Joss and Colour Blindness.
According to tyrell it is International Blog Against Terrorism week, and I'm bored, even if I only have forty minutes before I should leave for WARP, Bing's not back from a meeting yet and I want to talk to her before going, so. Anyway, I was reminded of the essay linked to by shati last week, about Joss Whedon and race, which accused Joss "in general" of suffering from "white person color-blindness. My guess is he thinks that it’s okay, even progressive, to be “color-blind”."
I blinked at that sentence, and Bing blinked at that sentence, and we blinked at each other and I continued to blink at the rest of the essay. Bing herself said she gave up after the second instance of the term "whiteboy" in an essay dealing with racism.
Tyrell's post mentions this colour blindness, and calls it a bad (or at least 'not necessarily good') thing in a much more eloquent way than the Feminist blog. The point of his post that I took away was that homogenisation is bad and differences should be celebrated. I'm all for this. Yay diversity. Yay curvy black asses and silky Asian hair and... well, I'm sure even the French have something good going for them.
Now, I grew up in Slough, right in the middle of a Sikh vs Hindu turf war. I had Hindu friends and Sikh friends and Muslim friends. But I still can't tell you how long Savita's family had been in the country, or what Kavita's religion was, or what exactly the Singhs' country of origin was, because I was more interested in their taste in music, whether they were snogging Stephen or Marc, and just how short they rolled up their skirts to be. One of my best friends was West Indian, but I was so ignorant as to racial differences that I sort of assumed she was Asian and at one point uttered the immortal line "oh, you're black?"
I'm not defending my ignorance here. I'm just explaining where I'm coming from.
Bing was once asked by a school friend to describe her in five words. Bing used adjectives such as "intelligent, well-spoken, friendly, etc.," and this friend immediately turned on her, saying "why didn't you say black?" and Bing said "because I don't' see you as black." To which Bing's friend replied; "You see, you're part of the problem!"
What am I trying to say? Maybe it's that myself and Bing and maybe privileged white people as a whole really don't see colour as being that important. That we don't make an active decision to ignore race. We ignore it because we don't see it. If that's a bad thing, I don't see why. I don't want people - especially professional people - to look at me and see a bisexual woman, even if I am one, and proud to be one, and consider it an important part of my self-image. I want people to read this journal and see an intelligent, fun person. I want scientists to look at me and see a palaeontologist.
I do think that the biggest relevant problem in the USA right now is not one on racism, but one of classism. It's just a remnant of the colonisation history that the lower classes tend to be non-whites, while the richer people tend to be white, and the Government seems to care more about rich people than poor people. After all, rich people are more likely to keep the Republicans in office. Basically, their priorities of 'who to look after' goes rich white; rich non-white; poor white, poor non-white.
But back to the Feminist Blog essay. I'm not going to pick it completely apart, because it's rubbish. I will bring out a couple of points though. Firstly that black male vampires had a tendency to die by fire. and OMG burning black men is racist and bad! Well, know why that was? Because the stunt team had one person who excelled at doing the gorey flamey death stunt. And that was a black male.
Then there's paragraphs about how there's sexism in Firefly but no racism, and this was 'colour-blindness' and by default a bad thing, though having the sexism means Joss is a cool funky male feminist. I'd kind of like to see these examples of sexism in Firefly, because Bing and I sure as hell couldn't think of any...
[Anyway, as race is a genetic construct, and the human races are interfertile, I would have thought it obvious that any future of the human race would result in homogenisation of the gene pool as the world gets smaller and interracial breeding becomes more common, resulting in the loss of some racial characteristics due to genetic drift. Meanwhile, sex on a chromosomal level continues to be binary, even if gender roles are blurred]
But then there's my favourite part. The part on my fandom.
BuffyVerse / Fray (2003)
Because we’re talking a lot about Joss Whedon, I think it’s worth looking at Fray. To me, Fray is a negative illustration of the problem of color-blindness in live-action casting - meaning, the problem of color-blind attitudes in live action casting goes away in a drawn novel. So Fray is the progressive color-blind attitude in caricature. Fray is a woman of color, but she’s not raced, because race doesn’t exist in the color blind world.
