Racism is more than a hat you put on in the morning.
There have been a lot of thoughts and words already written on the J2 Haiti story in the past few days. Most of them have been much more eloquent than I am at the moment and I do not feel the need to repeat their sentiments. I have not read the story itself, nor am I going to. I've read the excerpts and a fair number of posts of people who have read the story and that is enough for me. What I want to say is, ultimately, not about the story directly, but more about the larger issue it represents.
Which is not to say I don't think the author shouldn't be held responsible for what she wrote, but that it seems like she has been taken to task by a great many people already and I do not feel the need to throw myself on that particular pile.
There are three more posts directly related to the story that I want to highlight though, while discussing my own thoughts.
The first is from bossymarmalade who offers a selection of quotes from the story, if you are somehow unfamiliar with the controversy. It highlights the truly problematic nature of the narrative: that a RPF story is set during the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, that the Haitians are depicted in entirely racist ways and that all of it is simply a vehicle for the White protagonists' romance and porn. Bossymarmalade's entry focuses on just the story, but because it is a Big Bang story it also includes artwork from a separate person that uses actual pictures of the Haiti disaster. Which is why I have chosen not to link to the story itself.
Now, after the immediate questions of racism, privilege and colonial appropriation had been raised, people began to wonder how something like this could have happened. Yes, it's possible that this was a singular random act of egregious racism, but is that likely? Especially when you consider that with a project like a Big Bang, you have the writer, the artist, several beta writers, and the moderators of the BB challenge at the very minimum. The question arose, how could no one else had said something?
facetofcathy has an excellent post on this very question. A person doesn't just wake up one morning and decide "well, it's Monday, I think I'll be racist today." It's a slow build, taught over a lifetime, brick by brick by brick. You learn it from your family, in your education, from the media. Your family are first and foremost the source of prejudice in one's life, not because family are inherently prejudiced, but because they are responsible for the majority of a child's socialization. My grandmama used the term "colored people" in polite company and n****r among family, for example. I didn't pick that habit up, but it did highlight for me the massive difference in how my parents treated people. And I can see some of her attitude sometimes in my cousins who grew up more under her influence.
You also learn prejudice and privilege as part of your education. Pretty much until we get to college, American education privileges the narratives of the colonizers when learning about history and culture. In the instances when we learn about non-Eurocentric voices and stories, it is almost always part of some 'special' unit like Black History Month or Women Authors. The implication being there is HIStory (of the dominant White, Christian, middle and upper class culture) and then there is everyone else. We learn that Columbus and Cortez were the first people to 'discover' the Americas (because no one of consequence lived here at the time), the accrual of territory by the U.S. from indigenous people is described as simply broken treaties or infighting among the natives or crafty maneuvering on the part of American politicians. Within the confines of a High School classroom none of this is ever described as a systematic genocide against the people of North America that killed between 50-100 million people. Did you hear about the recent news reports of the Texas school board ruling to rename the African Slave Trade to the Trilateral Trade System when teaching American history? If you think that doesn't have ideological and racial implications, you are fooling yourself [1]. Now, allow me a slight backtrack, I've pointed these things out as culturally relevant examples for American readers but biases in education are true across all cultures. In Turkey it is illegal to teach about the Armenian genocide as a genocide and not a civil conflict.
Finally, you also learn prejudice and privilege from media. We learn it from news coverage and from 'entertainment' TV. Consider the prevalence of domestic violence, rape and systematic violence against People of Color we see on a daily basis in fictional TV shows. There have been numerous studies that show Women and People of Color are most likely to be the victims of violence in fictional TV narratives, doubly so when the character is introduced exclusively to become a victim of violence. In local news broadcasts, crime stories covering violence involving People of Color is disproportionately covered in relation to the overall percentage of crime and the corresponding percentage of the local population they represent [2]. The protagonists of television shows are overwhelmingly White and Male, unless the show is targeted specifically towards a specific demographic, such as a women's talk show.
