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bliumchikOkay, okay, I TRIED to stay out of it because I KNEW it would be full of the same old infuriating People Who Just Don't Get It, but I caved. I read up on the blowout currently going by RaceFail 09. And I found to my surprise that I did, in fact, have something to say about it.
Okay, firstly, to get it out of the way, my thoughts onyaoi Writing Characters Of Colour. This is pretty simple on a macro level - there are two ways in which race can affect characterisation. The first is a character's cultural background, which is in fact not the SAME as race and is unique to every character regardless of race (and there's nothing that makes my skin crawl like a story full of blonde clones who somehow have identical family histories) (...we're talking about scifi so let me clarify that I do not ACTUALLY mean ACTUAL clones) (and okay other things make my skin crawl more, blonde clones are just, you know, boring. HYPERBOLE DAMMIT), BUT does correlate somewhat with race. The other way race affects characterisation is in how people percieved to be of a certain race are treated by others of various races throughout their lives. Somebody who is "white" enough to "pass" will experience certain privileges when dealing with strangers - but if she's from a family and community full of people who CAN'T pass, she might have some issues with that. Somebody who is visually white while coming from a background completely different to that generally associated with Whiteness (e.g. myself and Elizabeth Bear) usually has a tendency to not notice the privilege and not think of themselves as an Oppressor, which can create strain in certain situations.
But we're not talking about that yet. My point is: characters. Their family and their interaction with other of and outside of their community are vital to their personalities, and so yes, Race Is Relevant.
Now, on to the actual controversy. EDIT: I got distracted and ended up waffling about something only vaguely related? So my actual comments about the actual internet kerfuffle are in the next post. *looks sheepish* All right. So. The thing about fantasy is - quick summary of my understanding of the background here before I get into what I think I can actually add to the discussion. The thing about fantasy is that offensive themes are very easy to disguise in it. Mostly subconsciously. Because, of course, it's not our world. Back before anyone was really talking about Coded Language and whatnot it was very easy for someone whose personal worldview was very self-centered to create a fictional world in which all those pesky things which do not fit either don't exist or are warped into something that doesn't make them uncomfortable. It's still easy, it's just nowadays people actually notice and talk about it. And nowadays most good fantasy writers are not quite so blatantly xenophobic as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. The problem is that most good fantasy writers regardless of race grew up READING fantasy written by white people for whom race was a d'n'd style straitjacket. Like Tolkein, who imagined the whole world to be a cookie-cutter clone stamp of about a hundred acres of British countryside. Can't really blame him. After all, the man lived on an island.
I cannot overstate this: Tolkein. Lived. On. An. Island. Tolkein was also obsessed with feudal nostalgia, but that's a class thing. We're talking about RaceFail here. AN ISLAND. I bring this up because I was recently having a related discussion here (on page two).
The thing about this whole discussion is that Western writers dominate fantasy and science fiction. (this incidentally was the most compelling of the pearls to come out of this oyster of wank.) The balance was even whiter historically speaking, so all the archetypes in our heads that feel "natural" to the genre to us - those were all invented by western writers.
Now, what do we mean by Western? Why, we mean American. British. Australian. Australian and American mostly DESCENDED from British. American as in U.S. of American. Other countries that identify with Britain and the U.S. culturally. And what, ladies and gentlemen, do these countries have in common?
Islands. We all live on goddamn islands. (I am of course now speaking metaphorically, since by no stretch of the imagination is America literally an island.) Britain has historically been pretty separate from the great cultural melting pot that is Eurasia. It got invaded three or four times (well, I think it got invaded more than that, but the only ones that really took were the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, am I right? Please tell me if I'm wrong. Wait, did the Celts invade or did they just sort of show up?) but England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales have been more or less constant for a good long while, with England dominating for hundreds of years. In otherwords, nationally and ratially stable. The kerfuffle over Ireland? It only had two or three sides. Compare that. Look at everything that happened in the 6th Century CE. No, in fact, look at the 16th, because England was actually a player at that time. So much STUFF happened that was completely unrelated to them! Many ethnic groups in Eurasia have been both oppressed and oppressor multiple alternating times in their history, albeit on a smaller scale than the current "white" ascendancy. I'm currently working my way through this website and marvelling at all the sheer History that exists in the world.
Because of course I was raised on an island. We literally have two hundred years of history, throughout which one cultural group was in charge. I mean, obviously there WAS aboriginal history, but since they didn't write it down and oral history tends to get disrupted by such little things as massive near-genocidal relocation and kidnapping, who the hell knows? We certainly didn't learn about it in school. We did three classical empires, Egypt Greece and Rome, and we did the Middle Ages as focused on Britain, and we did the two hundred years of Australian and World As Relates To Australian history plus misc Aboriginal myths disconnected from any sort of context. (and boy, did we do those two hundred years OVER and OVER again). In primary school we got a lot of Jewish history. Later, we learned some American history. And because I specifically chose to do Modern History in years nine through twelve, I am slightly less ignorant about South Africa and Japan than I might have been. That leaves swathes of pre-1700s, of South America, of most of Africa, of ancient empires aside from the Classics big three, of the entire Islamic world, even of most of Asia. Don't tell me America and American education is all that different. We don't LIVE this history. Every building I spend any time in was built in the last hundred years or so, more probably the last fifty. Everyone's an immigrant, which is good, but everyone's an immigrant from far away. There is nobody here from the country next door, because there is no country next door - we're an island. South East Asians are the closest thing we have to neighbors, and do you think that's part of our culture at all the way India and Afghanistan are part of Pakistan's identity? We are disconnected.
