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

[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.

[gethenian.livejournal.com]

I want to see that movie so badly, really. I keep forgetting to look it up. And then when I remember, I forget how to spell it. :P

Miniver is indeed supposed to be of 100% Irish descent on both sides. Why I did that has vaguely to do with a spur-of-the-moment backstory decision that came from wanting to give his backstory a sense of realism and basing him off people in my mother's hometown. Also, he looks like Oscar Wilde. ^^ But honestly, his canon doesn't really specify his race -- it's a personality sketch applicable to anyone, at any time, and in fact I *know* I'm cheating by having him be from the 1960's because the poem was written in the late 1800's. And it WAS written as part of a series of poems about people in some imaginary small town and was actually the author's self-insert character. Contextually, in terms of what's known about the poem and the other poems written around it, Miniver was probably envisioned as white by his own author.

Now that I think of it, it'd be a fun experiment to do some drabblythings writing Miniver as black or hispanic or Jewih or an American mutt of uncertain ancestry or not even American at all (even though his author was, and the other poems in the series make clearer that they're in an American setting). I might do that later.

Oh yes and as for othergame pups... SPOCK IS NOT WHITE. pwn'd.

[adiva_calandia]

I watched some of it with my parents when I was, like, thirteen, which was AWKWARD, because it's a) very long and b) has explicit sex scenes! La.

Miniver was probably envisioned as white by his own author.

Which I think is part of why I chose Edward Norton for Tom's PB, because the guy who wrote his song is white and probably assumed the characters he was writing were white.

Experiment! That sounds like fun.