Revisiting 'The Color Purple' Wars
Up First from NPR
NPR
4.6 • 59K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2022
⏱️ 55 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's Rachel Martin. This is up for Sunday. |
| 0:03.0 | In the last decade, there have been a lot of public conversations about representation |
| 0:07.8 | and misrepresentation in the movies. Change has been a long time coming, but we do see it. |
| 0:13.7 | Right now, as 2022 comes to a close, one of the biggest hits at the box office is the Marvel |
| 0:19.3 | superhero film Wakanda Forever, which features an almost exclusively black cast. |
| 0:24.8 | But these conversations about representation are hardly new. |
| 0:28.2 | And my colleague, Isha Harris, has been thinking a lot about this. |
| 0:31.2 | Isha is the co-host of the NPR podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour. |
| 0:35.2 | She decided to revisit three major films with enduring legacies and complicated histories. |
| 0:40.6 | The result is Isha's series, screening ourselves. |
| 0:43.8 | We're going to play one of the episodes from the series, but first, I had some questions for Isha |
| 0:48.0 | about how she put this whole thing together. And she joins us now. Hey, Isha. |
| 0:52.6 | Hey, Rachel. So besides, and excuse to go revisit all these classics and spend a lot of time |
| 0:59.9 | watching movies, why did you decide to make the series? What were you hoping to learn? |
| 1:05.8 | Well, I realized that we were, you know, having a lot of conversations about representation |
| 1:12.4 | in film and TV today. And there's been a lot of pushback from certain corners of the internet |
| 1:19.1 | and on the internet came an industry and in the media landscape against, you know, quote unquote, |
| 1:23.4 | woke movies, woke talk around movies and TV. And I just wanted to use this as an opportunity to show |
| 1:30.6 | that while yes, the way that people discuss how their represented on screen has changed and shifted |
| 1:37.4 | and maybe even been amplified, we have social media. We've of course had hashtags like Oscar, |
| 1:41.8 | so white to sort of bring these conversations to even wider mainstream attention. |
| 1:48.0 | People have always been protesting and pushing back against representation on screen |
... |
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