So where am I going with this? We are disconnected. When we write fantasy we hark back to Tolkein's figurative generation, but they lived on islands too. And so we swing wildly between that problematic default and our own urge to write something that speaks to us, for us, because we don't know what it's LIKE not to have a whole island to ourselves. I realise this metaphor isn't perfect and doesn't describe the actual mixed Western culture, but every country has an idealised version of itself that sits in the collective subconscious, and ours sprawls. Ours is simple. Ours is not tied into the context of its surroundings as well as it ought, ours is unmoored.
This post has been getting more and more poetically incoherent as the time gets closer to four am. What I'm trying to say is I believe our lack of humility is in part geographic, and our construction of race in opposition, of whiteness and Other, is influenced by that disconnect. (Obviously I realise that non-island nations also have racist and nationalist dialogues. But go and count how many of them are not primarily based on territory, religion or both, go and count how many involve an conflict that did not begin across a national border or a line of scripture.)
And western framing leaks, we impose our ways of dividing society on the rest of the world whether purposefully or otherwise. Information flows OUT from us, and it is SO easy not to look elsewhere, not to look in any other way than this one. Is it any wonder that our fantasy worlds take on that same affect?
I want to see a fantasy Eurasia. I want to see countries upon countries upon ex-empires upon conquerors upon conquered, I want to see DEPTH to the history of fantasy universes, I want to see a character get six completely different Once And Future Exposition speeches from six different Wise Old Folks who live within sixty kilometres of each other. I want to see descriptions of racial characteristics that don't stand out like a sore thumb because everyone but that character defaults to fantasy-caucasian, I want to go through ten characters before one repeats a skin colour. I want friendly four-way arguments about religion in which none of them are barely-disguised Wicca or obviously-coded Christianity or Generic Oriental Philosophy X.
...
Possibly what I want is more Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, I do! I want people who have learned from her! After all, it's fantasy. If you can write anywhere full of anyone, why write Grandad Tolkein's Good Old Days?
Okay, firstly, to get it out of the way, my thoughts on
But we're not talking about that yet. My point is: characters. Their family and their interaction with other of and outside of their community are vital to their personalities, and so yes, Race Is Relevant.
Now, on to the actual controversy. EDIT: I got distracted and ended up waffling about something only vaguely related? So my actual comments about the actual internet kerfuffle are in the next post. *looks sheepish* All right. So. The thing about fantasy is - quick summary of my understanding of the background here before I get into what I think I can actually add to the discussion. The thing about fantasy is that offensive themes are very easy to disguise in it. Mostly subconsciously. Because, of course, it's not our world. Back before anyone was really talking about Coded Language and whatnot it was very easy for someone whose personal worldview was very self-centered to create a fictional world in which all those pesky things which do not fit either don't exist or are warped into something that doesn't make them uncomfortable. It's still easy, it's just nowadays people actually notice and talk about it. And nowadays most good fantasy writers are not quite so blatantly xenophobic as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. The problem is that most good fantasy writers regardless of race grew up READING fantasy written by white people for whom race was a d'n'd style straitjacket. Like Tolkein, who imagined the whole world to be a cookie-cutter clone stamp of about a hundred acres of British countryside. Can't really blame him. After all, the man lived on an island.
I cannot overstate this: Tolkein. Lived. On. An. Island. Tolkein was also obsessed with feudal nostalgia, but that's a class thing. We're talking about RaceFail here. AN ISLAND. I bring this up because I was recently having a related discussion here (on page two).
The thing about this whole discussion is that Western writers dominate fantasy and science fiction. (this incidentally was the most compelling of the pearls to come out of this oyster of wank.) The balance was even whiter historically speaking, so all the archetypes in our heads that feel "natural" to the genre to us - those were all invented by western writers.
Now, what do we mean by Western? Why, we mean American. British. Australian. Australian and American mostly DESCENDED from British. American as in U.S. of American. Other countries that identify with Britain and the U.S. culturally. And what, ladies and gentlemen, do these countries have in common?
Islands. We all live on goddamn islands. (I am of course now speaking metaphorically, since by no stretch of the imagination is America literally an island.) Britain has historically been pretty separate from the great cultural melting pot that is Eurasia. It got invaded three or four times (well, I think it got invaded more than that, but the only ones that really took were the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, am I right? Please tell me if I'm wrong. Wait, did the Celts invade or did they just sort of show up?) but England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales have been more or less constant for a good long while, with England dominating for hundreds of years. In otherwords, nationally and ratially stable. The kerfuffle over Ireland? It only had two or three sides. Compare that. Look at everything that happened in the 6th Century CE. No, in fact, look at the 16th, because England was actually a player at that time. So much STUFF happened that was completely unrelated to them! Many ethnic groups in Eurasia have been both oppressed and oppressor multiple alternating times in their history, albeit on a smaller scale than the current "white" ascendancy. I'm currently working my way through this website and marvelling at all the sheer History that exists in the world.
