Story Of A Little Black Child Who Liked To Read SF
pandorasblog Responded to me here about my new icon in a GIP post. But my comment was too long and I don't want to break it up into two or more parts.
Her:
I just finished Octavia Butler's "Kindred" last night, oddly enough. Enjoyed it a lot, and also the biographical info my edition of the book had was interesting.
It talked about how (at the time of that edition's publication, which was late eighties) there weren't many fans of colour, and how this could be traced to certain assumptions inherent in how mainstream (esp. American) sci-fi was being written, eg. a lot of it was a sort of colonial nostalgia. Self-congratulatory stories about spacemen bringing their hi-tech message to planets filled with limited people of darker races... kind of obvious.
Or when you did get something where characters of colour appeared in a non-colonised-nation role, it'd be in a tokenistic way, as if by having one character they were paying sufficient lip-service to the ideal of having a mixed society, while in fact they imagined in their heart of hearts that each office would have one token person whose skin colour would be politely ignored, rather than their whole identity being truly accepted.
It gave me a lot of food for thought, particularly in relation to your and your roomnie's recent blog topics... do fans of colour feel that things have fundamentally moved on since then, or is it just the same problems with slightly improved ratios of CoC involved?
Me:
Growing up in the Caribbean with such a mix of skin tones, ethnicities and religions I gave SF a lot of slack. I assumed that PoC were just around the corner the way they were in my childhood. And that just because the composition of this ship, or this crew or this whatever was one way didn't mean anything. And that was just the main characters, who knew about the rest of the people on the planet, station, etc.
I was amazingly colorblind in my initial readings of SF. And then I read more and read more and I started taking it for granted that black people didn't read it, so that's why there weren't that many black chars cause they weren't even black writers. I had elaborate fantasies of becoming a famous writer and proving that blacks had been reading all along and interested all along and that people would pull out these stories they hadn't thought would get published for lack of an audience.
Then I discovered Octavia Butler. And I realized I wouldn't be the first female, black, SF writer. And so I wouldn't have to break ground. And yet, I felt incredibly frustrated at the thought of her being the person burning the path ahead of me - being my pioneer - because her path seemed so limiting. She seemed to only ever write from the pov of a character of color.
I actually stopped reading her because I was innocent enough to think of it as ghettoizing my SF experience. There was this whole wide world out there and people could/should/weren't they all writing about diversity?
What I didn't realize was that when I read other authors, I was shifting things in my head. The Elves were Amerindian. Any society remotely Egyptian became Black. I skimmed over descriptions of blond hair and blue eyes. I clung to Misty Lackey's OathBreakers because there was someone like me (with braids even) on the cover and involved in the plot.
In my own writing I started not thinking of what my characters looked like, or even of describing them, I simply wanted to follow the plot. When I did my first Trek PBEM RPG's, I was a Black Trill, a Caribbean Human, or an Orion female trying to use her brain. I didn't realize I was pushing to be a minority and to prove that color existed in space.
And it was easy not to realize it. In Trek, Captains and Admirals and Ambassadors were PoC. I admit to not catching Keiko as an Asian Scientist stereotype, because I was just thrilled to see color and interracial relationships up there; because it felt more like the island I'd grown up on where people mixed and blended.
When the EarthSea movie came out on SciFi a few years ago, that was my first instance of discovering that there had been fantasy available to me with people of color. I read the books eagerly and looked forward to the movie, wishing I'd been around my father (who encouraged SF reading) at an earlier age cause maybe he'd have mentioned it.
And then in the movie it was all turned around; the characters, the plot, the message. I felt insulted as a Black woman, as a pagan, as a SF fan. Then I read about other disappointed fans who not only had those feelings of offense but the cry of 'SciFi why did you piss all over my childhood!'.
And I understood them from a certain POV. My mother despaired of my reading SF. I thought it was because she thought that kind of fantasy was impractical. She also didn't like me watching Disney. It was years before I realized the true reason why.(Disney's Princesses)
Then came the Star Wars revival and I realized for the first time that Lando Calrissian is the only obvious Black man there. James Earl Jones' voice doesn't quite count. And so it wasn't that as a child I'd just been so thrilled with the story I didn't notice anything but the main characters. All sorts of aliens yes, but all the humans were white. (And I don't need to mention Jar Jar Binks in the Prequels, do I?)
