Subashini writes about Les Miserables and whiteness.
But Red Lights didn’t need De Niro. Maybe it would have been less of a smug mess without him. He plays the character of Simon Silver, a charismatic superstar psychic, with absolutely zero charisma. One imagines that De Niro might have possessed some charisma at some point—so many people seem to love him—but that charisma is gone and you’re left with De Niro and his superstar-psychic soliloquies. With De Niro now you get a superstar playing an actor playing a superstar psychic. Something was lost along the way, and I think the something is Feelings. What happens to male actors who are great (or considered great?) They ossify and become spectres of themselves. This is what awards shows like the Golden Globes “honour” year after year. Ghosts. While real people like black women and women of colour try to find roles that don’t demean them too much.
Check out a strong female character.
White People HQ brings you many pearls of wisdom. For example, on being a straight ally:
Gay people are the in thing right now. They are all over TV and the movies. Every summer they have a huge parade which, if you ignore the first half being filled with uniformed colonizers and harassment agents (the military and the police respectively), is really fun. To get to the parade you will need your ally card. Here is how you get it.
The most important thing about being a straight ally is reminding everyone that you are straight. Never let anyone think you are gay. Letting people think you are gay might mean you get a gay card which comes with so much more responsibility than the ally card. You want access to the parade and maybe some services (decorating and the like) you stereotypically associate with gay folk you don’t want the real struggle. That is draining. If you are really lucky you might be able to use some gay folk to brighten up your dull racist assertions about a particular elsewhere being full of evil people.
A recent TV advert by Unicef offers parents a chance to purchase a card system allowing them to discuss difficult concepts with their children. Although the concept of parenting-by-card is unusual in most cultures one is expected to jump on the opportunity to have your parenting automated should you present yourself as white. The final card in the Unicef deck deals with something every white person struggles with: empathy.
Empathy was largely inbred out of white leadership in order for them to succeed as colonial overlords over a century ago. Nevertheless a combination of training and drugging (mainly privilege and experimental pharmaceuticals) keeps non-elite whites from developing empathy during puberty. This results in strange result when white people encounter others who display the trait.
It’s okay white people, the person who wrote this is white. Calm down. Don’t be a sensitive crybaby. Grow up. Get some skin. Punch yourself in the face.
More on whiteness at Spectra Speaks: When Doing Good Goes Wrong: One Woman’s Story about White Saviorism in Africa. See?
Jaymee Goh lays down some truth, again on white people: Racist Things Steampunks Are Not Immune To: Looking for Other People’s Hurt To be Offended By.
Chiusse goes after misogyny in neckbeard favorite Waste of Time: A Misogyny of Light.
Claire Light has a few things to say about urban fantasy.
Outsider status: although all these conflicts and anxieties and desires are common and mainstream, there’s still the desire to stand outside of the mainstream, to be special and also be to be a bit oppressed. This is partly adolescent, partly American (wherein our entire identity hinges on overcoming challenges and being individual), and partly guilty-white-girl. The last one is why so many urban fantasy heroines are mixed race (never just poc, though.) In this post-civil-rights-movement era, outsider status is most quickly vouchsafed by being a person of color. But, of course, no white woman REALLY dreams of being black, so it’s always American Indian or Asian (although the half-Asians are usually the sidekicks.)
This is why white authors who throw in biracial status for their characters can’t be trusted. Trust them even less if they toot their “inclusion” horn. For more, see Assassin’s Creed 3: Mighty Whitey Fantasy Recast as Biracial Dude.
Ronan Wills gives some thoughts on Djoango Unchained in The Caucasian Escape Hatch.
ronanwills
/ January 27, 2013White people HQ is my new favourite website XD
layogenic
/ January 28, 2013All of this on the tail end of white people channeling black activists this month in the US. I am feeling ill. :/
Andrea Harris
/ January 28, 2013I went to that Huffingtonpost link and now I think I’m 1% stupider. On the other hand, looks like the reign of Old White Men is about to collapse into senility, so there’s that.
layogenic
/ January 28, 2013McCarthy. Reagan. Cheney.
