Barbie ‘Snubbed’?
Did some Sister White Girls just get "Brown-Girl"ed?
Wait, did some sister white girls just get Brown-Girled?
Like when brilliant Greta Gerwig and amazing Margot Robbie didn’t get nominated for the blockbuster of 2023
BARBIE!
Now I know all of you have already heard, read, and watched all about this, but I didn’t know till I just watched Ayman on CNN report on how a lot of feminists are furious that Gerwig and Robbie didn’t get nominated, leave alone win anything for BARBIE, when you couldn’t get Kenough of nominations for Ryan Gosling, our very own Ken.
At which Gosling himself, so sweet he is, no?, said, “There is no Barbie movie without Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie, the two people most responsible for this history-making, globally-celebrated film.”
And to worsen matters, Kady Ruth Ashcraft then writes in JEZEBEL that “folks are taking issue specifically with Gerwig and Robbie’s names not gracing the shortlist for the ceremony’s top honors and frankly, it’s a self-serving, overblown reaction to something that happens almost every year. . . . I am just suggesting that folks who are sharpening their needles to knit pink pussy hats . . . . might consider that this inconsistency isn’t just about them—a big ask of a certain brand of liberal feminism.”
Oy Vey. (Where are those brown pussy hats, anyway?)
And if you think Ashcraft is withering, do read Hannah Ryan: ““Barbie” is neither smart enough nor interesting enough to be inspiring this level of uproar.”
Ahem. And, “There is nothing radical about the feminism that “Barbie” puts forward. In fact, I feel that it actually lets patriarchy off the hook far too easily by suggesting – through the proxy of Ken – that men’s misogyny comes from a place of idiocy rather than malice.”
And then, as if this reality check weren’t KENOUGH, Aschcraft concludes, “Barbie’s snubs are disappointing to some. Sure. But I’d argue that the out-of-proportion outrage fans are feeling highlights the film’s failure to convey a core tenet of feminism to its audience: A personal slight against some high-profile, privileged (white) women is not an affront to the gains of womanhood overall.
There you have it, and I didn’t write this. A personal slight against some high-profile, privileged (white) women is not an affront to the gains of womanhood overall.
And while that all might send some soft-hearted ladies wailing to the girls’ room at the heartless, thoughtlessness of a perspective that suggests that sometimes some white girls aren’t going to get all the limelight they surely deserve because they are competing with other white girls, maybe—just maybe—this could be a salutary moment for them to be reminded that this sort of thing happens to brown girls again and again.
This is sort of even the sort of thing brown girls are trained and steeled to expect—that in a stiff, wide competition, sometimes their stuff, just as good as anyone else’s stuff in the fray—black, white, brown or polkadot—is going to get overlooked, or passed over, or marginalized, or just told to wait till next time.
Brown Girls and other Women of Color will know this is true, and don’t kill the messenger.
As, case in point, guess who else didn’t get nominated for Oscars for great work? As Ashcraft reminds us: “In fact, this conundrum is concurrently happening to Celine Song and Greta Lee this year, the director and lead actress of Past Lives, a film also nominated for Best Picture and one that, frankly, did a remarkably restrained job at not beating its message over the audience’s head.”
Two Korean artists also not nominated but Hilary Clinton hasn’t tweeted her personal support and outrage to them yet (last I checked).
Conclusions. We are sorry Gerwig and Robbie weren’t nominated. They should have been. But neither were Song and Lee. They should have been, too. Let’s talk about both oversights and injustices when we talk about this, okay?