Apparently there are some people who are angry at a black guy being cast in the Thor movie as a Norse god. I haven’t seen it, but in addition to liking Idris Elba quite a bit, I don’t see the problem here. The most hilarious accusations are that this somehow is an insult to “white culture” — which, I suppose the implication is that the Scandinavian people who believed in this mythological pantheon, are for some reason exemplars of that culture.
The problem here is that whatever “white culture” is, I sort of guess that it probably involves, at minimum, some list of nice things that white people did in the past. And the sort of person who would be very concerned about white culture might consider, say, the civilizations of Europe, the preservation of pre-Dark Ages knowledge or the spread of Christianity as three of those nice things.
Here’s where the problem with considering the Vikings part of this comes in — they were, to put it mildly — historically opposed to these developments. I don’t mean they lodged complaints at the white people’s local 182, I mean they sailed up on ships and brutally murdered lots of the white people who were doing these nice things. It seems like, whatever white culture is, when a group of people run around killing, raping and plundering those who represent it, no one should get really irritated when the ancient gods of said plunderers are victims of some perceived insult.
