It might seem peculiar that Rowling would go to the trouble to racially identify certain characters only to ignore their racial status for the remainder of the series, but this particular combination of behaviors is characteristic of contemporary neo-conservative racial ideology (Omi & Winant).
According to this ideology, race is assumed to be socially constructed and racial justice is pursued via a “color-blind” society in which everyone pursues the American/British dream by “lifting themselves up by the bootstraps” (i.e., a “just world” that rewards good choices and a strong work ethic). “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our [biological or God-given] abilities,” says Dumbledore (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets 333), who later reminds Fudge, the Minister of Magic, that what people grow to be is much more important than what they were when they were born (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 708). Accordingly, for neo-conservatives, the belief that race (a biological or God-given characteristic) does not matter is typically grounded in one or both of two seemingly contradictory but actually compatible beliefs—that “we” are all the same (i.e., “humans” or “Americans” or “Muggles”) and that each one of us is a unique person.
–Robin S. Rosenberg, The Psychology of Harry Potter: An Unauthorized Examination Of The Boy Who Lived
Fans of a thing will wank themselves into a coma to make that thing look more erudite, more prestigious, and just all around more elevated than it really is. This is not a surprise and not a new phenomenon; fannish investment turns brains to mush and replaces higher functions with zergling behavior because at a certain stage of fannishness what you consume becomes your identity, and you spend both money and time toward this consumption as well as acting as unpaid marketing drones for it, incorporating it into your life philosophy and how you view the world. The synonym for this is “fucking pathetic.”
I’ve been over this before and it’s self-evidently stupid, so what I want to address is the kind of fan behavior that makes you do the opposite of being a fan of problematic things. This behavior comes in two types: ignoring that a problem exists (to wit: fans of Tolkien or R Scott Bakker) or pretending that not only does the problem not exist, the piece of media in question actively solves the problem it is perpetuating.
For the latter, see the fandom of Harry Potter, young adult at large, Joss Whedon, or romance.
There’s at least some honesty to the shit-eating roaches that say it’s okay for GRRM or Tolkien to be racist, sexist bores–these roaches flat-out don’t care and wear their bigotry on their sleeves. There’s something more insidious about the roaches who insist that JK Rowling or Joss Whedon is the Deity of Social Justice, here in their straight white glory to dispense equal rights for all people of color and queer folks by writing or creating shit that marginalizes the shit out of POC and queer people.
I probably don’t need to point out how neither does any of that, and if anything quite the opposite. You know how Firefly has no Chinese main character and how everyone of importance in Harry Potter is so white a bunch of them are actually red-headed stereotypes–but bring that up and your average social justice-loving HP drone or your average “Joss is so feminist and inclusive!” zergling bursts into a froth of incoherent rage?
What’s happening goes back to the deep fannish investment that drives people to identify with what they consume, sometimes because they’re genuinely that vapid and have nothing else to define themselves with, sometimes because they really, really love calling themselves “browncoats” and Firefly shaped their lives and perspective, okay (note: stay away from these people, some are contagious!). When this happens you feel that any critiques of these works are horrible personal assaults on your very moral integrity and sense of ethics. At this point you either flip your shit or you make up a load of dogshit to paper over the cracks of Whedon’s, Tolkien’s or Rowling’s galloping bigotry. Some common fall-backs:
- Tolkien was progressive for his time! His books are full of strong women! He told off some Nazis! (Actually, one of his gripes was that the Nazis made the noble Aryan spirit look bad.)
- Rowling includes an Asian love interest for Harry (who is perpetually weepy and has a gibberish, racist name)! Some minor character who never does anything (except be “racist” toward a red-headed white girl) turns out to be black! Dumbledore is gay! (Live in the closet, die in the closet.)
- Joss Whedon was responsible for Buffy! River Tam kicks ass! There are lesbians in Buffy! (Don’t some of them wind up dead?)
- Rue from The Hunger Games is black! (And is fridged specifically to motivate the extremely white protagonist. Very diverse, don’t you think? Almost as diverse as Far Cry 3, I would say.)
- Avatar: The Last Airbender is inspired by Asian cultures! (Remember that it’s actually made by two white American dudes?)
