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发帖数: 29576 | 1 这位在the wire里也活下来，还升官了。
Though there’s no way to verify the notion in a peer-reviewed study,
African American men would likely have as much chance of survival as any
other demographic in the event of an actual zombie apocalypse. Of course,
they might fall victim to a corrupt, racist military state should one arise
out of the ashes of the world as we know it. But absent outright post-
apocalyptic discrimination, anyone who can run and wield a weapon has an
equal chance against those who return from the dead to consume the living.
Zombies don’t discriminate.
Except: On AMC’s smash hit “The Walking Dead,” whose fifth season finale
aired Sunday, African African men seem over-represented among those who have
bitten the dust. The show’s black male characters often exit the series
abruptly, chomped by stray zombies who, it seems, could just have easily
chomped someone else — someone else of a lighter complexion. And often,
these black characters exeunt just as they’re graduating from a guy in the
background to a fleshed-out human being with an interesting backstory.
There’s even a name for this practice among fans: “T-Dogging,” named
after a black character killed off before his time in Season 3.
“T-Dog never had a storyline, his background was never really explored, and
he didn’t have a love interest, major kill or anything of substance
throughout his run on the show,” Jason Johnson of the Root explained. “
Somewhere in the backs of the writers’ minds, they must have been aware of
this, so T-Dog was given depth, substance and even a shining moment on the
show — just before he dies.”
Even worse: Sometimes, “The Walking Dead” kills a black man just as it is
introducing another black man. Awkward!
“After three seasons, this weird pattern borders on the comedic cliche and
show in-joke: a central Black male character can only be introduced if the
show’s previous Black man is bumped off, a pattern I (and others) have
dubbed the ‘One Black Man at a Time’ rule,” Jenn Fang wrote at the Nerds
of Color last year.
Which is what made Sunday’s season finale of “The Walking Dead” so
special. Though some expected Father Gabriel — the dastardly priest played
by Seth Gilliam of “The Wire” — to get his as Morgan (Lennie James),
another black character of some substance, returned from a long exile,
Gabriel survived. For now.
This means that, going forward, “The Walking Dead” will have two black men
in the same place at the same time. The last time this happened, the “
extra” black guys ended up dead (as “Dead”-heads who remember characters
such as Bob and Tyreese and Noah already know). Will Father Gabriel or
Morgan end up in the belly of a zombie in the first episode of Season 6? Or,
perhaps worse: Will one of them be sidelined — given little dialogue and
killed at random sometime down the road?
Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem confined to America’s most popular
basic cable series. Johnson of the Root pointed out other examples of “T-
Dogging” in “Battlestar Galactica,” “X-Men: First Class” and “The
Hunger Games.” “The Dirty Dozen” and “Aliens” also come to mind.
“T-Dogging — the act of taking a black character, making that character a
critical part of the group, and then killing him or her the minute the
character proves his or her mettle — is actually part of a much larger
trend of the last 10 years, in which writers, looking to subvert old racist
tropes (like the “magical Negro” or “black guy dies first”), have
created a new one that has the same mortality rate,” Johnson wrote.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/30/wa |
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