2013 has been a great year for movies featuring all shades, genders and people of color – especially films starring Black America.
The Butler grossed over a million dollars and as many as 5 films with black leading actors are among the movies being tossed around to get a nomination for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars, including Fruitvale Station, 12 Years A Slave, The Butler, Mandela and 42.
But with all this mainstream success comes more opportunities to offend, and that’s what happened when USA Today called The Best Man Holiday a race-themed movie.
Sure, the movie stars mostly black people, but nothing about it is race-themed. It’s a romantic comedy about humans who live in America, play football, write books and fall in love.
So of course this caused Black Twitter to go off!
A few tweets highlighted by the Chicago Tribune sum up the dialogue rather well:
”USA Today calls movies with black people in them race-themed Cos black people are a genre. Like superhero movies,” tweeted Sindi Nikosi.
“So according to USA Today any movie showing Black people acting like humans is considered a race-themed movie,” said T. Brown via Twitter.
“Why are movies that star people of color ‘race-themed’ but movies starring whites are not USA Today?” tweeted April. “Is friendship a race theme?”
So in an effort to promote diversity, we would like to highlight some of our favorite race-themed movies. *Insert sarcasm here*
Pretty Woman – A movie about a wealthy guy who falls in love with a prostitute he hires to escort him to a few events. Appropriately, there are two black people in the below scene: one is a bellhop, the other a chauffeur. It’s practically like The Help.
When Harry Met Sally – Tells the story of two friends who fear sex would ruin their friendship. In this popular scene, Sally fakes an orgasm, because that’s only done by one race.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall – Pretty much America’s introduction to Russell Brand, who just so happens to be the only person still dressing like Jesse from MTV’s I Wanna Be A VJ Contest.
As Good As It Gets – This is basically a movie about one of Russell Simmons’ friends, an old rich white guy dating a much younger girl who just so happens to have a summer house in the Hamptons.
Pretty In Pink – Don’t forget: that song that Jay Z sampled is from PIP. This is most definitely a race-themed movie; it stars Molly Ringwald.
Finding Nemo – A racially charged film about a clown fish who goes on a journey to find his son. Dory is even bilingual; she not only speaks regular fish, she speaks whale too.
Anything starring Meryl Streep – White people love Meryl Streep more than Mayo, classic Prince songs, Tivo and really ignorant hip-hop.
Knocked Up – Not even including Paul Rudd and Judd Apatow, but this is a movie about a one night stand that ended in pregnancy and the couple considered getting married. Race-themed because if the actors of this film were darker, this would have been called The Maury Show. That or just Child Support.
Anything starring Adam Sandler – aka The White Tyler Perry.
500 Days of Summer – One of the most memorable lines from this movie is, “I don’t want to get over her, I want to get her back.” If this movie was made today, it would simply be the video for Young Dro’s “FDB.”