- Look how racially diverse YA is! Let me tell you all about White Author X, White Author Y, and White Author Z who include characters of color. Oh what’s that? I’m sorry, but white authors are all I read.
- Sookie Stackhouse is really feminist because Sookie is a Strong Female Character who loves to call other women bitches, sluts, and whores.
And so on. Basically these points are generally made based on extremely limited understanding of racism or feminism, or alternatively come out of desperate straws-clutching–and an eager, puppyish desire to congratulate white authors for being racially inclusive, male writers for being “feminist” and straight writers for being “queer-friendly.” It’s about setting a low bar so the writer, usually who belongs to a majority with oppressive privileges over that particular minority, can vault them without having to try and get applauded endlessly and mindlessly for being so awesome… even if what they write actually perpetuates oppression. It’s no coincidence that some of the YA whitewashing “controversies” were centered around books by white authors, fussed over by a fandom that rarely if ever is able to recommend works by actual writers of color–a fandom that finds “racial inclusivity” as repackaged and peddled by white people more palatable than, and preferable to, any other type.
As an aside? If you’re compiling a list of racially inclusive books and even 10% of it is white authors, you’re full of shit. If you’re compiling a list that is made up of this many white authors (and you are yourself a white author who loves to toot her own I AM SO INCLUSIVE horn), you’re full of shit and self-serving. Until the mainstay of your “racially diverse” recommendations is writers of color, you’re full of shit. Your flavor-of-the-week pseudo-progressive list of “diverse works” is full of shit.
What? Look for tidbits tossed from some huge, focus-tested corporation? Stare at these anemic, mechanical representations of lesbian sex?
Should we cringe when a new show comes out, mumbling that we hope it will have a “sympathetic depiction” of minorities and that we hope Straight White Male Writer won’t fuck it up? Should we eat scraps under the table?
They don’t love you. They will never accept you unless you remove everything good and interesting about yourself and replace it with their poison.
Capitalism takes everything we care about and turns it into a product.
–Porpentine, Creation under Capitalism and the Twin Revolution
The main thing for these people is that they get to have their cake and eat it too: they continue to consume exactly the same bullshit they always have for fun, they don’t need to leave their comfort zone, they don’t need to become more critical. They get to mindlessly keep on with Joss Whedon or Generic White YA Author #542312 and strut around showing how enlightened they are without ever having to do any work to earn those fauxgressive feel-good cookies. It’s unbelievably lazy and absolutely transparent.
It’s not even armchair activism. It’s several grades below that. It’s digging in your heels and screaming that this is your critical limits–that when it comes to the media you like you’ll construct political critiques only so long as you can contort them through illogic and mental gymnastics to make your fan favorite look good.
It’s the opposite of critical engagement, and you should very fucking well feel ashamed of yourself.
And look, I’ve done it too!
Porpentine (@aliendovecote)
/ January 7, 2013YES
Reminds me of what I was saying in my Creation Under Capitalism essay–not only is it foolish to look to straight white upper-middle class people for our sympathetic depictions, but we have the power to create our own depictions, ones that ring true:
“Look for tidbits tossed from some huge, focus-tested corporation? Stare at these anemic, mechanical representations of lesbian sex?
Should we cringe when a new show comes out, mumbling that we hope it will have a “sympathetic depiction” of minorities and that we hope Straight White Male Writer won’t fuck it up? Should we eat scraps under the table?
They don’t love you. They will never accept you unless you remove everything good and interesting about yourself and replace it with their poison…The only sympathetic depiction we can trust is the one we make ourselves, in love and tenderness and the desire for justice.”
I want more people to stop feeling like they need to be consumers and instead take things into their own hands–or at least, like you say, stop trying to justify their taste under the guise of feminism.
acrackedmoon
/ January 7, 2013I must read your essay. Do you mind if I add a link to it on this post?
Or support people who share your oppression over people throwing you scraps under the table, if nothing else.
