 for me is hilarious, man, because Hollywood tries to pretend that it's so progressive, man. And Hollywood is literally still the most racist industry in the world. This article that was done about us from Sarlos Cantana, who I consider another great voice happening in the independent Chicano thought world. Sarlos Cantana, white guilt, white defensiveness and the birth of a nation. Recently, Homie Pauly from Latinos Night went on the Salty Nerd podcast where he made an argument for gringos, men and Western literature. This is just a snippet of the entire conversation, but I had a couple of thoughts about it. The conversation starts off with commentary from Pauly regarding council culture and the push by many Wocosos woke woke people. In this era who wanted to destroy Western culture, history, society lit. With this, I can't agree. It takes more energy to destroy than create. I think that's wrong. I think it takes way more energy to create. It's easy to destroy. It takes more energy to destroy than create. Yeah, I don't think I said that. I think actually, Sarlos, I was saying it's easier to destroy. It's lazy to destroy. It takes more creative energy to create. That's why these modern activists, whatever they fall under, that's why they go for this destroy thing. But yeah, go on, Dante. Yeah, no. We're seeing it every day or every other day anyway, when it comes to just projects that fandom that we love. We've seen it with Star Wars. We've seen it with the MCU. We've seen people who are not fans of this material that a lot of us grew up loving. They're not fans. So they can go in there and completely destroy everything that we've loved for decades, right? Because they didn't have to create it. All they had to do was hijack it. It's harder to create something from scratch to finish. It's harder to create and they don't wanna do that. Okay, struggle? Ditto, freaking ditto. No, seriously, nobody's really creating anything, actually, like it's pretty rare. I think the main things we see within, you know, film, music, pop culture that we're just like, wow, it's when it's something original and I feel like we don't have any originality anywhere. Nothing's really being created. So it's definitely much easier to destroy something than creating and it's just, it's terrible to see. Like I'm trying to think of the last thing that I've seen while I was like, wow, that is really creative. Nothing, absolutely nothing. And with everything coming down as far as, you know, everything's attached to an IP or it's a sequel to something. So yeah, nothing's being created anymore, ever. I was distracted by the birth of a nation. I was like, what? I was trying to see what. We're getting there, we're getting there. We are getting there, my friend. But when the conversation goes into something deeper, which has more to do with white guilt, white defense and defense and the history of the West, or some might say, the birth of a nation. Firstly, it's a powder cake conversation topic and no one, no matter the context is bound to be heated. It just comes with the territory. But hearing the white man get defensive about the blame laid upon his ancestors for the sins of his past and the society we live in now is just thinly veiled, deep seated white guilt. Do you agree, Dante? Okay, so I'm gonna say this and I really hope it's not taken out of context, but for me, honestly, man, I feel like white guilt is cringier than racism. And I can deal with racism. I'm a fighter, I can deal with it. But the white guilt thing is just so cringe to me, man. It's like, I don't need white people to speak out for black people and I'm so tired of hearing it. It gets to the point of cringe when white people are telling other white people how to act around black people. It's like, you're not doing us any favors. We don't want you to do it. What the hell is white guilt? Like, I've never understood white guilt. I feel like it's pandering. I always felt like it was faith. Like, if you have to create it and call it white, then it's not a real thing. Like, don't do me any favors. Get out of my damn face, I'm sorry. Right, I think we're gonna go on? No, it wasn't gonna be anything good. I was probably gonna curse. I'll probably upset you some more. I think with Hollywood, it refers to white guilt. It's always the white liberal executive showrunner, writer that creates a new show. And it's like, let's have a DACA illegal alien, be our leading lady, heroin, heroin. And let's make her do this and that. And it's like, why don't you just relinquish some of your creative power and just go hire, if you're so hell bent on that, right? If you wanna do us that favor, hire the writer director who happens to be an expert in that field and let them go with it. But what we're seeing is like you're saying is just getting these horrible Disney products. And I say Disney, it's just Hollywood in general, forgettable garbage. And what it does is like, it's an awful Latino story. You maybe have ruined the career of this young person for a while because they're connected to the project that gets canceled and no one wants to hire them for you. And they're actually very talented. So you did us no favors. That's to me, that is a Hollywood white-gilled example, Tyra. Hollywood