Racefail 09
You know, I've been watching Racefail 09 on the sidelines for the last few days because people more eloquent than I had already stated what I could have ever wanted to say about it. And by the time I came in, it seemed to be winding down--the overarching discussion has been occurring for many years before, but this incarnation just blew up at the
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Ah, I figured it was something like that. Y'know though, I do happen to rather like the phrase, as it goes some way to illustrating how (ignoring culture for a second) race is kind of a silly notion to begin with. Obviously some people look different to others, but as biologically-speaking it's not a case of stark categories but a multi-dimensional continuum.. I dunno, it seems a bit crap to cram people into one box or other because of some vague similiarity to a tendency in phenotype in people with a heritage form a certain locality.
I honestly have no idea, but although I look white, there's a very good chance indeed that i'm 10% black, 20% east-Asian, 20% south-Asian etc, and yet I'm described (and describe myself) as white without qualifier.
I saw some program ages ago which was so brilliant: they got a bunch of right-wing jingoistic idiots who were all nominally white and gave them genetic testing. NONE of them were 100% white; most of them were less than 50% white, and none of them was any more than 60% white.
I have to admit to rather a bit of schadenfreude when they interviewed them after they got their results, and they'd just happened to amend their views on race quite a bit. WEIRD HUH
I think as long as you treated your characters like characters instead of confining them to stereotypes or tropes (negative or positive) then you're probably okay.
The main thing I worry about is I'm making subconscious assumptions, and although it feels like I'm just writing people rather than racial or gender stereotypes, I may not be.
There's stuff in my writing that I am very worried about in terms of subtext and implication - but I won't list it here, as it's probably not very interesting :/
I'm curious though, have you been following the Racefail '09 stuff?
I tend to intentionally avoid stuff like that nowadays. It's not good for my blood pressure.
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Even though I look (and identify as) black, I know that I'm at least 25% white (thank you Grandpa) and probably a bunch more going by what I know of our nation's long history of engagement with other races. That documentary sounds cool though. I'm surprised that the idiots changed their tune though, that they didn't deny the DNA tests or come up with some other explanation. I do wonder though how their fellow idiots treated them once it was revealed that they weren't 100% white.
There's stuff in my writing that I am very worried about in terms of subtext and implication - but I won't list it here, as it's probably not very interesting :/
I don't mind. In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say. I've realized that as long as I don't have to deal with twits and everybody is willing to listen and learn, that I like these conversations.
'm curious though, have you been following the Racefail '09 stuff?
I tend to intentionally avoid stuff like that nowadays. It's not good for my blood pressure.
Yeah, I was going to avoid it as well, but it just kept wearing on me. Thankfully, I've found more win than fail, but when I find fail, boy, there's a lot of it. That's what prompted this whole tl;dr entry; I had a mental BSOD moment when I read Gerri's entries and comments.
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Well.. I'm usually willing to give them the benefit of the doubt there. If they mean they don't actually notice race at all then yeah that's pretty dumb (and frankly, almost certainly a lie), but maybe they mean they don't tend to load a certain set of preconceptions when they deal with someone of a certain race.
Sadly, I'm aware that I'm very aware of race, although I desperately try not to be. I come from an area that hovers around literally 99% white, so tbh it's hard to not automatically cast people of other races in your head as The Other when you're so used to only seeing white people.
It's so silly too, because then you start saying to yourself "just ignore it, you're being an idiot, ignore it", and because you're trying to ignore it so much, you end up focusing on it even more. I do tend to get over that hump fairly quickly, though: hanging out with someone for a few hours is usually enough.
Anyway. Enough about my neurosis :P
I don't mind. In for a penny, in for a pound, I always say. I've realized that as long as I don't have to deal with twits and everybody is willing to listen and learn, that I like these conversations.
Thank you :) It's always fun to talk about this stuff.. but I suspect far more fun for me than the victim listener.
Well. *thinks* I'll try and make this brief.
The story is centred around an organisation which uses cloned bodies to put the spirits of dead soldiers that died in particularly heroic ways into. The organisation is a sorta quasi-religious/spec-ops/assassinations/does-stuff-regular-soldiers-can't type deal.
