system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
No, you're right. The whole 'anti woke' movement is specifically designed to undermine this understanding. When you talk about this stuff, conservatives can roll their eyes and decide you're just following a Hollywood trend and ruining their comic book movies. That way they never have to confront the problems.
gpt
The conservatives on the TV that drive the perception of woke being bad don't care about comic book movies or anything like that. They care about creating an environment where people are scared that things are changing for the worse so that the people will fight against any progress that happens. Chris Rufo, a conservative pundit, literally bragged about how he found CRT in obscure grad school level books and turned it into a wedge issue. He didn't accidentally admit it. He never tried to hide it. He tweeted about it as it was happening.

Most normal people don't play these games. They're generally sincere in what they profess to believe, however misguided it is. They're susceptible to being misled, like most people are. For whatever reason, they end up being misled by conservative media.

Look at opinion polling on most hot button issues. Most of the progressive agenda, which the media likes to pretend is controversial, actually polls with like 75% people supporting it to some degree. The overall goal is to maintain power by keeping people from realizing that they agree with policies that would be bad for billionaires, but good for everyone else.

I would push back on the idea that wokeness in Hollywood isn't meaningful. Some of it is lazy performative wokeness (frequently &lt;existing property&gt; but with women type movies tend to be mediocre), but mainly, changing the gender or ethnicity of a character isn't a big deal unless people make it a big deal. It has always happened. Its not like there aren't still plenty of roles for white men in Hollywood. There still aren't that many roles for historically underrepresented groups, despite what some people would like for you to perceive. Secondly, it DOES matter. Seeing representations of people like you in media makes a difference. Might it arguably be better if new narratives we written that featured people of color? Sure, but the reality is that the European storytelling tradition that much of our media is based on and that new media is primarily descended from is very very male and very very white. Without concerted effort, things tend to stay the same. It will always be the case that for every completely original piece of media, there will be multiple other pieces of media that are based on something that already existed. There are multiple reasons that this is the case.

I think idle speculation about making recasting existing characters, like James Bond to be a different ethnicity is usually just done to attract attention, but in reality, is doesn't matter much. A handful of historically white characters being played by people of color doesn't mean that the US is losing its identity. Its just a casting decision.