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

[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

[aberration]

Re: Ali - Heh, yeah *facepalms at the thought of watching Lawrence of Arabia in her history of Jordan class with the accompanying Bedouins - You're Doing It Wrong comments*

[adiva_calandia]

That sounds like my dad watching Ben Hur in Jerusalem.

He says the audience laughed uproariously at all the "wrong" spots.

[jezrana.livejournal.com]

Yyyeah--Gen loaned me books on Middle Eastern culture for research, but my own potential for Doing It Wrong still has me worried.

This is why I like characters from fantasy/sci-fi universes. Then I only have to worry about screwing up something that's made up to begin with.

[genarti]

Yeah. This is why every time I get worried about getting Russian stuff wrong with Piotr -- which I do, because I am so very far from an expert on the area -- I reassure myself with the fact that any research at all I do is more than some of his canon writers have done.

Which doesn't mean I don't try to get it right, but -- well, I have leeway anyway in the fact that even his date of birth involves shoehorning and retconning and handwaving of Sovietness nowadays.

But it means that I would be much more nervous apping any character from a canon in which I was expected to get more correct than Marvel.