“I asked a young White woman why she was studying social anthropology. She replied that she was hoping to go to Zimbabwe, and felt that she could help women there by advising them how to organize. The Black women in the audience gasped in astonishment. Here was someone scarcely past girlhood, who had just started university and had never fought a war in her life. She was planning to go to Africa to teach female veterans of a liberation struggle how to organize! This is the kind of arrogant, if not absurd attitude we encounter repeatedly. It makes one think: Better the distant armchair anthropologists than these ‘sisters’.”
Can we just talk about the fact that Rami Malek struggled much of the first half of his career by being typecast SO badly that he had to ask his agent to stop sending roles his way if they were the stereotypical “middle eastern person = terrorist” roles. He has talked openly about how disheartening that was for him, how he saw his own peers auditioning for these roles using a fake name just to avoid being typecast, and how he hoped things would change one day…
Cut to now: He’s won a Golden Globe and he’s one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all while standing his ground and paving the way for others in the industry who struggle with their own diverse backgrounds.
And I am just so, so proud of my sweet baby angel.
That is all.
“Malek returned to television in 2010 in a recurring role as the suicide bomber Marcos Al-Zacar on the eighth season of the Fox series 24.[30] Growing weary of playing characters he called ‘acceptable terrorists,’ he instructed his agent to reject any role that painted Arabs or Middle Easterners in a “bad light.”[1]
