Blogging Against Racism, better late than never

[adiva_calandia]

It's easy to identify prejudices in another's work, though -- that's why we have editors, because it's too hard to find our own problems in our own work. Which is why, I think, the representation problems in Milliways go largely unnoticed. It's our work. Last night, Coalhouse Walker from Ragtime entered and summed it up: You travel beyond the reach of the sun, to whatever world lies beyond, and it's full of white people.

I'm as guilty of it as everyone else. I was thinking this morning as I walked back from getting coffee, composing this in my head, Why didn't I cast Epimetheus as Greek? Well, because I'm playing off Prometheus' PB, who's white, and whose music partner is white. So why is Prometheus white?

For that matter, why are all of the mythical, seperate-from-general reality characters in Milliways white? The only exceptions I can come up with off the top of my head are Coyote and, on occasion, Raven (varadia talked about that a lot). Why are these pups that are half personal canon white? Why did I assume Tom would be white? Why are none of my pups in The Wasteland non-white?

I don't feel that I can use the excuse that I'm white, and that I therefore can't write a non-white perspective. I'm female and I write guys fine. I'm straight and I write lesbian okay. I'm young and I write middle-aged or immortal okay.

And to be fair to myself, I play two non-white characters: Carmela Rodriguez and Nirupam Singh. But I still come back to that question -- why are the characters I create white?

Not like I'm going to change my PB selection on Epimetheus and Tom and Russ and Journey all of a sudden, but it's worth keeping in mind when I write.

Comments

[avariel-wings.livejournal.com]

I used a Native American guy for Wisakedjak?

[adiva_calandia]

Excellent point! And I ill think it's awesome that you took on a Native American pup, for a ton of reasons, starting at "He's Native American" and going on to "and the player is British." *grin*

See, the super-fine distinction I draw -- at least for myself -- is that there's a difference between choosing a non-white pup for a character who is specified in canon as non-white, and creating a character and automatically giving them a white PB.

I mean -- okay. Me choosing a Hispanic actress for Carmela is not really a big deal. Carmela is explicitly non-white. Ditto Nirupam. They're "marked" in canon.

If they had not been marked, I would have been more likely to choose a white PB for them.

Epimetheus is a Western myth with no specific canon, and therefore no specific racial marking. Therefore, I assume that he should be played by a white guy. Make sense?

[skygiants]

This is something I think about a lot - and I still find myself playing white Anglo characters in Milliways, and I feel kind of guilty every time I pick up another one, because it's a trend both in Milliways and in the kind of fiction that I read and that appeals to me in such a way that I want to play with it in an RP setting. And it's a trend that a lot of us do without thinking.

That guilt is one of the reasons I try really hard to play OCs who are non-white; I've been trying to write more non-white characters too, in my original fiction. When I first conceived of the character of Preston, he had a different last name and was going to be PBed by Macauley Culkin. He turned into a very different character when I chose to use Freddy Rodriguez instead, and I'm incredibly glad I did - but the fact remains that my first mental image, when I think up a character, tends to be white. And it's something I'm trying to change.

[adiva_calandia]

Heh. When I first conceived Heather? She was black, and I just wasn't going to mention it. And then because it was never mentioned, when we needed to NPC her, someone else chose a white PB.

Freddy Rodriguez looks very white to me, even though evidently he's Hispanic. It's confusing.

Now, see, the thing about Journey, though -- I have fewer qualms over her being white, because I think her character is such that she can only get away with being as crazy as she is because she has white privilege on her side.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I still find myself playing white Anglo characters in Milliways, and I feel kind of guilty every time I pick up another one, because it's a trend both in Milliways and in the kind of fiction that I read and that appeals to me in such a way that I want to play with it in an RP setting.

I have that same problem; my reading tastes are overwhelmingly Anglocentric, and I draw characters primarily from the books I loved growing up. As a theorist, I know very well that there is a problem with my selections, but as a writer, I know whose stories I'm interested in telling.

