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steven moffat

The Way We Live Now

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Capaldi.  Wow.  I’d have put money on it being some new variation on the Tenant/Smith entity.  A young relative unknown with male model looks (one reason Moffat says he hired Smith is that he looked like someone who got photographed wearing pants for a living).  I admit, I’m astonished.  Capaldi is a genuinely great choice (if only I could believe he’s likely to get decent scripts to work with).

Of course, the Doctor is STILL not a woman or a person of colour… but I’m not ‘disappointed’ because I never expected that to happen.  Either written by Moffat would’ve been likely to end up as a blood-curdling, shaming disaster.  As one bizarre online comment has it, Moffat’s idea of a woman Doctor wouldn’t have pleased “internet anti-equality feminists” (whatever the bloody hell an ‘anti-equality feminist’ might be).

So it’s probably just as well that Moffat has – completely out of left-field – cast an older, male, white Scotsman. 

On the subject of online comment…  Facebook and Twitter are now plastered in remarks and memes in which fans sneer at all the (supposedly) weepy young fangirls who’re unimpressed with Capaldi because he’s not young and hot.

There’s a bit of me that sympathises with the derision, if I’m honest. These young whippersnappers are annoying (largely because they’re young and happy and I’m neither)… but the comment on this has immediately become venomously contemptuous and sneeringly sexist.  Because the focus is clearly on the silly, hormonal young wimmenz.

Viz:

Yeah, ‘cos that’s just what the Fourth Doctor symbolises: sneering at young women.

There’s also a YouTube video doing the rounds of a young woman, possibly a teenager (I can’t tell anymore; anyone under thirty looks like a foetus to me nowadays) reacting unhappily to the announcement that the new Doc will be an older, craggy fella.  Take a look at the comments below it.  I shouldn’t need to quote them.  They’re all too predictable.

As I say: misogynistic society + internet anonymity = ugly honesty.

Apart from anything else, this is rank hypocrisy. Just imagine the tantrums from the legions of sad, middle-aged fanboys if the new companion were an older, craggy actress rather than some perky young ingenue that they’d like to daydream about tupping.

Still, that’s sexism for you. The sense of entitlement on the part of the privileged is so ingrained that it isn’t even noticed, and any challenge to it as perceived as persecution or silliness.

On a related issue (well, it’s the same issue really), it seems Moffat took the opportunity of the Capaldi announcement to sneer at the idea of a woman Doctor.  He says, sarcastically, that he wants a man to play the Queen.

Well doesn’t that just say it all?

Firstly, Moff, why do you always, instinctively run to establishment authority figures?  You creep.

Secondly… OH YEAH ‘COS NO MEN HAVE EVER PLAYED WOMEN HAVE THEY!?!?!?!?!  I MEAN, IT’S NOT AS IF CROSS-DRESSING AND DRAG ARE INBUILT, AGE-OLD ASPECTS OF THE BRITISH THEATRICAL AND TELEVISUAL TRADITION!!!!! …

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A Town Without Context

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On ‘A Town Called Mercy’

The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.

 – Trotsky

Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier.  His motive is to end a war which is killing his people.  But were his people the attackers or the attacked?  That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story.  It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant.  Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one… with the answer being, of course, “yes”.  But I’d argue that the wider social context of Jex’s actions (beyond just saying that ‘it was war’) is as important as it is obscure.

The notion – that war is, as Jex puts it, “a different world” in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy – is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism.  Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. “Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people… but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!”) or ignored (i.e. “Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!!  Why do they hate us???”) according to ideological needs and preferences.

Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys
now that he’d been assimilated by the Borg.

‘A Town Called Mercy’ actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time).  Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling ‘Our Boys and Girls’, since it is assumed that they deserve ‘our’ support whatever they do).  ‘Mercy’, by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best.  Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations… and the omissions are interesting.

As I say, it’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things.  Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn – written during the Blitz – with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him.  The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, “is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Jex is, of course, serving his ‘country’, so to speak.  But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis?  To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian?  Or is the situation more complex than that?  Is it more like America vs Japan?  Two rival empires clashing.  One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.…

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Maybe some of us BELONG in the fields

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A very good overview of the squalid pass to which Moffat has brought the show in its 50th anniversary year, with special attention paid to the issue of mysoginy, via River and Clara:

…we’re not being encouraged to think there’s something wrong with this person [River]: it’s the show itself that comes across as jaded and withdrawn from empathy and decency to a psychopathic extent (and what a charming ethical copout to have the Doctor leave before he can witness the rest of the killing). Again, we have the depressingly widespread idea that a woman acting violently is empowering and a corrective to sexism and misogyny. When questioned about his ability with female characters during a Guardian interview Moffat replied:

River Song? Amy Pond? Hardly weak women. It’s the exact opposite. You could accuse me of having a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people. That would be fair.
It would indeed. Unfortunately, a fetish for powerful, sexy women who like cheating people is no substitute for an interest in human beings.

http://richardhcooper.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/steven-and-women-or-how-steven-moffat.html

I don’t agree with every jot and tittle of this, but it’s still excellent.  Very well worth reading, with lots of points which seem, to me, pretty much irrefutable… depressing but irrefutable.

