U.S. Society

Remembering the Alamo, Davy Crockett, and the Butterfly Effect

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Alamo fell just before dawn 190 years ago today. An estimated 220 men died in the furious attack by would-be Mexican emperor Santa Ana’s army of 5,000: once it breached the walls of the fortified mission, a massacrec commenced that was over in 20 minutes.. The defenders had come from many states, territories and nations, and eventually they knew they were going to die if they stayed. Only one of them, Lewis Rose—maybe—decided to leave. Even the messengers sent out by William Barrett Travis to seek rescuing troops returned to the Alamo knowing hope was lost, and they they would be killed. After 13 days, during which the Alamo was pounded by cannon fire, forcing the men to spend the night making repairs, the battle was over. But those 13 days gave Texas General Sam Houston time to raise the army that would defeat of Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto.

Ethics Alarms has posted ethics essays about the Alamo almost every year since the blog began. It is my favorite U.S. historical story, mixing drama, legend, ethics lessons and fascinating personalities, notably Jim Bowie, Travis, and, of course, Davy Crockett. Here is my first post about Davy, from March of 2010, posted to mark the passing of Disney legend Fess Parker, whose portrayal of the frontiersman on TV brought Crockett out of the historical shadows.

Crockett was the most important casualty of the battle, because at the time of his death he was the first modern celebrity, famous in part for being famous, celebrated by dime novels and sensational, and fictional, stage plays. His death focused public attention on Texas as nothing else could. Actress-singer Zendaya is the most popular celebrity in the U.S. today: imagine what the public reaction would have been if an Iran-backed terrorist attack had eliminated her. (Try to imagine it without reflecting on the relative values of a nation whose top celebrity is Zendaya as compared to a nation whose children idolize “The King of the Wild Frontier”). In that 2010 post I wrote in part,

“Like another iconic figure who once portrayed him, John Wayne, what Davy Crockett symbolizes in American culture matters more than his real life story. He built a reputation for being the perfect example of the rugged American individualist, standing tall for basic values, especially honesty and courage, while keeping a sense of humor and an appetite for fun.  In his doubtlessly ghost-written 1834 hagiography, “Narrative of the life of Colonel Crockett,” Crockett stated his credo as

“I leave this rule for others when I’m dead: Be always sure you’re right–then go ahead.”

It is as good an exhortation to live by the ethical virtues of integrity, accountability and courage as there is, and it gained great credibility when Crockett remained in the Alamo to die defending a nascent Texas republic, in complete harmony with his stated ideals. Battling for right against overwhelming odds,remaining steadfast in the face of certain defeat, never complaining, never looking back once he had decided to “go ahead,” Crockett’s legend is a valuable and inspiring, if not always applicable, example for all of us when crisis looms. Nobody who ever saw the final fade-out of the Disney series’ final episode, with Fess Parker furiously swinging “old Betsy,” Crockett’s Tennessee long rifle, like a baseball bat at Santa Anna’s soldiers as they swarmed over the walls, ever forgot the image, or mistook what it meant. Davy knew he was going down, but he would fight the good fight to the end….”

They don’t teach the Alamo in schools any more except in Texas, and the woke historical revisionism of the battle casts it as a minor event and even a shameful one, since many of the Texas settlers Mexico invited to settle its Texas territory brought slaves with them. In our “1619 Project” World they were fighting for white supremacy against a brown army.

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“Is We Getting Dummer?” The Primaries This Week Tell Us “Yes”

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

I have written a couple of times about “IQ 83,” by science fiction author Arthur Herzog. A man-made virus escapes a lab and begins reducing the intelligence of Americans to idiot levels. “Is We Getting Dummer?” shouts a typo-filed New York Times. The scientist responsible for the disaster desperately tries to come up with a cure before his own IQ drops so far that he is endorsing Kamala Harris and losing Scrabble games to Joe Biden. (OK, that last a part isn’t true; the book was published in 1978. The scientist would have become a Jimmy Carter supporter.)

