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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: 2007-07-16 02:33 pm (UTC)From:Thanks for writing this-- the more I see discussions of this on my f-list, the better.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-18 05:51 pm (UTC)From:I think you're right that this is usually the effect of saying it; probably usually unconscious, but all the more powerful for being so (and so unexamined).
Sometimes, though, I think that what's happening with white people who say "I don't see race!" or "I'm colorblind!" is that it's a purely reflexive expression that they say because somewhere, somewhen, it got put into their head that that's what they should be, or should aspire to be. I don't think they know what it MEANS; or what it might have meant, at one point. And thus, when a lot of people use it today, it means... whatever they think it means; and what they think it means is often far removed from how it might have been meant to start with.
(There are othere examples of this. Expressions that summarize a movement or way of thinking that was good in intention, but which has become distorted over time, with the expression taking on and indeed embodying negative connotations. My brain's mush at the moment, though, and won't seem to give me any of the other examples... except maybe "political correct", but it doesn't map neatly onto this idea.)
And I'm totally just guessing about what "colorblind" may have been meant to suggest, once upon a time. But I have this feeling that it might originally have been meant to refer only to a concept like that embodied by that MLK quote that someone made in earlier comments -- that the "colorblindness" to aspire to is one in which you ignore color/race as a factor in judging the worth/ability of a person. And that's *IT*. That it wasn't meant to suggest that color/race doesn't mean *anything* -- but that it should not mean something in a "blind test". That in contexts such as getting a job, or deciding who to date, or who you can/will marry, or how you treat a person in a service/receiving service context, yes, be "blind" to color. Which essentially means, to put it crudely -- treat everyone, no matter their color/race, as if they belonged to the color/race that you naturally privilege. Overcome your white privilege -- extend it to everyone, not just other whites.
In a sense, though, that kind of colorblindness *requires* you not to be blind to color/race -- because in order to overcome your privilege and your own ingrained, reflexive reactions, you've got to see someone else's color/race, and make a conscious effort to be "blind" to it (in a context where being blind to that factor *could* be a positive, such as job hiring).
But, this kind of "colorblindness" only works in a limited way. It only works if you TRY to do it; just patting yourself on the back for "being" colorblind doesn't work, unless you examine your actions to see whether they're *actually* colorblind. It also only works to prevent a negative -- it should, in theory, make you think twice (and then three or four times, if necessary) to prevent you from automatically privileging a white candidate over a PoC candidate (or, to prevent you from putting an unconscious negative checkmark next to the PoC).
It does not, for example, address institutional imbalances. It doesn't take social factors into account, and it won't address those. In fact, it actively falls down in relation to that -- if being "colorblind" means you leave color/race out of a decision, and only judge on "merits", without thinking of the social context of race, then you may fail to see the worth/achievements of a PoC in relation to a white candidate, because you are still coming from an unexamined white viewpoint that privileges white categories of accomplishment over alternative categories -- even though PoCs may for a host of reasons not have the same level of accomplishment when judged by the white yardstick, reasons that are inextricably bound up in... yeah, racially influenced social constructs.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-18 05:52 pm (UTC)From:I also often wonder whether the "colorblindness" strategy is simply... woefully out of date. By which I mean -- as a tool for highlighting problematic thinking, and for changing behavior, maybe it was a tool that was more effective 30 or 40 years ago, because it's a blunt instrument, instead of a nuanced one; it works only in a limited way, but if you're starting from zero, it can be useful. (The Sesame Street approach, as others have pointed out -- just getting people to take those first broad steps.) At some point, though, in your thinking on/approach to race -- you've got to grow up, and move beyond those simplistic tools, and start learning about more nuanced ones. So perhaps the problem is just... growing up is hard, examining problems in a nuanced way is hard, and it's awfully tempting to grab onto a simplistic notion, and think that because you've done *a little* work, you don't need to do any more.
(I'm sorry -- I didn't mean to spam your comment. This is more of a tangential outgrowth of thinking from what you said, rather than a response to it or an argument with it.)
(And also -- thank you, Hth, for an excellent original post.)