For reasons that are too lengthy to include here they're all basically east-Asian, and due to the fact that the cloned bodies have been monkeyed with at the genetic level quite a bit, they're all born female.
- which is of course a trope in itself, but what concerns me is that pretty much all of the female characters are members of this organisation and the fact that they're not actually human (due to having 54 chromosomes and being incapable of breeding with humans even if they weren't almost all sterile, which they are due to their genes being screwed with) is a moderate issue.
Also, they vary in personality a lot, but because they've been raised from birth in a military environment your average member of this organisation is fairly cold, dispassionate and - well, not amoral exactly, but because they've all been alive so long most of them are past caring about things other than just doing what they're told to.
I don't think it would be difficult to take from that that I'm saying "Jyoushi [the members of the organisation] are all frigid bitches and a hive-minded species apart/The Other".
But yeah, they're portrayed as very different people to each other.
Good god, I'm making it sound lame XD
Another concern is that a secondary character is black, kinda-sorta genderqueer (or rather, just very androgenous), gay and somewhere between priest and magician. You got the "Magical Negro" and possible white-man's-wishful-thinking-about-emasculating-threatening-black-man thing right there. There's strong reasons why he's all those things (other than gay, which just seemed to fit with him), but.. yeah. Ftr, he's got more of a gentle intelligent vicar vibe around him than Threatening Darky Witch-Doctor From Ooga-Boogaland. He's the sort of spiritual, nurturing character, whereas my main character (female, east-Asian) is neither of those things in the slightest.
There's other stuff, but those are some of the top 5, and this waaay too long already.
Thankfully, I've found more win than fail, but when I find fail, boy, there's a lot of it. That's what prompted this whole tl;dr entry; I had a mental BSOD moment when I read Gerri's entries and comments.
Heh, you're evidently a stronger person than me, dude.
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but because they've all been alive so long most of them are past caring about things other than just doing what they're told to.
I meant it's more that, in response to "go kill these cute kids", they'll just kinda shrug and go, yeah, okay. As opposed to being generally submissive, which they typically aren't.
The main character kinda wakes up to it though, and goes, "Y'know what, this is fucked-up, and I'm not going to do it any more, repercussions be damned".
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Thank you :) It's always fun to talk about this stuff.. but I suspect far more fun for me than the victim listener.
Heh, I'm sure some of my friends feel the same way when I go off on tangents about my research.
For reasons that are too lengthy to include here they're all basically east-Asian, and due to the fact that the cloned bodies have been monkeyed with at the genetic level quite a bit, they're all born female.
- which is of course a trope in itself, but what concerns me is that pretty much all of the female characters are members of this organisation and the fact that they're not actually human (due to having 54 chromosomes and being incapable of breeding with humans even if they weren't almost all sterile, which they are due to their genes being screwed with) is a moderate issue.
Huh. Why are the soldiers East Asian (more or less)? I mean is everybody that way, like, the traits show up in the general populace and theirs are just exaggerated? Which could be problematic in itself (if I have it right), since then you get to the even more touchy topic of colorism (which as a very nasty history in the African American community, I don't know about elsewhere). I guess how problematic things are would be dependent on the strength of their explanations--I get the sense that there is some--and so long as it doesn't sound like "I want them to be female and East Asian cuz that's cool" readers will likely give some leeway.
Heh, it's funny, I was going to have a bioengineered, enhanced human military force that was disproportionately female as well and I hadn't really considered how cliche it sort of is--it was just an outgrowth of an old short story centered around Amazons.
Also, they vary in personality a lot, but because they've been raised from birth in a military environment your average member of this organisation is fairly cold, dispassionate and - well, not amoral exactly, but because they've all been alive so long most of them are past caring about things other than just doing what they're told to.
Get out of my head! XD
I don't think it would be difficult to take from that that I'm saying "Jyoushi [the members of the organisation] are all frigid bitches and a hive-minded species apart/The Other".
TBH, that's not the impression I got from your description. There is a certain hivemind to the military, and I wouldn't attribute any hivemindedness that they may display to the fact that they're all female, but that they're all ruthlessly militarily trained.