This past primary Tuesday gave us more cause to wonder if the Founders’ audacious experiment is nearing a bad end. We may not be smart enough to keep a republic. In my previous IQ 83 post, I revealed that Michelle Wu, then a Democratic City Council member in Boston, argued that because use of the crumbling public transportation infrastructure of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority was dropping and rush-hour traffic was increasing, the solution would be to let everyone ride buses and subways for free. She explained that the system was too expensive to repair, see, so the solution was to stop getting any revenue from it at all, because public transportation “is a human right, like health care and education.” It was pointed out by some above an 83 IQ level that a free bus that doesn’t run very often isn’t worth much, but never mind.

The Rest of the Story: Wu was elected Mayor of Boston.

Six years later, the signs are no more promising:

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Apparently A Majority Of Younger Americans Think The U.S. Invented Slavery. I’ll See You At The Wood-Chipper…

/ Jack Marshall / 13 Comments

A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…

The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.

“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….

Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.

Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.

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Can We Trust Wikipedia? Should We? No and No, Of Course…But What’s The Alternative?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

Ethics Alarms hasn’t pointed out what a biased, often incompetent, purveyor of progressive and Democratic propaganda Wikipedia is for a while, and I regret that. I am reminded of Wiki’s key role in hammering woke propaganda into the brains of unsuspecting users (like students) virtually every day, however, when I choose to use the crowd-written web encyclopedia for basic facts (when did Jerry Lewis die was the latest) and am irritated both by what the badly curated articles leave out, and the dunning for contributions. The promise of AI Grokipedia as a more ethical alternative has been dimmed by my dawning realization that I can’t trust bots either, and that Grokipedia uses Wicki among its sources.

“Reason” has posted an exposé of sorts on the Axis ally, here. Nothing in it unseats what I had already included, but the brief against Wikipedia is damning. As we would assume, the site reallt went over to the dark side, and violated its alleged mission, when Donald Trump shattered the Left’s dream of forever power in 2016. Reason notes, describing the page on the current President,

“He’s described as an “American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States.” Biographical details include his time as a real estate developer, reality show host, and his 2016 presidential victory over Hillary Clinton. So far, no disagreements.

But the first policy mentioned is a travel ban against seven Muslim-majority countries, expanding the border wall, family separations, rolling back environmental and business regulations, downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic, refusing to concede the 2020 election, and getting impeached. Then comes a recounting of his legal battles, his second term involving “mass layoffs of federal workers,” “targeting of political opponents,” the “revers[al] of pro-diversity policies,” and “persecution of transgender people.” 

The final paragraph concludes that “many of his comments and actions have been characterized as racist or misogynistic” and that “he has made many false or misleading statements during his campaigns and presidency, to a degree unprecedented in American politics.” It also states that his  actions “have been described as authoritarian” and “historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history.”

Even more revealing is the reaction of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose response to Reason’s query about that biased alignment, replied, “If you get a negative view of Donald Trump from reading it, that’s not our fault.” Wow. No bias there!

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Hump Day Ethics Dumps, Bumps and Clumps, 3/4/26

/ Jack Marshall / 25 Comments

I’m accumulating too many topics, so it’s time for another inventory dump. Above is one: Hakeem Jeffries delivers an epic “huminahumina” response to a simple question with a clear answer because he doesn’t have the integrity to admit the real answer. There is no way to distinguish Obama’s bombing of Libya from Trump’s attack on Iran, other than American interests are far more tied to Iran’s fate than Libya’s.

I am reaching the point where I have to reset my brain any time I learn that another freind is inclined to support the Democratic Party, meaning the current version, the one, in 2026, that apparently bases its entire justification for its existence on blind hate for the President of the United States, and seems to think that makes sense as well as make them heroic. And they aren’t even embarrassed about it, no matter how many times they are shown that Trump is finally pursuing courses they advocated not long ago.

The NeverTrump conservatives are arguably even worse. Bill Kristol, who a month ago tweeted out that it would be a disgrace if Trump didn’t take decisive action to “help the brave people of Iran overthrow a cruel and terrorism-sponsoring dictatorship,” yesterday tweeted that “Maybe Rubio should stop inventing ‘imminent threats’ to justify the war his administration started and get to work doing his department’s job of helping Americans in the war zone they created.”

