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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.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 01:28 am (UTC)From:Actually, in the old-school Who I'm familiar with he pretty often treated companions in exactly the same way -- for example with Three and Jo, or Three and Four with Sarah Jane, and especially Four with 'noble savage' Leela (a clear example of your point about the difference between a white and black actress in a role). And come to think of it, Four's treatment of Harry Sullivan is pretty much a Captain Mainwaring-like 'stupid boy!', comparable to Mickey, even though Harry too is a (white) doctor.
That being said, there's a fine line when trying to write CoC with more sensitivity to racial issues -- it's very, very easy to tip over into writing stereotypes. If we want things to change with regard to portrayals of those characters, then at some point they have to be treated as Just Anther Character, and allowed to have the same sort of non-race-specific reactions as the white characters. It might or might not work in any particular individual case, but it needs to be tried.
On the whole, I thought S3 of new Who did a reasonable job with Martha -- it seemed clear that she got a lot out of the relationship even when there was the unrequited crush thing going on. There were quite a lot of scenes with her and the Doctor with a very Rose-like feel: a mutual 'isn't this just TOO COOL!' or deep concern about Martha from the Dcotor as they go about exploring wherever, to the point where I sometimes wondered if they were adapting scripts written with Rose in mind. But with both it's very much in the spirit of earlier Who -- it's only the semi-spwcific treatment of romance aspects that's new.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 04:40 am (UTC)From:I'm always chary of arguments about how "easy" it is to start writing stereotypes accidentally. My reaction is -- isn't that why writers do research? If you want to write about werewolves in Victorian London, you go out and *learn stuff* about Victorian London. I'm always puzzled that white writers so often treat characters/people of color as if they are Utterly Inscrutable Forever and Ever. Meet some people of color, for crying out loud! Note how they are different from each other, and do not match your stereotyped expectations in every way! It's not rocket science, honestly. I think the professionals who work in television, in wildly diverse environments like L.A. or London (okay, sometimes Vancouver or Cardiff, but still! We're not talking about a cornfield in Iowa, here!) can be called upon to make the effort.
One of the reasons I have the utmost respect for Tom Fontana's work is that he's genuinely interested in his characters of color as subjects and as individuals. But at the same time, characters like Augustus and Said, Gee and Lewis and Pembleton, are not raceless -- they are specifically *African-American* men, and that informs their characters...without making any of them interchangable with any of the others. I say this just so you know that I'm setting RTD and other showrunners a task I think is totally within the bounds of possibility to accomplish! Hell, even the occasional sitcom can produce characters of color who are both really *characters* and really *of color* -- Turk and Carla on Scrubs are some of my favorite human beings on television ever; both their ethnicity and their full personhood are present and accounted for.
The trick to not writing stereotypes is not to do it. If it doesn't come naturally for you, work harder to get there. My free advice to writers. *g*
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 10:50 am (UTC)From:I agree, although I think that applies to any characters who don't have your own experiences (i.e. most of them, really). I suppose I personally have a tendency to wing it, although since I write in Harry Potter fandom I can get away with it to a certain extent because that posits a world where the wizard characters really are 'colourblind', but have a fully-functioning equivalent prejudice about magical blood.
(Mind you, I'd like to see a story which dealt with the probably different reaction of 'Muggle-born' students to racial differences -- I can't off-hand think of one. If I get round to writing one of the Dean Thomas stories I had in mind -- and I'm waiting for the last book before doing any more! -- I should probably incorporate that theme.)
As for Who, I think the clunky bits are more to do with Martha's family than Martha herself. Martha's cool.