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Race, Brand and the Placebo Effect

by Dan H

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Dan rambles on the vague theme of Racefail~

This is an article about race, but it's going to start off being an article about shampoo.

I have, on occasion, had trouble with dandruff, and as a result have needed to purchase shampoo to deal with this affliction. In my second year of university, I ran out of shampoo, so I went to the local Co-Op and picked up a bottle of Head and Shoulders.

It wasn't until I was on my way back home with my purchase that I realised that the only reason I had chosen that particular brand was that I had been seeing advertisements for Head and Shoulders for as long as I can remember, so that in my mind “anti-dandruff shampoo” was linked with the Head and Shoulders brand on a fundamental and inextricable level.

This was something of an epiphany for me, because it finally made me realise that advertising does not work the way I thought it did. I had assumed, and I think most people assume on some level, that advertisements worked my making you see the advertisement and immediately want the thing advertised. Some adverts do (particularly ads for food or drink if I see them when I'm hungry or thirsty) but that's usually secondary to their main function, which is to get into your head on a subconscious level and make you associate a particular need (anti-dandruff shampoo, a cool refreshing drink, a boost to your fragile self-esteem) with a particular product in a positive way, so that your choices and actions are influenced without your even knowing it.

And it works. If I am generically thirsty and not making a conscious effort to drink more fruit juice, or actively wanting a particular type of drink, I'll buy a coke.

What's even more interesting about this phenomenon is that it works even if you are aware of it. I know that a big part of the reason I drink coke, eat fast food, and shop in Sainsburys is that I've been influenced by advertising, but I carry on doing them anyway because most of the time people don't make informed decisions about things, we just go with our first instincts and our irrational impulses, even if we know they're wrong.

The same concept shows up in all kinds of places. It shows up in the pharmaceuticals industry, people find shiny red pills in bold, brand-name packaging to be more effective than nondescript white pills in generic grey packaging. We respond instinctively to visual cues, and we don't know we're doing it.

I bring all this up, because one of the many semi-irreconcilable controversies that came up during the whole Racefail debate is the dichotomy of race-as-physical-appearance versus race-as-cultural-identity. Heck, the whole thing basically started as a direct result of Elizabeth Bear saying you should write non-white people the same way you wrote white people, and some other people respectfully disagreeing.

Essentially there's two problems. The first is that most characters – particularly most protagonists – in genre fiction tend to be white (and tend to be men). The second problem is that most invented cultures in genre fiction tend to be based on either medieval Europe, modern America or horrendous stereotypes of non-European cultures.

The argument can be made that the latter problem simply can't be addressed by white American or European authors. Hell, it could be argued that it can't be addressed by non-white American or European authors. Nobody can ever really shake off the preconceptions of the culture they were raised in, and you can never really understand a culture that isn't your own. You can know stuff about it, but no matter how much anime you watch you can never know what it's like to be Japanese.

The first problem, however, can be addressed by white, American or European writers, and should be. Again the argument could be made that, particularly if you're working in a created world, race is kind of an arbitrary choice and so is ultimately meaningless. This argument is half-right. In a created world, race is purely cosmetic, but it's cosmetic in the same way that the colour of a headache pill is cosmetic. It's the sort of cosmetic that gets in your head and changes the way you think.

It all comes down to the nature of racism (or, for that matter, of prejudice in general). Prejudice is a lot like advertising: people think that it's all about big, obvious things. You see an ad for coke, so you go out and buy a glass of coke, a black man applies for a job, but he doesn't get it because the guy who interviews him is a big fat racist who hates black people.

I'm going to go off on another tangent here and talk about

Captain Planet

was a well meaning kids cartoon that took an endearingly multiracial gang of kids and had them fight villains who represented various ecological issues through the power of Earth, Fire, Wind, Water and Heart, which together allowed them to summon Captain Planet, who would lay the smackdown on evil villains who wanted to wreck the environment for no clear reason.

My mother really didn't like it.

She didn't like it because she thought it was dangerous to present the idea that problems for which we are all responsible (like pollution) are caused by single “villains”. I kind of think she was right.

I get that you can use a villain to personify something that is “part of all of us” (man) but I think it's actually hard to pull off in practice. Most of the time, personifying a social problem as an unambiguously horrible villain just sends the message that there are “bad people” out there who are polluters, racists, or whatever. This is why Whedon's cardboard misogynists piss me off, this is why the pseudo-Nazism of the Death Eaters was so annoying to me. Pollution doesn't happen because some guy in a cape decided to tip toxic waste into the sea for fun, it happens because guys like me can't be arsed to turn out heating down in the early summer.

The same kind of goes for racism. We all like to think that racism exists because of other people, that somehow there's some kind of rogue group of twenty or thirty hardcore racists out there who are between them responsible for all race issues everywhere, from the lack of Chinese characters in Firefly to the lack of decent Kosher butchers in Oxford. In fact racism exists because racist attitudes are pernicious, self-perpetuating, and all-pervasive.

