hth | helpful hint for the colorblind: BE LESS BLIND

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interesting points you're raising. I remember once a criticism of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series in which the critic pointed out that some of the character were described as black, but beyond they're physical description of them nothing about them acknowledging their non-European roots. They were black, so that the HP-verse could appear racially diverse without actually being culturally diverse. The criticism was fairly muddled, mind you, because it begged the question if Rowling had tried to make the black characters act "black" as the critic demanded, the likelihood of overdoing it and engaging in a racist cliche - not out of malice, but out of white, middle-class inexperience - would have been infinitely high.

Is a black token that acts white better than a racist cliche? Of course. The real question is if a black token is better than no racial diversity at all?

Ultimately it comes down to the same old conflict of individuality versus equality. The communists always hated the idea that people are born with talents. For them it was always nurture over nature. Meanwhile every sci-fi story written in the West is about the freedom of individual choices. The heroes of sci-fi are always claiming the right to be unhappy, to "grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind" the right to be an individual.

Because the more you distance yourself,from the societal average, the more of an individual you are, the more likely you're are to be poor, helpless and miserable. An individual is, in the end, a minority of one.

Race is still a factor to define an individual as aberrant of the societal norm (the non-vacuum you're talking about), so the problem here is one that I consider unsolveable. It's easier to eliminate race as a defining factor of societal norms than to solve the problem here.

If a black actor should be given special consideration during the casting process, aren't we denying him the equality he deserves? And if we treat him colorblind, casting him as servant, minion, evildoer, villain, just we would cast a white actor aren't we ignorant, if not hurtful, of his special, individual circumstances?

And are we taking into account that Doctor Who (which I guess inspired this post) is British and has a less pronounced history with colored people in subservient roles? Has an entire non-American history where slavery was something that Britain profitted from but that never seemed to have happened on their own soil? Segragation never happened. No one ever sat on any backseats in any buses in Britain.

So is it possible that your sensibilities and Russell Whatshisface's are just continentally divided. So perhaps, the problem is that Russell can afford to be colorblind, because his country never needed to have thousands of black people marching for their capital to claim their equal rights.

Who is ultimately an underserving topic because you're splitting hairs from an American and very subjective perspective. If you want to find some real racism you should pick on American shows and their unfortunate tendency to cast Latinos as servants. When even a million dollar Latina like La Lopez at the height of her fame had to play the eponymous Maid in Manhattan you know you're looking at racism at its finest.

So is it possible that your sensibilities and Russell Whatshisface's are just continentally divided. So perhaps, the problem is that Russell can afford to be colorblind, because his country never needed to have thousands of black people marching for their capital to claim their equal rights.

As someone British, I can categorically state that Britain has had, and continues to have, major issues with racism. And we have a long tradition of activism being needed to claim equal rights here too.

No, racism here hasn't always manifested in exactly the same ways as in the US, and the history and context isn't identical.

But frankly - from my perspective, it's astonishingly naive to imagine that RTD (or anyone else) can "afford to be colourblind" because Britain is some magical racism-free paradise in which women of colour have never been oppressed or forced into subservient roles.

I can categorically state that Britain has had, and continues to have, major issues with racism

There is racism everywhere, but every nation has a different way of dealing with it, and different issues that come with it.

I lived in England for a year, and wow, I didn't realise how differently you guys handle race.

From one perspective, the use of the word Asian. You refer to Indians and Pakistanis as Asian, that confused me, in Australia Asians are Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese etc. That's just a matter of language, but I found that you guys are very casual in the workplace about being bigoted about the Irish, or the Welsh, or the French. I had no idea that there was such animosity, I'd never pick that up if I didn't live in the country.

Racism in Australia is different from the US. For instance, the major minority is indigenous, so there are land rights and cultural differences to consider. In the US, it seems to be all about the 'African American' which confuses me a little, because they get a lot of coverage about their rights, but nobody talks about the indigenous Americans, it's like they don't exist. I think that's so unfair, everyone in the US is came from other places, and the Indigenous Americans had their land taken away from them (just like here), but it's not even a big issue in the country.

It's certainly a huge one here. I think the person above wasn't saying that there is no racism in the UK, just that it's handled differently.

I'm confused about the "african american" rights coverage too, believe me.

Also, ignoring Native people in the US serves a very specific purpose of marginalization, particularly when Indian lands hold so many energy and other natural resources that non-indians are very eager to exploit.

helpful hint for the colorblind: BE LESS BLIND

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