MovieChat Forums > Bird Box (2018) Discussion > Netflix and black male white female coup...

Netflix and black male white female couples.


Is this their fetish or something? Every single Netflix prodcution I watch has a couple like this. I know some of you are already shaking and want to tell me how perfectly normal it is in the current year 2018, and that I'm racist for even mentioning it or whatever, but come on. When you put a couple like that in everything you make, you clearly have an agenda or a fetish. And just to be clear, I have nothing against it, but if you're gonna push race mixing that hard, at least mix it up a little. I think I've seen one couple where the male was white and female black.

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omg who cares...

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I knew some idiot like this would surface.

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Lol. There's always one.

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Expecting a comment like this proves OP's point.

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Really? In all my years of watching Netflix I've found hetero black male & white female romantic pairings to be fairly rare. I honestly can barely think of another remotely high profile Netflix show or movie off the top of my head where this is the case. The only thing I can think of is Jessica Jones and Luke Cage but that was more of a fling than an actual couple. Would you care to provide some examples instead of broadly claiming that "every single production" you've seen has a black male white female couples because in my experience you'd really have to go out of your way to find examples.

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I have not noticed it specifically as a Netflix thing, though they did also pair the black kid with the white girl in Stranger Things.

Over on Amazon, very much like in Bird Box, Julia Roberts falls in love with a younger black man in the show Homecoming.

There are several other examples as well, though I can tell you where I've noticed this trend the most is in advertising. There have been lots of TV commercials that specifically feature the white woman/black man pairing.

It's something that has clearly and intentionally been ramped up in about the last three years, and I am not sure why. As I just said in another post, this specific romantic configuration is relatively rare in the real world. So why are we suddenly seeing it represented liberally on screen? What is the endgame here?

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"There are several other examples as well, though I can tell you where I've noticed this trend the most is in advertising. There have been lots of TV commercials that specifically feature the white woman/black man pairing."

Not quite the same thing, but lately my wife and I have been seeing more and more commercials featuring gay couples, specifically men. But -- here's the cliche part -- one of them is always wearing a pair a hipster-looking glasses with coloured frames... like it's some sort of 'code' for 'gay couple'.

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"It's something that has clearly and intentionally been ramped up in about the last three years, and I am not sure why."

It seemed you'd know why, as the answer is pretty obvious: just like the media is trying to normalize homosexual couples (when they're not), they're also trying to normalize race-mixed couples (when they're not), to get you to believe that different races don't exist (when they do), just as they want you to think that gender/biological sex doesn't exist (when they do).

Now, homosexual couples aren't normal for obvious scientific reasons: no species can survive and continue if members of the opposite sex stop mating. I'm not saying non-hetero people should be ostracized, but I AM saying they shouldn't be normalized (and this is coming from a bisexual person).
As for race-mixed couples, that's just down to a preference thing. Most people decide to date someone of their own race, and there's nothing wrong with that. The media WANTS you to think there's something wrong with that, because they're convinced it's racist to do otherwise, but there's nothing wrong with that, and it's not racist.

What's the endgame you ask? Well, that's were we delve into conspiracy territory, the the most popular ones being population control, sterility, eugenics, dysgenics, etc. While all those sound like outlandish accusations that are extremely difficult to prove, honestly, why else would the media try to normalize things that, quite frankly, weren't considered normal for valid reasons? If you haven't done so already, read the books "1984" and "Brave New World", and you'll start to understand why such conspiracy theories are thrown out there. Hell, with the way the leftist media is acting lately, they seem to be pulling right from the pages of these books. Those books may also get you thinking about other things, such as how the Nazis and Commies came about, the push for socialist/globalized health care, censorship, revision of history, but I digress.

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It's not just a Netflix thing. We've been seeing it a lot lately across movies, TV shows and especially commercials.

As you say, the configuration that's always seen is black guy/white girl, and we're seeing it far more than we have in the past, and far more, for that matter, than these couples exist in the real world.

It's almost never, for instance, a non-Asian girl with an Asian guy and also very rarely a white guy with a black girl. The question is: Why?

Even if you think seeing these kinds of couples on screen is the most beautiful thing, you should still acknowledge that it's strange we're suddenly seeing it so much and be suspicious of the obvious social engineering.

