Monday Meditation: Why I Love that Alec Loves His Orange Soda
...or How I Learned to Embrace All of Me
This post by rawles so eloquently and succinctly clarified so many things I've been feeling but hadn't articulated about the discussions surrounding Uhura's characterization in ST:TOS and ST:XI that I felt compelled to add a bit of my own thinking on one of my new fandom favorites: Leverage's Alec Hardison.
I'm a black woman.
These are facts about me. There are other facts--I'm married, have cats, like to knit, have a PhD in English Literature, grew up in the American South--but those facts are a bit less evident on initial inspection than my physical characteristics. People make assumptions about you based on those characteristics. There are stereotypical expectations for how you will behave in public places, how you will wear your hair, what you'll eat/drink/smoke. Not everyone expects every one of those things to manifest in every black person, but anyone who regularly shops in a Southern Piggly Wiggly AND a Kroger can feel the difference in universes just by walking past the meat counters. Expectations from within and without the group just are a fact of life, and for the most part, I must admit that I try to ignore them.
When I was studying very hard in PhD school, I had several interactions that were emblematic of some of the frustrations of those facts throughout my life. They were, by and large, interactions of the exact same type, and they would go something like this:
Random Person Affiliated with My Department: What do you do in your Multicultural Literature Class? I'm thinking about/need assistance with/have a question about X.
Me: I don't teach Multi. I study Dead White Guys and Computer Things.
The conversation would generally end at that point, with Random Person either shuffling off to Buffalo with a few mumbled words or asking me to suggest someone they could speak to about X. I wasn't mean about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they thought I was annoyed because I was annoyed. Very Much So.
The (few) black students in my department (and faculty, come to think of it) never asked me these questions; to them it was quite clear that I wasn't studying AfAm/Multi since I never darkened the doorstep of any of their classes. The faculty with whom I did study (mostly white men and women) never asked because they clearly knew that I spent my time thinking about William Blake, Jane Austen, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Alan Turing, Katherine Hayles, Sherry Turkle, and other folk, some dead, some alive, mostly Caucasian.
But none of these people assumed (at least, I have no evidence of this assumption; I could be wrong) that through studying artifacts/relics/texts (pick your poison) of White Culture I was trying to somehow access the imprimatur of Whiteness. I hope they understood that my appearance in their lectures, classes, and at departmental discussions of these topics was due to my genuine interest in the literature/issues presented by these writers/thinkers. Whether or not they consciously saw me this way, I was just me, a young scholar interested in and passionate about the things they were passionate about, which happened to be the cultural products of a bunch of dead white British males (and Jane Austen).
This is but one chapter in this story in my life, the story of how I have become who I always have been, who I've (mostly) always been encouraged to be--myself. This doesn't mean, however, that I eschew or deny my racial heritage; it is as much a part of my makeup as my culture (a strange mix of Louisiana Creole/Cajun), my faith (Roman Catholic),and my gender (female). Rather, I have tried in my life to embrace as much of the whole of me as I can, with no apologies to anyone for inconsistencies between the way my person develops in/moves in the world and what the outside world might assume of me given my outward appearance. I pursue the things that interest me, the things that move me.
So this is why I love Alec Hardison.
I get him in so many ways, not merely because he's a geek, a black geek, a black geek who just moves through life as who he is. He's smart, he's insecure at times, he's sensitive, he's geeky, he's nerdy, he's awkwardly cool, and to me, he feels so atypically real. Alec is who he is, whether he's chatting up a hottie who also plays WoW or stocking the fridge with orange soda or investing large sums of money in buildings to keep the little family they're building together or just brimming with pride over the latest cool gadget/program/hack he's introducing. The moment I fell in absolute love? That bit in "The Two Horse Job" where he chastises the team for ignoring the presentation he'd carefully put together, noting that he'd tried really hard to put in something for everyone ("a little something visual for the visual learners and [handmotion] for the auditory"). Alec must have ROCKED in Freshman Comp (or would have--not sure if he attended college) because he cares about people understanding what he communicates to them.
He's also not afraid to be afraid, which I really love. At times he needs someone to shore him up, to believe that he can do the thing he thinks is impossible--we all need that sometimes--and I love that those moments pass in the show as if they are as natural as breathing. Of course, they build some dramatic tension (and now that I'm typing this a part of me is trying to remember if any of the other characters have these moments of self-doubt--I don't think they do--and whether that absence is significant with regard to racial presentation), but I guess I can sympathize because sometimes I need that external validation too. Living in a community that openly embraces affirmative action policies tends to make you wonder sometimes whether or not you really ARE good enough in a way that I don't think folks not subject to it can fully understand. And for a unicorn like Alec, a geek-gamer-hacker, being considered good enough for this team of super-elite criminals may just not be enough to cement his confidence. I kinda like that too.
He's a whole person, not a mock-up. He embraces who he is, all the bits of him, and for the first time that I can ever remember, I find myself identifying with a black male on television. I find that I like it.
Next time: My thoughts on Martha Jones. Really. I've actually written them, although I must warn you that they appear to be inextricably bound up with my thoughts on Rose Tyler. And Mickey Smith. And maybe even Donna Noble.