I do want to express my increasing impatience with the idea of accidental reactionary writing, a notion that the writer of the above article flirts with (though his conclusions are nuanced).  Personally, I’m coming to the brain-bending conclusion that people who aren’t racists or sexists don’t need to concentrate on remembering not to say racist or sexist things. 

Thanks to Johnathan Barlow (or ‘old Legohead’ as I always think of him) for putting this my way.…

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Changing Times, Nice Guys and ‘Strong Female Characters’

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I’ve gone on the record saying I think Moffat’s version of Doctor Who is sexist and heteronormative.  A challenge I often hear – and it’s a serious point – is the idea that Moffat’s Who is, at least, no worse than previous eras on issues like depictions of gay relationships, and is frequently better.  There are positive depictions of gay characters, quite unlike anything in, say, the Hartnell era.  Well, firstly, let me say that I don’t want to claim that things are ‘worse’ now (in any absolute way) than in the Hartnell years, when homosexuality essentially didn’t exist at all in-story in the Who universe. And sure, many old episodes have displayed all sorts of heteronormative stuff, and also outright homophobic stuff (albeit usually by implication).  Harrison Chase is, in many ways, implied to be an evil gay man (it’s not that I think gay people are like him, but rather that he is constructed partly of tropes that connote gayness in pop culture).

It isn’t that there’s a scale that pertains to culture now just as it pertained in 1963 and 73 and 83 etc, with Who scoring 3.7 points on the heteronormativity scale (or the racist, or sexist, or whatever, scale) in 1963 but now scoring 9.1 under Moffat. That’s not how I see it (which isn’t to say that comparisons across the decades are meaningless). Normative assumptions shift and fluctuate with all sorts of social and economic changes (this is part of what I was getting at in my previous post with regards to upswings and downswings in the reactionary content of culture). There are ideas now that simply weren’t widely accepted (or even much known about) in, say, 1963… but which are now widely understood and championed by large numbers of people.

Awareness of homophobia, discrimination against LGBT people, heteronormativity, etc, are all examples of issues where people’s widespread views have changed drastically. And this isn’t the ‘condescension of posterity’, because I acknowledge that people’s ideas have been changed by people, particularly as a result of the great breakthrough struggles of the mid 60s through to the early 70s. That’s partly why Moffat’s Who looks extraordinarily liberal and right-on by the standards of much of the old show… if we look at them with the same constant, reductive scale of measurement… which we can’t do because it’s more complex than that, with struggles and changing ideas altering the normative assumptions against which we make judgements. 

To be crude about it, even today’s crusading reactionaries in the Tory party talk the talk of respect for gender equality, racial equality, etc.  They have to… even as their actual policies reinforce division, discrimination, inequality and attacks upon the living standards of ordinary people that Thatcher could only fondly dream of getting away with.  But there are swings and roundabouts in people’s consciousness.  Poeple today would be (and are) very unwilling to tolerate open racial prejudice from their politicians, yet there is widespread anxiety about immigration and asylum, carefull inculcated by the media. …

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Fall and Rise

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There was a fair amount of media chin-scratching last year about a supposed glumness and seriousness creeping into popular movies.  The real trend, I think, is not towards the ‘serious’ but towards the reactionary.

For one thing, there’s recently been a spate of popular, lauded films and TV shows re-inflating Islamophobia (again) in a ‘nuanced’ form acceptable to liberals as well as to outright bigots.  The much-lauded Argo depicts a heroic CIA rescue of American hostages in Iran.  Always handy, being able to demonise Iran.  (Modern Iran’s origin is, of course, a long and complex story, and does not present ‘the West’ in a good light… which is why nobody balanced and objective ever mentions it.)  The much-lauded Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture as being both effective and morally conscionable, with the only negative consequence in sight being the discomfort of the torturers.  It misrepresents ‘enhanced interrogation’ as being a valuable technique leading directly to the location of Osama and, by means of ambivalence and ambiguity (disingenuously used as a defence by the director), it effectively sides with the torturers.  To be neutral about torture is to be effectively pro-torture.  The enmeshing of the torture within a legalistic framework of neutrality and supposed utilitarianism is both very apt – the quintessential facet of torture as it is practiced by modern democracies is that it is steeped in punctilious legality – and very normalising.