It made me pause and start to think about everything I'd been doing. It made me reevaluate my writing style and my characters and frustrations I'd been quietly sublimating.
But I told myself one thing at a time. A writer has to grow. I'd get a handle on writing men, thus doubling up my potential character pool and then I'd go from there.
Though I wondered why I felt pressed to make an issue of 'And the heroes just happen to be gay' and thus fell so readily to slash. But I couldn't quite wrap my mind around 'And the heroes just happen to be people of color'. If I had to describe them, that is.
The whole Octavia Butler thing was like a loose tooth and I just kept pushing it waiting for revelation to pop out.
Then Keith Hamilton Cobb cut his dreads. He'd grown them in order to get bigger roles, so people could match his dynamic presence with a just as distinct and regal look. But then he started getting fed up of being cast/offered roles of 'the exotic dark skinned whatever'. Other than that people weren't hiring. So he cut them, and he misses them; they were such a part of him and he sacrificed them in order to be more like what he thought Hollywood was now wanting to hire. He cut off a part of himself!
My rage at that simmered and simmered. I felt it. I felt how angry I was.
I was already pissed off that on Smallville they'd made Pete Ross black for absolutely no reason and then failed to do anything with it. A token black and then they didn't even use his blackness as part of his identity. The black character was a non-entity.
I started realizing how everyone I liked in certain shows was 'Lt. Uhura'. Except it wasn't even lip service to a mixed and diverse society. Kendra was an exotic other and she died. So did Crispus Allen, and as the Spectre tell me how that isn't one hell of an exotic other? Renee Montoya got fetishized as a lesbian - twice the exotic other. Tyr... Tyr got torn down. I refuse to see it in any other way. His exotic other was too powerful for Kevin Sorbo to handle. So another exotic bites the dust. Teal'c is an exotic anti-slavery champion other. Ronon is an exotic Freedom Fighter other(and I have a post about dreads brewing that explains my anger at 'animalistic with a lion's mane') And then there's Teyla. Somehow Teyla wasn't exotic enough!
I hear people talk about Ronon in Stargate Atlantis and hesitate to mention that when Teyla fit in too well with the group, once they'd stripped away all but her fighting sticks and method of speaking, they went out of their way to get a proper native guide.
I bite my tongue at people mentioned how they just paired up Ronon and Teyla together but didn't think anything of the fact that they just happen to put the two people of color together. (And just happened to assume they'd end up heterosexual)
I do not bite my tongue when I hear people say they made Ford, when they did use him, the homophobic obstacle because he was black and in the military; thus forgoing any of the universe set up that the original Atlantis Crew was hand picked for a one way trip. Essentially they were a colony! How does someone who's dealt with body switching Aliens, mechanical termites of doom and that bloody level of security clearance, who wants to go see the far reaches of space, end up small minded?!
Colonial Nostalgia, that's a very good phrase. I fell in love with Babylon 5 the moment I realized Mars was suing for independence. I loved DS9 for having an Indian character as part of the main cast (Siddig El Fadil's real ethnicity not withstanding) And a black Commander I got to see every week? Woohoo! But then Voyager had a 'token Amerindian' and TPTB seemed to forget that Tuvok couldn't count as a CoC because he was Vulcan, so what if he didn't have extensive make up and prosthetics. He represented an alien race!
Which is all a very long winded way of my saying, that while I can't speak for my roommate, I don't feel PoC are represented well in SF. It does feel like the same damn thing with a slighter higher ratio of CoC visible - mostly because there are more channels and thus more shows.
I think half the talk going around is white-fans not realizing that FoC are well aware of everything the show creators are doing wrong. But that since fanfiction fixes what's wrong, it's even more offensive to see certain very demeaning tropes played out.
Let me just end this TL:DR by saying, I have an unholy love of Chronicles of Riddick and I slowly realized that's because PoC were three of the major characters on screen. They're in the universe. In all sorts of positions. And one was the hero! Yay! The plot is actual an aside to me. That's how much I want more than lipservice.