Now -- because you've brought the subject up, and because I've been feeling guilty about all of my white, Anglo-Saxon (or British, because Bran Davies ap Arthur Pendragon is certainly not Anglo-Saxon) characters, and because I am frankly bored with my current set of characters and would like a change of pace, and because the first of the month is coming soon -- I'm trying to think of non-white characters who I could actually play.

Cat Valente's Orphan's Tales is full of powerful nonwhite women, but my favorite character, Sigrid of the Ways, has the body of a northern, near-Scandinavian milkmaid before she gets old and fat. No help there.

I've been thinking about exploring the options in Madeleine L'Engle, but all of her nonwhite characters that I can think of at the moment are magical Indians whose treatment rather gets on my nerves. Most of them even have blue eyes. Besides, the characters who interest me most in L'Engle are the minor characters who aren't Indian (or have very little Indian blood) in Swiftly Tilting Planet: Beezie, perhaps, or Matthew. (Matthew, at the very least, is disabled!) But that just puts me back where I started from, with characters who are white and, for goodness' sake, Welsh.

In canadabear's Arthurian game that never really got started, I was going to play Sir Palomides the Saracen, who happens to be a black Muslim knight associated with Arthur's court. I couldn't really think of what I'd do with him, though.

Except that I never really liked the books, it would be lovely to play Ged or Tehanu or some other Earthsea Archipelagan character and actually use an Indonesian actor for the PB. Of course, then I come to the problem that my favorite character is Tenar... who is barbarian, and white.

I'm still stumped, I guess. Any ideas?

[agonistes]

The reason I dropped hetoldthisstory was not because I lost his voice.

It's because I didn't feel comfortable writing from a perspective I would have to experience to be able to accurately portray. I don't know what it's like to live on a reservation, or depend on nasty government cheese to survive, or deal with rampant alcoholism -- or racism, every time I leave the reservation.

And I can read all the books I want -- and I have read about reservation life and the politics inherent in living there, thanks to a few courses I took in college -- but being able to portray the ugliness of the world in this way when I haven't experienced it would take not being white and being there in the middle of it.

And I asked myself if it was better to get it wrong, or to not have it at all, and I went with not having it at all.

Thomas, to this day, is the only non-white character I've ever played in the bar.

I don't feel that I can use the excuse that I'm white, and that I therefore can't write a non-white perspective.

But it's different than age, or sexual orientation, or gender. It's culture, and it's different. To keep using Thomas as an example -- you can't just have him eating fry bread and drinking Pepsi all the time and say, "I'm portraying this Spokane Indian with accuracy and good taste, even though I am white." Because that makes him a stereotype. Unless you've steeped yourself in the culture and can thus give it more depth than what the character eats or how they dress or how they wear their hair -- unless you can get underneath the surface, you're writing a stereotype. And propagating something that's false is -- and this is my opinion, here -- worse than not having it at all.

Because getting something like this wrong is dangerous.

I don't think this is an excuse. I think it's a valid explanation. At the same time, I don't know what I can do to fix things in the bar (and I say in the bar because I've deliberately made Firefly-verse NPCs Asian -- believe it or not, I actually put some thought into designing Edward Chao) without apping other characters, or twisting around characters I've already got.

And frankly, I'm terrified of trying to use Al Swearengen as a critique on the racial makeup of the bar. But it's crossed my mind.

[adiva_calandia]

That's absolutely a valid explanation. I still feel that personally, with the types of characters I tend towards, it doesn't always cut it.

Take Carmela. She's the middle kid in an upper-middle-class East Coast family in the suburbs with a dog and an entertainment center. She's an otaku with a fondness for chocolate and tormenting her little brother. (And she hits on sentient trees and deals illegal chocolate to aliens, but that's less relevant at the moment, la.)

She also happens to be Hispanic and is Spanish-English bilingual.

For most intents and purposes, she's race-neutral. The fact that she's Hispanic isn't really an essential part of her character, so I'm a lot less worried about it.