These new liberal/Islamophobic popular movies, which also appeal to the criterati and the awards-boards, have come just as the American empire (and its allies) has beeing stepping up its rhetoric about the evils of Iran in particular, and the possibility of intervening in struggles in the Arab world.  Clearly, part and parcel of the imperium’s cultural reactlash to/against the Arab Spring.  This isn’t anything new.  The previous round of mainstream liberal-inflected movies about the ‘War on Terror’ and Iraq were similarly punctual in their ideological addresses; as with the Vietnam movies of the late-70s and 80s, they served as an ostentatious display of American culture in the throws of ‘painful self-examination’ and ‘angst’ about a military adventure held in increasing public opprobrium.  The Hurt Locker was more prompt than The Deer Hunter, but essentially peddled the same assumptions and the same normalising effects. 

The buzz lately has been about two big movies from big directors, both tackling the issue of slavery.  Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained.  Lincoln makes the destruction of slavery seem like the accomplishment of old white guys in government offices.  It’s not actually that much better than Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.  (Okay, that may be an exaggeration.)  Lincoln nods in the direction of black soldiers and black resistance, but the essential story being told is the one long since abandoned by most historians: the story of the abolition of slavery being a legal coup handed down from Washington.  The reality is that Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation was a recognition of something happening ‘on the ground’ as the slaves of the South rebelled in enormous numbers, stealing themselves from their owners and joining the Union armies. …

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Shabby Efforts

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I’m sometimes rather startled to realise just how much Doctor Who I’ve missed.

I mean, chronologially, the last actual TV episode I saw was ‘Night Terrors’.  I watched that ages after transmission, as part of a foolhardy attempt to catch up with the series (which I finally gave up watching upon transmission roundabout the time of ‘A Christmas Carol’, which I liked about as much as I like Ian Duncan Smith).  I was hoping that I’d either get my mind changed by the catch-up session – i.e. become persuaded that Who under Moffat isn’t just empty, bombastic, cynical, reactionary, sexist, culty drivel – or, alternatively, that my justified hatred of what I was seeing would give me something to furiously blog about.

As it turns out, my undignified little scrape with ‘Night Terrors’ (see here) put me off the project again.  Initially inclined to be soft on it, despite some nitpicks, I was soon convinced by commenters that it’s actually the story where the Doctor becomes David Cameron, lecturing the clueless working schlubs on how to solve their problems by being better parents.  Dispirited, I quit again.  So, I’ve not seen anything after ‘Night Terrors’.  And I feel just peachy about this, to be honest with you.

Besides having been driven away from the TV show, I was surprised to realise, as I was following Sandifer’s analysis of the Virgin New Adventures at his blog, how many of those I’d missed back in the day.  I always thought of myself as a follower of the line, but it seems I neglected to read a fair few of them.  Still, I was going through college and university at the time.  I had other things to read.  The menus of pizza restaurants, for example, and loan forms, and letters about my overdraft.

It’s the same with Big Finish.  I’ve heard, I suppose, about a fifth of their Who output – at most.  I guess I just haven’t tried hard enough. 

And as for the late-90s BBC novels line… well, I think I’ve read all the Lawrence Miles ones and all the Chris Boucher ones, but beyond that… I think I tried reading one by Justin Richards once.  It was called ‘The Burning’, as I recall.  It’s possible that my copy (with the first 12 pages lightly thumbed) may still be being used as a wedge under a table leg in a rather seedy set of student digs on the South coast.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

I actually suspect there are a lot of fans like me.  In this respect, anyway.  But the point I’m limping towards is this: there are lots of things that a sizeable number of Who fans know about that I simply don’t.  I don’t know what’s so bad about those John Peel Dalek novels, for instance.  Never read ’em.  Never will.  I also don’t know (not from personal experience anyway) what’s so bad about ‘The Eight Doctors’ by Terrance Dicks, though I know that it is generally considered to be absolutely awful.…

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Playing with Dolls

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UPDATE, 25/09/12:  If you read this post, please read on through the comments too.  Some astute readers used the comments section to set me straight on some issues both of fact and interpretation.  As a result, my attitude towards ‘Night Terrors’ is now considerably more negative than my initial reaction (which you can read in the main review below).  In fairness to myself, I do spend most of the piece saying what I don’t like about ‘Night Terrors’, including identifying some of what I call the “latent hostility” towards working-class people… but I failed to notice the wider context of the episode and so also the scale of the problem.  I don’t mind admitting when I’m wrong (of course, I do really) but I hate that I blogged before giving myself sufficient time to think.  

