in recent episodes--after a decade on the air.
Of course TV is not real life. And Schwimmer, the child of two liberal Jewish lawyers who were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and other causes, laughed as he noted: "The first real theater I can remember was attending demonstrations and walking picket lines."
Asked when he first became conscious of race, Schwimmer said: "You mean, when did that loss of innocence occur--that moment that everyone has when they realize there is an issue? I think I was always aware of it as a child because my parents so diligently taught my sister and me the lessons of the Holocaust, and were so concerned with women's rights. They made a point of sending us to a multiracial school and I always had friends of every race. It was only after college that I think I realized I had lost all my friends of color along the way."
Schwimmer's big hope is that audiences will leave the theater with a desire to continue talking about the issues raised in the show. "I also hope they will realize that we still all have a lot of work to do."
mailto:hweiss@suntimes.com
(Excerpt) Read more at suntimes.com ...
Not to worry, I'm currently starting up a rent-a-friend service. I plan to have at least two friends in stock from every major racial group, and a few from minor racial groups for those who want to go the extra mile. All at very competive prices too.
At present I don't have a suitable Asian friend in stock, but I can let you have a swarthy but well mannered Pacific Islander at 20% off the regular rate if you take him for a full month.
Asians and hispanics married with whites at roughy the same rate, if I recall, around 20 percent for each ethnic group. However, blacks very rarely rarely marry whites, or ony other group, except blacks. The article was bemoaning the fact that although the US would become a more homogenous "tan" country (as opposed to a "white" country) blacks would still be on the outside.
As for Asian inter-racial marriages of Asians with whites, this is highly variable depending on the size of the Asian community. In L.A., where the Asian community is huge, there is relatively little Asian inter-racial marriage because the community is huge. Other places where the community is smaller, hence slimmer pickings, they are more likely to marry outside their race.
So NP-INCOMPLETE, you can relax because there will still be a pure Asian ethnic group. Unfortunately, you will have to live in L.A. to find it.
I'm not trying to push any kind of agenda here, I think inter-racial relationships are fine as long as its kept within normal bounds. You have to agree that the current relationship between the asian and white populations in this country is totally out of whack. I'm not concerned really about the racial aspect as much as the cultural aspect. When asians pair with whites, they lose alot of their cultural identity(strong work ethic, respect for authority and family, desire for education). Clearly this is not a good thing.
Get real. I'm a mix of several different European ethnic groups that were once more or less homogenous groups in this country. Being a mutt isn't that bad, unless you define yourself by the color of your skin or other meaningless characteristics.
I don't want to see the asians in this country become a group of "mutts" as you put it. Remember that asians are currently the best educated and the richest of all groups in this country. This is not due to race, but to culture. And if the good elements and cultural values become diluted due to inter-mixing with the whites, then all other performance aspects of asians in this country will decline as well.
Oh this is great! I can look foward to there being pure chinese/japanese/korean people only in ethic communities in the cities and everywhere else there will only be mixed asians and whites eh!
But getting back to your original thread topic, I listened to an audiocassette of Studs Terkel about a year ago of selected radio interviews from the mid 1950's through the 80's. I knew nothing about Studs before that, otherwise I would not have listened to the tape.
The guy sounds like NPR before there was NPR. The most interesting aspect was that he interviewed all of these people who he thought would "change" America for the better. I never heard of anyone of them, nor could I come up them on a google search. There were also some East coast intellectuals, who maybe had some notoriety in the late 50's-early 60's bashing the Eisenhower administration.
The one thing I realized is that liberal "intellectuals" all sound the same no matter what decade they are from--they all have that air of I'm smart and you're not
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