The apparent 50-50 split in the public over the Iran war, coming—let’s see—47 years after it should have, isn’t surprising. One nice, kind, smart, religious freind posted a meme on Facebook showing Jesus destroying a missile. That’s nice. Stupid, but nice. Too many Americans are weenies, too many never have the stomach for necessary military action, too many think guns are icky and “if it saves just one life” to sit back and keep saying “Don’t!” like Joe Biden, that’s being compassionate. Not enough Americans have served in the military or have loved ones who have. Too many don’t want America to shoulder the job of stepping in to fix the biggest problems and crush the worst international evildoers even though the choice is us or no one.

That’s still better than a culture that wants wars.

Meanwhile…

1. At least one furious Trump-Hater, George Will, can demonstrate integrity. In his column “At last, the credibility of U.S. deterrence is being being restored: The perhaps 30,000 protesters who perished in Iran’s streets in early January did not die in vain,” Will endorses the bold action of the President he despises. He wrote,

“Some say that U.S. involvement in Iran constitutes a “war of choice.” That too casually bandied phrase rarely fits untidy reality. America’s Civil War was a choice: Lincoln chose not to heed those — they were not few — who agreed with the prominent publisher Horace Greeley. He said of the seceding Southern states, “Let the erring sisters go in peace.” Lincoln chose against such national suicide. Donald Trump’s administration has chosen not to wager U.S. safety on Iran’s abandoning its multi-decade pursuit of nuclear weapons, or on Iran’s acquiring them but not really meaning “Death to America.”

For Israel, the death of Iran’s self-proclaimed genocidal regime was a choice only in the sense that Israel chose to believe the regime when it called Israel a “one-bomb country.” Tyrants lie promiscuously, but occasionally are candid. In 1939, Adolf Hitler said a world war would mean “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Israel exists because Hitler meant that. Israel’s survival depends on forever thinking that nothing is unthinkable.

The U.S. action for regime change in Iran is not sufficient to produce regional tranquility. It is, however, a necessity for beginning to reestablish a precondition for a more peaceable world: the credibility of U.S. deterrence.”

Welcome back to the real world, George! The Ivy League, buttoned-up class snob couldn’t bear being in a nation with such an unmannerly peasant at the metaphorical helm, but at least his principles aren’t completely subject to bias. I may even start reading him regularly again….Nah.

2. Megyn Kelly, on the other hand, is a depressing reminder that a disproportionate number of the “Ew! Violence!” Americans in that 50% are women. Here was her embarrassing take on the U.S. attack:

“First and foremost, I, Megyn Kelly, am praying for the troops. That’s where my mind immediately went. The guys in the and the gals who have to actually carry out this mission… why again? And put their lives on the line… for whom, again? [Those] are the ones who are on my mind, and I prayed for them mightily yesterday and the day before, and I hope you have and will continue to as well. There are massive divisions over what we’ve done here, and people are going to change their minds over the coming days and weeks, one way or the other.

“But my own feeling is no one should have to die for a foreign country. I don’t think those four service members died for the United States. I think they died for Iran or for Israel. I understand how this helps Iran perfectly well. I get it. I mean, I hope, long term, we’ll see… But they seem rather jubilant, 80% of the country does not support the Ayatollah. He was a terrible, terrible man. No one is crying that he’s dead, no normal person, but our government’s job is not to look out for Iran or for Israel. It’s to look out for us.”

a). The “praying for our troops” virtue-signaling is nauseating and manipulative, as well as pretty close to being signature significance for an untrustworthy pundit. b) Preventing a nation that has been screaming “Death to America” from becoming a nuclear power is looking out for the U.S. So is giving oppressed people a chance to be free, because that, after all, is what this nation stands for. c) So Kelly is another “the Jews really run everything” conspiracy theorist! Good to know.

