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I think I'll quote somebody out of context, because that's always worked really well for me in the past.
Saying "black characters are written too broadly in New Who, making them resemble stereotypes" rather ignores the fact that white characters are treated the same way.
Look. This is the problem with trying to raise white people on Sesame Street in order to cure racism: you get a generation of white people who think it's to their credit that they hold everyone to the same standard, and run around operating like the world is one big, happy block party -- people who think they're complementing themselves when they say they're "colorblind."
BLIND is not a moral positive. BLIND is an inability to perceive what the non-blind people around you can clearly fucking see. My grandfather was red/green colorblind. His family also had a strawberry farm. His father used to beat him for not obeying instructions to pick only the RED strawberries and leave the GREEN ones on the bush.
Now, I'm not recommending regular beatings for the colorblind. That wasn't a nice thing to do (my great-grandfather was not a nice person in general, for oh so many reasons). But the thing is, my grandfather's colorblindness? Was a problem, because there is actually such a thing as color when it comes to strawberries, and it's easier to work on a strawberry farm when you can see it.
And there is actually such a thing as race. If you can't see it, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors. There are cases where you can give the EXACT SAME script/character arc/iconography/etc. to a white performer and to a performer of color, and the overall effect WILL BE DIFFERENT. Race is real. People respond to it, often on levels they aren't entirely aware of. So it actually misses the whole entire point of discussing race and racism if your sole defense is "but we're just treating them the exact same way we treat white characters!" It may be true, or it may not be true, but either way it's singularly useless.
Some fans seem to find gender easier to understand than race, so think of it this way: if there's a character that isn't very bright but always uses sexuality to manipulate other people, does it make a difference if that character is a man or a woman? Isn't it more of a stereotype in one case than in the other? And if some writer or producer said, "Oh, it's not sexist -- this is just what we were going to do, and we thought we might hire a male actor, but we went with a woman instead, so we kept the same stuff!" that doesn't magically make her not a sexist cliche, does it? If they'd cast a man, the character would read one way; when they do cast a woman, it reads differently. Same character. Different, because of the baggage we bring surrounding gender. If you were somehow magically oblivious to any and all gender issues, you might not notice that. But you wouldn't thereby be a better person than the rest of us. You'd just be oblivious.
Unfortunately, in our culture, we are conditioned to see white people as Real People, and black people as sort of thin slices of people, operating in one of a very few available modes and with only a very few emotions and interests. Therefore it's just different to write a white character "broadly" versus a black character. It's not enough to write the black character "just like" all your white characters, because race is not invisible to most of us and it doesn't have no consequences. In order to challenge people's already racist assumptions about black characters, writers have to work that much harder, and they have to work not blind. They have to work with their eyes open and their brains engaged and with the awareness of subtle signals and context and connotation that anyone who writes for a living should damn well be conversant with. To do less than that is to write lazily, to write foolishly, to write contemptuously of one's characters and one's craft, and to do all that because you can't or won't go the extra mile to bring race into the universe of stuff that factors into your writing does, in fact, have racist implications.
"Colorblindness" may be one's reason for making all of those mistakes, but it isn't an excuse, and it doesn't magically make the product impervious from criticism. Be less blind.
Saying "black characters are written too broadly in New Who, making them resemble stereotypes" rather ignores the fact that white characters are treated the same way.
Look. This is the problem with trying to raise white people on Sesame Street in order to cure racism: you get a generation of white people who think it's to their credit that they hold everyone to the same standard, and run around operating like the world is one big, happy block party -- people who think they're complementing themselves when they say they're "colorblind."
BLIND is not a moral positive. BLIND is an inability to perceive what the non-blind people around you can clearly fucking see. My grandfather was red/green colorblind. His family also had a strawberry farm. His father used to beat him for not obeying instructions to pick only the RED strawberries and leave the GREEN ones on the bush.
Now, I'm not recommending regular beatings for the colorblind. That wasn't a nice thing to do (my great-grandfather was not a nice person in general, for oh so many reasons). But the thing is, my grandfather's colorblindness? Was a problem, because there is actually such a thing as color when it comes to strawberries, and it's easier to work on a strawberry farm when you can see it.
And there is actually such a thing as race. If you can't see it, you're not doing yourself or anyone else any favors. There are cases where you can give the EXACT SAME script/character arc/iconography/etc. to a white performer and to a performer of color, and the overall effect WILL BE DIFFERENT. Race is real. People respond to it, often on levels they aren't entirely aware of. So it actually misses the whole entire point of discussing race and racism if your sole defense is "but we're just treating them the exact same way we treat white characters!" It may be true, or it may not be true, but either way it's singularly useless.