Okay, my foolhardy project of catching up with all the Doctor Who I’ve not seen in order to re-synch with the new stuff (and hopefully provide myself with blogging material) continues.

Last night I finally watched ‘Night Terrors’. Much to my astonishment, I didn’t absolutely hate it. I mean, it wasn’t particularly good… but it wasn’t actively offensive most of the time either. Which is fairly good going for Moffat-era Who written by Gatiss.

I was horrified by the idea that the Doctor now hears and answers prayers like God, with the pleas of a little boy travelling up to him through the heavens, but that was somewhat neutralised later by some technobabble explanation that made it sound very much like a special case.  In the end, I liked that the Doctor actually seemed comparatively less full of himself, and more like a guy making it up and thinking it out as he went along.  Matt Smith should be encouraged to slow down a bit more often.  He had some nice, quiet moments (inbetween all the usual frenetic gibbering) that were very likeable.  He does ‘kindly’ rather well.

There were cliches galore, of course.  An old lady complains about her knees.  A yobbo guy with a pitbull.  Hoodies, etc.

Where would any mainstream BBC drama be nowadays if it had to try and depict a housing estate without the employment of hostile cliches?  I think the latter stages of RTD’s depiction of Rose’s estate are the last example of such places being sketched without such latent hostility.

But… there was an interesting visual stress on the uniformity and blandness of the housing estate, bathed in that sickly yellow night-time street-light aura.

And this made the opulent but fake interior of the ‘mansion house’ into a fairly interesting visual counterpoint.

Of course, it was entirely predictable that the mansion would turn out to be a dolls house.  But even that was kind of covered when the Doctor immediately realises it when he ends up there, treating the conclusion as though it’s self-evident.  It looks like evidence of two tracks of thought at work in the story.  We’re more on the Doctor’s wavelength than the other characters… which is not self-evidently the wrong way to do it. …

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Double Coded

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There’s a scene that is evidently supposed to justify the way Moffat’s version of the show has been talking the Doctor up as a powerful, scary, dangerous bad-ass.  It supposedly justifies the Doctor’s own increasing tendency to appear decidedly impressed with himself, to see himself – and talk about himself – as Mr Scarypants.  It justifies the decision to show him (especially in Moffat scripts) as being hubristic, bombastic, aware of his ability to strike terror into the monsters.  Look me up, Vashta Nerada, and then run away.  Look me up, Atraxi, and then run away.  “There’s one thing you never put in a trap…” and “Don’t ever think you’re capable of playing games with me…” and all that pompous, I’m-so-hard, showoffish bum-gravy.

The scene in question is said, by some, to throw all this into relief, to undermine it, to pull the rug from under the Doctor’s feet, to be the reversal towards which all this was leading, a treacherous terminus that forces us to reassess our hero’s morality, and to make him reassess it too.

The scene is near the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  It’s the scene where River rebukes the Doctor.  He says “None of this is my fault!”, referring to the war waged by the anonymous military people and their anonymous Headless Monk friends, the war in which Amy and her baby have become unwilling pawns, in which other friends and allies of the Doctor have been killed.  River snaps back at him that it’s all his fault.  He brought it all upon them by allowing himself to become a figure of terror to the bad guys, a warrior… to the point where even his name – “Doctor” – has come to mean “mighty warrior” in the language of the anonymous military people.

You see, Doctor, what a pass this has come to?  Ooooh, you have become what you were fighting.

Except that it doesn’t do or say or achieve anything of the kind.  If that is the intended import of the scene, it fails miserably.

Firstly, how many times are we supposed to have seen the Doctor bitten-on-the arse by his own hubris now?  And when has it ever changed his behaviour?  He’s supposed to have been humbled at the end of Series 5… only to come back at Christmas, so arrogant, such a self-appointed puppet-master, such an unrepentant and moralising neoconservative of other people’s souls, that he inserts himself into a man’s past, his memories, his innermost self, and rewrites his life – as he watches.