OK, here I'm just very very confused. Wanna know why? And no, it's not the insistence of people who don't know the canon very well to call Melaka by her last name, just because that's the name of her canon. If she'd actually read the comic, she;d know that no one actually uses her family name when addressing her.
The problem, in case you haven't read Fray yet, is this:
Mel aten't coloured. (Gods I hate that word. But I also hate the word 'ethnic'). Melaka's white. She has pale skin, black hair and blue eyes. Her sister is blonde and blue eyed. Those right there are only found in European 'white' races my dear. The Frays in general are pale skinned to the point of not even being tanned because the sun in this future is toxic. They daren't even get a tan. Lack of exposure to solar radiation => no melanin => pale complexion. Not that it matters to me; I couldn't give a shit what Mel's skin colour is. I like her 'cause she's a kick ass poor city chick with superpowers A little like my second favourite Slayer, Nikki Wood. But the riding point of Mel being a non-raced 'woman of colour' is... well, an outright lie.
Fray is created out of Joss’s imagination, where he can live a color-blind life, and not confront actual people of color in casting choices. He doesn’t have to try to translate across a lens of race (because trying to be color-blind is not the same as actually being color-blind) to see human performances. Rather, he can create the human performance in his own head. The perfect opportunity to create a raceless person of color. Looking at Fray this way leads one nicely into Firefly/Serenity, which, as a far-future world gave him some of that same cover - here’s a person of color with no racial identity or problems; it must be because in this far-future SF world, how do you know what race will look like?
Again - the same problem. Where did race prejudice go and why? Color blindness is a pleasant progressive fantasy but that blindness to reality is a product of privilege, and is ultimately counterproductive in terms of neutralizing racism.
Or maybe it's because a) racial interbreeding over the next couple of centuries, especially in poor, multi-cultural inner city areas results in racial homogenisation, or b) because prejudice against radies (the mutants that litter every crowd scene) is more important. As Terry Pratchett put it: "black and white unite together and gang up on the green".
Anyway. Apparently Joss is racist because... he's not racist. Or something. I don't know. I'm tired. I'm going to Sad Club.
I blinked at that sentence, and Bing blinked at that sentence, and we blinked at each other and I continued to blink at the rest of the essay. Bing herself said she gave up after the second instance of the term "whiteboy" in an essay dealing with racism.
Tyrell's post mentions this colour blindness, and calls it a bad (or at least 'not necessarily good') thing in a much more eloquent way than the Feminist blog. The point of his post that I took away was that homogenisation is bad and differences should be celebrated. I'm all for this. Yay diversity. Yay curvy black asses and silky Asian hair and... well, I'm sure even the French have something good going for them.
Now, I grew up in Slough, right in the middle of a Sikh vs Hindu turf war. I had Hindu friends and Sikh friends and Muslim friends. But I still can't tell you how long Savita's family had been in the country, or what Kavita's religion was, or what exactly the Singhs' country of origin was, because I was more interested in their taste in music, whether they were snogging Stephen or Marc, and just how short they rolled up their skirts to be. One of my best friends was West Indian, but I was so ignorant as to racial differences that I sort of assumed she was Asian and at one point uttered the immortal line "oh, you're black?"
I'm not defending my ignorance here. I'm just explaining where I'm coming from.
Bing was once asked by a school friend to describe her in five words. Bing used adjectives such as "intelligent, well-spoken, friendly, etc.," and this friend immediately turned on her, saying "why didn't you say black?" and Bing said "because I don't' see you as black." To which Bing's friend replied; "You see, you're part of the problem!"
What am I trying to say? Maybe it's that myself and Bing and maybe privileged white people as a whole really don't see colour as being that important. That we don't make an active decision to ignore race. We ignore it because we don't see it. If that's a bad thing, I don't see why. I don't want people - especially professional people - to look at me and see a bisexual woman, even if I am one, and proud to be one, and consider it an important part of my self-image. I want people to read this journal and see an intelligent, fun person. I want scientists to look at me and see a palaeontologist.