With Thomas, on the other hand, culture is clearly an integral part of his character, and so your reasons are perfectly understandable. And with Nirupam, as apparently the one non-white kid in his British classroom in the '80s, race and culture are a lot more important, even though canon suggests that he assimilates British culture pretty easily. And he does scare me.

*curious headtilt* How would you use Swearengen to critique?

[skygiants]

Getting something like this wrong is dangerous. You're absolutely right - and it's why I'm terrified every time I create a non-white original character.

But it's a very fine line - the problem is that I feel like this explanation is what causes a lot of people to veer away from writing non-white characters at all. And then you get the utter whitewashing of fiction, and it perpetuates the problem and the marginalization of other cultures. Because if they're not represented except in fiction written by the portion of that particular group who write fiction, then it's a lot easier to ignore their existence.

[gethenian.livejournal.com]

*ponders pups*

As far as my active characters go, yeah, Miniver is as white as white gets, and really, so's Faramir. And Harry Potter. Sheogorath APPEARS white but skin color in his canon is strange and variable and my main othergame OC from that same canon is quite dark-skinned. The video game I base most of his personality off of -- the 3rd in the series -- is inhabited by several hundred NPCs and, if memory serves, 80% of them are non-white -- the majority being ash-skinned Dunmer, with the occasional gold-skinned Altmer, dark olive Bosmer, chocolate-brown Redguards, catpeople, lizard men, and only THEN do you run into the Imperials (who are like Gondorians, white skin and dark hair), who are portrayed as beurocratic bastards; the Bretons (vaguely Northern French or Irish in appearance) who are poor and stand-offish; and in the Northernmost town of the whole country, you get an inhabitation of Nords, who are basically Viking-like folk -- big dumb and blonde. Sheogorath's appearance in Morrowind (and the previous game) is based on one factor and one factor alone: He looks like the guy who actually created him, Tedders, who is a redhead of Irish descent.

But then, the pups who are dearest to my heart are not at all white. There are no white people in their canon. The Gethenians are short and dark-skinned a la Tibetan/Inuit -- and I might add it took me over a year to find a PB that would fit Therem. Sorve was a happy accident and I still think his skin is too light. And the main character of their canon, Genly, is a black man from Earth. (Who keeps trying to move into my head.) And I do get really, really obnoxious about forrecting anyone who leaves out that detail. I could go on at length bitching out the designers of the German and one edition of the American bookcovers, the first of which has some random white guy on the cover, and the second of which has two faces in a shard of ice which are both far too finely-featured to belong in that book. Le Guin describes them very vividly, right down to having Therem note at one point the strange wiriness of Genly's hair, and Genly being asked repeatedly how his nose got broken.

As far as OC's go, other than the very dark-skinned Pinion, at least half my OCs tend to at the very least shades of olive. Admittedly, that's because I am. It's a pale olive, but I'm not Northern European White. Put me next to one of the Irish girls I went to school with and the difference is immediately noticible. My sister's even a shade or two darker. My grandfather is white only in comparison to an African-American.

As a note of interest, the artist I do work for occasionally, who is Greek, spent his childhood after the age of 9 when he came the America helping his father run a resturant -- which was colored-only. They wouldn't LET him and his father go to white places, because even though they're pale Greek, olive back then wasn't white enough to be white.

[adiva_calandia]

Miniver is white? I mean, I guess the character is white, but the PB doesn't look of European descent to me. (But, uh, neither does Summer Glau, and apparently she's Scotch-Irish/German, which makes me go "WTF?")

Le Guin, from what little I've read of her stuff and about her stuff, likes to fuck with binaries and assumptions, so. Yes. *grin* And I love the fact that you use images from Atanarjuat for Therem.

[aberration]

Well.

This is sort of weird, as my main character is non-white, and is also the only character I find myself really consistently wanting to play. And his race and religion do come up often.

