[throwfaraway135]

One thing that always rubs me the wrong way in this type of situations, is how patronizing it is towards black people.

It got the "let little timmy play too" vibe all over it. It hints that there are no interesting historical events with black people having a major role in it that you would want to create a movie about.

[enoint]

One thing that might change your mind is the 20th century mythic cowboy. Where I’m from, maybe 1/4 cowboys were black. So we accepted that as whites-only theatre. Do we have to keep accepting whites-only theatre?

[throwfaraway135]

I think this makes my argument even more true. Imagine you have a budget and want to create a western/cowboy movie. You care about representation and want to have more black cowboys in the movies.

Option A: Take a story with a white cowboy, cast a black guy for him and shoot the movie.

Option B: Find a story of a black cowboy (and as you said there were many of them) and shoot a movie about it.

IMHO option A is patronizing while option B is empowering. Because option A assumes there were no black cowboys, there are no good stories too tell about black people.

[enoint]

Because dime novels were indeterminate about race, it’s not a binary set of options. Those novels relied on dialect rather than physical description.

[throwfaraway135]

I think we agree there are a lot of books which you can make movies about where it is more than reasonable to have a black cowboy protagonist.

And this is the right way to do things, and not by pity race swapping some famous character/historical figure.

[bazoom42]

Is it also patronizing towards Americans to have Brad Pitt play Achilles?

[throwfaraway135]

I don't get your argument. You can look at historical monuments or modern Greeks and Brad Pitt doesn't look to different from them.

Let me try to elaborate on my argument. Imagine you are in a park and there are three children playing, child A, B and C. Imagine child A has 10 toys, B has 7 and C 1.

Now if you forcefully took toys from A and B and gave them to C, then that's patronizing behavior as it means "you can't have your own toys, you need to steal them from someone else, you are not good enough".

A more respectful way of solving the dilemma for all involved parties is by just getting more toys for child C.

[bazoom42]

What historical monuments are you referring to?

[throwfaraway135]

I'm surprised anyone would ask. For example this https://www.worldhistory.org/image/6002/marble-bust-of-a-you...

[bazoom42]

Are you aware this is from the Roman era, more than a 1000 years after Achilles supposedly lived?

Also, this does not particularly look like Brad Pitt. If you are referring to the greyish color of the marble, be aware statues were painted in antiquity.