Uncomfortable topics: Let's talk about race

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am having a hard time extracting your point from that. Can you clarify? In my opinion, consciously recognizing and naming passive racism is an important step forward; are you agreeing or disagreeing with that?

[Telarus]

Last night I watched "Top Dog", a surprisingly well filmed (for what it was, the cinematography was good) Chuck Norris + Lovable Canine Badass vs the Evil White Supremacists movie.

With my fiance's 12 yr old (who has lagging social coping skills).

This thread came in surprisingly handy to get some clear basic concepts about discrimination and how racism is imbedded in our cultural momentum (& how to approach that as a mostly caucasian + native american kid  ).

Then we got to watch Chuck Norris kick some neoNazi ass when they tried to blow up the inter-faith conference. 

Thanks everybody.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Nigel- i just realized that i know a youtube clip of an irish asian and some of the perceptions white irish sometimes have of him. Its (like a bunch of his other clips) in irish but has subtitles. And some of the comments he gets are nasty too along the lines of hes butchering the language. Except hes actually irish. Will post later when im home.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel- i just realized that i know a youtube clip of an irish asian and some of the perceptions white irish sometimes have of him. Its (like a bunch of his other clips) in irish but has subtitles. And some of the comments he gets are nasty too along the lines of hes butchering the language. Except hes actually irish. Will post later when im home.

Oh cool! I'm looking forward to it.

[Placid Dingo]

 

I am having a hard time extracting your point from that. Can you clarify? In my opinion, consciously recognizing and naming passive racism is an important step forward; are you agreeing or disagreeing with that?

Agree.

But I'm feeling frustrated because I feel like this thread is saying if you can interpret it as racist in some way, it's a racist work. Which seems pointless because if thats the way to do it, anything ever written is a racist work.

[East Coast Hustle]

Well, most people are racist so that's not really a stretch.

Racism doesn't have to be conscious or overt. It just means that you allow a person's race to influence how you look at them as a person.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I am having a hard time extracting your point from that. Can you clarify? In my opinion, consciously recognizing and naming passive racism is an important step forward; are you agreeing or disagreeing with that?

Agree.

But I'm feeling frustrated because I feel like this thread is saying if you can interpret it as racist in some way, it's a racist work. Which seems pointless because if thats the way to do it, anything ever written is a racist work.

Can you explain what, specifically, in this thread is making you feel that way, maybe by pulling some quotes? And is it really a feeling, or is it a thought? I think that's an important distinction. 

In my opinion, one of the reasons it's valuable to point out ingrained racism is actually to help make it less ingrained. It's less likely, if people point out the embedded (and most likely unconscious) racism in Tolkien's work, that writers will continue unconsciously embedding racism into their work.

Who would you rather be, the guy who is conscious that making all your villains dark-skinned is going to be seen as racist, or the guy who is happily oblivious and publishes a book in which all of the villains are dark-skinned?

[Placid Dingo]

I think the LOTR discussion is what started to irritate me. I still don't believe it's racist because that work has a very specific meaning in my mind; the idea that any race is superior or inferior to another. So yeah there's dark creatures and light creatures but it feels like a stretch to me that the normal way to read that is White humans are better than black humans.

YES Tolkein should have been aware of the implications that could be read into his work and either changed it or decided to cop the flack.

YES as an author I want to make sure I avoid writing that could be seen in any way as racist.

YES as I have said pretty clearly, I agree racism can be implicit and unintentional.

But you know, if I write about balck and white people fighting green goblins, well couldn't that be maybe interpreted as fighting the thrd race; an allegory for Asians? Is Zoolander racist because of the 'black janitor makeup' scene? Is the Lion King racist because the hyenas are obviously the post ww1 Germans rallying behind the Hitler figure of Scar? So on.

I feel like there's a point at which 'identifying racism' in media becomes. Lo5ing. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm not saying it needs to be intentional. I'm not saying it needs to be obvious. But for my money, unfortunate implications are not racism.

I'm not even sure there's a clear disagreement here. We all think that works should take care to avoid unpleasant implications, that racism should be avoided in a work, that Tolkein made some bad choices in writing that led to his works being interpreted in an unintended racist way. I just dont feel like you can dismiss a work as racist singularly because it CAN BE SEEN AS racist.

[East Coast Hustle]

I don't think anybody was trying to dismiss it.

I mean, I love LOTR. The fact that there is implicit racism in it doesn't negate the quality of the storytelling, it's just an aspect of it that's better acknowledged than ignored.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think the LOTR discussion is what started to irritate me. I still don't believe it's racist because that work has a very specific meaning in my mind; the idea that any race is superior or inferior to another. So yeah there's dark creatures and light creatures but it feels like a stretch to me that the normal way to read that is White humans are better than black humans.

YES Tolkein should have been aware of the implications that could be read into his work and either changed it or decided to cop the flack.

YES as an author I want to make sure I avoid writing that could be seen in any way as racist.

YES as I have said pretty clearly, I agree racism can be implicit and unintentional.