So I guess.. I don't know. I try really hard not to fuck things up - I have to deal with the fuck-ups of his canon coming into it (Turkish with a Persian name and apparently may speak Arabic! WTF?), but... I don't know, I can't say I've had more worries when it comes to race or religious differences than when it comes down to gender, as well. There have been times when it's sort of come up in a way I wasn't expecting - remarks toward the fact that he is not white, the fact that Islam and a Bar at the End of the Universe that runs on a heliocentric calendar = headachey, but I also have that issue with some things concerning the fact that he's a boy (... well, really it came down to a point where my thought process was like: OMG, he would have grown a BEARD! THAT IS SO WEIRD! That's so hard to even imagine!).

I'd like to think I'm not Doing It Wrong, but I'm not going to say my research or background knowledge is equal to any real experience. The closest I can come to that is being the only person in the classroom who didn't speak the language as an eight-year-old, or the only white person on the street (and once, the only girl with her hair not covered). That's not at all the same, but the first, as a childhood experience, is I think something I occasionally draw on when it comes to Behrooz and the idea of being an immigrant.

His other problematic issue is that, well... he is, or was the terrorist stereotype. And I do believe that he had to redeem himself for it. Some have criticized the character as showing American culture as steering him away from his terrorist!parents and/or heritage - which is something I've tried to stay away from. But these characters were controversial from their inception, and given the way the season turned out, it was probably for good reason. But I fell for them, and for Behrooz, because of the intensity of the character and the relationships, not because of how the plot turned out.


And I hope that made... any sense at all >.>

[adiva_calandia]

(... well, really it came down to a point where my thought process was like: OMG, he would have grown a BEARD! THAT IS SO WEIRD! That's so hard to even imagine!)

. . . I have honestly barely thought about that with any of my male pups. SHIT. *giggling* Well, except Tom, because I chose a PB with a goatee and that reminded me "Oh, if you're running from zombies for six months, you probably don't have time to keep your beard neatly trimmed." But uh. Yeah.

It made sense! I think. I'm running out of brainpower on this topic.

[wickedtrue.livejournal.com]

It isn't just an "I'm white" argument. It's something I've done a lot of discussions over the years with different writes when we've been workshop scripts and doing the intentional discussions of gender/racial casting. And how I've always used the argument that a very dear to me professor taught me "if you don't have to be specific, don't". But, even nonwhite writers, in American society, do have a certain lean toward "white washing" their own writings. It is very specific, something that might have mainly been influenced by Reagan's America, which was a "white washed" middle America.

It's a media thing, I think. We've gotten almost brainwashed on the "pretty white kids with problems" soap operas from the 80s to ...now, and it's hard to get that out of our systems unless we purposefully try for it. And that brings up all sorts of arguments people then have because if they have to purposefully try to make their characters, then what does that accuse them of by implication? (It doesn't accuse people of anything. It really and honestly doesn't.) And I even saw from the comments here that there was this sort of ...undercurrent to the comments that were people trying to say "I AM NOT A RACIST AND THIS IS WHY".

[adiva_calandia]

Oh, absolutely. And I know I'm guilty of the "I AM NOT A RACIST HERE'S WHY" mindset. *eyes first and third sections of post* I honestly think I've got my head on a track where that may be more true, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm a well-off white girl in America.

And that statement, to be very very technical about it, is racist too.

"if you don't have to be specific, don't"

I like that idea, and like I mentioned upthread, I -- well, specifically *grin* -- never specified Heather's race, even though I had it in mind when I mentioned her in-game. But then, because I hadn't specified, other people did, and they specified white.

So . . . I'm not sure. I would like everything to be non-specific, and have fiction just be about people and not necessarily about people of any certain color, but as our cultural mindset currently stands, I don't think that's realistic. Maybe we have to start by specifying everything. If we start specifying "white," then people might stop assuming it as a default state.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

My relationship with race and RP is tricky because I'm an African-American female whose current active pups are all white. (And British. I'm still confused over that one.) I've tried non-white characters in the past. I like to think I've tried Latino characters successfully in the past, and if they didn't stick around, it wasn't because I was afraid I was doing them wrong. I either just didn't play them, or I didn't pick up their headvoices well enough to play them. But there was Tony, and he was my first thoroughly active Millipup.

