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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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Date: 2007-07-16 04:18 am (UTC)From:White writers very often seem to feel that race is something they can "choose" to include or not include. This is flatly impossible. As long as you are writing about characters who have race (i.e. human characters), you are addressing race. You can address it by what you don't say, by what you imply, by the images and language you choose -- you can address it in a thousand ways other than explicitly speaking about race. But sadly, if you don't deal with it consciously, you aren't always aware of exactly *how* race is coming up in your work, and I think that's what's happened to RTD and Dr. Who. Race *is* an issue this season -- a real issue, not a fake issue, not one we have to stop talking about because the writers maybe didn't mean to make it one. It's harder to decide not to care about race for the space of the story you want to tell than you might think it is. It's also grossly patronizing to tell your readers/audience that what they see in the story is not "relevant." Readers find relevant what they find relevant, and any writer knows it's not always what you expected it to be.
What "already racist assumptions" am I bringing to the table when I see Martha Jones or Mickey Smith?
Well, rather than rise to your bait, I'll tell you mine. I assume that, as black characters on tv, they're likely to be vastly less important than the white characters, and that their relationships with white characters will not be relationships of equals. Sadly, my assumptions about the relative importance to any given narrative of the black vs. the white characters is rarely challenged, and very certainly has not been challenged by the Mickey/Rose or the Martha/Ten relationships. I've been given exactly what I expect, a reinforcement of the same entertainment cliches that keeps bolstering people's conscious or subconscious attitudes that nothing black people do is quite as interesting or worthy or important as what white people do.
God forbid I bring up how I was raised to treat everyone fairly, or give examples of my interactions with black friends and family, because none of that counts, somehow.
Unfortunately, no, it doesn't. A lot of people are raised with those values and have good relationships with black friends and family, and yet still repeat attitudes that bolster the structures of racism in ways they would never, ever want to. The solution isn't having good intentions -- I wish it were that easy!
But race is just one component in what made you you, or what made me me. It's not necessarily the most important one.
It's probably reductive to talk about the "most" and the "second-most" important element of identity, but what I've noticed, consistently, everywhere and always, is that white people are ten billion times more likely to say they think race isn't important than non-white people are. In my opinion, expecting people of color to prioritize race the way white people do, even when they say that's *not* their own experience, is an unintentionally profoundly racist thing to do.
What do you think the next step ought to be? What is the corrective action to be taken?
Stop ignoring race. Talk about it. Talk more. Talk better. Listen a lot. If you want to know about television that I think does it well? I'm sorry, I'm not too familiar with British tv, so I can't cite you examples there, but on American television, I'd say that anything Tom Fontana-produced (Homicide: Life on the Streets, Oz, The Wire) is a shining example of taking the next step -- lots of characters of color, with a variety of experiences and personalities, serving their own plotlines and character arcs and not acting as spear-carriers in a white character's, and seriously engaged with race at least some of the time, while treating it as a given the rest of the time.