It’s similar with the Doctor’s ‘lesson’ at the end of ‘A Good Man Goes to War’.  Once River has finished lightly scolding him, and he’s finished looking faintly sheepish, he instantly snaps back into normal mode.  River – the quintessential Moffat ‘strong female’… i.e. slavishly obsessed with her man – goes all gooey-eyed as she reveals her (entirely predictable) identity and the Doctor, grinning, announces to Amy and Rory that all is well.  He knows that they’ve just lost their chance to raise their daughter, irrevocably, forever.…

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How to Write a Steven Moffat Script

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TITLES

AMY: Ah, hello oldest and best friend who I’ve never mentioned before for some reason.

FRIEND: Hello Amy.

DOCTOR: Hello, I’m quirky.

FRIEND: And sexy.

DOCTOR: Yes, and now I will make a double entendre that could just about be interpreted non-sexually by a forum casuist who is trying to win a debate with someone who says Steven Moffat is obsessed with proving that the Doctor is an active heterosexual. Because, however much he wants us to know that he’s a sexy shagging randy lad who likes girls and sex, Moffat also has an inner core of nerd.

ENEMY: Hello, here are some evil monks with no heads. They can’t be reasoned with or persuaded. Because they don’t ‘reason’ like the evil old Doctor. And they have no heads. They’ve cut their own heads off. Geddit? So, no brains on these monks. By choice. DO YOU SEE?

RORY: Euuurrgghh…

AMY: Oh my God, they killed my wonderful impossible man who is centuries old and had a box (the Pandorica I mean), etc. I mean Rory even though I seem, for some reason, to be framing my remarks to sound like I mean the Doctor.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Hello Doctor, I hate you. I mean I love you.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3: Oh, I know. He’s a wonderful, impossible man who once took me to the wedding of Princess Diana (he was best mates with her and may have shagged her) and got some other celebrity historical figures to do something hilarious at the party afterwards, where it is implied he got drunk.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oooh, double entendre.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3. Yes, sexy quip.

SHOOTS SOMEONE.

DOCTOR: Mmmm, I liked the way you shot that guy. That made me stand to attention. By the way, I am also a hypocrite so I will warn you against immoral behaviour that I just approved and also committed. So, don’t do it again. Or I’ll come after you. And I’m scary.  Even scarier than my best buddy ever, Henry Kissinger.

HEADLESS MONK: Yes, the Doctor is scary. And powerful and dangerous.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: And sexy.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #4:  And I should know, because I met him when I was a kid and became obsessed with him before I even hit puberty.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Yes, so did I.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #3:  Uh huh.  And me.

AMY:  Me too.

FRIEND:  Yep.  And me.  In fact, I was genetically designed to be obsessed with him.  I have no other purpose in life.

MURRAY GOLD BACKS PROLONGED SCENE OF MATT SMITH LOOKING SMUG WITH BIBLICAL EPIC CHORUS MUSIC.

FEMALE OBSESSED WITH DOCTOR #2: Oh, by the way, I’m the headless monk’s daughter or something, because of a time paradox or something.

DOCTOR: I knew that all along because I am now so powerful and all knowing that no mere drama ever threatens me.

FANS: Give this man a vault full of Hugo awards, this is genius.…

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White as Snowy

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I’m sure I’m giving you all the impression that I’m a kind of obsessed stalker when it comes to China Miéville, but everyone should read his latest blog post.  It’s about the recent decision by the Belgian Supreme Court to reject the application by Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo…

to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law.  However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this – and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.

When human rights lawyer David Enright asks for the book to be sold as an adult work, while explicitly, repeatedly, stressing that he does not advocate banning it, nonetheless, cometh the resentment-spewing dissemblers in the comments insisting that he is supporting ‘censorship’. This is a degree of point-missing so great it is hard to believe it is not performative.

(Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments ‘for free speech’ & ‘against censorship’ or ‘banning’ are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very fucking complicated. Cry Free Speech in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about & criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient.)

In case you don’t know the book, here‘s a link (provided by Miéville in his blog post) that will fill you in.

Had a look?

Delightful, isn’t it?

I’m not quoting it or putting any of the pictures on here.  It makes me feel ill.

Herge (real name Georges Remi) was, by the way, a Nazi collaborator who featured anti-semitic stereotype villains (hook-nosed, cigar-chomping financier called Blumenstein, for instance) in his cartoons.  Nice company for Spielberg and Moffat.

Aside from picking over the Tintin issue forensically, Miéville’s blog post is of relevance to this blog because he goes over the various weasely excuses always wheeled out by people who want to sleaze their way out of confronting the racism often blatant in cherished old stories.…

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