But playing characters from my own race is...very, very tricky. In the one instance I tried to play a character of my race in game, I backed off both because I couldn't get the hang of her voice and because I thought she was too cosmetically close to me: she was an African-American female college student who I wrote as attending the very same college I went to, who was born and raised in Maryland, and who grew up in a middle class setting. I was afraid she was a Sue. Deeper still, I was, well, bored with her. The pups I have now? They are nothing like me, cosmetically. They're decades older than me (one is, at least), they don't live in the same country, don't share the same interests, don't have the same background.

Do I feel bad that they're all white? Yes, especially since I have an African-American pup who's been accepted into Milliways but who I haven't brought in yet. I was afraid to start playing her at first because I was afraid I would get her wrong. That's not an issue anymore. The issue now is that I'm...well, not interested in playing her. I like her character, but that's not the same as being interested in playing her.

So, I dunno. I feel that my issue is not that I'm afraid to play a black character, but that I haven't yet found a black character I'm interested in playing. When I do, I'm sure I'll go through the requisite "but what if I do them wrong?" that I feel for any of my prospective headvoices, but I think I'd also app them. It's just a question of finding them, really.

Yeah. I guess I'm not a huge fan of picking up characters just because they're not white and you want to upgrade your non-white character quota. I'd much rather play a character I find interesting than pick up a character to fill up a quota. Though, yes, defaulting to white is a problem. I've done that in the one OC game I played, where I made a white character from Argentina when he easily could've, y'know, been Latin American. (I hate to add this, because it sounds like me rushing to my own "I'M TOTALLY NOT RACIST" defense, but I did also create an actual Latin American pup. I'm not sure if that means I'm totally not defaulting to white because I also have no idea who else I would've created had the game gone on longer.) But, as far as canon characters go, I'd say play them if you find them interesting enough to explore in an RP setting.

[adiva_calandia]

I'd say play them if you find them interesting enough to explore in an RP setting.

Agreed. I was very conscious, when choosing Nirupam, that I was choosing him in no small part to have a non-white character in Milliways. But also he's MADE OF AWESOME, so.

I mean, I have no interest in apping, say, Michael from Lost, just to have a black guy on my cast list, because I don't like Michael. *grin* But I do feel like I ought to put more thought into my OCs, and not assume they're white.

[jezrana.livejournal.com]

The choice of race for OCs is something I've thought about a lot with the Wasteland.

Karla is white when she could easily not be in part because she grew out of me, and my experiences and my assumptions and my worldview. Jacob, who I still need to actually app, is black because I sat down and said "If I app another character for Wasteland, I already have a white female, so it should be male and non-white." But I had to decide to do that, and I think it's because when I create OCs, I default to what I know best unless I have reason not to--and what I know best is white and female. And when I actually get around to playing Jacob, I know I'll be more nervous than I was taking on Zoe, because Zoe is rooted in a culture that's full of both mishmashing and making shit up, while Jacob is a black man who grew up in 20th-century California, and I am not.

(There's also Ali, who I still would really love to app someday but am TERRIFIED of screwing up with.)

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

APP ALI WOMAN

/Lawrence of Arabia fangurl

[ashen_key]

Just for the record, and because I have been worrying at this in my head; Medusa's PB is white for a simple reason - I don't think I'd be able to find a non-white PB for her. She has a very, very specific look in my head, based off a Greek girl at my high-school, and Amelia Warner is honestly the closest I've found. And technically, she should be Middle Eastern anyway, but trying to find enough pictures of a Middle Eastern actress to be a PB is well nigh impossible even without specifying that she be young and curly-ish hair (although a slightly later legend has Medusa with blonde hair I'm, uh, ignoring this). Of course, then you come back to Amelia Warner simply being the closest to my Greek mental image.