This post by rawles so eloquently and succinctly clarified so many things I've been feeling but hadn't articulated about the discussions surrounding Uhura's characterization in ST:TOS and ST:XI that I felt compelled to add a bit of my own thinking on one of my new fandom favorites: Leverage's Alec Hardison.
I'm a black woman.
These are facts about me. There are other facts--I'm married, have cats, like to knit, have a PhD in English Literature, grew up in the American South--but those facts are a bit less evident on initial inspection than my physical characteristics. People make assumptions about you based on those characteristics. There are stereotypical expectations for how you will behave in public places, how you will wear your hair, what you'll eat/drink/smoke. Not everyone expects every one of those things to manifest in every black person, but anyone who regularly shops in a Southern Piggly Wiggly AND a Kroger can feel the difference in universes just by walking past the meat counters. Expectations from within and without the group just are a fact of life, and for the most part, I must admit that I try to ignore them.
When I was studying very hard in PhD school, I had several interactions that were emblematic of some of the frustrations of those facts throughout my life. They were, by and large, interactions of the exact same type, and they would go something like this:
Random Person Affiliated with My Department: What do you do in your Multicultural Literature Class? I'm thinking about/need assistance with/have a question about X.
Me: I don't teach Multi. I study Dead White Guys and Computer Things.
The conversation would generally end at that point, with Random Person either shuffling off to Buffalo with a few mumbled words or asking me to suggest someone they could speak to about X. I wasn't mean about it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they thought I was annoyed because I was annoyed. Very Much So.
The (few) black students in my department (and faculty, come to think of it) never asked me these questions; to them it was quite clear that I wasn't studying AfAm/Multi since I never darkened the doorstep of any of their classes. The faculty with whom I did study (mostly white men and women) never asked because they clearly knew that I spent my time thinking about William Blake, Jane Austen, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Alan Turing, Katherine Hayles, Sherry Turkle, and other folk, some dead, some alive, mostly Caucasian.
But none of these people assumed (at least, I have no evidence of this assumption; I could be wrong) that through studying artifacts/relics/texts (pick your poison) of White Culture I was trying to somehow access the imprimatur of Whiteness. I hope they understood that my appearance in their lectures, classes, and at departmental discussions of these topics was due to my genuine interest in the literature/issues presented by these writers/thinkers. Whether or not they consciously saw me this way, I was just me, a young scholar interested in and passionate about the things they were passionate about, which happened to be the cultural products of a bunch of dead white British males (and Jane Austen).
This is but one chapter in this story in my life, the story of how I have become who I always have been, who I've (mostly) always been encouraged to be--myself. This doesn't mean, however, that I eschew or deny my racial heritage; it is as much a part of my makeup as my culture (a strange mix of Louisiana Creole/Cajun), my faith (Roman Catholic),and my gender (female). Rather, I have tried in my life to embrace as much of the whole of me as I can, with no apologies to anyone for inconsistencies between the way my person develops in/moves in the world and what the outside world might assume of me given my outward appearance. I pursue the things that interest me, the things that move me.
So this is why I love Alec Hardison.
I get him in so many ways, not merely because he's a geek, a black geek, a black geek who just moves through life as who he is. He's smart, he's insecure at times, he's sensitive, he's geeky, he's nerdy, he's awkwardly cool, and to me, he feels so atypically real. Alec is who he is, whether he's chatting up a hottie who also plays WoW or stocking the fridge with orange soda or investing large sums of money in buildings to keep the little family they're building together or just brimming with pride over the latest cool gadget/program/hack he's introducing. The moment I fell in absolute love? That bit in "The Two Horse Job" where he chastises the team for ignoring the presentation he'd carefully put together, noting that he'd tried really hard to put in something for everyone ("a little something visual for the visual learners and [handmotion] for the auditory"). Alec must have ROCKED in Freshman Comp (or would have--not sure if he attended college) because he cares about people understanding what he communicates to them.
He's also not afraid to be afraid, which I really love. At times he needs someone to shore him up, to believe that he can do the thing he thinks is impossible--we all need that sometimes--and I love that those moments pass in the show as if they are as natural as breathing. Of course, they build some dramatic tension (and now that I'm typing this a part of me is trying to remember if any of the other characters have these moments of self-doubt--I don't think they do--and whether that absence is significant with regard to racial presentation), but I guess I can sympathize because sometimes I need that external validation too. Living in a community that openly embraces affirmative action policies tends to make you wonder sometimes whether or not you really ARE good enough in a way that I don't think folks not subject to it can fully understand. And for a unicorn like Alec, a geek-gamer-hacker, being considered good enough for this team of super-elite criminals may just not be enough to cement his confidence. I kinda like that too.
He's a whole person, not a mock-up. He embraces who he is, all the bits of him, and for the first time that I can ever remember, I find myself identifying with a black male on television. I find that I like it.
Next time: My thoughts on Martha Jones. Really. I've actually written them, although I must warn you that they appear to be inextricably bound up with my thoughts on Rose Tyler. And Mickey Smith. And maybe even Donna Noble.