There's a lot wrong with the Avenue Q song Everyone's A Little Bit Racist (it frequently sounds like it's using that statement to excuse racism rather than examine it - “ethnic jokes are so uncouth, but we laugh because they're based on truth” umm, no they're not, guys). It is, however, an important statement of fact. The reason that a white person is more likely to be hired for any given job than a nonwhite person is not because the person giving them the job is a cartoon racist, sitting there saying “no, I will not hire a filthy mudblood” it's because the person giving them the job is affected by racism on a level so fundamental they don't realise they're doing it. Just like you pass over the store-brand coke for the one in the red-and-white can you have been taught your whole life to associate with a cool refreshing beverage, so you pass over the guy (or woman) who doesn't look how you have been taught your whole life to expect a lawyer/teacher/investment banker/data entry clerk to look.

The really scary thing is that I catch myself doing it. I do, in fact, pay less attention to the opinions of my non-white and female friends. Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation. It's weird as fuck when you catch yourself doing it, just like when you catch yourself unconsciously reaching for a can of coke instead of a bottle of lemonade, or buy Head and Shoulders instead of a cheaper or more effective shampoo.

It all comes back to branding.

Now okay, you can make the argument here that I'm just passing the buck, and to a degree I am. Ultimately my attitudes, my purchasing habits and my behaviour are my responsibility, but they are influenced by the surroundings I grew up with. There isn't a causal link, I don't listen to my female friends talking and think “gosh, I remember this one TV show I saw had a woman on it who didn't know what she was talking about, therefore I won't listen to this person” nor do I think “well Willow knew what she was talking about, so this person must too”. I just have instinctive responses to things which are coloured by the society in which I was raised.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid. Of course first you need to get over the fact that it would then be a book about a black kid who gets rescued from his abusive black family by a kindly white guy, but if we assume that Harry was black and the Potter books weren't written in such a way that “Muggle” was effectively a racial slur. You would then have a situation in which the single most recognised fictional character in the world was a black kid (not only a black kid, but a black British kid). It would be huge, just like it was huge the first time they let an actual black guy play Othello. It wouldn't matter in the slightest that Harry Potter didn't listen to hip-hop or talk about Malcom X or use “urban” slang or do whatever else it is that white people seem to think black people have to do in fiction to properly represent “black culture”. The simple fact of the most popular fictional character in the world having black skin would have been huge. It would have changed the way a generation of children thought about race, and it would have changed it for the better. It wouldn't have been a miracle, it wouldn't have abolished racism overnight, but it would have done more good than any three government initiatives you might care to name.

Of course, if Harry Potter had been black, the book might not have sold at all, but that's a whole different problem.

Themes:

Topical

Minority Warrior

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http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/

at 23:19 on 2009-03-31This is really interesting, Dan! The comparison between unconscious racism and branding makes a scary amount of sense. (And you are right about the "Potter" books, as well.)

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it? A friend and I were discussing this when racefail happened - the link is here, if you're interested.

http://mary-j-59.livejournal.com/40140.html

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http://viorica8957.livejournal.com/

at 00:31 on 2009-04-01(I keep getting an error message when I try to log in, so I'm using OpenID)

It's a pervasive problem, and one that is worsened by the fact that so many people refuse to acknowledge it. I was arguing with my mother about racism recently, and the argument she kept falling back on was "But don't you see how much has changed since the sixties? There's a black president! There's no segregation! Things are so much better!" It's a defense people use to ignore their own buried racism- "

I'm

not a Nazi/KKK member/skinhead, so clearly

can't be racist."

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Sonia Mitchell

at 03:20 on 2009-04-01

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I'd love to bristle more at that than I am, but much as I hate myself for it that's a bit of branding I end up buying into. Whenever my mum says I'm studying in Oxford I have to add 'Brookes, not proper Oxford' just to make it clear I'm not attempting to ride on coat-tails.

Anyway, interesting article. Whenever I'm staying for any length of time with advert game co-players (guess the advert on tv before the product is named) I find myself much more aware of how many don't mention the product until right at the end. Building up the atmosphere/message first and then linking it to the product, cementing it in people's minds on a less conscious level after a few repeated viewings, seems to be the way a lot of things are done.

Which, as you say, is exactly what makes these attitudes harder to spot - they don't come ready labelled.

Mary-j-59 - that was an interesting read, thanks.

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Guy

at 05:30 on 2009-04-01I think a really interesting example in relation to this question is the original series of Star Trek. For anyone who isn't a total nerd and therefore doesn't know this already, part of Gene Roddenberry's idea for Star Trek was that in the far future, all of our silly, parochial attitudes about race and gender and nationality and so on will have been resolved and looked on much like we look on witch-burnings or the crusades or whatever; we will have gotten over it and it'll just be a bit of ugly but quaint ancient history. And on this basis, he wanted to have a multi-ethnic crew, with men and women in equal positions, and, most importantly, for them *not to make a big deal out of it*, with "episode of the week on gender equality" stuff happening.

Of course, for any of us who watch an episode of Star Trek now, this is a pretty laughable conception of what's going on, because the most important person on the ship is Captain Kirk, a white American male, who is pretty much defined by his adherence to an ideal of American masculinity which is very much "of its time". Meanwhile, he's surrounded by a crew of other white men who are primarily distinguished by their funny accents... and Uhura, who essentially is a telephone operator wearing a very, very short skirt. So from the point of view of making a judgement about whether or not this represents a successful embodiment of Roddenberry's vision, we would stamp "FAIL" all over it in big red letters.

