I was watching Terminator 2 the other day. It’s a good action movie when in the first ten minutes, you know what’s going on and you are totally hooked on “what is going to happen next?”.
But it also reminded me of something that seemed to only touch me, during the 90s when I saw it for the first time.
“Bummer. That’s uh that’s a bummer, man.”
The man responsible for Skynet’s creation, Miles Dyson, is black. The black engineer is the start of a nuclear holocaust that would kill billions of lives.
Watching the scene where Sarah tries to kill Miles in front of his family after he tells his wife how excited he is about this new microprocessor, is kind of painful. I remember being young and feeling so much for the character. “This is so unfair!”. Not just because of the Miles line, “so you’re judging me for something I haven’t done yet, how were we supposed to know?” to which Sarah replies that he’s still fucking guilty but because for ONCE a black man on screen was super smart. For ONCE that black dude wasn’t wearing gold chains or dancing, he was a programmer and allegedly, the best on Earth.
You can’t have a better role model. Except when that guy happens to start Judgement Day and has to die for that.
At that time I had a computer, my own computer. Except one, none of my white friends had one in their house, let alone just for them. It was still so rare in France. I had worked and invested money to buy a sound card for it. I couldn’t grasp the feeling but I remember this all scene left me empty. From there, the movie just wasn’t the same to me.
Terminator 2 is one of the biggest movie of the last 20 years, ranked #84 on the all time worldwide box-office. Impact.
Now I read this excellent article: declining numbers of blacks seen in math, science. Science, Technology, Engineering, Math. STEM. Where some jobs for us humans being replaced by machines, are left. In biological and biomedical sciences:
6,957 PhDs were awarded in 2009. Only 88 went to black men — that’s 1 percent. (176 went to black women.)
Note how gender overrides ethnicity for the better, even if it’s still so bad for women.
It reminds me of this other big 90s movie, Boyz N The Hood. Furious Styles is the true hero of the movie and of course, everybody forgets about him, he’s too deep. Like he says, math is the only thing taught at school that is not compromise by racial issues and ethnicities. I wasn’t good at math at school, but I loved the agnosticism about it. The cold, non biased, maybe not perfect, truth of it. Anyway, the fact that Doughboy the motherfucker with no future became the huge, iconic hero of BNTH is terrible. It’s fucking terrible.
I could write about the weird and patronizing Silicon Valley’s way to deal with minorities, the unbreakable “pattern matching” system that automatically makes things harder or the black dudes cleaning my street while white people “go to work”, but you get the idea.
Looking at the Terminator 2 casting, Joe Morton, the guy playing the black scientist had and has a great career of movies and TV shows. He lives with his wife and their three kids, since 1984. Meanwhile, Arnold, Linda and especially Edward had some chaotic fucked up future waiting for them. Talk about saviors!