Good god, I'm making it sound lame XD
I'd read it, and not because it sounds superficially similar to something that I'd like to write.
As long as you show that your black character is fallible and that, you're probably okay. Again, it's hard to say w/o more info, but the fact that you're worried about this stuff says lots to me about how you're going to handle these issues.
Thankfully, I've found more win than fail, but when I find fail, boy, there's a lot of it. That's what prompted this whole tl;dr entry; I had a mental BSOD moment when I read Gerri's entries and comments.
Heh, you're evidently a stronger person than me, dude.
Yeah, right before I responded to this I was reading about how someone who had not informed themselves as to what this whole thing was about decided to characterize the whole thing as POC + allies playing the race card. -_- I just don't know what drives people to come into a conversation that they're not a part of, and make an ass of themselves without at least trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
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This is really lengthy and complicated, I'm afraid :S
The story is set in an alternate universe where the Axis won WW2, although that fact is never stated as it's set in the twenty-ninth century or thereabouts and.. well, how often do we mention the Battle of Hastings?
WW3 (at the time of which there were numerous extra-Solar colonies either run by Imperial Japan or the Reich) was Japan v. Germany and ended in a horrific and very quick MAD scenario.
The centres of power for both superpowers being knocked out, the colonies became more inward-looking and, being so used to autocratic rule, started to develop their own royal families or equivalents deriving from either ouke - minor scions of the Japanese royal family who moved off Earth to try and be bigger cheeses than they could on the homeworld - or de facto Nazi "royals" like relatives of the Reichsleiter.
Anyway, the colonies gradually evolved into worlds in their own right with their own royal families. Back on Earth (which had managed to claw its way back both into habitability and the political centre of human worlds), the former Reich had become the centre of one office of government - the bureaucrats - whilst the former Japan had become the royal centre, although the actual monarch was drawn from the royal families of one of the colonies rather than there being a native monarch.
On worlds that were once Reich colonies, the house guards of the respective royal families were typically derived from the Waffen-SS.
Aliens invaded Earth and her colonies, and being descended from the Waffen-SS and hence a little too keen on genetically-created supermen and worship of Teh Fallen Heroez, one of these house guard units cooked up the Persephonid Guard, all blonde, blue-eyed Aryan super(wo)men types very keen on all things Nordic and such.
The patriarch of the royal family the Persephonid Guard worked for, Cadan Bauer-Graf, ended up seizing Earth's throne and generally being a dictatorial bastard, with the Persephonid Guard being his own personal Gestapo.
After a coup by another of the royal families displaced him and sent his whole family into exile, instead of disbanding and basically burying the Persephonids, the new ruling family saw them as a useful tool, but as a mutual decision between them and the Persephonids themselves, every aspect of Cadan and Saint-Célestine - where he was from - would be purged from them and other than their basic function they'd start afresh.
Instead of being blonde Aryan superwomen, they'd adopt strictly-traditional Terran (i.e. Japanese, in this context, as we're talking about royal stuff - see the mass of crap above, somewhere) language, dress, religion, architecture of their facilities and even appearance. As Earth had no ruler of its own, this would look the most impartial to any of the royal houses.
Which, incidentally, is why they're so fanatically loyal: considering their earlier reign of terror they realise that they're treated with wariness at best and that showing favouritism to any royal family could get them shut down (and shot, as keeping their constantly-disintegrating bodies alive isn't cheap) very quickly. That, and the ruling family (and hence current bosses) is the ones who whacked their former boss, so they're pretty keen to show that they're loyal to them.
Jeez, that was long :P Sorry.
TBH, that's not the impression I got from your description. There is a certain hivemind to the military, and I wouldn't attribute any hivemindedness that they may display to the fact that they're all female, but that they're all ruthlessly militarily trained.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. I try and write them as individuals kinda squeezed into regulated conformity rather than people that've come off a factory line.
As long as you show that your black character is fallible and that, you're probably okay.
Oh, he's certainly that. I did play with the idea of making him kinda jittery (as you probably would be if you were in his position), but I didn't think it jived so well with the rest of his character.