Take for example, the show at the source of our current fuckery, Supernatural. Even though the show has a large female audience, it is billed as a "drama and horror show." The main cast of SPN are all male, white and (presumably) heterosexual. I only add presumably in there because as an angel does Castiel have a sexuality in canon? As this chromatic recasting comic by dhobikikutti (on DW) so eloquently points out, so much of what Sam and Dean do in every single episode of SPN is enabled and furthered by white privilege. Every time they walk into a place and produce their fake credentials with a shaky bullshit explanation about their legitimacy and someone buys it? That's their white privilege as White Men paying off. Consider all the female characters in SPN. Oh, wait, they're all dead. What about the Persons of Color in SPN? Oh yeah, also all dead. Beyond even individual portrayals, consider the massive amounts of cultural appropriation that the show has engaged in over its five seasons. There have been episodes where Native American religious practices have been misappropriated and deities shown as savage monsters. There was 5.19 Hammer of the Gods from this season that featured caricatures of gods for various non-Western religions all banding together to fight off the apocalypse. When this episode came out, there was some criticism among fans and in the media for the stereotypes but I think the individual stereotypes aren't even the most telling point. The episode is fundamentally about constructing the Other. The writers took gods from a bunch of other world religions and had them band together against the Christian apocalypse. We are introduced to this group through Sam, Dean and eventually Gabriel's exposition. We are not encouraged to empathize with this foreign pantheon, they are vicious and ruthless. The exception to this is Kali, because Gabriel has romantic/sexual feelings for her? So we have unsympathetic aggressive men who are ruthless and an exoticized woman. Ultimately, none of them are able to stand up against Lucifer. So even if the episode could theoretically be read as seeing 'another front' of the war in the apocalypse, it is experienced exclusively through the gaze of our current order.
There is a phrase for this: Orientalism. And the tendency to put stories, news and narratives into the perspective of privileged white men is called the Western Gaze. This western gaze manifests itself in many particular ways, one example being the frequent depiction of People of Color as passive victims in non-western societies falling under the yoke of oppression. These depictions also serve to recreate and enforce myths of a homogenized ‘third world’ Other. The way we teach our history, our media, SPN itself - all of it - implicitly teaches us that stories are told from white men's perspectives, even if they're about non-white subjects.
For example, I know a lot of you are watching the World Cup right now. Have you paid attention to any of the programming about any of the African national teams recently? A sizable chunk of it of it focuses on the poverty of the country at large while soulful narratives about failed infrastructure and civil wars are transposed over disaster-porn images of homeless children and shanty-towns. Yes, there is poverty in many countries in Africa and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) was in a civil war. Yet the tone of this coverage is galling, it's: look at these poor people, or how lucky are these footballers to have escaped? Please, let's be a little more condescending with our racism. We have widespread poverty and violence in America, do they talk about that when talking about our NT? Of course not. Do they talk about the status of poverty or government or social stability of European teams? Spain currently has an unemployment rate over 20%. To their credit, the Spanish press did ask their NT about that, but has English-speaking media covered that in relation to the NT? No. Interestingly, the coverage of South Africa itself is nearly the opposite. All of the stories about the host country focus on it's historical triumph over apartheid, yet Johannesburg has one of the highest murder rates in the world and the country has a rising problem with "corrective rape" [3].
When we (the media, our culture, you/me) talk about poverty and oppression in the non-Western World, it's in the abstract, National Geographic type way. It exists in the abstract or on the extremely local level, but never in between. Everyone 'knows' there is poverty and oppression. We get emotionally desensitized by an onslaught of images of particular instances: after a tsunami, an earthquake, a starving child. What we in the Western world, especially in America, never see is the connection between us and the images we see. As facetofcathy noted in her entry, there is an emotional disconnect between us and them. There is no understanding of how colonialism and Western, particularly American, policies have created disparities and impoverishment. Nor the continuing impact of neo-colonialism in the form of economic policy (the IMF, World Bank, sanctions, trade deficits), US media imperialism and white privilege.
So when people ask how could this have happened? How did no one notice? My answer is two-fold.
It's not like there isn't some precedent in the series itself.
And it happens every fucking day.