And then with the Greeks, I always had the impression that the Ancient ones were inclined to be blond. Alexander the Great, and grey-eyed Athena, and then the Ottoman Turks invaded and intermarriage occured. I could be wrong, but that was always the impression I got from history, so I never found it iffy that the Ancient Greeks were shown as blonde or 'white'. Although, if anyone apps Andromeda and doesn't have her black, I'm going to be annoyed. Princess of Ethiopia and all.

But I'm distracting myself from your main point, and say sorry.

I don't have the why are the characters I create are white, because they...aren't. But I think to my brain it's less 'well, I've created all these white people in the past, I need to even things up' and more 'oooh, more places, more oppurtunties, and it makes sense for this and than that, and I need to research that, and that'd be interesting' because to me, where I am right now, white tends to be...boring. It tends to mean American/Brit/Aus in my brain, and that bores me. Also, North Americans stress me out far more then playing Brits, and I don't know why. The only reason I feel comfortable with Armand and Chammy in Wasteland is that civilization has collapsed. I don't understand the logic, but that's it.

The multi-race cast in my head admittedly isn't M'ways or Wasteland, but dirty_life. To be sure, I haven't apped most of these people yet, but they are there and I just have to find plot for them.

I'm not good with going 'well, I have to play this because'. My main character in M'ways is Ajedrez - Mexican. I didn't think about her being actively another race - Hispanic, as opposed to just Mexican, until I started fleshing out backstory and having her join her Dad in San Antonio, Texas, while she was a teenager. And then I've had to think about race a lot, but it never made go 'well, I'm not Mexican, I can't play her'. It just means I have to research, and imagine, and to a certain extent hope people will be forgiving when I make mistakes. And she has bitched about everyone being white, everyone speaking English. It drives her insane. But Coalhouse put it far, far better.

If I stuck to playing what I know, well, I'd be playing Corrie and that'd be it. There just AREN'T enough good Australian characters out there for me to be able to think like that.

With the non-specifing...I think as sad as it is, we have to. Unless we are somewhere where everyone would be not-white, we have to specify. It's just way our brains our geared - we tend to think of people being like us. It's like the saying, if horses could picture gods, they would be horses.

And...I've actually really, really lost what I was saying, as it's 9am and I got up at 7am and it's a Sunday, so, I'll just...stop...now.

[ashen_key]

Actually, re: Medusa - if I find someone Turkish/Greek or Middle Eastern that fits, I might use her. It depends how long it takes and how much Amelia Warner sticks in my head. I fear quite a lot, since I develop characters very, very rapidly, and things tend to stick, but, in the back of my head I think I'm still sorta searching.

Not that it...strictly would do anything, as she wears a VEIL, but when it comes off. Rarely.

[cupenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, looking at Milliways, the majority of the characters are white. I'd believe that this is due to most of us being English speaking players (Most- I know of one person that english is not his first language, and I'd believe there are others), and the english language has several hundreds of years of literature available for us to draw on. This liturature is going to be written by english-speakers, which for most of this time, were white.

The last hundred or so years, there has been more written, and other medias available for story-telling, but for the most part of this time, they were still controlled by the upper-class- which still tended to be white. Now, this is changing- slowly, but it is. Compared to a hundred years ago, more people in the world are literate, in what ever language they speak. English isn't the only 'educated' language out there anymore. I would imagine that in 20 years from now we'll be getting best sellers from China, Brazil, and Egypt- and we'll be having to wait for them to be translated into English for us to read them.

As for now, hopefully we'll have more people write from their cultural point of view on things- because with being 'politically correct', I think a lot of white writers shy from writing about other cultures and ethnic backgrounds, for fear of 'doing it wrong'.

[adiva_calandia]

This is all very true, and I share your hope that we'll start seeing more non-white authors in the mainstream bestseller list -- same as I hope we'll see more gay or female authors (though glancing over the NY Times Bestseller List, that latter seems to be doing okay).

