Hacker Cinema
Shaft
2019 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Tim Story
JJ, aka John Shaft Jr., may be a cyber security expert with a degree from MIT, but to uncover the truth behind his best friend’s untimely death, he needs an education only his dad can provide. Absent throughout JJ’s youth, the legendary locked-and-loaded John Shaft agrees to help his progeny navigate Harlem’s heroin-infested underbelly.
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>>>do you mind if there were simply no big budget movies or TV shows to ever be centered around black American characters, or portray black American culture in any way?
I think those are strange questions, because they aren't the situation we have in America. We have plenty of entertainment content focused on the black experience. Friday franchise, Shaft franchise, Undercover Brother, Black Dynamite, all those terrible Tyler Perry movies, even some of the classic blaxploitation films such as Coffy (Pam Grier in her prime, 1973) are solid entertainment. So I wouldn't prefer that this stuff not exist.
>>>Do you feel it's okay to have a large ethnic population and continue to exclusively produce content with only white people and historically white culture in them?
Why deprive all the non-white people of their agency? If a non-white culture wants content that better communicates their lived experience, they should produce it themselves. Japan does it. India does it. Those cultures rightly recognize that they don't need some goofy Americans with gender studies degrees to write their stories for them. Stop outsourcing your culture to people who hate you ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rt9MKUsKqHk ).
The amazing thing we are seeing lately is the decentralization of content production; people are realizing that they don't have to rely on the weirdos in Hollywood to produce culture for them.
This means the content created by independents needs to stand on its own merits though, it can't coast to success on established star power or well-refined CGI content mills: it needs genuinely good storytelling, compelling characters, innovative but affordable visuals, etc.... And this is where a TON of the current-generation BIPOC/LGBT/whatever content falls flat on its face: it fucking sucks. You have mediocre creators trying to separate the buying public from their money by brow-beating people with "if you don't buy my product you're a racist!". The backlash to such tactics was predictable and IMO well-deserved.
We might be better off looking at African storytellers to write uniquely-"black" scifi: http://theblerdgurl.com/comics/the-rise-of-african-comics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism