So they're supposed to be actual blood-relatives, not "street brothas" and "street sistas"...Come on, Lelia totally white.
sharewith the man not blacker than wentworth miller , and the girl paler than suzanne pleshette..
shareSaw Lelia at a screening of Shadows tonight. First thing she said, "I am 100% Italian."
shareShe's light skinned. Ever heard of Augustus Hawkins? He's famous for being the first African-American congressman from California. He looks like a white dude. Here's a pic: http://www.thehistorymakers.com/bio_images/1195149017.jpg
shareHa ha, he looks like a zombie!
sharedude, check out carol channing. she's black, yo! so weird.
shareI looked that up and according to her bio, her father was German and black and her mom was white. So basically, she isn't black. She is just of mixed heritage.
I'm extremely fair skinned and get mistaken for white all of the time and both of my parents are black. One time, I got an ID card and the lady put my race as white. I was too embarrassed to go in and have it changed, so my mom went in for me :-)
Augustus Hawkins, on the other hand, probably either had a white parent or one of his parents was biracial. I say that because that's how it was in my family.
Ever heard of the "one drop rule"? That's how race was "decided" back then... remnants of slavery times, when it conveniently allowed owners to sell their own kids if they wanted to. Nobody was considered "mixed", they were either 100% white, or considered black. What the movie shows is the results of that mindset.
Listen to the silence at night
That's very true. In our society, "black" isn't so much a color as an ethnicity. If you had a drop of black blood, you are considered black. Barack Obama was fathered by a black man he barely knew, but his white heritage is largely ... well, whitewashed.
shareI think the point the OP was making was that the two actors are clearly white, while the older brother is clearly black. It would have been better if the older brother was played by a light skinned black actor rather than the man who was cast who clearly could not be their full or half-sibling.
I don't want to get into an argument about genetics, but there is no way they are siblings and the suspension of disbelief Cassavetes asks for is too great.
How do you know they're not supposed to be half-siblings? :)
shareTo make the film make sense I had to assume they were half-siblings yep.
shareEven if they are supposedly half siblings, its not believable.
share@christopher
Uh, yeah, it's believable for the simple fact that they probably had different parents of each color. Even heard of the two twins (one black, one white) both to an interracial couple in Britain some years ago? And, nope, they weren't test tube babies--they were born naturally that way. And it's not uncommon for black folks to have siblings and relatives of different colors (yeah, even some very white-looking ones) within the same family. White people who have never been exposed to the wide range of colors black folks can be are the only ones who just think that's strange, or not possible. Well, it is. And to be fair, the lead actress did look like she was biracial, tbh.
That's exactly what I thought. They had either the same mother or the same father but not both, and of course the lighter siblings had a white parent.
shareWait a minute, the actress who played Leila may be white but the actor who played Ben is black.
I am no man. I am BEDDINI!
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The point of the film and its British equivalent, Sapphire (1959), is that perception of race and skin colour affects how we treat one another. A prejudice is that black = dark skin when there are lots of variations in skin colour. In the film Sapphire the siblings are bi-racial with the female looking more white and her brother more black, just like Leila and Hugh in this film.
A bird sings and the mountain's silence deepens.share