3. I should have posted this on Founders Day on Ethics Alarms. The scene was the oral argument before the SCOTUS Justices. In the course of arguing that heavy marijuana use was a constitutional reason to have one’s Second Amendment rights curtailed, the government, taking an anti-drug position that morphed into an anti-gun position, cited the colonial “habitual drunkard” laws that imposed certain restrictions on individuals who were raging drunks. Justice Neil Gorsuch made a surprising point to respond to the analogy. Gorsuch said, “The habitual drunkard, the American Temperance Society [said] back in the day, has eight shots of whiskey a day. [That] only made you an occasional drunkard,” he said. In the Founding era, Gorsuch said, “you had to do double that. John Adams took a drink of hard cider with his breakfast every day. James Madison reportedly drank a pint of whiskey every day. Thomas Jefferson said he wasn’t much of a user of alcohol; he only had three or four glasses of wine a night!”

“Are they all habitual drunkards who would be properly disarmed for life under your theory?” Gorsuch asked.

Americans used to drink much more before Prohibition than they do now, and drunkenness was far more common as well as less stigmatized until it reached extreme proportions. That doesn’t mean 19th century standards should control ours, but if an advocate for curtailing gun rights is going to cite 18th and 19th century authorities, that advocate is obligated to know the cultural context.

4. From the “These people are crazy” and “Res Ipsa Loquitur” files...

5. Imagine: This Atlantic puff-piece is actually talking about Pete Buttigieg, the failed small city mayor who became the most ineffective and incompetent Secretary of Transportation ever while taking long breaks from his job at the worst possible moments. Head Explosion Warning!

“Buttigieg’s critics seem to fault him for the vaguest reasons, many of which come down to: he’s too perfect; he’s not authentic; he’s not a man of the people. It’s an odd line of attack. Is it possible to be too perfect? Is perfection a flaw? Social psychology has documented something known as the “pratfall effect”: the distrust of people deemed too perfect.”

This is, again, Pete Buttigieg getting such fawning treatment, a man whose only qualification for office is that he’s gay at a time when for some reason in the Age of the Great Stupid where and into whom you choose to insert your patootie is deemed a credential.

Too perfect? Here’s this jerk’s Ethics Alarms dossier. Almost as disheartening as Ethics Alarms’ AWOL columnist Curmie’s deterioration due to Trump Derangement is Popehat’s Ken White joining The Atlantic as a pundit. Few publications have disgraced themselves more. I expected better from Ken.

Note: Now WordPress’s page break is malfunctioning again. I give up!

Ethics Quiz: The Movie Star’s Daughter

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I have no idea what’s right or wrong in this scenario, so it makes an appropriate topic for an ethics quiz. The realm is high fashion and modeling. There are few things I know less about than those subjects. I’m kinda weak on metallurgy and thoracic surgery too.

That’s Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s daughter, Sunday Rose, above. The teen recently became the object of vicious social media scorn following her appearance at New York Fashion Week on February 13, 2026.

The 17-year-old’s big time modeling debut at a Calvin Klein show put her under a harsh spotlight. Many mocked her runway demeanor and declared that her qualifications for high-profile modeling opportunities consisted of famous parents and a movie-star mother, and nothing else. The central ethics issue is nepotism. One social media critic wrote, “Remember when models were stunning, unique and natural? Not just some celeb’s child.”

To be honest, no, I don’t remember when models were natural. Were they ever? Most of them look like freaks, with odd proportions that resemble newspaper drawings of women wearing dresses, and too many of them have looked like recent concentration camp escapees in make-up. But again, I don’t get the whole fashion thing, why it exists, or why anyone pays attention to it.

To my untrained eye, I see nothing about Sunday Rose (what an awful name!) that explains why she is a model except her Hollywood pedigree. Do you? She’s not particularly pretty, seems sullen, and resembles the original “Young Sherlock” in drag. See?

Some models resemble whomever that is with Young Sherlock…

But the real question is how to treat the children of the rich, famous and powerful fairly. Surely the fact that she is Nicole Kidman’s daughter shouldn’t prevent a young, talented, aspiring model from pursuing her dream, but how can unfair advantages be avoided? Nepotism is even more advantageous in Hollywood. Acting success is normally based more on luck and opportunity than stand-out talent, but the children of already established stars are born lucky.