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If this is such a prominent thing it would should be easier to provide examples instead of a broad generalizations with one or two examples. Apart from the fact that the OP was talking about Netflix specifically I still don't see much of it. Obviously to anyone who harbors white supremacist/anti black sensibilities "any" occurrences of this will be perceived as too much and an overt "interracial agenda" of some sort.

Also white male and non white female has always been and still is by far the most common interracial pairing in media. White male & black female pairings are definitely more common than black male white female & the only reason I can surmise that some people perceive the opposite is because they take more "notice" of it.

The Netflix show Black Mirror for example had multiple interracial pairings predominately featured white male /black female couples & only one black male/white female couple that I recall. The fact is I still casually notice black male/ white female couples way more commonly in real life than I do in film or television so the idea that there's somehow an overabundance of it is fairly erroneous.

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If this is such a prominent thing it would should be easier to provide examples instead of a broad generalizations with one or two examples. Apart from the fact that the OP was talking about Netflix specifically I still don't see much of it.


I don't write it down every time I see an instance of it. All I can say is keep an eye out for it, not just in movies and shows, but also in commercials. As I said, there's been a visible increase just in the last few years with notably more black male / white female couples than white male / black female couples or, say, Asian male / white female couples.

Just speaking statistically, if movies are supposed to be even a somewhat accurate reflection of the real world, then you would occasionally see black male / white female couples on screen, but right now, for some reason, their representation is much greater on screen than should be expected based upon how often you actually see such real-life couples.

As I said before, my question is: Why? A social statement is clearly being made, but I'm not positive exactly what that statement is.

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What ever one's perception may be it's objectively true that white male/non white female (including black female) couples are by far the most commonly depicted interracial relationships in media. On the other hand mainstream theatrically released films in particular almost never feature a black male/white female as romantic leads especially when it's completely irrelevant to the plot. The film 'Focus' which starred Will Smith and Margot Robbie a few years back was a very notable exception.

It seems more accurate to say that the only "social statement" has really been Hollywood's long avoidance of depicting such couple pairings. It just seems a bit strange to treat a few exceptions slipping through here and there as something forced and overt when it's overall still pretty rare. Hollywood certainly has its agendas that it likes to promote and if this was one of them they haven't been doing a very good job. Probably because they're far more busy pushing lbgt stuff to name one thing, which comparatively it's not even close.

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I think your post actually speaks to the point I'm making.

I definitely think that it is true that white male / non-white female couples traditionally have been the norm when interracial couples have been shown on screen. But what I'm saying is that just in the last few years there has been a perceptible shift in this, not just in movies and TV, but also in advertising.

It's almost like someone sent out a memo telling everyone that this was to be the new thing. You seem skeptical, but like I said, just keep an eye out.

Another recent example would be The Mountain Between Us with Idris Elba and Kate Winslet.

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I wouldn't call it shift which suggests that the long trend of white men/non white women has somehow decreased and been displaced by a trend of white women/black or non white men which isn't the case.

I think there aren't nearly enough examples to suggest that there's been a memo sent mandating it as a new thing as you suggest. If you were arguing this point about the explosion of lbgt relationships/storylines in film and television especially the past decade or so especially you'd have a much stronger argument. I mean lbgt should have its own award category considering pretty much every award season at least one lbgt themed film gets major award buzz/ nominations

Oh Yeah. I forgot about the Idris Elba, Kate Winslet movie last year.

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Well yeah, the LGBT stuff has also been exploding. There's no doubt about that. So many movies and shows clearly feel like they have to have a gay character, plot or sub-plot.

Again, it's almost like a memo was sent down from the top. . .

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Well yeah, the LGBT stuff has also been exploding


I wouldn't say "also" as it would be more accurate to say very much "more so". There's really no comparison. Hollywood is actually pretty open about specifically pushing lbgt themes in it's media as a mandate. You would be hard pressed to find a modern show where it doesn't come up.

Comparatively, depictions of interracial heterosexual relationships, particularly those between black men and white women are merely perhaps "slightly" less actively suppressed in recent years however it's still rare by comparison & in general.

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So I went to see Bumblebee tonight and, surprise, Hailee Steinfeld's love interest in the film just happens to be a young man of color.

I also remembered another recent example: In 2017's Murder on the Orient Express, which was based on Agatha Christie's novel of the same name, Daisy Ridley's character is engaged in a secret love affair with a black man. What is particularly puzzling about this particular instance is that the character is not black in Christie's book. So what is the purpose of changing his race? Why do that? What is the filmmakers' intent in doing this?