Her:
I just finished Octavia Butler's "Kindred" last night, oddly enough. Enjoyed it a lot, and also the biographical info my edition of the book had was interesting.
It talked about how (at the time of that edition's publication, which was late eighties) there weren't many fans of colour, and how this could be traced to certain assumptions inherent in how mainstream (esp. American) sci-fi was being written, eg. a lot of it was a sort of colonial nostalgia. Self-congratulatory stories about spacemen bringing their hi-tech message to planets filled with limited people of darker races... kind of obvious.
Or when you did get something where characters of colour appeared in a non-colonised-nation role, it'd be in a tokenistic way, as if by having one character they were paying sufficient lip-service to the ideal of having a mixed society, while in fact they imagined in their heart of hearts that each office would have one token person whose skin colour would be politely ignored, rather than their whole identity being truly accepted.
It gave me a lot of food for thought, particularly in relation to your and your roomnie's recent blog topics... do fans of colour feel that things have fundamentally moved on since then, or is it just the same problems with slightly improved ratios of CoC involved?
Me:
Growing up in the Caribbean with such a mix of skin tones, ethnicities and religions I gave SF a lot of slack. I assumed that PoC were just around the corner the way they were in my childhood. And that just because the composition of this ship, or this crew or this whatever was one way didn't mean anything. And that was just the main characters, who knew about the rest of the people on the planet, station, etc.
I was amazingly colorblind in my initial readings of SF. And then I read more and read more and I started taking it for granted that black people didn't read it, so that's why there weren't that many black chars cause they weren't even black writers. I had elaborate fantasies of becoming a famous writer and proving that blacks had been reading all along and interested all along and that people would pull out these stories they hadn't thought would get published for lack of an audience.
Then I discovered Octavia Butler. And I realized I wouldn't be the first female, black, SF writer. And so I wouldn't have to break ground. And yet, I felt incredibly frustrated at the thought of her being the person burning the path ahead of me - being my pioneer - because her path seemed so limiting. She seemed to only ever write from the pov of a character of color.
I actually stopped reading her because I was innocent enough to think of it as ghettoizing my SF experience. There was this whole wide world out there and people could/should/weren't they all writing about diversity?
What I didn't realize was that when I read other authors, I was shifting things in my head. The Elves were Amerindian. Any society remotely Egyptian became Black. I skimmed over descriptions of blond hair and blue eyes. I clung to Misty Lackey's OathBreakers because there was someone like me (with braids even) on the cover and involved in the plot.
In my own writing I started not thinking of what my characters looked like, or even of describing them, I simply wanted to follow the plot. When I did my first Trek PBEM RPG's, I was a Black Trill, a Caribbean Human, or an Orion female trying to use her brain. I didn't realize I was pushing to be a minority and to prove that color existed in space.
And it was easy not to realize it. In Trek, Captains and Admirals and Ambassadors were PoC. I admit to not catching Keiko as an Asian Scientist stereotype, because I was just thrilled to see color and interracial relationships up there; because it felt more like the island I'd grown up on where people mixed and blended.
When the EarthSea movie came out on SciFi a few years ago, that was my first instance of discovering that there had been fantasy available to me with people of color. I read the books eagerly and looked forward to the movie, wishing I'd been around my father (who encouraged SF reading) at an earlier age cause maybe he'd have mentioned it.
And then in the movie it was all turned around; the characters, the plot, the message. I felt insulted as a Black woman, as a pagan, as a SF fan. Then I read about other disappointed fans who not only had those feelings of offense but the cry of 'SciFi why did you piss all over my childhood!'.
And I understood them from a certain POV. My mother despaired of my reading SF. I thought it was because she thought that kind of fantasy was impractical. She also didn't like me watching Disney. It was years before I realized the true reason why.(Disney's Princesses)
Then came the Star Wars revival and I realized for the first time that Lando Calrissian is the only obvious Black man there. James Earl Jones' voice doesn't quite count. And so it wasn't that as a child I'd just been so thrilled with the story I didn't notice anything but the main characters. All sorts of aliens yes, but all the humans were white. (And I don't need to mention Jar Jar Binks in the Prequels, do I?)
