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

[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.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

I like Michael! ;_; I don't like that he's yet another example of "black men = deadbeat dads," but I like his character regardless.

Not enough to play him though. :P

I think this is probably more a commentary on the media than anything else. There just aren't enough non-white characters around, and when they are around they tend to be stereotypical or not interesting--though, then again, "interesting" depends on the person. Just because I, say, don't find Michael interesting enough to play in a RP setting doesn't mean somebody else does.

Which begs the question: why don't more people find non-white characters interesting to play? I think, for me, it has nothing to do with their race and more to do with how they are as a person. And I have the dual "how interesting are they as people/how similar are they to me, cosmetically" issue going on, which really slims down the characters I might pick from. Because, sadly, there aren't that many. I have tons of white characters to choose from. Not many non-whites to choose from.

[adiva_calandia]

Excellent point. I . . . have other stuff to say about it, but my brane is starting to hurt from all this.

I think media is getting better -- Jin and Sun are awesome characters, and as discussed in the other posts, Heroes is making some steps in the right direction. I feel like there's still a dearth in written fiction, though -- or at least in fantasy/sci-fi, which is what I read the most of.

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

Heh, well, the canons and genres I'm dabbling in right now? Lilly white. Oh, so one of my canons made a concession towards race and made the one character who's had more regenerations than the Doctor (Felix Leiter) black, but heaven knows that might not be the case in the next movie (he might, for all I know, be Asian in the next film--as he has gone from being young in one film to middle-aged and married in the next). But the other canon has deliberately kept non-whites out of the show. (And the other canon, I have no idea why there aren't any non-whites in it given that its predecessor was rife with non-white extras.)

So basically I'd like to see more non-white s00per seekrit agents pls. Preferably one with better dialogue. *eyes Felix warily*

[adiva_calandia]

Jeffrey Wright. <3333

Wait, which canon was rife with non-white extras?

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

Shaun of the Dead?

spingboard into tangentland

[shati.livejournal.com]

I was afraid she was a Sue.

Sometimes I look at what's on my TV (and on my shelves, and in my DVD players) and I think maybe we should be writing Mary Sues. But that is a tl;dr for another time.

Re: spingboard into tangentland

[buongiornodaisy.livejournal.com]

I would be very interested in reading this tl;dr!

tl;dr like the wind

[shati.livejournal.com]

*pauses. tries to sort brains. fails.*

My Mary Sue issues mostly boil down to two things.

I think "Mary Sue" is a useful term in a setting with mostly-female writers. See: 10 year old girl rewriting Harry Potter to be about Harry's long lost twin sister Raven Moonpearl. Or writing about Harry getting a girlfriend named Sparkle Princess. We know the dynamic.

Except that we also talk about Canon Sues, and Lana Lang is not the same issue as the above 10 year old. But that dynamic there's too, and we need to be able to talk about that also. Mostly I wish we had different terms for them, and I wish that, say, a male writer's inability to write women well didn't so often get fandom loathing the female characters instead of criticizing the writing.

And anyway, if there aren't any female Harry Potters in the library . . . well, why shouldn't Miss 10 Year Old write about Raven Moonpearl?

I hate the feeling that we're collectively talking ourselves out of . . . writing ourselves into the stories we shouldn't be written out of in the first place. Because it's ridiculous and offensively self-indulgent to write SPN fic about a female, Chinese hunter? but all the white boys with magic powers are just business as usual? why? Sure, badly done self-insert wish-fulfillment is boring to read, but the way the fear of Mary Sueing works, I feel like we treat wish-fulfillment itself as the bad guy. That, and writing characters who are like us (in gender -- white girls writing about white men doesn't get called Mary Sueing, natch).

And it's kind of like . . . well, part of the idea of Mary Sues is that they're taking screen time/importance that doesn't belong to them? I think? And when it's (rich, straight, attractive) white boy protagonists everywhere, it's like we're collectively saying the screen time belongs to them and we shouldn't be intruding on it.

I think about Mary Sue stuff mostly in terms of gender -- which is why this is a tangent -- but I think a lot of the issues are applicable to every flavor of identity politics.

And with all that said, I'm still profoundly uninterested in most fic with OCs. My mouth and my money, they are not in the same place.

er

[shati.livejournal.com]

*adds --*

I meant springboarding, not spingboarding . . .

And my frustration, lest this be unclear, is with myself and with some nebulous abstract Fandom, not with you or anyone else who is a specific person.

Re: spingboard into tangentland

[adiva_calandia]

What Midge said!

Re: spingboard into tangentland

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

*adds vote in favor*