Old White Men being senile has never stopped them from being in power.
pearceduncan
/ January 28, 2013After reading that Huffington Post link, I now fully expect pro-lifers to start saying that armed fetuses could prevent abortion.
layogenic
/ January 29, 2013Close.
gefnsdottir
/ January 31, 2013I’m really, really, really sick of the “biracial” protagonist. Actually, I’m sick of UF in general, but not so sick of it that I decided to try my hand at writing it….and I ended up with a protagonist who is white, gay, and married to a black cop. Nobody wants to read UF with that kind of protagonist though, so it’s currently sleeping on my hard drive.
It also seems like a lot of characters are “biracial” when there’s really no reason for them to be like that. On the show “Elementary” for instance, I was looking it up and said that Watson (played by Lucy Liu) was biracial, and I was just like “WTF? Can white people not relate to her unless she has some whiteness in her?” I mean, there’s nothing wrong with biracial characters, it just seemed like it was stuck there to be like DON’T WORRY WHITE PEOPLE, IT’S OKAY, YOU CAN STILL RELATE TO HER.
BTW, have you heard of this book called “Out” by Laura Preble? It’s basically homophobia’s answer to “Save the Pearls”. I think you’ll love it. Please eviscerate it for everyone’s amusement.
layogenic
/ January 31, 2013I totally agree that, in particular when a creator is white, the “biracial” chip is ante’d up as a way of being “look how inclusive I am” with an excuse to not ever have to point out race again (see Anita Blake, amongst many others). I’ve also heard about a bajillion different ethnicity raffle guesses for Lucy Liu’s heritage, most of which are mixed. She’s full Taiwanese, if her wiki is to be believed.
On the other hand, there are also examples of biracial actors enforcing their ethnicity onto their characters because it DOES matter (ie, Jennifer Beals’ character in The L-Word, originally white in script). In any sort of racially dominated society, being a mix drastically changes one’s experiences with both/all the groups represented–often to the exclusion of the individual.
There’s definitely a narrative role that biracial characters uniquely fill. On the other hand, I don’t think there should be a Reason the character is biracial, anymore than a Reason a character is a POC, because it sounds more than a little like we’re defaulting to white otherwise. The trick, as always, is representing a person accurately and honestly, without ignoring the differences that race incurs on a character’s life.
saajanpatel
/ February 1, 2013Good post. There is sort of a bind in that the existence of a bi-racial character shouldn’t *have* to default to a discussion of race anymore than having, say, an Indian character means we must have discussion about spices and Hinduism.
OTOH, there seems to be an overabundance of characters who have dark skin but light (meaning “white”) eyes. Of course this is no fault of actual bi-racial people, but rather the narrowed standards of beauty that possibly extends beyond the influence European norms. In the West though I think it is safe to say those norms do inform standards of beauty – African American and African European models are usually light skinned.
And as Moon noted in another book where a woman gets her beauty from her Norwegian half but has a “coffee tone” IIRC, or some nonsense like that.
saajanpatel
/ February 1, 2013Also, the body types deemed beautiful are not fully inclusive of those appreciated by varied minority cultures.
layogenic
/ February 1, 2013“…a bi-racial character shouldn’t *have* to default to a discussion of race anymore than having, say, an Indian character means we must have discussion about spices and Hinduism.”
Yes, exactly. Or colonialism or racism in predominantly white countries. The discussion doesn’t have to be ABOUT those things just because that is the nature of the character, but it should come from those perspectives. Or, I guess, those perspectives should be kept in mind, and not just glossed over because you don’t feel like doing research on them.
“African American and African European models are usually light skinned.”
Or photographed and then ‘shopped/airbrushed to look lighter when appealing to the wider market. Which should be in quotes, big douchey internet quotes. Similarly, using the white, western markers for standards of beauty, and adding biraciality (or just lolfantasy) to introduce “exoticism” for extra spice, primarily by giving them a tan.
chiusse
/ February 1, 2013Hey, thanks for linking!
Recent real-life WoT anecdote: my book club (which is 90% female) was meeting at the local bookstore last weekend, and apropos of nothing some 30ish dude comes up to us and gushes about how amazing Robert Jordan’s fantasy world is and how we should all be reading The Eye of the World. Yeah…