Some fans seem to find gender easier to understand than race, so think of it this way: if there's a character that isn't very bright but always uses sexuality to manipulate other people, does it make a difference if that character is a man or a woman? Isn't it more of a stereotype in one case than in the other? And if some writer or producer said, "Oh, it's not sexist -- this is just what we were going to do, and we thought we might hire a male actor, but we went with a woman instead, so we kept the same stuff!" that doesn't magically make her not a sexist cliche, does it? If they'd cast a man, the character would read one way; when they do cast a woman, it reads differently. Same character. Different, because of the baggage we bring surrounding gender. If you were somehow magically oblivious to any and all gender issues, you might not notice that. But you wouldn't thereby be a better person than the rest of us. You'd just be oblivious.
Unfortunately, in our culture, we are conditioned to see white people as Real People, and black people as sort of thin slices of people, operating in one of a very few available modes and with only a very few emotions and interests. Therefore it's just different to write a white character "broadly" versus a black character. It's not enough to write the black character "just like" all your white characters, because race is not invisible to most of us and it doesn't have no consequences. In order to challenge people's already racist assumptions about black characters, writers have to work that much harder, and they have to work not blind. They have to work with their eyes open and their brains engaged and with the awareness of subtle signals and context and connotation that anyone who writes for a living should damn well be conversant with. To do less than that is to write lazily, to write foolishly, to write contemptuously of one's characters and one's craft, and to do all that because you can't or won't go the extra mile to bring race into the universe of stuff that factors into your writing does, in fact, have racist implications.
"Colorblindness" may be one's reason for making all of those mistakes, but it isn't an excuse, and it doesn't magically make the product impervious from criticism. Be less blind.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 07:07 am (UTC)From:And it's so creepy when it comes to fanfic, because if authors were just willing to do the critical thinking about individual characters that's necessary to write convincingly about background, motivations, interrelationships, etc., then just about all the unintentionally racially-charged portrayls wouldn't crop up. I mean, I've seen people argue along the lines that, hey, in an AU where, say, Atlantis is a major metropolitan newspaper, of course it'd make sense that Ronon was some guy in a street gang while everyone else was a reporter--Ronon keeps *knives in his hair*. How could someone like that to work in a professional setting? And I just think, What the hell, man? Stopping to examine that kneejerk assessment of Ronon's character would remind us that, on SGA, a large proportion of the characters go around with guns strapped to their legs. The fact that Ronon has knives in addition to a gun just means he's better-prepared than his colleagues. Thus, in an AU where everyone works in a newsroom, it'd make a lot more sense for him to be the reporter with pencils and tiny recording devices and cameras in his hair.
Now, I get that not everyone wants to think critically when it comes to writing fanfic. Hey, that's fair enough; when it comes to my hobbies and leisure time, I don't like to practice mathematical reasoning. But if fanfic authors just want to pour out their ids unfiltered and reproduce tropes uncritically, then I really wish they'd go on leaving out characters of color and women from their stories. Because the anti-color, anti-women stuff is so pervasive in the culture that shapes our ids and tropes, writing about characters of color and women without engaging critically will just lead to repeating the racist, misogynistic crap, and I just don't want to see that in fandom. A pile-up of shallow whitebread stories can get boring, but at least it's not *actively* offensive to me.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 04:33 pm (UTC)From:Exactly right. Also- ha ha- I love that image.
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Date: 2007-07-15 06:47 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 06:59 pm (UTC)From:But if fanfic authors just want to pour out their ids unfiltered and reproduce tropes uncritically, then I really wish they'd go on leaving out characters of color and women from their stories.
I should been clearer that I completely agree with what your post states so well: thinking critically about the characters also has to mean thinking through the implications of your portrayal in a broader cultural context. Just saying, "Well, this wouldn't be problematic if a white character did it!" doesn't constitute thinking it through. It constitutes being just as idiotic as the white guy on some reality show saying black people shouldn't be so be so sensitive about the n-word--if someone said it to him, it wouldn't bother him at all.
But that's even assuming that one's willing to accept an author's claim that they'd write a white male character in that same kind of degrading role they gave a character of color, and they just happened not to this time. Or any of the other times, and neither did any of the other authors. Because, unless they're making a rhetorical point to "prove" they're not racist, it wouldn't occur to these authors to reduce a white guy's status in their fanfic, the way they do with characters of color and women, because it'd just seem weird and throw the reader out of the story. True colorblindness is definitely a problem for all the reasons you say, but I feel like, at least when it comes to the fanfic-authors I've seen, the unconscious reproduction of racist assumptions and then the refusal to examine them is even more widespread.
Still, their excuse for doing this is often "But I don't see color!" So, yes, it's great you've made it so easy to reply, "Yeah, well, even if that were true, here's why colorblindness sucks."