Since the 2024 announcement of the casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Emerald Fennell's buzzy adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, invested parties online have condemned the filmmaker's choice of Elordi, a white (and very tall) Australian actor, for the role of Heathcliff, the adopted brother of the Earnshaw family who, through their mistreatment and his separation from his beloved adopted sister Cathy, becomes implacably vengeful and cruel.
In 2020, a prize-winning English poet and teacher who worked as a writer-in-residence with young refugees published a book about her experiences. Reviews were warm. Sales were strong. It won awards. A year later, Kate Clanchy's book suddenly came on the radar of a small number of other writers, who criticised her for some supp­posedly racist or otherwise belittling depictions of her students.
Girlbands, then. Shimmering icons of empowerment or Pygmalion projects for middle-aged A&R men? Here's a radical idea they're both. Two become one, baby. That's the sense you get from Girlbands Forever (Sat, 9.20pm, BBC Two), the documentary executive produced by Louis Theroux charting the fortunes of 90s bands such as All Saints, Eternal, Atomic Kitten and Mis-Teeq through to 00s stars Little Mix.
Pete "would have been an ideal - if I were a straight white man." "But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man," Kamala wrote, according to The Atlantic. "Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let's just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk." "And I think Pete also knewe that - to our mutual sadness," Kamala added.
Playwright Karen Zacarias first encountered Jack Schaefer's classic 1949 novel Shane as a sixth grader and recent immigrant to Boston from Mexico. Not yet having internalized the expectation of seeing white Americans at the center of every story, she envisioned the main character of this classic Western tale as Puerto Rican baseball start Roberto Clemente, a hero of hers who happened to be Black, and the farming family at the center of the story as Mexican.