[1] Texas school board rewrites US history, The Guardian.
[2] Racialized Portrayals of Reporters and Criminals on Local Television News, Travis L. Dixon.
[3] Raped and killed for being a lebian, The Guardian.
Which is not to say I don't think the author shouldn't be held responsible for what she wrote, but that it seems like she has been taken to task by a great many people already and I do not feel the need to throw myself on that particular pile.
There are three more posts directly related to the story that I want to highlight though, while discussing my own thoughts.
The first is from bossymarmalade who offers a selection of quotes from the story, if you are somehow unfamiliar with the controversy. It highlights the truly problematic nature of the narrative: that a RPF story is set during the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, that the Haitians are depicted in entirely racist ways and that all of it is simply a vehicle for the White protagonists' romance and porn. Bossymarmalade's entry focuses on just the story, but because it is a Big Bang story it also includes artwork from a separate person that uses actual pictures of the Haiti disaster. Which is why I have chosen not to link to the story itself.
Now, after the immediate questions of racism, privilege and colonial appropriation had been raised, people began to wonder how something like this could have happened. Yes, it's possible that this was a singular random act of egregious racism, but is that likely? Especially when you consider that with a project like a Big Bang, you have the writer, the artist, several beta writers, and the moderators of the BB challenge at the very minimum. The question arose, how could no one else had said something?
facetofcathy has an excellent post on this very question. A person doesn't just wake up one morning and decide "well, it's Monday, I think I'll be racist today." It's a slow build, taught over a lifetime, brick by brick by brick. You learn it from your family, in your education, from the media. Your family are first and foremost the source of prejudice in one's life, not because family are inherently prejudiced, but because they are responsible for the majority of a child's socialization. My grandmama used the term "colored people" in polite company and n****r among family, for example. I didn't pick that habit up, but it did highlight for me the massive difference in how my parents treated people. And I can see some of her attitude sometimes in my cousins who grew up more under her influence.
You also learn prejudice and privilege as part of your education. Pretty much until we get to college, American education privileges the narratives of the colonizers when learning about history and culture. In the instances when we learn about non-Eurocentric voices and stories, it is almost always part of some 'special' unit like Black History Month or Women Authors. The implication being there is HIStory (of the dominant White, Christian, middle and upper class culture) and then there is everyone else. We learn that Columbus and Cortez were the first people to 'discover' the Americas (because no one of consequence lived here at the time), the accrual of territory by the U.S. from indigenous people is described as simply broken treaties or infighting among the natives or crafty maneuvering on the part of American politicians. Within the confines of a High School classroom none of this is ever described as a systematic genocide against the people of North America that killed between 50-100 million people. Did you hear about the recent news reports of the Texas school board ruling to rename the African Slave Trade to the Trilateral Trade System when teaching American history? If you think that doesn't have ideological and racial implications, you are fooling yourself [1]. Now, allow me a slight backtrack, I've pointed these things out as culturally relevant examples for American readers but biases in education are true across all cultures. In Turkey it is illegal to teach about the Armenian genocide as a genocide and not a civil conflict.
Finally, you also learn prejudice and privilege from media. We learn it from news coverage and from 'entertainment' TV. Consider the prevalence of domestic violence, rape and systematic violence against People of Color we see on a daily basis in fictional TV shows. There have been numerous studies that show Women and People of Color are most likely to be the victims of violence in fictional TV narratives, doubly so when the character is introduced exclusively to become a victim of violence. In local news broadcasts, crime stories covering violence involving People of Color is disproportionately covered in relation to the overall percentage of crime and the corresponding percentage of the local population they represent [2]. The protagonists of television shows are overwhelmingly White and Male, unless the show is targeted specifically towards a specific demographic, such as a women's talk show.