Andrea Harris
/ January 7, 2013I just remembered something that should by rights put the coffin nail in the “Joss Whedon is progressive/feminist/whatever” meme: Right-Libertarians and conservatives of all stripes (including Christian fundamentalists) just love love love love love Firefly.
angelrenoir
/ January 7, 2013I love that you mentioned Avatar: The Last Airbender. The characters in the show pronounce the Asian names like a white person would and that always gave me gripes. I hated the show for the longest time because of it.
green_knight
/ January 7, 2013I’d completely missed that Blaise was black; there’s one single line in it. (And I’d equally missed that Dean Thomas was black; he shares Harry’s dorm and comes up a couple of times, but doesn’t really get a role in the books.) A single line is not enough to make those characters visible.
But on the lists, I think the two you mention fulfil different purposes. One is simply a listing of everything that is out there, regardless of quality and problematic status and who wrote it, just to show that these things exist. And such a list fulfills a function, too. (Ideally, they would not be necessary because most books have balanced, inclusive representations of humanity… but we’re not there yet. Far from.) The second one seems to be a list of books-to-watch, and books-to-read. The fallacy is that the first type of list is a good basic source for the second, because the first will contain a lot of inauthentic and bad representations, so you can’t just stick a pin into it and pick the ones that press your buttons best on the basis that ‘they’re all equal’.
saajanpatel
/ January 7, 2013But isn’t the first also a marketing tool based on misguided political idealism? As in, “read the these books and you are making a better world for PoCs!”
That said, I’m not sure I agree that a list for PoC characters can’t have a few (or even many) white authors if the characterization/depiction of cultures/religions are done well. Of course, one shouldn’t claim the merit badge for being a multicultural reader if one only reads of cultures from second hand sources even if they are well researched.
Athena actually had a good post about depiction of cultures not ones’ own, “Caesar and Caesar Salads” that I read last night:
http://www.starshipnivan.com/blog/?p=7368
Next Friday
/ January 7, 2013The fact that those lists are centered around PoC characters is actually a part of the problem, for it creates an illusion of inclusivity where none exists. By privileging fictional people (or even a setting only) over the real ones – the actual PoC authors – one sends a quite explicit message – there’s no need for PoC authors as long as we have a bunch of characters, no matter how caricatural. But since some white authors theoretically CAN do a good job, I guess we’re all covered.
Another message being sent is that the PoC authors may only be relevant as long as they write about other PoC characters or their “exotic’ setting. They are only there to educate the white folk about world wonders and diversity, and once they dare to pursue their own themes, they are suddenly not good enough for those ‘all inclusive’ lists.
saajanpatel
/ January 9, 2013Excellent points Next Friday. I wasn’t trying to support the notion that PoC authors are superfluous, though admittedly this message is almost inevitable. My hope is that white authors doing depiction well would lead to greater interest in cultures beyond the pseudo-Europe that only has assassins and the occasional exotic love interest of color.
Not to say that PoC authors should only be limited to depicting their own ancestral cultures either, as Mark Charan Newton, Rushdie, and Boddard, as examples, have done some excellent world building and depiction outside of their own ethnicities!
acrackedmoon
/ January 7, 2013White authors getting praised for being “awesome and inclusive” by writing characters of color are being praised for acting like human beings. They shouldn’t be, any more than men should be praised for not spitting on women.
acrackedmoon
/ January 7, 2013The person who compiled that list wrote a racist memoir. Just fyi.
Next Friday
/ January 7, 2013Oh, poor souls. They need to be told that POC exist “out there”. Fucking newsflash!!! Buy the fucking world map already!
dynamickenparker
/ January 7, 2013Manija? Do you have a link? Thank you for your excellent blog!
acrackedmoon
/ January 7, 2013Sure.
You basically just don’t fucking describe people of color like this: “A leathery little man had appeared out of nowhere. His diminutive stature, wizened face, and pointy white beard reminded me of a china figurine I had of a gnome riding a pig.”
Or this:
whythebicyclists
/ January 8, 2013I think I need bleach for my brain after reading that.
Nonny Blackthorne
/ January 8, 2013Yeah, that is… seriously racist, and in regards to the description of the dwarf, ableist as well. I’m just… jaw-dropped, really. Why the hell would you write this shit down?
Brain bleach, pleeeeeease.
Neorice (@Neoriceisgood)
/ January 7, 2013Interesting read, thank you.
