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
( Read more... )
Comments 15
(and now I'm stuck on the assertion that Superman is a racist.)
Reply
But if I can try and explain something: Theoretically, color-blindness is awesome, and if the whole world was color-blind, by golly, we'd all get along! However: the whole world isn't. And most -- not all, but most -- color-blindness, in real life, is incomplete. This is the "if I treat everyone like they're white like me, then I'm not a racist and there are no race problems" perspective. The motivation is sound, and by and large this is fine, but it can become problematic because it actually neglects something formative in a person's character. (I'd venture that it is impossible to grow up not-white and not have that influence your development/personality. In what way/to what degree=variable, of course.) This is very like -- and usually comes paired with -- the anti-hyphenated-American stance. Obviously -American-ness is a bit ridiculous, but ignoring it completely isn't the way to make the problem go away. "If I don't call you an ( ... )
Reply
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”."Okay, tying into what Emmy and Ji said -- if I were to take the stance of not thinking about race at all, I wouldn't pick up on my own unconscious -- not even just prejudices. Everything. I mean, mainstream US literature is *so white*; most bookstores even put black authors (of all genres) in their own section. So one Korean-American woman on my flist has written about how for years, all the characters she wrote were white. It was the default; she read mostly fantasy, and she'd pretty much only found fantasy novels about white characters. And, you know, if you want to write all white characters, great, but she didn't -- she was disturbed to realize how automatically white = default came ( ... )
Reply
Reply
Uh, also I missed/forgot the part where it was suggested he actively propagates racist messages. The former was all I was on board with.
Reply
*LOOKS*
Reply
Not caring what colour someone is makes you part of the problem? How does that work, exactly? In order to get rid of racism, we have to pay attention to race the whole time?
Yeah, right, that'll work. Alternately, we could just get on with our life, take an interest in what we like, and just get on withthe people we get on with? There are 3 people on my f-list I know to be at least partially black, 2 are people I've met, one is an actual friend. There are many others I've never met and who I don't know the skin colour of, neither do I care. Didn't know pootergeek was black until he put his picture up ( ... )
Reply
(The comment has been removed)
where we were told over and over to judge people "...not on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
I don't think acknowledging someone's (wacky culturally constructed) race = judging them by it. Nor does acknowledging if it's affected their lives.
I've seen and heard people say that when they've gone their entire lives hearing things like "you're good at math, right?" / "yeah, but where are you really from?" / "my mom says Jews cause bad traffic" / Insert Insensitive/Stereotyping Remark/Flat-out Racist Here, that being told that race doesn't matter hurts. Because to them it does, and it's not their fault. I don't want to judge people by the color of their skin, but I don't want to brush aside if it's had an effect on their lives.
Reply
Leave a comment