Lastly, while I haven't seen the show, just based on what I've read it sounds like Freeform's show Cloak & Dagger, which features a white girl/black guy team leading the show, includes a romantic subplot between the two characters.

Anyway, that's just two more examples from recent films, including one that is in theaters right now. Keep looking at you'll find more.

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Can't speak to Orient Express, but Hollywood has a history of doing the exact opposite by casting white actors in roles where the screenplay was adopted from a novel where the character was a different race. Recent examples Jennifer Lawrence playing Katniss Everdeen in Hunger Games (in novel she is darker olive skinned, not white); Jim Sturgess playing Korean character Hae-Joo Chang in Cloud Atlas (2012); and Shymalan's Last Airbender (2010) casting white actors Jackson Rathbone and Nicola Peltz to play Asian characters Katara and Sokka in a movie taken from an Asian culture TV series.

The whitewashing even happens of real life adaptations of ethnic minorities. More recent examples Ben Affleck in Argo (2012) playing Hispanic CIA agent Tony Mendez; Angelina Jolie starring in Mighty Heart (2007) as slain journalist Daniel Pearl's Afro-Cuban wife; Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth in 21 (2008) about a true to life group of students from MIT and Harvard that devised a scheme to count cards in casinos and made millions, except in real life they were all Asian.

This is a topic of study. The Annenberg Report is a comprehensive study released annually by USC analyzing diversity in media and film. They're very thorough and to date they've always found minorities vastly underrepresented compared to their US population numbers no matter the media platform, from CEOs to minor characters. For instance, in the 2016 report examined the 109 films released by major studios in 2014 and 305 scripted, first-run TV and digital series across 31 networks and streaming services that aired from Sep '14 to Aug '15. More than 11,000 speaking characters were analyzed for gender and ethnicity as was the gender and ethnic background of more than 1,500 executives. "Overall, the landscape of media content is still largely whitewashed" the study concludes. Here's the most recent 2018 report that examines the period of the last 10 years, you'll see it's not much better.

http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf

What you're noticing is Hollywood playing catchup.

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I understand what you're saying especially if you go back and consider classics like Mickey Rooney playing a caricature of a Asian man in Breakfast at Tiffany's or John Wayne playing Genghis Khan or the multitude of white guys starring as Indians..
That's quite different..And earlier Hollywood was especially guilty of this.

But wasn't Jim Sturgess only made an Asian in Cloud Atlas as they were showing the same souls in different lives and it made sense to keep it the same actor? It seems if memory serves me right they even made an Asian woman out to be Caucasian in one of her lives, didn't they?
And Katniss was still a Caucasian with slightly different characteristics than the book as we Caucasian's are a mixed bag. We are not one thing. We are not all pale and blonde.

If race is irrelevant than I think it works fine to insert someone of color..
After all, stars like Denzel Washington has made a career of half his starring roles being irrelevant to his race.
But there are times it seems a little ham fisted and obvious..Sometimes they do this with gender or sexual preference as well and that is part of the way it begins to seem like various agendas are being used. Sometimes it just doesn't fit quite so neatly.
I've never had a problem with mixed race couples although I do think I notice it more in film and tv lately too..What I didn't notice is the assertion that the trend is more white women and black males and that that is less common. (In my reality...or corner of the world.. that is more common) That may be because of the people I've known personally plus myself and may have little to do with what's going on all over the country.
If this is truly a new trend (white women and black men) then I wouldn't be surprised as it may just be another way to marginalize white males..And yeah, I have noticed that trend lately..
They are increasingly shown as weaker or more often evil or the villain ...or even discarded for a female gender.




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Why does it make sense to use a white actor in yellowface (via prosthetic eyelids) speaking with a British accent to play a Korean native of Neo-Seoul named Hae-Joo Chang? I thought it was weird. It wasn't even entirely clear to me he was supposed to be a native Korean until his name was mentioned which forced me to take a closer look at how they did up his eyelids. Until that point I assumed he was a British expat bizarrely trying to blend in by combing his hair straight to look more native. It also wasn't just Sturgess. Hugo Weaving and James D'Arcy were also cast as Asians. FTR, I'm not accusing the Wachowski brothers of racism or anything like that. I understand the book linked the characters by having them share a common birthmark so I'm aware they were trying to make things a little easier to follow. But seriously, was it? I thought it could have been less confusing and just as effective if they just cast ethnic Asians playing Asians and stuck to the book's way of handling it instead of using white actors with tweaked eyelids which I found comically distracting. Instead they used the birthmark to indicate the good guy in every reincarnation which just made it MORE confusing.