Avery Shy
/ January 7, 2013I read that list you linked to. Just going by what the blogger says about them, they do sound mildly inclusive in terms of race and sexuality. BUT. Then I got to her description of Tamora Pierce’s Circle of Magic series and it became clear there was some vast exaggeration involved.
Her description was “An excellent, well-characterized imaginary-world fantasy series with four main characters, two of whom are people of color. [...] There are also major lesbian characters, including the black metal mage, Daja.”
^That up there is just blatant lies.
There is one POC character (Daja), not two. (And even if there were two, so what?) And the whole lesbian thing… hahaha, no. There is one lesbian main character (Daja again) and her sexuality isn’t brought up until book nine, wherein Daja realizes she’s a lesbian and has a horrible, short, sad relationship with a woman who ultimately rejects her.
There are also two secondary characters who are probably lesbians (they live together and hug sometimes), but their romance is so swept-under-the-carpet even their foster children feel weird about bringing it up. Let me repeat: they are two powerful, interesting, intelligent women. Living together. Raising children. And they can’t explicitly be gay.
I loved her books when I was a kid (yay feminism!) but going back now, as an adult, they make me uncomfortable (boo racism).
Jessica Liang
/ January 7, 2013I want to send a link to this essay to whomever keeps trying to justify the yellowface in Cloud Atlas under the film’s purported themes of unity and inclusiveness. Maybe one to Lana Wachowski, too, even. Because you hit the nail on the head, totally.
oakdilettante
/ January 8, 2013I can’t even fathom someone trying to use Harry Potter as an example of pro-POC social justice. I mean I really enjoy Harry Potter and all, but it’s just white kids fighting a bad guy.
I always interpreted JK Rowlings theme about “making choices” as a commentary on the British class system. The comment you quoted about the implications of that w/r/t to racism/race issues is not something I had thought about, but now I am. Thanks for sharing it.
Seth Gordon
/ January 8, 2013Should “Joss Whedon is progressive for Hollywood, which is a pretty sad commentary on the rest of Hollywood” be counted as a subcategory of “Tolkien was progressive for his time”?
saajanpatel
/ January 9, 2013Well I don’t have as harsh an opinion on Tolkien as others here, but I do think it’s mistaken to believe Tolkien was progressive for his time. ACM and Athena have pointed out that this was the time of Malcom X and Virginia Wolf respectively.
naishee
/ January 9, 2013Malcolm X was 60s, Tolkien was 30s, 40s and 50s. Something quite dramatic happened in the 1960s before Malcolm X’s rise to prominence… Virginia Wolf is another matter, but I don’t know enough about her. But compare Tolkien to the Tories in the UK of the day, and he was a left-wing liberal. Tolkien and Churchill are a good comparison (they died 7 years apart). And Churchill had almost no redeeming qualities. Most people just don’t realise *how* bad it was back then, in the UK at least.
The best case for Tolkien is the story of Numenor, of how “good-intentioned” colonialisation to help the savages turn horrbly evil. He also did refer to WW1 as “the war of the colonial powers”, and thought it a meaningless war, from an ethical standpoint; both sides being wrong.
But the important thing is the writings he left behind, and how they read now. Racist? Yeah. Sexist? Yeah. There are a few stories that goes against the grain, like the Haleth, Galadriel and Eowyn ones (my interpretation of the Eowyn story is more forgiving than mosts, though). But… In Huckleberry Finn, the N-word is used a lot. It’s a pretty good book. But I have read a LOT on the internet about how black people felt about reading the book in lower grades when they were young, aloud in class. And it’s pretty heartbreaking. That it was written long ago is no excuse.
Seth J Dickinson (@sethjdickinson)
/ January 10, 2013“or pretending that not only does the problem not exist, the piece of media in question actively solves the problem it is perpetuating.”
I saw Zero Dark Thirty and it made me super uncomfortable (obviously) but I walked out thinking it was the most profoundly anti-American-policy work in the last decade. It seemed like it flat-out stated that the obsessive hunt for revenge on bin Laden had made Americans into empty, terrified people unable to relate to the world except through fear and violence. The movie climaxes with a Pakistani interpreter for ~our heroic SEALs~ approaching his countrymen and warning them, face to face, ‘Stay away. These people will kill you.’