It doesn't change the fact, though, that the pups in the bar who are as much OC as a canon are predominantly white, and they don't automatically have to be. Yeah?

[varadia]

Just chiming in here because, yeah, I've talked offline extensively about what I did with Raven, and why, and how now I wish I hadn't started off with Adrien Brody as a PB, because . . . white.

And some of that is hard, because I have taken the myth/story/person and put my own spin on it, and there is a feeling of guilt for co-opting that character the way I have, and I suppose sometimes I don't feel I have the 'right' to use the whole Native thing, because--I think it's liberal white guilt. Which is ridiculous, because it is far more disrespectful to do what I did than it would be to just . . . choose a Native PB.

And no matter how often I know/remember that it started because I could not find ready-made Native American icons, and needed someone to put in as a PB so I could just start playing before I chickened out--the thing is I did it.

It still makes me embarrassed and kind of ashamed, but it has made it more likely that I will think about Characters of Color in my own writing and in others. Even if I get the culture wrong, and someone has to smack me upside the head and go 'dude. you're looking kind of racist there'--at least I try.

I have a character of Indian descent in another game, and I have tried to make the choice of Indian or Turkish or Kiwi PBs when they were not specified in text. I have not yet defaulted to black or asian yet, but I live in hope that one day my brain will get there.

So that's something, even if it came from a GINORMOUS FUCK UP. I just (we just?) have to keep working at it, I guess.

And try not to be an asshat.

[adiva_calandia]

Well, and you've worked to correct the initial fuck up, so. That helps, I think.

Trying not to be an asshat is the key. *grin* I don't think anyone choosing white PBs for race-neutral pups is purposefully trying to further an imperialist European Western cultural assumption -- but the the invisible meaning, as Doc would put it, is that people of other races are, well, invisible.

INVISIBLE REPRESENTATION ISSUES.

. . . I'm sorry, I've been doing this all day and the brane, she is not so coherent anymore.

[sdelmonte]

Hmmmmmm.

I played Lando, as you may recall. Being from the (seemingly) color blind (if speciesist) Star Wars universe, I couldn't very well call him "black" and he certianly isn't African American. I will note that I apped him 9n part because it did seem that he was not being apped in part because people were afraid to play a man of color, and in part just becuase it seemed like fun. But I hever had to deal with any race issues.

But I wanted to. I wantd someone to say something about his skin color, even something that just noted it, and no one ever did. We are, as a whole, sort of afraid to place with racism of all sorts. It's tricky and ticklish and so on, but it's also part of reality and we all don't know how to approach it. Myself included, since I hasn't exactly apped anyone but white males. (Does it count in the least that I have made Knox part Jewish, so that at some level he can at least relate to the anti-Semimtsm his ancestors and mine faced?)

The closest I have come to playing on that third rail was with Barry and Eska. I had a plan for him to not know how to react to her being gay, since Barry - created in 1956 and a total midwestern square - would have been a honophobe. He would have learned fast how homophobic he was, and would have figured out that people are people. Alas, Eska never did find true love before Debi retired her, and I never did get to do this. Still, I was hoping to see how it played out, with all sorts od disclaimers that the pup was not the mun. I hope.

[gramarye1971]

*ponders this very interesting question*

I don't count Mikage as Japanese, because...well, Shoujo Kakumei Utena has a whole other set of issues revolving around race (i.e., Akio and Anthy) that isn't germane to the immediate subject of this post. I think that my character choices in Milliways and in the HP RPGs I've been in before tends to stem from this principle: Can I work my history knowledge into the character's background to create an authoritative and confident-sounding character voice? So in Milliways I've got Merriman and Sam Stewart and Brother Cadfael, all of whom draw heavily on my British history studies, and in one of my HP RPGs I played Antonin Dolohov, whose backstory I essentially invented out of my pre-existing knowledge of Soviet/European/Cold War history. I've seriously considered apping Taichi Hiraga-Keaton *points to icon* from the anime Master Keaton, who is Anglo-Japanese but whose series is based in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the end of the Cold War...and I think you can see where I'm going with that.

