Can we do anything these days without the "woke mob" getting involved and creating problems where they need not exist?
Yellowstone is a fantastic, although a bit slow-moving drama series starring Kevin Costner - who just happens to be one of my favorite actors of all time. Seeing him in the role of the "bad guy" is quite refreshing since as far as I know he doesn't do this very often.
It has been categorized as a "series worth watching simply for the scenery" and in my mind, I now want to visit Montana just to see some of this awesome countryside and mountains. Despite being an American for my entire life, I had no idea such amazing beauty existed in this otherwise basically ignored state and now I want to visit.
That aside, the series was drug through the mud and there was even a call to boycott the series due to a "lack of diversity" in the cast. It was, as you would expect considered to be "too white" which is a completely absurd claim no matter what the film or series is and especially true when you consider the racial demographics of the actual state that it is meant to take place in
According to official census data, the state is nearly 90% white and only .04% black but of course, people were coming out of the Twitter basement to complain that there were not enough black actors in the show. I haven't seen all of it, but there are 2 black actors in the entire thing as far as I have seen. Both of them have relatively major roles.
Now let's imagine for a second that you are wandering around Montana and the entire enormous state has an overall African American population of 0.04%; how likely do you think it is that you are going to run into an African American? The odds are not in your favor if that is your objective. If anything, unless you don't believe in math, having 2 of the 20 or so major actors in this show be African American is a massive overrepresentation as far as diversity in the cast is concerned.
In my mind, the show was probably going for at least some level of geographic accuracy and wasn't at all trying to intentionally exclude African Americans from being in the cast, as is the accusation.
There was other "controversy" created by the presence of one of the major characters in the show named Monica Dutton and how she is played by professional actress Kelsey Asbille. Asbille claims to be part Cherokee and I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't actually know very many people of Native American ancestry... but she certainly looks the part. Activists, who were almost certainly mostly white people trying to make problems wherever they can create them, were complaining that she is "not a real Native American."
She says she has Cherokee lineage but certain groups were coming out to say they can find no proof of that. Whether she is or not isn't really important to me but I guess I am a bigot who prefers that films have good actors in them rather than the person being the "exact representation" of what they are meant to portray.
Actual Native American actor Native American actor Adam Beach, who has a name about as Native American sounding as I do, took to Instagram to encourage Native Americans to not have anything to do with this series both as paid actors or as viewers.
Quite a large portion of the people in the film are what are categorized as "actual Native Americans" and I really feel as though the producers went out of their way to have as many of this demographic in the series as possible even to the overall detriment of the project. There are a number of Native Americans in the show who are completely out of their element when it comes to acting, and this is evident. I don't know if they had a lot of lines to start with, but there are a great many of them that say almost nothing and merely stand in the background. One particular actor whose real name is Moses Brings Plenty says almost nothing in the episodes and when he does I sometimes wonder how many takes they had to do in order to get through the shot. The guy simply isn't a good actor.
So what is it that the woke mob would like to see done here? Do all films have to have a certain number of each race / ethnicity in them in order to placate these troublemakers? Should we just completely ignore the fact that there are, in fact, certain places in the world where a certain ethnic group or race actually is the majority of the overall population? Is it not reasonable that film/series makers should try to find the best people they can for the job in order to make a good end product?
In my mind this "controversy" is a nothing-burger and it is just a few people out there looking to score some points for themselves at the expense of others.