is the most racist industry in the world still to this day. And they're acting like they're progressive and that they're inclusive and no, they're not. Well, we knew that. We knew that what was coming down the pipeline. When every single film like in the past five years has just been stamped with the word representation, I just threw them all on the ground. But it's fake representation. Fake representation. They're ass, man. I pitched a script in Hollywood that they loved and the only reason why they didn't buy it from me was because of the fact that I wouldn't change the lead character to a white guy because the lead character was black. Everyone else in the script was white except for the lead and that wasn't good enough. And this is 2008. So now Hollywood's going to pretend that they're inclusive and progressive hell no, still racist as hell. Except now they're pointing that towards white people, right? Because now they don't want white folks in their movies or at least they don't want too many of them, right? Well, they're villains now. They're villains now. It's just a goofy, goofy ideology. And I think that, I think Hollywood, even though they're trying to pretend that they're, you know, opening all these doors, they're really not, if you really think about it. If you really look into it, you'll see that nothing they're doing is working. It will be better if these things, these projects actually performed. They don't perform. So then the next excuse is going to be well, we don't have, we tried the representation thing and nobody wants to see that. Nobody cares. So now we're going to go back to what we were doing. Like you've been wanting to go back and do that in here. And they're going to do the same with genre movies, you know, superhero films, sci-fi, they're going to say, oh, people are over that. They, you can tell by the numbers that they don't want to see it anymore. It's like, no, we want to see it. You just were putting out bullshit, you know, one after the other. And now you're blaming the fandom for your failure. Let me ask you two something. I'm going to throw a little curveball and we're going to get back to the story. Do you think Hollywood has done a fair job of presenting the black male as a full-rounded, heroic role model, you know, that that's the reality of black men and their families? Not at all, the black man in Hollywood has either been the thug or the buffoon. Right, for the most part, you know, here and there, you know, of course you got your Denzel's and your Morgan Freeman's and guys like that, but they were few, they were few and far between. Now, I'm not saying that they weren't great actors, great black actors, they just weren't using them. And they weren't writing scripts for those actors. So we were either the Wayne Brothers buffoons or we were thugs. It's the same thing, like, it's, you know, you get typecasts and you've seen, I can't think of how many movies I've watched where I've seen black men play the exact same character, the exact same way every single time. If they did... Oh, God. Is that it again? If we... What did you say? What did you say? I said more than just that, man. I got to play the same role. You've been playing the same role since 1992. I'm sorry, bro. If we did get, you know, anything upstanding, any growth within, it's, you know, an indie, out there project, something, you know, a lower budget film or it's a foreign film. It's never anything that's on the main stage. It has to be something... It's never because of Hollywood that did it intentionally. It's always by accident. It has to be an indie project or it has to be something where the black person took it up on themselves to write their own character, pay for their own movie and do everything just so they can be put in that particular role. But no, it hasn't been something where like, oh, they were outstanding and portraying black men in that light. Like, what movie? Let's go back a little bit with this article a little bit. And what Sarlas was saying. No matter how you slice it, the West was created through theft, genocide, drape, slavery and centuries of institutional general, generational racism. What's that? How did you forget about the slave? Don't forget about slave roles. Didn't I say slavery? Oh, God, yeah. You know, I think when you say thugs or, you know... You don't get to be a slave, you don't get to be a slave. I think subconsciously, I block slave out of my mind because I hate those movies so much that I just... There's no getting around the fact that the reverberations from all of those things are still felt today by the same populations. No matter how much white people try to distance themselves from them or from history. It's not my fault. I wasn't even alive. Is an ages old excuse as to why a light should not be shown on the atrocities of the past and also upon those who benefited, no matter how many generations removed. I'm still on it. It's not my fault. I wasn't even alive. That's such a, you know, that's a good one. Like it's a... The proof isn't a pudding. Like we repeatedly see the same things over and over and over again. It's rare that we get any real representation, real diversity for black women or black, black men as actors. Like you say