Should they be blamed for accepting what their lineage hands them? Horror writer Joe Hill deliberately used a fake name on his first attempts to follow in his father’s footsteps (Dad is Stephen King) so he could be sure that his work was judged on its own merits. He’s an ethics hero for that, but the list of the offsprings of movie stars who used their names to get on screen and went on to respectable careers, sometimes even surpassing their parents, is too long to publish.

Still, if the the daughter of a movie star puts herself out in range of public judgment, is it unfair for critics to take aim? Does it change the question if she is only 17, like Sunday Rose?

Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day:

What is ethical treatment for the beneficiaries of nepotism in modeling or any other competitive field?

 

Open Forum Friday!

/ Jack Marshall / 35 Comments

What amazing ethics stories will you uncover today?

I’m going to let Prof. Turley handle the follow-up to this post, which he did yesterday quite nicely. In “You’re Not Alone”: Reporters Comfort Those Triggered and Traumatized by Scenes of Patriotism” the red-pilled George Washington University Law School professor expressed his dismay and disgust at “how some in the media found the entire demonstration of patriotism to be intolerable and triggering.” He was speaking of the Axis media’s Trump Derangement that the Mad Left transferred to the U.S. hockey team. Turley wrote in part,

“The HuffPost even published an article with therapeutic advice for liberals triggered by seeing so many American flags. The liberal publication ran an article titled “There’s a Name for the Discomfort You’re Feeling Watching the Olympics Right Now.” It then published it a second time before the gold-medal hockey game with Canada — presumably to prepare its readers for the nightmare of the United States actually winning. The subheading read, “If waving the American flag or chanting ‘USA!’ turns you off right now, you’re not alone.”

“Senior writer Monica Torres began the article with this line: “While President Donald Trump’s deportation agenda separates families, and federal agents detain 5-year-olds and kill unarmed civilians, American athletes are winning medals on behalf of the nation at the Olympics right now.”

“Torres goes on to interview three therapists for this “story” about how the celebration of the United States team has forced many liberals into therapy over their trauma and “the cognitive dissonance of rooting for U.S. sports.”

“Los Angeles-based licensed clinical social worker Aimee Monterrosa explained that the “atrocities” of the United States can trigger feelings of guilt, despair, shame, anger” in seeing the country celebrate these sports victories.

“Expert Lauren Appio echoed how “waving the American flag or chanting, ‘USA!’ [can make] us feel grossed out or ashamed.”

I was going to write a follow-up to this post centering on the amazing comments by The Athletic, the New York Times owned sports website, which criticized the U.S. hockey team for taking a congratulatory call from their President and coming to the SOTU address. “This isn’t a neutral climate,” he wrote. “This isn’t a neutral president. And in a nation this polarized, the proximity carries weight whether the players are being intentional or merely naive.” Both The Athletic and Vox claimed the star of the Olympics was…wait for it…Elaine Gu, the American who accepted millions to skate for China, an international criminal and enemy of the U.S.

Trump is, of course, being criticized for saying in Tuesday’s performance, “These people are crazy.” I believe that statement was one of his best, and should have the same delayed effect as Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire.”

Because, you know, they really are crazy.

Over to you, Clarence…

I Can’t Let This Pass…

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

As long as ABC News persists in making Americans dumber by presenting the biased, silly, incompetent panel of women on “The View” as a news program, that network has to rank third from the bottom of the journalism barrel, slightly above MSNOW and CNN. Its commentary on the SOTU speech, however deserves some kind of prize for being the most ludicrous of all. If you’ve been paying attention, that’s quite an achievement.

Co-host Amanda Carpenter got the gold by complaining that Trump had an “unfair dynamic” while delivering the speech:

CARPENTER: He got that split screen. And when he was talking about Minnesota and saying we’re not going to go easy on them. Who thinks he’s been easy on them? And so, she was shouting back, ‘you’ve killed Americans’ but you couldn’t see what she said!

WHOOPI GOLDBERG: No.

CARPENTER: And so, it’s such an unfair dynamic that I just – We got to find ways not to participate in that and give him that kind of advantage. I just can’t believe we haven’t learned this lesson after ten-plus years.