Could I write a non-white character, or create a non-white character? My answer to that would probably have to be 'only if I knew his/her historical and social background to the point where I felt comfortable writing it'. So...yeah. I don't entirely know what that says about me.

[shati.livejournal.com]

I just remembered I meant to ask you about this -- SKU totes has its wacky race issues, but I'm curious about why Mikage doesn't count as Japanese. Your thoughts! Let you show me them? Not necessarily here, if you feel off topical.

[jothra]

...man.

First of all, very interesting discussion and comments from everyone. Mostly I feel like I am simply Not Intellectual enough to make any serious points about racism and the study thereof that someone else has already made.

This is because I've never seriously studied the subject, and I live in one of the whitest states in the freaking union. It is a problem of invisibility here, frankly. I have very few friends who are not white, because I don't often meet people who are not.

However, this does make me very aware of when I am the only white chick in the room. It also makes me interested in other people's cultures and experiences just because they are different.

It's that difference that attracts me to characters I roleplay. I don't want to play a white twentysomething middle class girl who has a nice house in the countryside. I want something else. One of those differences is bound to be race at some point. But I have not (as of yet) made it a conscious decision to play a character of another race just for that reason.

It just sort of happens, I guess. Lynne talked about her choices with Raven, I guess I chose to make Coyote's PB a native american woman (or man)...but I didn't think about it. I want to get her stuff right, but I have a certain amount of leeway there just because there are so many sources to pick and choose from. I would specifically enjoy some easily accessible information on Navajo culture and religion.

Daniel is a whole 'nother topic. He was Chinese from the start, and I never pictured him otherwise. However, the stereotypes he has floating around him I did pick deliberately. Daniel himself is pretty aware of being one of the only asian kids around, especially in a small Texan town. Some of this is blahblah backstory that hasn't come out yet, but his guardian (who is white) made a deliberate if slightly misguided effort to get Daniel to learn more about his heritage. Thus, his continued fluency in mandarin, even though he doesn't use it much. Also, the kung-fu. He finds the whole thing more than moderately humorous.

I'm sure that someone could point out something from either of them and say Native American and Chinese Culture: You're Doing It Wrong. I would actually probably appreciate that, even if it stung at the time. But I can't do it right if I never try it.

[agoodshinkickin.livejournal.com]

As questionable as this may sound, I actually put a lot of thought into who I chose for human PBs for Mike and Raph.

Raph needed to be the stereotypical New Yorker. He needed to be That guy. And in my mind That guy is always white. The stereotypical New Yorker in my head is this nondescript white guy with a big nose. Garden State was just coming out, and I knew NOTHING about Zach Braff except that he had this great "blank stare of confusion" about him, a look that in my mind's eye Raph has a good chunk of the time. Had I known then what I know now, I'd have gone with this guy instead.

Mike presented a challenge, because the only thing he really required was a smile that could light up a room. I was thinking Ernie Reyes Jr for a while, because of the DELICIOUS meta, but couldn't find enough pictures of him to make a decent icon pool...so I went with Breckin Meyer.

I'd like to be the one to say that the turtles, as characters, only have as much of an ethnic voice as you put into them, but that's easy for me to say as a white woman of character written by white men.

I don't play characters that aren't "anglo"...because let's face it, the loompas are orange...because my white liberal guilt won't allow me to.

[adiva_calandia]

*nodnod* That makes sense. And -- after sleeping on it -- I realized that this could come off as "omg no one should play white characters or choose white PBs."

Which -- no. Not what I'm trying to say. It's just the unconscious assumption of whiteness that I want to address. Evidently you were making a conscious choice, and that's legitimate.

[batyatoon]

why are the characters I create white?

Here's one I've wondered that might trouble you even further:

Why are none of the characters I create Jewish?