Race and Fandom

[browngirl]

I don't talk much about being Black in the context of my fannish involvements, which contrasts with how I talk all the time about being female. This is for many reasons, not least because whenever I do it tends to take over the conversation. I'm an African-American, but that's one facet of who I am, not the only or most important one. But more on that below.

It's an important facet of my identity, though. Like anything else in my ongoing experience of the world, it colors the way I view, read about, and write about my characters. Recently, I've been thinking about it, as I periodically do but most proximately because thete1 wrote an entry about Characters of Color, and how when TPTB do include them fandoms often underuse them.

This entry sparked several responses, including but completely not at all limited to:
http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/213836.html
http://mildredmilton.livejournal.com/18751.html

Through Te's entry I found the Remember Us? Archive, which deserves careful perusal and needs some David!fic, and through the ongoing discussion I found the community boom_tube, for discussion and submissions concerning an upcoming fanzine about race, class, and fandom.

I also found Pam Noles' essay Shame, which made me cry with the deep intense resonance I had with it. I haven't yet read the followup, where the reactions to it are addressed, in part because....

....well, in part because of the reasons I wrote this entry with trepidation. Reason #1: one of the common responses to this subject, which was told to thete1, which was told to Pam Noles, which gets said over and over again, is "I only have X amount of experience with People of Color [where X=either zero or some form of 'not enough'], so therefore I can't write them properly, and the consequences for getting them wrong are Just Too High, therefore I'm not going to try." As Tobias S. Buckell says here, that is ridiculous when said of a character who's another profession or gender or species from us, so why do we accept it about race? We shouldn't.

Reason #2: But we often do because race is seen as hugely defining and therefore walling-off in a way that other characteristics are not. I wonder if this has to do with the fact that race is both real and not-real, that it is a cultural construct, and therefore constantly and unconsciously gets shored up lest it fall right over. (You know how I said I'm African-American? That's both true and untrue: my family immigrated from Jamaica before my birth, and I grew up in a West Indian enclave in the Bronx. But I grew up in a city that considered me Black, expected to acculturate into and relate to wider US culture through being Black. And so I both do and I don't, depending.) I wonder if it's because people don't want to write stereotypes that'll offend people, but they don't trust their imaginations to let them into the heads of someone Just That Different.

Reason #3. Or, as Douglas Blaine said in his response to Pam Noles' "Shame", "I submit this is one of the underlying motives of authors for creating new races." It's certainly one of the reasons I concentrated on hobbits, and wrote interspecies, during my time in LOTR. Still, a metaphor only goes so far. I love Tolkien dearly, but I do remember the Haradrim and Southrons and "swarthy" half-orcs; in part, they stand out because so much of his worldbuilding is beautifully original and about the world of Middle-Earth, not metaphors for or otherwise transplanted wholesale from our own world. Because so much of the transplanted stuff (like the relationship between Rohan's poetry and Anglo-Saxon poetry) fits so neatly and well, but that identification between dark skin and bad guy reminds some fans (such as me) of such associations in the current world as so throws us out of Middle Earth and back here. As well as being dismaying for other reasons.

All of these are reasons I only think about this subject so often, and talk about it less often. I'm not looking forward to reading more reflexive dismissals of this subject, about seeing various kinds of incomprehension and unhappiness. I'm not writing this to make people unhappy, but I would like to see them think, and share thoughts with them. Not least because.... for me, it's partially about race in the real world, but it's also about something very important for fictional worlds, which is to say, creating characters and cultures who are accurately themselves, both in otherness and sameness with the creator, the viewpoint character, and the readers. In the end, we are all individuals, and simultaneously members of several groups, and the interactions of these memberships affect who we are in ways specific to our individualities. I think that leaving certain groups of characters out when they should be present leaves scars on the fictional landscape; in the end it's not about prevailing upon some sort of liberal guilt to get some perfect Character of Color created, but in seeing a more diverse cast of individual charactters who provide more room for different sorts of heroism, understandable villainy, recognizeable personhood, and ultimately identification.

As one of the respondents to Tobias Buckell's entry said, "What you want to research is not some universal experience of being 'another color' but the unique experience of YOUR character, no matter what race they are." Or, in my words, if you can create an alien, you also can make a realistic particular-person-who-is-of-color-among-other-characteristics. Just as you can make a realistic particular-person-who-is-of-another-gender-among-other-charaacteristics. Just as we've been asking, as feminists, for good diverse female characters who are themselves rather than The Girl, as proponents of LGBT issues for homosexual and bisexual characters who aren't evil deviants or hapless plot engines, so too should we ask as people interested in equality and as people interested in the widest possibilities of creative speculative fiction ask for for good characters of different races and ethnicities who are themselves rather than tokens, and so should we as fans approach the particular differences of race and culture as we would any other.

I mean, gosh, women who eagerly imagine the view from behind the eyes of men, Americans who feel not at all daunted tackling the perspectives of Australians and Brits, humans who feel up to the challenge of writing elves and hobbits and Vulcans --- and they think they can't imagine what it'd be like to be of a different race? I think they can. I think *we* can. And, honestly, I'm not asking anything of anyone I'm not asking of myself. The Gotham character I hadn't written yet whom I was most likely to is Renee Montoya, the next new POV I'm tackling is Cass Cain's, and I expect both to require exactly the same sort of work as writing Dick Grayson or Talia al Ghul or Koriand'r does. I have to get myself into someone else's head and surround myself with everything they are. And, I think, the operative word is "everything", not just any one characteristic.

One of the reasons I love speculative fiction, why I love SF and fantasy and historical fiction, are the limitless possibilities of exploring other ways of being sentient. When we close off consideration of a group of sentients and their lives, such as people of a different race than we are, I think it does damage to the realm of creativity, and that makes me just as sad as the perennial effort to find myself in fictional universes that seem to exclude me do. It's an ongoing effort; an example of a wonderfully diverse fictional universe is that of Firefly/Serenity, and it is in many ways, but in others it isn't. I love Book and Zoe--- I love them all --- but why in a universe where Mandarin is a lingua franca are there so few Asian people onscreen? Now my point in this example is not to disparage Firefly, which I love, but to point out that we keep moving onward, moving upward, and getting better and better as we keep creating, but we can only do that if we're mindful and take risks. Zoe's part of the same tradition as Uhura, and they're both part of the same tradition as Lois Lane, and in his way Clark Kent too; the tradition of expanding the possibilities for characters in fictional universes, and simultaneously in our own.

*looks back over entry* Well, that got longer than I'd thought it'd be when I started it, but I think I'll let it stand, and hope for the best.

Comments

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

All I can really do is nod and grin helplessly, because you *so* get it when it comes to these subjects.

Also, Jack pointed out that photomanip to me, and she looks so *intelligent* and therefore so hot. Makes me happy. :)