Is white-washing the new Annie movie that big of a deal?

1-1-2015 1-03-16 PM

It appears that many people are upset with the Target retail giant for “white-washing” the new Annie movie. A petition has been created asking Target to remove and replace the ads in its stores with the real image of the current actress Quvenzhané Wallis playing Annie in the recent version of the movie.

I get what the petition is saying about supporting black actors and it is disrespectful to Miss Wallis, the current star of the film but this is not something that tops my list of concerns about Target. Furthermore, the petition does not call for a boycott but comes off as begging Target for an apology. I like it when corporations like Target show that they are run by racist suspects and white supremacists in hopes that people will stop spending money with them. Sony Pictures is behind the new Annie movie and it was recently busted with the leaking of internal emails that show they do not think to highly of Black people including the President Obama.

Why do some us continue to support Hollywood with our dollars when they have a notoriously racist history of anti-black propaganda films and when they do make a film about black life in America, it is usually comedic or depicting us as bunch of passive people dependent on white people as in every movie made about the civil rights period.

White-washing the adverts for the movie Annie is not the worst thing Target is engaged in. Target, like its competitor Walmart is engaged in 21st Century slavery and human trafficking. According to an article published earlier this year, Target is among the many corporations that employ prison slave labor in its business practices in some form or fashion.

“At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion.

Perhaps the petition creator is unaware of Target’s business practices. Perhaps the petition creator is unaware that slavery was never really abolished in America. I hope that those looking for information about this white-washing of a young black talented actress will come across to the realization that we as people at this moment in time should be devoting our time and energy towards recreating an abolitionist movement in the United States which includes the police terrorism protests that are dominating the headlines right now because after all, the policing profession was started out of the slave patrols and their mission is pretty much he same today as it was when they began in America.

Target should be petitioned more so for profiting off modern slavery instead of asking them for an apology for engaging in false advertisement of a fictional movie that profits Black people not one bit.


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