Who Can Play a Mixed-Race Role? by Michelle Malkin

Let’s set aside whether Cameron Crowe’s new movie, “Aloha,” is a good or bad movie. Whatever the flick’s merits or demerits, it has inadvertently helped expose the arbitrary, capricious and ridiculous demands of militant identity politics.

After getting hammered by ethnic mau-mauers, director Crowe issued an apology this week for casting actress Emma Stone as the character “Allison Ng” in his Hawaii-centered rom-com.

Stone is the alabaster-skinned, green-eyed, red-haired beauty who played Spider-Man’s sweetheart, Gwen Stacy.

“Ng” is a fictional Air Force fighter pilot of Chinese, Hawaiian and Swedish descent.

Native Hawaiians wanted a Native Hawaiian cast in the role. Mixed-race advocates wanted a mixed-race actress such as Olivia Munn (who is of Chinese, English, Irish and German descent) cast in the role. Asian-Americans wanted an Asian-American cast in the role.

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Lee, who identifies himself as “Chinese-American/French-Canadian,” declared: “I’m not buying Emma Stone as an Asian-American.”

Guy Aoki, president of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans, which bills itself as “the only organization solely dedicated to monitoring the media and advocating balanced, sensitive and positive depiction and coverage of Asian-Americans,” huffed: “It’s so typical for Asian or Pacific Islanders to be rendered invisible in stories that we’re supposed to be in, in places that we live. … We’re 60 percent of the population (in Hawaii). We’d like them to reflect reality.”

Feeling the heat, Crowe issued a “heart-felt apology to all who felt this was an odd or misguided casting choice.”

Via Human Events

Continue Reading....

Colleges and Universities Have Grown Bloated and Dysfunctional

 American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell.

Alas, even the great strengths of our colleges and universities are threatening to become weaknesses. Sometimes you can get too much of a good thing.

American colleges, dating back to Harvard’s founding in 1636, have been modeled on the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. The idea is that students live on or near (sometimes breathtakingly beautiful) campuses, where they can learn from and interact with inspired teachers.

American graduate universities, dating back to Johns Hopkins’ founding in 1876, have been built on the German professional model. Students are taught by scholars whose Ph.D. theses represent original scholarship, expanding the frontiers of knowledge and learning.

That model still works very well in math and the hard sciences. In these disciplines it’s rightly claimed that American universities are, as The Economist recently put it in a cover story, “the gold standard” of the world. But not so much in some of the mushier social sciences and humanities. “Just as the American model is spreading around the world,” The Economist goes on, “it is struggling at home.”

Via: Human Events

Continue Reading.....