Because of course I was raised on an island. We literally have two hundred years of history, throughout which one cultural group was in charge. I mean, obviously there WAS aboriginal history, but since they didn't write it down and oral history tends to get disrupted by such little things as massive near-genocidal relocation and kidnapping, who the hell knows? We certainly didn't learn about it in school. We did three classical empires, Egypt Greece and Rome, and we did the Middle Ages as focused on Britain, and we did the two hundred years of Australian and World As Relates To Australian history plus misc Aboriginal myths disconnected from any sort of context. (and boy, did we do those two hundred years OVER and OVER again). In primary school we got a lot of Jewish history. Later, we learned some American history. And because I specifically chose to do Modern History in years nine through twelve, I am slightly less ignorant about South Africa and Japan than I might have been. That leaves swathes of pre-1700s, of South America, of most of Africa, of ancient empires aside from the Classics big three, of the entire Islamic world, even of most of Asia. Don't tell me America and American education is all that different. We don't LIVE this history. Every building I spend any time in was built in the last hundred years or so, more probably the last fifty. Everyone's an immigrant, which is good, but everyone's an immigrant from far away. There is nobody here from the country next door, because there is no country next door - we're an island. South East Asians are the closest thing we have to neighbors, and do you think that's part of our culture at all the way India and Afghanistan are part of Pakistan's identity? We are disconnected.
So where am I going with this? We are disconnected. When we write fantasy we hark back to Tolkein's figurative generation, but they lived on islands too. And so we swing wildly between that problematic default and our own urge to write something that speaks to us, for us, because we don't know what it's LIKE not to have a whole island to ourselves. I realise this metaphor isn't perfect and doesn't describe the actual mixed Western culture, but every country has an idealised version of itself that sits in the collective subconscious, and ours sprawls. Ours is simple. Ours is not tied into the context of its surroundings as well as it ought, ours is unmoored.
This post has been getting more and more poetically incoherent as the time gets closer to four am. What I'm trying to say is I believe our lack of humility is in part geographic, and our construction of race in opposition, of whiteness and Other, is influenced by that disconnect. (Obviously I realise that non-island nations also have racist and nationalist dialogues. But go and count how many of them are not primarily based on territory, religion or both, go and count how many involve an conflict that did not begin across a national border or a line of scripture.)
And western framing leaks, we impose our ways of dividing society on the rest of the world whether purposefully or otherwise. Information flows OUT from us, and it is SO easy not to look elsewhere, not to look in any other way than this one. Is it any wonder that our fantasy worlds take on that same affect?
I want to see a fantasy Eurasia. I want to see countries upon countries upon ex-empires upon conquerors upon conquered, I want to see DEPTH to the history of fantasy universes, I want to see a character get six completely different Once And Future Exposition speeches from six different Wise Old Folks who live within sixty kilometres of each other. I want to see descriptions of racial characteristics that don't stand out like a sore thumb because everyone but that character defaults to fantasy-caucasian, I want to go through ten characters before one repeats a skin colour. I want friendly four-way arguments about religion in which none of them are barely-disguised Wicca or obviously-coded Christianity or Generic Oriental Philosophy X.
...
Possibly what I want is more Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, I do! I want people who have learned from her! After all, it's fantasy. If you can write anywhere full of anyone, why write Grandad Tolkein's Good Old Days?
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-11 05:15 pm (UTC)That would be hilarious and made of win. XD
no subject
Date: 2009-03-11 08:38 pm (UTC)everytime i try to write fantasy i try and shake it up culturally wise, but dude i was born on an island, and i live on an island right now. i'm descended (slightly watered down by a big ass lot) from native americans (the Haida and the metis) but the amount of knowledge is have is pitiful. and the people i want to turn to for knowledge have no clue in their own right.
when i am reading fantasy though i love looking for stuff based in countrys not white. even if the main char is white as white bread, they end up surrounded by different colours and its awesome.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-11 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:10 am (UTC)... There's currently a movement to declare Australia as part of Asia, dspecifically South East Asia. We might not be right next door to another country, but swathes of our population come from those countries and identify with those cultures. You write that "we" are disconnected, but you're writing about the caucaseans decended from British colonies; I doubt someone with an entirely family in Hong Kong, or who visits their family in Greece yearly, feels quite so disconnected. Discussing this on a macro level is a generalization, especially when the act of writing is so individual.
Anyway, I agree with your stance but not your argument, which seems to be "Yes, Western fantasy is racist, but its excuse is geographical." When that seems an unapologetic oversimplification of the reasoning behind white-bread fantasy. That said, I'm pleased you made the distinction between culture and colour in like, one of your earlier paragraphs because a lot of people writing about Racefail seem to confuse the two or think them synonomous. And despite everything, this was a pretty interesting post.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:18 am (UTC)I didn't mean it as an excuse, I meant it as a thought on a possible explanation.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 07:30 am (UTC)