Hollywood and White Supremacy

Left Turn, on the blog Jo Swift, posts a blog about Hollywood’s use of imagery in propogating imperialism and white supremacy:

The Frontier myth is America’s secular creation narrative–the story of how the waves of the historical frontier experience simultaneously birthed and cleansed the nation.

In this way European culture was said to be stripped away by the challenges posed on and by the savage frontier; and then, in turn, through an ill-defined, nearly mystical, quasi-magical process of environmental determinism, America was born.

That is, as the inevitable result of this transformation, the prototypical American emerged–Natty Bumpoo, John Wayne, Indiana Jones, the Marlboro Man–take your pick.

Hollywood has played and continues to play an important role in this process for two reasons. First, movies serve as our most influential history teachers, reaching and swaying audiences that the professional historian cannot even dream of.

Prisons and the Mentally Ill

Blogging on the mentally ill and their incarceration rates in U.S. prisons the blogger for A Bird and a Bottle writes:

It’s appalling to me that we treat mentally ill men and women who offend as badly as others who are incarcerated. We have set the bar for legal insanity so high that very few people can meet it, despite serious and often debilitating mental illness. Isolating mentally ill men and women takes this cruelty one large step further — not only will we incarcerate mentally ill men and women, but we will now also isolate them, placing them in situations that exacerbate their illnesses. Solitary (which, by the way, is the norm in Supermax facilities) is inhumane for anyone; when foisted on the mentally ill and suicidal, it is unimaginably twisted.