helpful hint for the colorblind: BE LESS BLIND

[hth]

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.

Comments

[wickedprincess3.livejournal.com]

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.
Wow, so life in magical fairy no-racism ever land must be awesome!

Too bad it doesn't exist :(

[(Anonymous)]

Perhaps you should take the perhaps into consideration and the attack on the original poster's stupid American attitude which sees Martha in the tradition of 400 years of American tradition of treating black people horribly and being generally okay with that. Britain is racist as shit, but it never institutionalised slavery on its own soil to the degree America did. But with American small cultural difference don't mean shit because the US is the one and only judge for how to perceive a black woman's role in a British tv show as it was intended to seen.

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

because the US is the one and only judge for how to perceive a black woman's role in a British tv show

Except that, as I keep pointing out to you, many British people of colour think that new Who is problematic in racist ways.

[hth-the-first.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you should fuck off with telling me how I see the situation. I am so fucking sick to death of anonymous posters calling other people names; you're not just wrong, you're not just an asshole, but you're a coward as well.

I am ENTIRELY FUCKING AWARE that racial issues are different in Britain than they are in America. I am also entirely fucking aware that, as you've been told and have chosen to ignore, there are a wealth of British Who fans, white and non-white, who find it problematic from a British perspective. I know this because I FUCKING LISTEN when people talk, and I don't always assume I know what they secretly think better than they do.

My post was about the extreme likelihood that, if you think race is not an issue for you to be bothered with, you will have trouble dealing well with race. Conversely, if you listen and learn and pay attention to what various people's various racial baggage actually is, you can navigate it better. I arrived at many of my feelings about what's going on in Who through that exact process. I fucking listened to people -- from all over the world, and of many racial backgrounds -- tell me what reactions it brought up in them.

You, on the other hand, have assumed an enormous number of things about my attitude and my critical perspective, based apparently on nothing more than knowing I'm an American. You are wrong about all of them. You are also grossly, stupidly wrong in your attempt to make a simple, one-to-one correlation between institutionalized slavery and servanthood/servitude, and to suggest that because Britain has made very minor use of the first, its history and issues surrounding the second are therefore insignificant. You fail.

Don't fucking come into my journal acting like you're remotely interested in having a conversation with me, then flatly call me stupid, judgmental, and imperialistic, you two-faced troll.

[teh-nos.livejournal.com]

Our slavery problem is that maybe that we like to pretend we never got involved in slavery. We avoid the "black maids" issue by having a whole other set of discriminations at work in our serving history. However, I don't think "black woman in subservient role" is alien enough to not strike us as A Bit Wrong.