Take for example, the show at the source of our current fuckery, Supernatural. Even though the show has a large female audience, it is billed as a "drama and horror show." The main cast of SPN are all male, white and (presumably) heterosexual. I only add presumably in there because as an angel does Castiel have a sexuality in canon? As this chromatic recasting comic by dhobikikutti (on DW) so eloquently points out, so much of what Sam and Dean do in every single episode of SPN is enabled and furthered by white privilege. Every time they walk into a place and produce their fake credentials with a shaky bullshit explanation about their legitimacy and someone buys it? That's their white privilege as White Men paying off. Consider all the female characters in SPN. Oh, wait, they're all dead. What about the Persons of Color in SPN? Oh yeah, also all dead. Beyond even individual portrayals, consider the massive amounts of cultural appropriation that the show has engaged in over its five seasons. There have been episodes where Native American religious practices have been misappropriated and deities shown as savage monsters. There was 5.19 Hammer of the Gods from this season that featured caricatures of gods for various non-Western religions all banding together to fight off the apocalypse. When this episode came out, there was some criticism among fans and in the media for the stereotypes but I think the individual stereotypes aren't even the most telling point. The episode is fundamentally about constructing the Other. The writers took gods from a bunch of other world religions and had them band together against the Christian apocalypse. We are introduced to this group through Sam, Dean and eventually Gabriel's exposition. We are not encouraged to empathize with this foreign pantheon, they are vicious and ruthless. The exception to this is Kali, because Gabriel has romantic/sexual feelings for her? So we have unsympathetic aggressive men who are ruthless and an exoticized woman. Ultimately, none of them are able to stand up against Lucifer. So even if the episode could theoretically be read as seeing 'another front' of the war in the apocalypse, it is experienced exclusively through the gaze of our current order.
There is a phrase for this: Orientalism. And the tendency to put stories, news and narratives into the perspective of privileged white men is called the Western Gaze. This western gaze manifests itself in many particular ways, one example being the frequent depiction of People of Color as passive victims in non-western societies falling under the yoke of oppression. These depictions also serve to recreate and enforce myths of a homogenized ‘third world’ Other. The way we teach our history, our media, SPN itself - all of it - implicitly teaches us that stories are told from white men's perspectives, even if they're about non-white subjects.
For example, I know a lot of you are watching the World Cup right now. Have you paid attention to any of the programming about any of the African national teams recently? A sizable chunk of it of it focuses on the poverty of the country at large while soulful narratives about failed infrastructure and civil wars are transposed over disaster-porn images of homeless children and shanty-towns. Yes, there is poverty in many countries in Africa and Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) was in a civil war. Yet the tone of this coverage is galling, it's: look at these poor people, or how lucky are these footballers to have escaped? Please, let's be a little more condescending with our racism. We have widespread poverty and violence in America, do they talk about that when talking about our NT? Of course not. Do they talk about the status of poverty or government or social stability of European teams? Spain currently has an unemployment rate over 20%. To their credit, the Spanish press did ask their NT about that, but has English-speaking media covered that in relation to the NT? No. Interestingly, the coverage of South Africa itself is nearly the opposite. All of the stories about the host country focus on it's historical triumph over apartheid, yet Johannesburg has one of the highest murder rates in the world and the country has a rising problem with "corrective rape" [3].
When we (the media, our culture, you/me) talk about poverty and oppression in the non-Western World, it's in the abstract, National Geographic type way. It exists in the abstract or on the extremely local level, but never in between. Everyone 'knows' there is poverty and oppression. We get emotionally desensitized by an onslaught of images of particular instances: after a tsunami, an earthquake, a starving child. What we in the Western world, especially in America, never see is the connection between us and the images we see. As facetofcathy noted in her entry, there is an emotional disconnect between us and them. There is no understanding of how colonialism and Western, particularly American, policies have created disparities and impoverishment. Nor the continuing impact of neo-colonialism in the form of economic policy (the IMF, World Bank, sanctions, trade deficits), US media imperialism and white privilege.
So when people ask how could this have happened? How did no one notice? My answer is two-fold.
It's not like there isn't some precedent in the series itself.
And it happens every fucking day.
[1] Texas school board rewrites US history, The Guardian.
[2] Racialized Portrayals of Reporters and Criminals on Local Television News, Travis L. Dixon.
[3] Raped and killed for being a lebian, The Guardian.