But of course I also worry that I’m just reading this into the movie because it had, for Hollywood, some really excellent (possibly queer?) women characters who developed meaningful relationships and got to exert power in ways that neither minimized their gender nor ignored the systemic discrimination they faced, and I don’t want that movie to also be a jingoistic piece of propaganda about how we avenged ourselves on ‘the most dangerous man on Earth’ (lol)
So I guess the takeaway here is that I would be really interested in what you felt about a movie that seemed, to me, to be asking Americans to consider whether they’d been reduced to a gang of torturing sociopaths, or whether you thought this reading was just committing the crime I quoted up front. Except I can’t think of a reason you would actually want to sit through this movie, since one way or another it’ll just tell you stuff you already know!
Alasdair Murray
/ January 10, 2013@sethjdickinson:
“I don’t want that movie to also be a jingoistic piece of propaganda about how we avenged ourselves on ‘the most dangerous man on Earth’”
I think you’re too late on that one. I haven’t seen ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, and probably won’t, but it’s already been widely reported as a ‘jingoistic piece of propaganda’ and seems to be succeeding for precisely that reason. The point is, it doesn’t really matter if you saw it as a criticism of American foreign policy, or even if it was intended that way by the filmmakers; most people who go to see it won’t see it that way, and their understanding of the film won’t go any further than ‘AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!’.
Or, to put it more simply, trying to make a critical, anti-American film about how the US military tracked down and killed one of their biggest enemies is going to be a fool’s errand from the start.
ǝuuǝıɹpɐ (@adrienneleigh)
/ February 9, 2013@Seth J Dickinson, @Alasdair Murray : I think Mr. Dickinson is right about it being profoundly critical of American policy, given that it was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who’s known for pretty nuanced movies (and not known for movies that uphold the status quo. ANYONE’S status quo.)
But Mr. Murray is almost certainly right that every damn reviewer is misreading it. “America Fuck Yeah” is sadly a way of life over here, for a lot of people. So much so that people who are satirizing it heavily fall under Poe’s Law.
lacksconviction (@lacksconviction)
/ March 8, 2013Yeah, this is a big thing in a lot of the fandoms I’m involved in right now. You won’t believe the lengths that some fandoms will go to to convince themselves and others that their preferred animanga is ~the most progressive thing ever~. (Actually, you probably will.) They’ll even say things like, “Well, it’s better than most shounen/shojo,” as if that is actually relevant to anything.
The worst offenders I’ve found so far are in the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom — especially the stans of the original manga. The way they tell it, it’s a paragon of nothing but inclusive feminist virtues. Which I’m afraid it very much isn’t.
acrackedmoon
/ March 9, 2013Hahahahaha FMA the paragon of feminist virtues hahahaha.
Winry is a fucking disaster and every major player is a dude. What drug are these people on?
amarielah
/ April 8, 2013Here’s one such post about how amazingly, wonderfully feminist and inclusive it is. Which at least acknowledges that Garfiel is “problematic” (I would go with “a disgrace”, personally, since a lot of the jokes are about how he’s a sexual predator lololol), but says its treatment of race is 5/5. Which is just…a whole new level of “what manga did you even read”.
http://nevermore999.livejournal.com/138905.html
vaiyt
/ April 13, 2013How can one even praise the “treatment of race” in a manga where there are literally a handful of non-Aryan characters worthy of note?
acrackedmoon
/ April 13, 2013And one of them, IIRC, is a Chinese analogue who literally has slits for eyes.
amarielah
/ April 13, 2013Nevermind the fact that the racial minority characters she praises as being neither “victims” nor “villains” (because acknowledging the victimhood of victimized people is apparently racist) achieve their exalted status by cooperating with the Aryans who exterminated their people — not their descendants, even: the actual individuals who were involved. And are portrayed as straight-out villains for killing military targets who are that world’s equivalent of WMDs.
vaiyt
/ March 10, 2013FMA what
Really, I love Major Armstrong to bits, she’s a hundred kinds of awesome, but… no.
tigerpetals
/ March 13, 2013I loved her so much and she’s a bit player. Dampened my enjoyment of the series.