The upcoming release of Ridley Scott’s epic film adaptation of the biblical story of Exodus has generated some controversy due to the all-white casting of the movie’s principle players. While creative endeavors are entitled to exercise license in the pursuit of effective storytelling, it is reasonable to observe a certain measure of fidelity to reality. For instance, an actor playing the part of Ray Charles does not have to be blind, but he sure as hell better be black. Consequently, the complaints about Exodus are justifiable and a worthy subject of debate.
Enter Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of the film’s distributor 21st Century Fox (as well as Fox News). Murdoch took to Twitter to defend the film from the criticism that its casting was insensitive to race. But his comments escalated the problem from mere insensitivity to outright racism.
The tweets that Murdoch posted said, in sequence…
5:07 PM – 28 Nov 2014: “Moses film attacked on Twitter for all white cast. Since when are Egyptians not white? All I know are.”
5:22 PM – 28 Nov 2014: “Everybody-attacks last tweet. Of course Egyptians are Middle Eastern, but far from black. They treated blacks as slaves.”
5:53 PM – 28 Nov 2014: “Okay, there are many shades of color. Nothing racist about that, so calm down!”
It is astonishing that someone who runs an international media corporation is oblivious to the offensive nature of his comments and that he manages to make things worse with every subsequent utterance.
First of all, it requires a rather perverse and racist logic to conclude that just because every Egyptian that Murdoch knows is white, it is therefore true that all Egyptians are white. What’s more, Murdoch has revealed information about himself that says something about his personal relationships. He confessed that he doesn’t know any Egyptians that are not white. Of course, the narrowness of Murdoch’s network of acquaintances does not define the diversity of a nation.
Secondly, Murdoch’s first defense is based on a distinction between Middle Easterners and blacks. However, it is Murdoch who is introducing the notion that the problem with the movie is an absence of blacks. In fact, the critics have mainly addressed the exclusivity of whites. That doesn’t mean that more blacks should have been cast, just more people who are not white, including Middle Easterners.
Furthermore, while artificially making this a black/white issue, Murdoch supports his bigotry by noting that Egyptians “treated blacks as slaves.” Is that supposed to mean that, therefore, there are no black Egyptians? Americans also treated blacks as slaves. So by Murdoch’s logic there are no black Americans. Additionally, someone should inform Murdoch that Egyptians also treated Jews as slaves, which is the whole theme of the film. So what exactly is his point?
Finally, having exhausted all of the tortured logic he could summon, Murdoch condescendingly instructs his critics to “calm down.” It’s as if his blatant prejudices are excusable because he is Rupert Murdoch and no one is allowed to question him. And those who do are over-excited and their complaints are unwarranted. He seems to believe that he has some moral superiority to tell other people how they should feel and respond to his hateful biases.
If anyone is curious as to why there is so much expression of racism on Fox News, and other Murdoch properties like the Wall Street Journal, they can fairly conclude that the source emanates from the top. It is people like Murdoch who influence those he employs, who then influence their audience of dimwitted followers, that results in the repulsive editorial bigotry that is so rampant in conservative media.
I remember when people were actually ashamed when everyone discovered
they were racist pieces of crap. Now they put them on the Sunday shows and
a future at Rupert’s klan opinion network is in their future.
Lawd! Egypt is in Africa for christsake. So using his racist’s logic South Africa is white. I hate that man for ruining our nation and setting us back to racist America.
I remember thinking that all Cubans were white bc of Ricky Ricardo. Also I had a teacher (white) who sworn up and down that Egypt wasn’t part of Africa. Yucky Africa.
I think it was Dick Gregory who said that Hollywood reinvents the Bible as white every 20 years. If these clowns knew anything about the Bible they would know it’s about BLACK PEOPLE, A BLACK FAMILY, stretching generations. If there were white people in the Bible it would be noted because of the rarity of their visibility.
Now since some white people know about the history of the Bible that Jesus was Black as well as all others, now they say color doesn’t matter.
White folks made Jesus/God from their image, when it states, in the Bible that people are made from the image of God.
One more point, Biblical Jews were BLACK. Blacks enslaved Blacks.
murdoch, Shar-Pei looking mofo is what is wrong with the US.
Conservative logic and thought process on full display and it is pretty ugly. Don’t forget that Santa is white too!
It will always be difficult to even approach the proper casting of a movie based on the OT, because our idea of race is not how people back then thought of race.
Race as we think of it is largely thanks to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For the first time in history, there was a slave population that was obviously different from the free population. Whites have been punishing blacks for this accident of history ever since.
The Egyptians weren’t ‘black’ in the modern sense, nor were the various Semitic peoples of the Middle East ‘black’ or ‘white’ (as we would define those terms). ‘Race’ in those days had to do with local ethnicity, which is why the OT is full of Semites bashing each other over territory and no acknowledgement of deeper ancestry. (Go back to when the Sahara was green, and flint-knapping was the way to make weapons and tools, and you find the origin language for Ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Ethiopic, Hausa, Hebrew, and numerous others.)
So, which modern groups should double for the peoples of the ancient Middle East? Were the Philistines Mycenean, a Middle Eastern ethnic group, or a mix of both? What did the ancient Egyptians look like?
Whose heads will explode if a filmmaker ever gets it right?
Your “Egyptians weren’t ‘black in the modern sense” is jumping on
the Rupert Murdoch bandwagon. The ancient Egyptians were black
in every sense of the word, See Kenneth post of Pleasant on Google
Plus My profile is of the ancient Egyptian King Sahure.
“While creative endeavors are entitled to exercise license in the pursuit of effective storytelling, it is reasonable to observe a certain measure of fidelity to reality. ”
There is the problem-many/most of the ‘realities’ of the Bible are anything but-it is fiction/fantasy/philosophy with a dash of historical accuracy.
And much hubris.