Uh, see, it’s the President’s speech, see, and the members of Congress are there to sit, listen, show respect for the Presidency, and maybe applaud. This is like saying that an actor playing “Hamlet” has an “unfair dynamic” if members of the audience aren’t welcome to run up on stage and dance.

The Trump Deranged think the fact that Trump exists and is the President is an “unfair dynamic.”

These people are crazy.

From Georgia State, A Woke Indoctrination Smoking Gun

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Rob Jenkins, a tenured associate professor of English at Georgia State University, recently wrote at Campus Reform about his interaction with a “gender studies” professor who took umbrage at his January op-ed criticizing Georgia’s university system for its “public syllabi head-fake.”

His point was that many professors hide their course’s political and social agendas behind sketchy course syllabi released publicly that don’t accurately represent what is being taught. In response, the state’s Board of Regents declared that instead of merely filling in a template with selected information, now faculty at public universities must publish the entire syllabi that they distribute to students.

Prof. Jenkins was pleased, but received an email from a colleague who described herself as a “gender studies professor.” She grilled him on why he put “transgender” in scare quotes, and what he thought were appropriate topics “in classes that discuss gender, sexuality, identity, and racial politics.” Jenkins answered that he puts “transgender’ in quotation marks because he believes people can’t change their sex and that the whole fad is manufactured. He also said that he doesn’t believe any topic is appropriate for classes that discuss gender, sexuality, identity, and racial politics because he thinks “gender studies” are a phony discipline that should not be taught at all.

The female professor didn’t like that, She accused Jenkins of promoting “right-wing” ideology and implied that he would be biased against LGBTQ students in his classroom. Jenkins wrote that her assumption is demonstrably false; I would add that it tells me that the “gender studies” prof is biased against students in her classroom who don’t toe the progressive line.People who can’t tolerate dissenting opinions and whom bias has made stupid usually assume everyone else is the same way.

Then, Jenkins writes, he discovered his woke critic wasn’t a “gender studies professor,” but a “history professor teaching mostly sophomore-level survey courses.” She just turned her history courses into propaganda on “gender, sexuality, identity, and race politics.”

“That’s exactly the sort of thing the state’s public syllabi policy is intended to expose: professors using their classroom to advance a political agenda that has, at best, a tenuous connection to the subject matter,” Jenkins writes. But how many state colleges around the country allow and facilitate woke ideological propaganda? How many glassy-eyed, brainwashed, doctrinaire progressives lurk on faculties, seeing the indoctrination of our rising generations as their sacred duty?

My guess: far too many. A daunting number. For society, the culture and our nation, a crushing number.

Unethical Quote of the Day, (Also Stupid): Theater Critic Nuveen Kumar

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

“But I don’t think it’s necessarily antiwoke to tell an all-white story or to relegate nonwhite characters to the margins, if that’s where they fit the creative intentions.”

—Former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar in the paper’s “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights.'”

Oh, well that’s really big of the critic, don’t you think? How generous of him! He is willing to concede that a director might still be regarded as a good person if he or she doesn’t cast actors “of color” (you know, like the critic) to play characters written as white, visualized by the playwright as white, in a story obviously about white people!

Yes, this fatuous, offensive statement came late in an essay that was already obnoxious, with the biased and reductive headline, “Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights’.” [Gift link!] The Post post was defending, sort-of -but- not-really, Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” film, in which Heathcliffe, Emily Bronte’s hormonal romantic anti-hero, is played…

…by a white actor. Never mind that previous film adaptations have cast Heathcliff as white, notably the classic starring Lawrence Olivier in the role, probably because he was the best actor alive at the time.

Yes, it is true that the ethnicity of Heathcliff has always been a matter of debate: with Bronte describing him as “dark-skinned,” a “gypsy,” and a “little Lascar,” a term for South Asian sailors. The idea is that he is an outsider and at the bottom of the social ladder; that certainly would justify casting a black, Indian or other non-white actor, but certainly doesn’t mean he has to be played that way. (I would not think that casting Heathcliff as Swedish would work, but you never know: I could see one of the Skarsgaard boys pulling it off.)

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