Oh boy: Charlotte Rampling says boycott of Oscars is 'racist to whites'

"Why should we always categorize people? I think nowadays we are living in easily offended societies. There will always be someone who's too beautiful, too black or not white enough," she said, when asked if Hollywood should enforce quotas for minorities.

It's not my place here to debate the merits of her statement because I don't see that many movies and I have no idea. It's simply to question why the fire of hell has to come down on her for merely suggesting it. It's not as if I don't know the answer, of course. Any of these power movements - "diversity" being among them - are not so much about winning the argument as they are about ending it. Anyone who questions the merits of your demands isn't just wrong. They're shockingly evil and racist and backwards and dangerous and unworthy of being heard. In fact, the movement fears what will happen if she is heard, because people might think she has a point, and you can't have that. The people who claim they don't want quotas enforce de facto quotas by insisting that, in practice, there's no way anything short of the outcome they want can ever not be racist. When Rampling suggests, hey, maybe it just so happened this time that all the most deserving nominees were non-black . . . that . . . will . . . not . . . do. Oh, and you knew this was coming: There are always reports that the person who dared to get out of line subsequently "walked back" (where did that moronic term come from?) their comments, although in this case, does it really sound to you like she backed down?

Hours after actress Charlotte Rampling told an interviewer that the blowback against this year's all-white acting nominees was itself "racist," she is walking back her comments. On Friday evening, the British actress, who is nominated for a best actress for her work in the film 45 Years, gave a statement to CBS News, which read, "I regret that my comments could have been misinterpreted. I simply meant to say that in an ideal world every performance will be given equal opportunities for consideration."

That doesn't sound like a retreat to me at all. It sounds like she's laying the hubbub on her critics for making her comments something they were not. Contrary to those who tried to say her comment was "anti-black," she's saying that when everything is based totally on merit without everything having to be categorized, that should be the ideal scenario. And for truly fair-minded people, it is. It only doesn't work for those in the professional outrage industry who need to find something to scream about, and not only do so but just as quickly descend upon those who dare to question the orthodoxy. By the way, for those of you who want to say Charlotte Rampling is just some old hag:

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