NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who has been active in race-related issues ever since he was in college at UCLA in the 1960’s, has decided that the film La La Land is racist.
Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, As a long-time jazz aficionado, Abdul-Jabbar resents the film for presenting the white jazz musician Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, as staying true to traditional jazz while the black character Keith, played by John Legend, sells out as he “corrupted jazz into a diluted pop pablum.”
Abdul-Jabbar writes:
The white guy wants to preserve the black roots of jazz while the black guy is the sellout? This could be a deliberate ironic twist, but if it is, it’s a distasteful one for African-Americans. One legitimate complaint that marginalized people (women, people of color, Muslims, the LGBT community, etc.) have had about Hollywood in the past is that when they were portrayed, it was done in a negative way. The ditzy blonde, the Muslim terrorist, the gay predator are all familiar stereotypes from years of TV and movies. So much has been done in recent years to overcome those debasing images, but we still have to be careful. It’s not that a black man can’t be the sellout or the drug dealer; it’s just that they shouldn’t be if they’re the only prominent black character in the story. Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, that sends a bigoted message rippling through our society.
It could be noted that Sebastian’s idea of artistic purity is his own issue; different people have different ideas of what purity in art represents. It would be just as arguable that Keith’s perspective represents an evolution of the art form rather than a bastardization of it, and that Sebastian is the misguided soul who wants to restrain the art of jazz from a natural organic growth.
The rest of the review, which is also quite articulate if less emotionally-driven, illuminates the dangers of the film espousing career over personal relationships, which is certainly a legitimate criticism. Abdul Jabbar quotes Mr. Antolini from The Catcher in the Rye asserting, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.”
Abdul Jabbar also stated after the ambush-murder of two Brooklyn police officers by a black man in late 2014, “Police are not under attack, institutionalized racism is.” If he believes ‘institutionalized racism” exists, it’s not surprising he would view La La Land though jaundiced eyes.