@acontributor said:

Science has shown that most people are sexually and romantically attracted to people with features similar to their own. It isn't racism. It's just biology. So it definitely seems like they're trying to push white people into interracial marriages by promoting it as much as possible in entertainment. That's not a theory since it can be observed.

You're talking about The Space Between Us. I wouldn't call that science fiction. It was just a brooding teen romance.

This both is and isn't true. People do indeed tend to favour people who outwardly appear similar and that treatment gets less favourable as the difference increases. However, that favourability then increases again as the difference increases. It's a sort of biological Uncanny Valley. Deformities aside, that middle distance in appearance matches what each society would call ugliness. Being 'close but not quite right' in any given community will be the worst place for a person to be.

The speculation is that BOTH homogeneity and heterogeneity serve useful biological outcomes.

But all of this is moot. We are talking about a work of fiction so even if it didn't match up to real world referents it wouldn't matter. Why this bothers people rather than something like the idea that you can just slingshot a spacecraft around Earth whenever you wanted for a trip to Jupiter is beyond me.

@MongoLloyd said:

Except that it's not an "argument".

Sometimes a valid and true argument is as simple as a statement of fact. If you told me that a square was a triangle, I could refute it by pointing out that the internal angles do not add up to 180 degrees. On an empirical basis, the proposition that all swans were white was immediately and totally refuted by the discovery that swans in Australia are in fact black. That didn't require a formal proof. The mere existence of black swans was the argument.

We can spin on semantics about how common something needs to be before it gets to be called common; but I think it's a fair call that if we've all encountered something then it probably gets to be called common. By contrast, to the best of my knowledge I've only met one billionaire in my life, and most people haven't met one at all, so my experience of them is that they are uncommon.

@acontributor said:

What's the problem with slingshoting a spacecraft in fiction? Not only is it not political, it's based on real physics.

There's a lot of science garbage in this. An astronaut with a punctured spacesuit has more to worry about than blood loss. That was just stupid. I could go on but it is hardly worth the trouble.

When you send a spacecraft to another planet you have to wait until that planet aligns properly. It is certainly theoretically possible to send a craft to another planet in a 'straight line' (it's not actually a straight line anyway, but no need to make this anymore complicated than it has to be) but the energy cost is horrendous and no known or foreseeable technology makes this possible. The launch window for Jupiter is a mere 22 days every 13 years. For a similar reason that's why all those Mars probes arrived at about the same time recently.

If you ask me I'm just tired of seeing straight white men portrayed so terribly all the time. That includes showing a white woman with a poc man which implies that the poc man is better somehow. This reminds me of an episode of Soulmate about an app that pairs you with your soulmate. A white woman married to a black man signs up for the app, and as I predicted the app matched her with a black woman since a white man would be a step down. And a black woman of course is a step up. Because the only way you can improve on an interracial relationship in ClownWorld is to make it a gay relationship.

I don't see the problem here. No white man in this movie is portrayed unsympathetically. Mitchell and Sanchez are old enough to be the fathers of both the female characters, and Mitchell is happily married. If I have a problem with this it is that a Commander having a sexual relationship with a subordinate is absolutely out of bounds. Further still, I would expect that for prolonged space flight a female astronaut would take the pill in such a way as to suppress periods and provide contraception simply as a matter of practicality. It is after all what many professional female athletes do.

There are black astronauts. Black people do have sex with white people. Get over it.

@acontributor said:

Science has shown that most people are sexually and romantically attracted to people with features similar to their own.

Try telling that to John C Reilly.

@acontributor said:

@Jacinto Cupboard said:

Black people do have sex with white people. Get over it.

For the record I never said that black people having sex with white people in real life was a cause for concern for me. I thought I was pretty clear about that when I said that white people are portrayed badly in scripted entertainment including but not limited to the implication of white men not being good enough for white women by the disproportionate amount of interracial relationship representation that is not even close to what occurs in real life.

Straight white men are also portrayed badly in other ways. In this movie George Cloony is not portrayed badly but that's because he's George Clooney.

There's an implication in what you say that if a white woman has a sexual relationship with a black man that this is indicative of 'white men not being good enough'. I honestly don't know how you get to this. If I have sex with a redhead that isn't some kind of statement that blondes aren't good enough for me.

I really don't know what 'disproportionate' representation means in this regard either. What is proportionate or not will depend on your own experience of life. I'm guessing that the lower you go in the income and class scheme the more unusual interracial relationships will be. And if you come from a place where there are not many POC then it will also seem atypical as well.

In this movie the hero is a straight white man. The black man does basically nothing. The black woman seems to be some kind of idiot. The other two white men end up doing something crazy but but which nonetheless is meant to be heroic. If this movie were made in 1955 the only difference would be the two black characters and sex in space. Everything else is stock standard.

I think this is an example of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or Frequency illusion. In this case it's a cognitive bias because you are seeing things that you didn't see years ago, and/or because there is something in what you are seeing that strikes you as discordant in the sense that you feel it shouldn't be there.

Yes, black people are now being represented more. They are after all 20% of the global population, and about 15% of the US population if South Asians and Hispanics are not counted. In some parts of the US they are either a majority or a near majority. So two black characters in a mainstream movie is actually LESS than their real world representation.

I'm not convinced by your argument about presentation of black characters as compared to white characters in media either. The hero in this movie is a straight white male. The black commander does nothing. There's actually more than a hint that Iris and Maya are the couple and that Adawole is just a sperm donor. Certainly there is no moment on screen to suggest intimacy between Adawole and Iris. Note how at the end they go off in different directions. I don't see this as accidental. Not that the two being a couple would bother me in any event.

The number of black leading actors who play heroic or romantic roles is comparatively small. For every Will Smith or Denzel Washington there might be 50 Brad Coopers. Nor to my eye does there seem to be a particular skew towards romantic depictions of black men with white women, even tho this is the most likely real world arrangement of things when it comes to mixed race couples. Halle Berry wouldn't have a career if this were otherwise.

I can't comment on the shows you mention because I don't know what they are and I probably haven't seen them. But the OP in this thread took this in a particular direction and here we are 3 pages later talking about things that don't really apply to THIS movie.

I get what you are saying about affirmative action casting. On the one hand with fiction a writer can create whatever characters they like. On the other there is clearly a lot of what is either stunt casting or simply casting a minority to please a marketplace. I have two problem with this. The first is that sometimes it stretches credibility. The second is that by casting black actors in roles just to have the numbers up, authentic black stories are not being told. It's all very well to have a black Sherlock Holmes for example, but that doesn't solve any problem except to provide a black actor with work.

I don't believe there is any kind of agenda or conspiracy on the part of the media industry to transform society. I am in no doubt that those people only care about money.