like, and I hate to say Morris Chestnut, that is stuck in my mouth. I'm not annotating every single role I've seen you know, a Morris Chestnut or Tay Diggs or you know anybody who wasn't your Will Smith or your Denzel, even though they are type cast to play the same type of characters. And it's just really, really unfortunate. And then it's you know, later down the line where we should now still be discovering actually like, oh my God, I didn't know they have that type of range. This is incredible. This is that it's like, yeah. they weren't giving the roles to display any of that ever. So, yeah. And it was even worse for black women because black women really only had one role. They're angry black women. This role right here? This one? Yeah, that's it. They're probably angry black women. That's all they have. This role right here? That's all. Well, why do you think, you know, whether they're our friends or they're in conversation or, you know, listening to channels, why do you think they get so defensive? Who's defensive? Which one? White guilt. This thing here, it's not my fault. That wasn't there. You know, why the defense? Because that's the real guilty part. Like it's the pretend guilt is the white guilt. Defensive part is the real guilt. It's just a mechanism to pretend like they can't do anything about it or it's always, you know, above a pay grade. You know, like your problem isn't with me. It's with the other person. Like the problem is a little bit of everyone. But yeah, the defense is just to pander to, oh, you know, I don't have any control. It's not me. It's you. It's like, no, it's just to mask the true feelings of we don't want to do that because we don't care to. We don't want to. If they wanted to portray these things, put black men and women in these roles, they would just do it. They don't want to. But instead of saying, I don't want to, they rather go, you know, it's not me. It's you or it's this person and that person in place to blame elsewhere. Act like they haven't seen any of these actors and they don't feel like they're capable or they're waiting for the next selfie coming. Like, no, many actors that came down the pipeline who were capable of more. They weren't given the script, given the role, given the opportunity. It was given to somebody else who was white. Well, look, you're going to have two kinds of people, right? You have the people who, you know, they blame racism too much. People who believe that racism doesn't exist anymore. Right? And there are two extremes, but unfortunately these two extremes are the loudest. And these are the people who speak the most, right? Because you have people who honestly, you know, if you were to ask them, racism ended when Obama got elected, right? Which is- I did. I thought- No, no, no. I did the memo. Wait a minute. But then you had people who were like- Hold on, hold on, wait a minute. That's right. But then you had people who, you know, they blamed everything on racism. And it's like- Right. You didn't get that, because the man got his foot on my neck. You're like, no, it's not every time. No, you just- I'm gonna ask that. That's why you're feeling that. Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. And again- You gotta put your hands up here. You're like, the man got his foot on my neck. That's why I didn't get that role. Like, they're trying to keep a black man- A lot of things are, you know, relegated and thrown under the bus ass. They're trying to keep a black man. They're like, a lot of the times, they are trying to keep a black man down, but not every single scenario, you know? Right? Angry brown guy, when I hear white fragility saying, you know, we're the victims, that we're always the bad guy in the films. We're always the bad guy now. We're, you know, we're always- Well, Pauly says, oh man, yeah, that's messed up. I don't like, you know, people putting down another man. That's not right. Angry brown guy says, join the fucking club. Latinos have been villains in film for a hundred fucking years. Yeah. Hey, man, give me your watch, man. What are you talking about, eh? What are you talking about? Hey, gringo, give me some fucking food, man. Give me your tires, man. Give me your shoes. Tell me you have not heard some of those lines. No, I'm laughing because like recently, and I hadn't seen it in so long, I just watched Hollywood Shuffle like a couple of years ago. So- Love that movie, love that movie. Yes, yes, that's got to flow. It's got to, oh, she froze it. Okay, it's just got to flow off today. So ahead of its time. Yes, hey, you drive turkey-ass motherfucker. Black-acting school. Can you be a little bit more black? Yes, a little black. Murphy-esque, Murphy-esque, Morphonic, Murphy-esque. Or was the opposite? Cause you know, in the 90s, when I was an auditioning, there would be casting calls for Latino projects, like walking the clouds, Keanu Reeves, Anthony Quinn, and they were looking for European-looking Mexicans. Just say, why people? Just say, why people? I'm not gonna, I don't need to audition. Cause you're not gonna, I mean- That's really specific, man. Right. And they're playing a Mexicans family in California. I mean, get the fuck out of here, man. Get the F out of here. Okay, that's all right.