Joss and Firefly and race, oh my!

[chickpea]

I was going to write this a long time ago, but you know me and my inability to write anything substantial that isn't about imagined boy dramas, so. That was the disclaimer. Oh, here's another one: I'm going to forgo transitions in this entry, because I can't be arsed to figure out how to string all these thoughts together. Transitions are going

Comments

[fairy_tale_echo]

First of all, submit this baby to the_cortex!

Second of all, I just read Margaret Cho's blog on Gwen Stefani and her harajuku girls a few days ago and...well, this was the perfect compliment to it!

Third of all, I heart this essay. One of my ex-boyfriends always used to wonder how it was that Buffy never managed to run into a single Asian character except the one Cordette. After all, the show was based in SoCal...

And it's not just that OMG, JOSS SAVE THE WORLD!!1 but you've made a really good point about how FF picks and chooses between the Asian elements it wants. Hey, aren't they the co-superpower in this 'verse? That means we should be seeing a lot more Asian faces around. Even, like you said, just in throw-away roles.

And yes, that matters. It really does. Remember the famous Star Trek story Nichelle Nichols tells about how a woman came up to her and told her that the first time she saw Lt. Uhura on TV she ran around her house yelling, "There's a black woman on TV and she isn't a maid!" And, of course, the woman who told

[chickpea]

Oh man, I'm so psyched about your comments right now, on multiple levels:

First of all, submit this baby to [info]the_cortex!
Awww, thanks! Most of my LJ is f-locked, but I am keeping this open in case people want to comment on it and/or read it without being on my f-list.

Remember the famous Star Trek story Nichelle Nichols...
I hadn't heard that story, but it's exactly what I was thinking. It does count to see yourself represented, because the media you consume in part shapes what you think of yourself.

(see also: Armistead Maupin's comments in The Celluloid Closet)
!!! I read parts of that book for my paper for a Women & 1950s class during my senior spring! It's awesome when things you have to read become things you reference in non-school things, no?

In the end, I come back to the story I read in Ebert's review of Better Luck Tomorrow...Dude. The events in BLT came nearly directly from the events that happened AT MY HIGH SCHOOL (the "Honor Roll murders") a few years before I got there. Though the filmmakers won't say

[randominity]

I've taken an age and a half to even attempt responding to this, because I think you've really said it all. I'm much like you in that I don't tend to notice things like a lack of minorities in a series unless I'm explicitly thinking about it. And even then, I'm less likely to think that a negative or stereotypical portrayal is really that, until it's pointed out (someone once compared Book's role in the Serenity movie to that of a "Magical Negro" and it had never occurred to me to even think that. I'm not sure I agree, but the thought hadn't even crossed my mind in the first place).

My friend and I took to making drinking game jokes every time we saw an Asian in the background in Firefly. "Asian person, bottom left corner! Drink!" We saw more people of east-Indian descent than Asians, I think, which struck me as odd: as you said, would it have been so difficult to even just fill the background with Asian faces, even if none of them had lines? (It would be better if one or two did, of course

[chickpea]

What's the "Magical Negro" role? I don't think I've heard that term before. I've been trying to come up with a definition on my own (based on my own recollections of the BDM), and the nearest examples I can come up with are from books: the old man in The Cay and Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Is that close?

I think I had some words to say about exotification and Orientalism, but they've left my brain now.
Ooooh. I want to hear them, if they come back to your brain.

[randominity]

[The Magic Negro]

If I come up further commentary, I'll be sure to come back to this thread and let you know!

[randominity]

Come up WITH further commentary. argh.

[randomsignal]

Yeh, the predominance of black actors as villains struck a sour note with me too.

There's been any number of times I've thought J.W. was being careless about the message he was sending (not just about race, either, but I won't go elsewhere right now.)

As for Zoe, I always sort of wondered if half the reason she's tagging along with Mal is because she knows he wouldn't last a week without her. The show so clearly portrays her as stronger, smarter, saner (not hard) and generally more together and more competant.

[chickpea]

That is a very good point about Zoe, and how she takes care of Mal in a more strong, silent type way. It's probably why I don't really feel all that peeved that Zoe is the acknowledged second-in-command instead of being the captain -- I don't think she really cares about the power, just about surviving and having the people around her be safe.

[barn_swallow]

I too am here from the cortex, I bet you will be comment-spammed soon

[randomsignal]

a "Race in America" class...should be mandatory
I agree. I've worked several places where "diversity training" (how to get along with people who are different from you) is mandatory and I think it's a pretty good idea. A lot of people sincerely want to be unprejudiced (is that a legitimate word?) but they really don't know how.

[barn_swallow]

The thing for me was, being a 'whitest white girl' myself, I wouldn't have known what it's like for other races if it wasn't for that class. Which is kinda sad that I would be so clueless - most of my friends are non-white, but the area we grew up and went to school in was so diverse that they never seemed to have any trouble. I guess I was more sheltered due to age than anything else, and I am glad my friends were, but now things are different. I still wouldn't realize the extent to which racism still exists if it wasn't for all the stuff I learned about in that one class. (And now that my friends are out in the world, most of them are Indian and mistaken for 'terrorists,' and I see how bad it is

[the_grynne]

Here via the_cortex.

This was something that annoyed me a bit at first, and there's an interesting piece about it in Finding Serenity, the book of essays about "Firefly": called "Asian Objects in Space". It talks about cultural borrowings and as opposed to true integration.

"What's happening here is that cultural artifacts--organic expressions of a particular people, situated in a particlar time and place--are being divorced from their meaning in order to be used as a metaphor for something else.

"This is what the world of FIREFLY does: it tales Asian culture (Asian cultures), takes each artifact, and strips it of its original meaning until it is just an object ("it doesn't mean what you think"), which can be used to signify something else entirely--in this case a future in which our world's superpowers have come together into something, we are to believe, entirely new. Like American's recent obsession with yoga (without the Buddhist spirituality), the result is entertaining but curiously empty."I'm not sticking the blame on Joss, really.

[chickpea]

You know, I should pick up Finding Serenity and read those essays, but I got really, really turned off the semi-academic essays after I bought and read most of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale and just really hated the intellectual masturbation going on in the book. I'm all scarred and gun-shy now.

But I did like this quote you posted. I agree that it's not a major crime, just that I expected more. But then again, you can please people some of the time... And on the balance, I liked FF as a whole more than the small parts that I didn't like. It's just that some people get all up in arms when I say, "I liked it, but not *this* part," because apparently the love is supposed to be unconditional and unflinching, and that's just not how I do things, you know?