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

[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.