It made me pause and start to think about everything I'd been doing. It made me reevaluate my writing style and my characters and frustrations I'd been quietly sublimating.
But I told myself one thing at a time. A writer has to grow. I'd get a handle on writing men, thus doubling up my potential character pool and then I'd go from there.
Though I wondered why I felt pressed to make an issue of 'And the heroes just happen to be gay' and thus fell so readily to slash. But I couldn't quite wrap my mind around 'And the heroes just happen to be people of color'. If I had to describe them, that is.
The whole Octavia Butler thing was like a loose tooth and I just kept pushing it waiting for revelation to pop out.
Then Keith Hamilton Cobb cut his dreads. He'd grown them in order to get bigger roles, so people could match his dynamic presence with a just as distinct and regal look. But then he started getting fed up of being cast/offered roles of 'the exotic dark skinned whatever'. Other than that people weren't hiring. So he cut them, and he misses them; they were such a part of him and he sacrificed them in order to be more like what he thought Hollywood was now wanting to hire. He cut off a part of himself!
My rage at that simmered and simmered. I felt it. I felt how angry I was.
I was already pissed off that on Smallville they'd made Pete Ross black for absolutely no reason and then failed to do anything with it. A token black and then they didn't even use his blackness as part of his identity. The black character was a non-entity.
I started realizing how everyone I liked in certain shows was 'Lt. Uhura'. Except it wasn't even lip service to a mixed and diverse society. Kendra was an exotic other and she died. So did Crispus Allen, and as the Spectre tell me how that isn't one hell of an exotic other? Renee Montoya got fetishized as a lesbian - twice the exotic other. Tyr... Tyr got torn down. I refuse to see it in any other way. His exotic other was too powerful for Kevin Sorbo to handle. So another exotic bites the dust. Teal'c is an exotic anti-slavery champion other. Ronon is an exotic Freedom Fighter other(and I have a post about dreads brewing that explains my anger at 'animalistic with a lion's mane') And then there's Teyla. Somehow Teyla wasn't exotic enough!
I hear people talk about Ronon in Stargate Atlantis and hesitate to mention that when Teyla fit in too well with the group, once they'd stripped away all but her fighting sticks and method of speaking, they went out of their way to get a proper native guide.
I bite my tongue at people mentioned how they just paired up Ronon and Teyla together but didn't think anything of the fact that they just happen to put the two people of color together. (And just happened to assume they'd end up heterosexual)
I do not bite my tongue when I hear people say they made Ford, when they did use him, the homophobic obstacle because he was black and in the military; thus forgoing any of the universe set up that the original Atlantis Crew was hand picked for a one way trip. Essentially they were a colony! How does someone who's dealt with body switching Aliens, mechanical termites of doom and that bloody level of security clearance, who wants to go see the far reaches of space, end up small minded?!
Colonial Nostalgia, that's a very good phrase. I fell in love with Babylon 5 the moment I realized Mars was suing for independence. I loved DS9 for having an Indian character as part of the main cast (Siddig El Fadil's real ethnicity not withstanding) And a black Commander I got to see every week? Woohoo! But then Voyager had a 'token Amerindian' and TPTB seemed to forget that Tuvok couldn't count as a CoC because he was Vulcan, so what if he didn't have extensive make up and prosthetics. He represented an alien race!
Which is all a very long winded way of my saying, that while I can't speak for my roommate, I don't feel PoC are represented well in SF. It does feel like the same damn thing with a slighter higher ratio of CoC visible - mostly because there are more channels and thus more shows.
I think half the talk going around is white-fans not realizing that FoC are well aware of everything the show creators are doing wrong. But that since fanfiction fixes what's wrong, it's even more offensive to see certain very demeaning tropes played out.
Let me just end this TL:DR by saying, I have an unholy love of Chronicles of Riddick and I slowly realized that's because PoC were three of the major characters on screen. They're in the universe. In all sorts of positions. And one was the hero! Yay! The plot is actual an aside to me. That's how much I want more than lipservice.