Race and Fandom
Sep. 23rd, 2006 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
browngirlI 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
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 tothete1, 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.
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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 10:48 pm (UTC)And the rejoinder included is that well, you can make up whole new species and cultures, and no one (in f&sf anyway) has a problem with that, why can't you cope with race?
For me, it gets bound up with fear of Doing It Wrong, whatever It is. If I write some new species or culture, I am by definition not Doing It Wrong because I'm the Author and what's right is what I say is right. If I were to create, and were to include in my creation someone of a culture or cultural experience significantly different than mine, I would have a permanent crick in my neck from looking over my shoulder for the ravening hordes accusing me of Doing It Wrong. And in that case, there is an objective reality and the experience of real people that contribute to the definition of Right and Wrong. It's not just auctorial fiat anymore. And the cultural differences that relate to the experience of race in this country are much harder to research than, say, the culture of 18th century Japan. Because I feel like I can ask about Japan. But, and here comes the White Liberal Guilt, I don't feel like I can ask about the contemporary experience of African-Americans. Because I feel like I should already know, and the fact that I don't reflects the suppression/opression of that culture by the dominant mainstream culture to which I belong, and...
And as I've just demonstrated, I bite myself in the small of the back for a while and then give it up as a bad job.
So if I'm making it up from whole cloth, I'm less scared of Offending Someone and Doing It Wrong because there's no one whose culture it is.. If I write about my own culture, I can stand on my own experience. If I write about someone else's culture, I feel like I would be walking on quicksand.
(Of course, not being a creator, all of the above is pretty moot. And I hope, having read your post and (eventually!) the comments, that should I ever set forth to create I would think about this issue.)
no subject
Date: 2006-10-05 11:18 pm (UTC)*grin* Hey, brighteyes.
My reply may come off sounding stroppy, because I'm exhausted. If so, I don't mean it to. I'm really glad you read my entry, and replied to it.
In the greater LJ-wide discussion, a great many people have said what you said here, that they're afraid of getting it wrong.
1) Within fandom, being especially afraid that people of color will form ravening hordes and descend on you accusing you of getting it wrong means, as
2) You said, I don't feel like I can ask about the contemporary experience of African-Americans.
Sure you can! Really. How else can you learn? Narrowly speaking, you can ask me, since you know me, and I'm an African-American, and I'll tell you what I know and what I think and as much about the holes and gaps in my knowledge as I can. More widely speaking, you can ask lots of people, by reading the books and articles and blogs they've written about their lives. People from Booker T. Washington to Toni Morrison to
3) In the end, each character is an individual, just like every person is an individual. I don't think anyone is asking for you to encapsulate The History, Culture, and Lives of All People of Color, but just that if you're writing a particular person of color that they be a person, with their background and culture and color part of but not all of their life. And that.... if the fear of Getting It Wrong means that people will write insectoid aliens but all their human characters must be White, well, writ large across fandom and speculative fiction, that means a dearth of characters of color, it means that people like me can't be part of these worlds. And that's kind of depressing.
I know you're not writing right now, but I think the Fear of Getting It Wrong is important to address in general, as a philosophy, and also in case you do end up writing or drawing or whatnot. I'm saying this to be encouraging. :) *hugs you*
no subject
Date: 2006-10-06 04:45 pm (UTC)1) I don't fear that people of color (ravening or not) are scarier than those who conduct shipwars, etc. In fact, I find them less scary. But more intimidating. (Understand the rest is hypothetical - I don't hang out in fanfic-fora or other places where the wars you mention tend to crop up). This is why: if someone comes back and says "I don't think you've interpreted the text correctly [text|show|comic|fanon]" (however rabidly and incoherently they may express that), I have grounds to work with. I can re-examine the source and either discover that I'd overlooked something that contradicted my view, or confirm that my interpretation is valid. I'm OK with the idea that different people can experience and interpret the text differently, even if my questioner is not.
But that's because I feel like I have standing to interpret the text. I read/watched, and so did they, and we each have opinions. To the extent that they draw upon the text, they are both valid opinions.
When it comes to issues of race and culture, I don't feel like I have standing.
And, when it comes right down to it, I don't need a ravening horde. I'm self-ravening. I can create a crowd in my head to glare at me disapprovingly before I ever get words onto paper, let alone out into public view. So it's more my problem than anything else, so the thinking about it and reading posts like this is helpful to me. At least it gives me something to raven back at the virtual crowd with.
2) Intellectually, I know I can. (And practically, thank you for the specific permission to ask you.) But again, this is a problem with the shape of the inside of my own head. These topics seem to warrant the internalized scandalized "Oh! You can't ask about that!"
3) The other big fear, other than the big Getting It Wrong fear, is the Tokenism fear. I have seen in mass media the following progression: 1) No members of the group in question are presented. (Which seems to be where we are in bits of fandom, and it's wrong). 2) Members of the group are presented, but only in subordinate roles and/or as comic relief (because Those People make mistakes, and it's even funnier when they're acting Above Themselves) 3) Members of the group are presented as Shining Examples who can Do No Wrong (aka the Sainted Token). 4) Members of the group are presented on equal footing with members of other groups, free to err or not as demanded by their individual character and the plot. This is the goal.
I can easily see myself getting stuck in the following cycle: Someone in the plot has to make a Mistake here (to move things along). I can have Jane do it; it makes sense for her as a character. But then it'll be the woman on the team screwing up. And didn't she make the mistake last time? People will think (there they are again, the invisible Auditors in my head!) that she always screws up, and it's because she's the woman. Oh, god, what am I thinking subconsciously? Am I making her screw up every time because she's the woman? Maybe it'd better be someone else, even though it makes more sense for Jane to do it. But now I'm protecting her from screwing up because she's the Token Woman and represents All Women and she mustn't do anything that would reflect badly on the group she represents. I don't want to make her the Token Woman, so maybe she'd better be the one to screw up after all. Lather, rinse, (froth), repeat. Close word processor with extreme prejudice; give up on whole process as a bad idea.
I entirely agree that this is a problem that we should be aware of and work to not perpetuate. Despite the fact that I continue to argue with you, I very much appreciate that you've brought this up. I guess the only solution is a mantra I've seen
I don't have to Do It Right, I just have to Do It Less Badly. And this discussion at least has me thinking about how to accomplish Less Badly. (And peering with suspicion at my own subconscious, but that's not your problem.)