To be clear there can be many legit reasons for screenwriters and casting to change up the race of how a character was originally written in a work of fiction. Maybe an ethnic minority actor was the best guy that auditioned for the role, had the best chemistry with the other actors, I can think of a dozen real reasons that have nothing to do with race and everything to do with merit. Hunger Games takes place in a setting centuries in the future where the author envisioned much more mixed races. The protagonist wasn't written with any of today's racial groupings in mind, but she was written as having a dark olive skin tone and straight black hair, which implies mixed race at odds with how Jennifer Lawrence looks.

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Why does it make sense to use a white actor in yellowface (via prosthetic eyelids) speaking with a British accent to play a Korean native of Neo-Seoul named Hae-Joo Chang?


It makes sense specifically in the case of Cloud Atlas because it's about reincarnation and the filmmakers wanted to use the same actors for reach incarnation. If you remember, Halle Berry also played a white woman and an Asian man.

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That's relevant to the point I was making since the hangup of the poster I was responding to was with the skin tone being changed from white to black of a fictional work of Orient Express. I was trying to point out directors do this far more often in the other direction so there's really no basis for his complaint. What I take issue with is the idea that there is any kind of coordinated and collaborative PC diversification agenda when the empirical stats and Annenberg studies exposes that idea to be total nonsense. Minorities are grossly underrepresented in Hollywood compared to present day US demographics.

One point I do want to address is your concluding paragraph:

"If this is truly a new trend (white women and black men) then I wouldn't be surprised as it may just be another way to marginalize white males..And yeah, I have noticed that trend lately..
They are increasingly shown as weaker or more often evil or the villain ...or even discarded for a female gender."

Are you serious? What do you mean "marginalizing white males"? Do you mean as opposed to always casting the minorities as the the weaker character or villains in order to marginalize minorities?

Here's the thing, in any story there's always going to a hero and villain. In an increasingly mixed race multicultural society that America is today there is going to be an increasingly greater representation of minorities cast as the protagonists. But you're still talking about a tiny fraction of the number of releases where minorities are for the first time being represented in any in protagonist roles to any significant degree which is still in gross disproportion less than their demographic representation in our society. The Annenberg study makes this crystal clear.

So I say this with no disrespect, but if you really think that "it's another way to marginalize white males" I urge you to examine your confirmation bias because it just dosen't hold up in light of the empirical facts. Hollywood casts white protagonists an OVERWHELMING majority of the time, and at a much higher rate than the 66% Caucasian whites make up of the US ethnic demographic.

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Are you serious? What do you mean "marginalizing white males"? Do you mean as opposed to always casting the minorities as the the weaker character or villains in order to marginalize minorities?


Yeah. Some red flags there. I'm sorry but it's difficult to imagine anyone who doesn't harbor some degree of white supremacist views could interpret a slight increase (from the normally almost never) in on screen relationships between black men & white women as "marginalizing white males".

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Or he's spent his life so self completely self absorbed (or alienated and deeply insecure) that he's just never actually bothered to consider any other perspective outside his own narrowly focused ethnocentric outlook that he identifies with.

But yeah, it's no doubt mind boggling he could say white males are "more often evil or the villain" when minorities have been recently portrayed as weaker characters that play to some of the worst racial stereotypes and evil villain cliches only 90% of the time instead of 95% of the time.

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I said I noticed a current trend..in an off hand way..and this was in reference to others taking note that the mixed couples tended to be more white women and black guys lately ..something I hadn't particularly noticed myself if you're paying attention to my actual words.

I'm a woman, by the way..And I'm not just referring to minorities..Sometime I see white males more often made weaker than the female or replaced by females.
Lately.

Don't put words in my mouth to support how you want to see me or the way you want to see yourself...
Trust me. I've probably worked for equal rights since before you knew your own name...
The current world has made me more a centralist ..I hate extremes.....
A good example of why I hate extremes is how I have just witnessed someone taking some innocent remark or observation based on another observation and twisted it and expounded on it into something entirely different..

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Ok my apologies for being presumptuous. It came across a certain way that I've not infrequently encountered in the past, so I have a tendency to be instantly cynical when I think I'm seeing it. But I'm happy to learn you're the exception. :)

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If this is truly a new trend (white women and black men) then I wouldn't be surprised as it may just be another way to marginalize white males..


