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[personal profile] browngirl
I was going to post about the "how to write the Other" discussion going on (posts by [livejournal.com profile] matociquala and [livejournal.com profile] deepad among others) but I hadn't yet compiled an exhaustive list. Then [livejournal.com profile] lomedet sent me a link to [livejournal.com profile] miriam_heddy's "The Lone Jew in Fandom", about the recent NUMB3RS episode "Arrow of Time" and about the depiction of the Eppes family as Jewish in general, and I found myself considering the discussion from the other side, as it were. This is a situation where I'm a member of the majority, a person benefiting from privilege, and I want to be the kind of ally that I would like others to be to me in the situations where I'm not.

My reply, which I wanted to put here too:

Thank you very much for this post. A friend of mine pointed me to it.

[Paragraph on my perspective, because there always has to be one.] Being a woman of color, I think about discussions like these a lot; I may be over-analogizing, but I feel as if I'm looking at this one from the "other side", not from the POV of a member of a misrepresented minority but from that of a member of the oppressive, privileged majority, one who wants to do what I can to be an active ally or at least not actively contribute to oppression. So I'm thinking of what I want people to do with respect to characters of color, and trying to see how I can do that with respect to Jewish characters.

I was at first delighted by The Arrow of Time because I was delighted to see Don in synagogue. I let that delight blind me to the huge problems in the way that was presented, from the emptiness of the synagogue to its use as the location of a potential shootout (!) -- even setting up that moment at the end where Robin tactitly gives Don her approval of his religious journey doesn't excuse that. I should have seen better before you pointed it out; thank you for saying this, personally because you opened my eyes, but globally because it needed to be said.

I've been thinking about how to write Don and Charlie as Jewish, how to show how their heritage informs every aspect of their lives the way I see it inform my Jewish friends' lives, the way being Black and a former Christian informs my life, the way it *should* if they are to be fully rounded people. This is uncomfortable to say, but that extends to thinking about their relationships. I love Amita, I am delighted to see a woman of color in her role on the show and an interracial relationship presented as a stable and long term one, but I have to consider if her role was taken from a potential Jewish character who should have had a claim to it.

But then, perhaps that very discomfort indicates that I should think about these things.

Thank you for having written this. I've learned a lot from it, both about how to do better by characters I love and the real people they represent, and about how to be true to oneself while being a fan of problematic canon.

PS I realized that "obviously Fallacci's comment was asinine so I won't say anything about it" isn't going to cut it, so I came back to edit my comment. *smile* It struck me as being the same statement people often say about characters of color or LGBT characters, that same 'it doesn't matter' dismissiveness, but that may be my particular lens. Regardless of what it is or isn't like, that statement was certainly *wrong*, and I thought I should at least say so.

Last but not least: yes, I feel weird about posting this on a Saturday morning; I don't want to feel like I'm trying to hide this from people who might have a perspective on it. But I also wanted to write this post while my thoughts were fresh, so.

Date: 2009-01-18 03:33 am (UTC)
sophinisba: Gwen looking sexy from Merlin season 2 promo pics (sayid by ofthe_sky)
From: [personal profile] sophinisba
I stopped watching ER some years ago too, but I was thinking about something I read really early on, like the first or second season, that said Eric LaSalle liked playing Benton partly because that role hadn't been written as The Black Doctor (like Denzel Washington's character on St. Elsewhere) but instead had been written as The Arrogant Doctor, and only later cast with him, a black actor. And obviously later they were able to get into some different story lines that dealt with his identity, his relationship to his family and to the black community, and so on. (I remember this one episode where he was on the committee selecting new med students and he's pushing to say, Okay, maybe this kid's test scores aren't as good but he's had to overcome some other stuff, and that seemed to be such a struggle for his character but he was doing it, and it was really cool, or at least so it seemed to me.)

I'm just thinking about these Numbr3rs writers saying that they wrote these characters and then they happened to get Jewish actors and how it was Rob Morrow as an actor who had to push for Jewish themes to be present in the show, and how people were discussing in comments that something similar happened o X-Files, and I just. Like...

Like way too often it seems that when a Jewish character or character of color appears on these shows, it's either that the series creators
1. wrote a character with "no particular ethnicity" in mind (that is, wrote them as WASP without realizing they were writing any particular ethnicity) and cast this Jewish actor or actor of color, but then have to be seriously pushed before they'll put anything in the show that talks about this characters family or faith or community, or else
2. wrote a character as being of a certain race or ethnicity and based it on stereotypes. (Stargate Universe omg.)

D:

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