I do think that the biggest relevant problem in the USA right now is not one on racism, but one of classism. It's just a remnant of the colonisation history that the lower classes tend to be non-whites, while the richer people tend to be white, and the Government seems to care more about rich people than poor people. After all, rich people are more likely to keep the Republicans in office. Basically, their priorities of 'who to look after' goes rich white; rich non-white; poor white, poor non-white.
But back to the Feminist Blog essay. I'm not going to pick it completely apart, because it's rubbish. I will bring out a couple of points though. Firstly that black male vampires had a tendency to die by fire. and OMG burning black men is racist and bad! Well, know why that was? Because the stunt team had one person who excelled at doing the gorey flamey death stunt. And that was a black male.
Then there's paragraphs about how there's sexism in Firefly but no racism, and this was 'colour-blindness' and by default a bad thing, though having the sexism means Joss is a cool funky male feminist. I'd kind of like to see these examples of sexism in Firefly, because Bing and I sure as hell couldn't think of any...
[Anyway, as race is a genetic construct, and the human races are interfertile, I would have thought it obvious that any future of the human race would result in homogenisation of the gene pool as the world gets smaller and interracial breeding becomes more common, resulting in the loss of some racial characteristics due to genetic drift. Meanwhile, sex on a chromosomal level continues to be binary, even if gender roles are blurred]
But then there's my favourite part. The part on my fandom.
BuffyVerse / Fray (2003)
Because we’re talking a lot about Joss Whedon, I think it’s worth looking at Fray. To me, Fray is a negative illustration of the problem of color-blindness in live-action casting - meaning, the problem of color-blind attitudes in live action casting goes away in a drawn novel. So Fray is the progressive color-blind attitude in caricature. Fray is a woman of color, but she’s not raced, because race doesn’t exist in the color blind world.
OK, here I'm just very very confused. Wanna know why? And no, it's not the insistence of people who don't know the canon very well to call Melaka by her last name, just because that's the name of her canon. If she'd actually read the comic, she;d know that no one actually uses her family name when addressing her.
The problem, in case you haven't read Fray yet, is this:
Mel aten't coloured. (Gods I hate that word. But I also hate the word 'ethnic'). Melaka's white. She has pale skin, black hair and blue eyes. Her sister is blonde and blue eyed. Those right there are only found in European 'white' races my dear. The Frays in general are pale skinned to the point of not even being tanned because the sun in this future is toxic. They daren't even get a tan. Lack of exposure to solar radiation => no melanin => pale complexion. Not that it matters to me; I couldn't give a shit what Mel's skin colour is. I like her 'cause she's a kick ass poor city chick with superpowers A little like my second favourite Slayer, Nikki Wood. But the riding point of Mel being a non-raced 'woman of colour' is... well, an outright lie.
Fray is created out of Joss’s imagination, where he can live a color-blind life, and not confront actual people of color in casting choices. He doesn’t have to try to translate across a lens of race (because trying to be color-blind is not the same as actually being color-blind) to see human performances. Rather, he can create the human performance in his own head. The perfect opportunity to create a raceless person of color. Looking at Fray this way leads one nicely into Firefly/Serenity, which, as a far-future world gave him some of that same cover - here’s a person of color with no racial identity or problems; it must be because in this far-future SF world, how do you know what race will look like?
Again - the same problem. Where did race prejudice go and why? Color blindness is a pleasant progressive fantasy but that blindness to reality is a product of privilege, and is ultimately counterproductive in terms of neutralizing racism.
Or maybe it's because a) racial interbreeding over the next couple of centuries, especially in poor, multi-cultural inner city areas results in racial homogenisation, or b) because prejudice against radies (the mutants that litter every crowd scene) is more important. As Terry Pratchett put it: "black and white unite together and gang up on the green".
Anyway. Apparently Joss is racist because... he's not racist. Or something. I don't know. I'm tired. I'm going to Sad Club.