adiva_calandia | Blogging Against Racism, better late than never

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.

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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?

The answer to that goes back to Thomas -- part of the reason I got a huge response on his first EP was because I wrote So that's why when the front door opens and a man -- fairly average-looking, hair long and unbound -- walks in, he blinks. Mostly because there's never been a bar in Thomas Builds-the-Fire's bathroom before, but also because this place is not the Spokane reservation. It is, in fact, white. Very white.

And it brought non-white characters out of the woodwork -- but it also brought out characters like Tim Hunter. Check out that narration -- the part that reads And English! His anscetors stayed on thier side of the ocean, no guilt there!

I'm still kind of gobsmacked by that, a year and a half later.

But the point is -- bringing in a character who is very in-your-face about the racial makeup of the bar, even if it's just in narration, gets responses.

And Al Swearengen is unabashedly racist. And has no problems with throwing around racist epithets in casual conversation. My theory is that if Al does his thing -- for example, commenting on the racial makeup of the bar -- it'll get people to look at the makeup of the bar.

I really think that in Milliways, racism is an invisibility issue rather than...how to put this. -- okay, it's like it's safe to ignore racial issues because we like to think we're above the kind of blatant racism that people like Al Swearengen (or like all four of my grandparents) exhibit/exhibited.

But that doesn't mean it's a great idea to use somebody like Al to get dialogue going. And also I'm scared of people not seeing the IC/OOC barrier. *wry*

. . . Wow, Tim. *giggling* What.

bringing in a character who is very in-your-face about the racial makeup of the bar, even if it's just in narration, gets responses.

I'm waiting for this to happen with Coalhouse.

Yyyyeah, I can see all that. *rueful* I am intrigued, but . . . yeah. Considering how up-in-arms we've gotten in the past over, say, girls in towels, the use of a racial slur could be very dangerous. And if it weren't a game, but a book or play or whatever, it might be dangerous in a useful way. Here, I'm not sure.

I'm wary of the race-as-culture argument ... People don't seem to have much of a problem playing characters from medieval canons, or Renaissance Europe, and so on, for example. And I really don't think it makes sense to say that, e.g., medieval England has a culture more imitable by a 21st century American than people living at the same time and in the same place do.

Obviously no medieval denizens can call you a time-ist and make you feel bad about getting things wrong, but still.

And that's the thing. In the meat world, nobody's going to run across a medieval character while possessed of an army of erroneous preconceptions about medieval culture.

It isn't just about feeling bad. Check out Scalped. I read the first couple of issues before giving up, because while The Sopranos could be the norm -- how would I know? -- it rang of exploitation. Is this what Indian culture is? Are these images of reservation life that are getting tossed out into popular culture to form the popular conception of reservation life? What's that going to mean for the people who actually live there outside of comic books?

It's my call that if it's a current issue, it makes a difference whether or not you write the culture as a stereotype. Aaron and Guera are. Jason Aaron is a white guy who went to a reservation in South Dakota all of once as his research, and depends on books for the rest. Would it make as much of a difference if the American government had succeeded in killing all the Indians in the nineteenth century? No. But since they're a minority group in this country, both in numbers and in the way they get treated, it makes a difference whether or not I get it right, as long as anybody at all will be reading what I write.

Also, people have plenty of problems playing historical characters, as far as accuracy goes. They just either aren't aware of them or don't care. And it doesn't make as much of a difference.

OK. I'm not sure if we're actually at odds here, or if we're having a language problem, or if we are nodding along to the same argument but coming up with different conclusions.

I think it's very case-by-case, and I probably would have abdicated Thomas' story for the same reasons that you did. But in less extreme cases ... as an under-represented voice, and as a general rule, I will put up with Memoirs of a Geisha for Geisha of Gion. And if well-intentioned, relatively-informed white people won't write about Thomas, then white people who aren't as well-intentioned or as well-informed will. So will actual Indians, of course, but I don't like their odds in that market.

OH PS OF CLARIFICATION. That was not a (you):Arthur Golden* comparison.

That was a Jason Aaron:Arthur Golden comparison.

* I think so much more highly of you I cannot even put you in the same linebreak as that man.

In terms of Nirupam - whether or not he's the only non-white kid in his classroom depends on where the school is and what class he is, largely.

From the age of four or five to eighteen, I went to a tiny middle-class private girls' school in the suburbs, and we had... maybe two or three Indian girls in my class at any given time, plus a couple of Japanese girls and one Korean as we got older, and one black girl who I can remember from the entire time I was there.

Inner-city schools would be different.

Blogging Against Racism, better late than never

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