Every story is a moral

I keep thinking about the idea that all stories have a moral (or several) and whether or not you consume media through a critical lens, those morals tend to stick around in our subconscious.

We’re not conscious of every moral that lives within us. Particularly if that moral was formed by a movie, or tv show, etc. These are our little narratives that help guide our lives even if we don’t know they exist.

So, if you see a Puerto Rican robbing someone in a movie, maybe you form a little narrative about that, and maybe, if there isn’t a moral to counteract that, like a Puerto Rican playing a CEO in the next movie you watch, that little narrative gets a little long in the tooth behind your back.

American media have gotten slightly better at fixing these representations. Slightly. Though, it’s not perfect, and it does not mean to undo the narratives already formed. I fear that Puerto Rican CEO in the woke remake of All Puerto Ricans Are Criminals might register as an anomaly, and not as a clear challenger to the rooted narrative. This movie doesn’t exist, by the way. Just in case you thought you had a new Letterboxd review in waiting. I’m just ranting and too lazy to research a good example.

The moral to this story is (nothing, it’s a rant remember?), we all work from unconscious narratives. Some benign, some harmful. Our media may be a reflection of us, but we look to media for a baseline of cultural norm. And so, these little narratives bounce back and forth, validating themselves.

We may think to ourselves, I’m not racist. And that may be true in a I-don’t-burn-crosses sort of way (because that’s what our media say racism looks like). But it doesn’t mean we are free from the racist morals we collect as a result of our media consumption. And because those morals form narratives without our consent, it’s our job to, every once in a while, dig around for those narratives so that we may challenge them.

Here’s the fun part: those narratives surface anyway, no matter how niche. Most of the time, it’s useful for our decision making. But sometimes, we learn in public that some of those narratives are real fucking racist and everyone around us now knows it too. Better to challenge them in private, on our own terms.