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I always worry people feel obliged to read stuff I've written, and I understand it can be a bit ugh feeling compelled to read not-so-great amateur prose so.. yeah. Tis all good :)
And I can see all the typos I made. Foo.
Eh, I habitually do even better - I have a habit of leaving out words entirely in sentences, and usually the most critical/embarrassing one e.g. "Do you think I'm stupid?" "Of course I think you're stupid". ... ... "DON'T think". Arrghgghh -_-
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I always worry people feel obliged to read stuff I've written, and I understand it can be a bit ugh feeling compelled to read not-so-great amateur prose so.. yeah. Tis all good :)
Hon, I've been reading fanfiction for about 10 years. Trust me, your prose can't be as bad as some of the stuff I've slogged through.
I have a habit of leaving out words entirely in sentences, and usually the most critical/embarrassing one e.g. "Do you think I'm stupid?" "Of course I think you're stupid". ... ... "DON'T think". Arrghgghh -_-
Hee, I just have extra words in mine because I was writing something else and didn't erase it fully. Or I didn't complete my thought so the statement just ends abruptly. I did that in one of my finals last semester, more than once even. -_-;;
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I really really recommend setting up a wiki if you do much worldbuilding stuff. MediaWiki is kind of a headache to install and get working properly, but it's totally invaluable.
Hon, I've been reading fanfiction for about 10 years. Trust me, your prose can't be as bad as some of the stuff I've slogged through.
Haha, gotcha.
Hee, I just have extra words in mine because I was writing something else and didn't erase it fully. Or I didn't complete my thought so the statement just ends abruptly. I did that in one of my finals last semester, more than once even. -_-;;
Oh man, I totally do that all the time too, ha -_- Oh, and Jeez, I remember I kept forgetfully slipping into Japanese in my Spanish oral exam many years ago. That wasn't good.
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Jeez, I remember I kept forgetfully slipping into Japanese in my Spanish oral exam many years ago. That wasn't good.
Ha, I can do one better. I've taken Spanish for a number of years, but I still can't speak/listen to it very well. Every once in a while, I'll have a dream where everybody's speaking Spanish and I can't understand what they're saying when I wake up. I understand in the dream, although that understanding isn't because I can translate the Spanish. The best part is waking up, remembering the Spanish conversation and having no fucking clue what I said or the person I was talking to said.
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Yeah, I found that too.. and I found myself having to explain stuff (for who?) over and over again, when I could just have a little clicky link.
The best part is waking up, remembering the Spanish conversation and having no fucking clue what I said or the person I was talking to said.
Haha, that's kinda weird. Often I'll have times when I make up songs in my dreams, and then wake up and struggle to remember them - although I guess maybe we're actually just feeling like we're saying something coherent in Spanish or writing full songs, when we're actually just producing goddledegook.
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Heh, it's funny, I was going to have a bioengineered, enhanced human military force that was disproportionately female as well and I hadn't really considered how cliche it sort of is--it was just an outgrowth of an old short story centered around Amazons.
As they say on TVTropes though, tropes only really suck if they're boring and predictable, and every story out there ever falls into at least one.
I kinda fretted about cliché initially but I dunno, I don't think it matters that much if you manage to wring an interesting story out of it, or do something interesting with the existing trope.
This covers both of us:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AmazonBrigade
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Ughhh. See, I hate to play identities here, but I think if you're in a group that isn't typically prejudiced against it's tempting to believe that if something isn't an issue for you, it isn't an issue for anybody, and if someone thinks it is then they're just whining about nothing.
Y'know though, whilst the obvious group (straight white men, add "cisgender", "Christian", "macho", "sane", "reasonably attractive", "young", "thin" etc. to taste) is definitely the biggest offenders, I think everyone falls prey to it.
I would never argue that as a guy I have it harder than a woman overall, but I do find it frustrating when you get some women (a very, very small percentage, I hasten to add) implying that if you're a guy everything's Christmas cake and roses. Men still have problems specific to our gender - there's just not as many of them, and they're usually not as serious as those afflicting women, unless you're gay/black/crazy/etc.
Which may sound like a straw man, but trust me - I wish it was.
Do you do any writing, btw? I'd be fascinated to read, as we seem to be on the same page to some degree :)
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