I may not necessarily agree but other than this I had no issue with most of what you said but someone whose instinct is to surmise that what is by comparison to the overwhelmingly standard white male/white female or even white male/ non white female on screen romance, something as innocuous as a minuscule uptick in on screen black male/white female romance is somehow undermining or "marginalizing white males" is expressing a degree of white supremacist/nationalist sentiment whether or not they've fully admitted it to themselves or are merely being coy.

That doesn't necessarily mean you have to be a full on David Duke, Mark Furhman or Richard Spencer but it is what it is more or less.

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If this is truly a new trend (white women and black men) then I wouldn't be surprised as it may just be another way to marginalize white males..And yeah, I have noticed that trend lately..

They are increasingly shown as weaker or more often evil or the villain ...or even discarded for a female gender.


It's definitely a new trend. There's no doubt about that.

As for the reason WHY it's a new trend, that is the question. The most charitable reading would be something along the lines of filmmakers wanting to show positive examples of black men in interracial relationships because in the past this has been an unfair taboo. A more cynical and conspiratorial reading would be that Hollywood wants to encourage interracial relationships because it literally wants to get rid of whiteness.

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Certainly it's true that this has been a problem with the past--I'll be the first to agree that people of a certain race should at least be able to play characters that are of that race--but the past is not the present.

And just looking at the PDF you linked, it seems to me that it's identifying problems that don't actually exist.

For instance, if you look at the "Hollywood still so white" infographic, then it shows that about 70% of characters in Hollywood productions are white, about 12% black, about 6% are Hispanic and about 6% are Asian.

According to the most recent data from the US Census Bureau, whites make up about 60% of the American population, blacks about 13%, Hispanics about 18% and Asians about 6%.

That info is here:

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218

It seems to me that the only group that has any real reason to complain would be Hispanics. Everyone else is getting about the representation that they should expect.

But I do not think a lot of people want that. They don't want the expected representation. Instead they want minority groups to be over-represented in comparison to their actual population numbers.

You should expect to see mostly white people on screen between it's still mostly white people who live in the United States.

It's kind of like women in action movies. Some might complain that we don't have as many female action heroes as male action heroes. But why should you expect to? There are biological gender differences that will naturally lead to more males being interested in soldiering and combat than females.

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I'm not really that invested this issue because I've already seen this argument come up a lot in many online discussions about population percentages in the U.S. and how those are indicative of what should be considered realistic or "fair" representation in Hollywood blah, blah, blah. I've also repeatedly seen the counter to that argument that points out that it ignores the variable which is the fact that a high percentage of films and tv shows take place in major metropolitan areas that generally have much higher percentages of non white groups than the national average. New York for example having a black population that is over 25% & Hispanic around 26% blah, blah, blah, so on and so forth.

Eh. I mean I get it but for some reason right now I feel somewhat ambivalent about it. It's likely that more "variety" behind the scenes in production would translate onscreen but at the end of the day I'm mostly interested in being entertained.

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It seems that if you go out of your way to look there are still really only a few examples which kind of supports my point. I don't really go out looking for notables examples of interracial relationships between black men and white women in media so I tend to see fairly little of it for the most part.

On the other hand I can think of dozens of examples of notable lbgt relations & story arcs in film and especially television in recent years alone & I certainly don't go out of my way to look for it. I mean it's so much now that it has its own genre category which says a lot about its level of prominence.

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Someone on another board commented that Euro-Asian couples are common in the real world, but not in TV/Movies.

There certainly is an agenda behind Afro-Euro couples, and deranged lefties freak out if you even mention this!

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I think I've seen one couple where the male is white and female black.

Only one couple that you can think of? Let me guess - Harry and Meghan?

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"Every single Netflix prodcution I watch has a couple like this"

How come you didnt name any of them then? cant think of any?

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You want examples? Fine.

Bird Box
The Haunting of Hill House
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
Stranger Things
Jessica Jones
Sex Education

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I definitely would like to see some Asian/White or Asian/Black or Hispanic/Asian. Hollywood is very into the Social Justice thing but they lack creativity. Which is quite surprising considering they are very creative people.

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They aren't, though. Their movie's best stories are nearly always lifted from an outside source. There's rarely an original idea in Hollywood.

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