But you know, if I write about balck and white people fighting green goblins, well couldn't that be maybe interpreted as fighting the thrd race; an allegory for Asians? Is Zoolander racist because of the 'black janitor makeup' scene? Is the Lion King racist because the hyenas are obviously the post ww1 Germans rallying behind the Hitler figure of Scar? So on.

I feel like there's a point at which 'identifying racism' in media becomes. Lo5ing. I'm not saying it's not there. I'm not saying it needs to be intentional. I'm not saying it needs to be obvious. But for my money, unfortunate implications are not racism.

I'm not even sure there's a clear disagreement here. We all think that works should take care to avoid unpleasant implications, that racism should be avoided in a work, that Tolkein made some bad choices in writing that led to his works being interpreted in an unintended racist way. I just dont feel like you can dismiss a work as racist singularly because it CAN BE SEEN AS racist.

I didn't see a single person dismissing the Lord of the Rings as racist simply because that aspect has racist implications. I did see a number of people (including myself) saying that it bothers them when people try to dismiss an entire work, or the work of significant historical figures, due to an element of racism.

And yes, I do believe that it is racism... albeit perhaps unconscious racism... to make the bad guys dark-skinned and the good guys light-skinned. That not-insignificant detail did stand out to me as a kid, and it bothered me. It wasn't incidental, and it was a repeated theme throughout the book. Elves are fair: Uruk-Hai are dark. The human good guys are light-skinned, mostly with yellow hair and blue eyes, the human bad guys are dark-skinned. Orcs are "A grim, dark band... swart, slant-eyed". Good is light/fair/blond/blue eyed, evil is brown with nappy hair. Furthermore, most disturbingly, it inextricably links good and evil with race.

It doesn't get a whole lot more directly racist than that.

When was the last time you read the books? It might be a good time to re-read them; you might be surprised at what you see with a new awareness.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That said, I also don't believe that he was promulgating any kind of racist agenda, either. I think that he was simply trying to make the bad guys ugly and the good guys appealing using imagery that was familiar and comfortable, and that was the imagery at hand, so deeply ingrained into him due to its dominance in culture that he didn't even question it.

Which is exactly why we are questioning it.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Sorry for the delay. Funny enough, I was talking to a black female friend about this same thread. She's upstairs putting Picklesson to sleep.

Anyway:

Here's the Irish dude, he's Filipino, rather than Asian, and the relevant bit starts around 2:13:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVYrOn7j7eo&feature=channel_video_title

Now mind you, you can hear his accent, even if he's not speaking English. And just before this, he's saying it's a shame that Irish is dying. And in this clip he mentions that he's Irish. He identifies as both Filipino and Irish.

Now, I can't remember which clip it was, since he has a few in Irish, but he uses the phrase "Nil me muinteoir" which is incorrect, since it means "I am in a temporary sort of sense, not a teacher" where he should have said "Ni muinteoir me" (I am not a teacher [permanently, as far as I as the speaker can tell but maybe down the line I'll change my mind. Who knows, let's drink more and I'll make a temporary decision])" But people gave him shit about it. It's an honest mistake since English doesn't make that distinction. I am not a teacher vs I am not a teacher. And he admitted that he hasn't spoken in Irish in several years. And I've seen shit comments on his videos but encouraging ones for American or Canadian women trying hard to speak Irish and it's nothing but encouraging. He's some foreign fuck butchering the language for a slip up or two, except that he's an Irish born Irish citizen. He could run for president. I, as a pure (as it gets) Irish citizen, would not be able to vote for him, since I am a Bostonian.

You know what?

I am some foreign fuck who is entitled to citizenship. Those Americans and Canadians who are botching it? Put your dicks away. They aren't fucking you.


This dude is Irish. Here's the proof. Talking about Irish politics. In English. With and Irish accent:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH3xbYpQo28

[Placid Dingo]

Ok, there's not anything i really disagree with in the last few posts.

I'll admit I haven't read the books for years and was kind of relying on the movies.

[Golden Applesauce]

I always imagined the dwarfs as having darkish earth-colored skin, and the orcs and goblins coming in all the colors of boogers (usually not dark unless you have a sinus infection), although I don't remember any actual descriptions about them.  On the other other hand, I always thought of the people from the Earthsea as looking basically Irish (the main character was a goat or sheepherd on an island!  That's basically Ireland, right?)  Until recently, where I saw in an interview Ursula K. le Guin saying how stupid it was that fantasy worlds always had characters of real-world ethnicities, which was why she made the main race of Earthsea novels dark-skinned, red-haired peoples.  So maybe I just tend to gloss over appearance descriptions?

[East Coast Hustle]

Placid Dingo, if you haven't already done so you should REALLY read The Last Ringbearer.

As a fan of LOTR, I found it an enjoyable read in its own right, but it also does a great job of turning your perspective of that fictional world on its head and making you take notice of of the inherent (though almost certainly unconscious) racism in the original depiction.