“LUCY: WHY I’M TIRED OF SEEING WHITE PEOPLE ON THE BIG SCREEN”
“How is it that in a film whose premise rests on the idea of reimagining the past, present, and future, we still end up with a blonde white woman with flashing blue eyes as the stand-in for what personifies evolution and supremely fulfilled human potential? At one point the Ape-like Lucy and Evolved Lucy meet face-to-face as Evolved Lucy does a bit of time-traveling. Their fingers touch, and we see them deliberately posed to mimic the famous Creation of Adam painting, and in that moment I saw what I suppose we were supposed to see: humanity at its beginning, and then humanity at its end, at its most perfect. Blonde, white, and blue-eyed.”
Actually though. I was at a talk at Stanford a few years ago where a woman presented studies suggesting that the typical image used in science textbooks to depict evolution — which, I didn’t notice until then, is totally a dark person becoming a white person — is part of the reason why more than 10% of Americans think that Black people and White people are members of different species.
It’s also that thing where people are describing evolution and say “when our ancestors left Africa” or “when we evolved lighter skin”, or the AP Psych teacher at my high school who taught her class (soooo glad I was in the other one) that blue eyes were more evolved than brown because they can pick up more light than other eye colors (???).
This isn’t really at all what the post is about, but I wanted to complain about misunderstandings of human evolution.
(I keep on wanting to try to find that research but I would have to google like ‘racist image of evolution races different species perception’ or something and I do not want to deal with those results)