However, I remember seeing a documentary a while ago (possibly "Trekkies"? Anyway...) which mentioned that Uhura was the first black woman on television (either in a regular part or at all, I can't remember) and various well-known contemporary black women talking about how exciting and how important it was for them to see a black woman with a speaking part on TV. By contemporary standards the part seems incredibly sexist and virtually definitive of the whole "token black character" phenomenon, but compared with the standards of the other things on TV at the time, it was very progressive.

So I guess what I'm saying is, people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

In terms of fantasy fiction, I think the clear beacon showing how the representation of people of other "races" (I have to put the scare quotes because I'm one of those who believes the term "race" is not a good descriptor of anything) can and should be done is Ursula le Guin's Earthsea series. Ged is not just a "white character with dark skin", but nor is the culture he comes from depicted as some horrible stereotype of an existing earth culture. It may be the case that in 50 years time people will look back on Earthsea and find it just as gauche as we find Star Trek now, but for the moment I would say it is the gold standard. It's also rather unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be much else around that is even trying to achieve that standard, but... "90% of everything is crap", as they say, and with genre fiction that is probably, sadly, an understatement.

Lastly (I hope that I don't break ferretbrain with such a long comment!) on the "everyone's a bit racist" question, I think there is a grain of truth in that statement but taken at face value I would disagree with it. I think... in my own case, I grew up in a suburb of Sydney where I never saw a black person at all, on a day-to-day basis. In fact, the only black person I knew was my grandfather (who is/was an Australian Aboriginal - but the genes are "dilute" enough in my case that I look absolutely white) who I did not see often. And so as a consequence I think I had all kinds of unconscious ideas about "other races" that I didn't really think about... I guess I didn't have any real sources of information beyond books and TV and lectures at my very left-wing school that took the form of "Don't be racist! For real!" (which were well-intentioned but I think were in their form a bit stupid, rather in the way that Captain Planet is a bit stupid).

Anyway, when the family moved to England we moved to a suburb (and I went to a school) where there were a lot more non-white people around, and I discovered that... a lot of my ideas had been really dumb, as well as being rather unformed. And in some sense, if you were to spell out those ideas in words, you would probably conclude that they were indeed racist ideas and that therefore I was "racist", despite all my intentions to the contrary.

But... I also think that it was that exposure to the actual people that broke down and changed those dumb ideas. And it remains my conviction that all the well-intentioned talk (or even, clever and subtle argumentation and explanation) in the world is no substitute for encounters with real people for breaking down prejudices based on ignorance. I suppose, to go back to your Shampoo analogy, it's kind of like this: the world may be full of explicit, overt messages telling you to buy a certain shampoo, and those overt messages may be supported by hidden and hard-to-unearth ideologies (bright packaging indicates a superior product to those in bland packaging!) but once you actually put the shampoo in your hair, it either works or it doesn't. (There may of course be an effect whereby those social messages cause you to undermine or misunderstand your own experiences, but this post is already waaaay too long...)

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Gina Dhawa

at 07:46 on 2009-04-01@Guy regarding Star Trek - I entirely agree. There is a lot of fail with regard to the depictions of race in TOS, but as a product of its time, I give it a lot of credit. And about the gender imbalance, it's very interesting that he was specifically told to drop the female second in command from the pilot episode if he was ever to get the series on air.

@Dan I've never been entirely convinced by the argument that a white author can't write non-white cultures, particularly in SF/Fantasy. OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. I think the key thing people forget is just to have a

awareness

goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

In the case of culture, it isn't a case of understanding truly everything about a culture that isn't your own, it's about respecting that culture and not treating like the exotic other. I'm not saying it's an easy thing to do, but hell, if I wasn't to write about a culture other than mine then I have no idea

what

I'd ever write.

Even though I know that most of them went to Oxford and many of them have degrees in subjects that are actually directly relevant to the the topic of conversation.

I will bristle at that, thanks.

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Arthur B

at 08:27 on 2009-04-01

But the fact that SF/fantasy often seems more racist than other types of lit is another problem entirely, isn't it?

I suspect a lot of this boils down to people using particular ideas or tropes developed by the grand old racist authors of the past without really thinking about where the tropes from and why they are doing it; all they know is "this is the sort of thing that happens in the SF/fantasy stories I like, so they're going to happpen in the stories I write."

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way: you simply have to skip the ones which are just blatantly horrible, and treat the others as an inversion of colonialism, in which the simple beliefs of a "primitive" outsider prove to be more powerful and enduring than the hypocrisies of so-called "civilised" people.

There is nothing in this scenario which

requires

that the outsider be a white man from an analogue of Northern Europe, or the corrupt civilisations he encounters have to be Mediterranean/Middle Eastern city-states. But hundreds of Howard imitators, and even more folk who have been unconsciously influenced by his stories, make that assumption every time they use the idea. And that's racist.

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Andy G

at 10:18 on 2009-04-01"For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way"

I wondered about this recently when I was reading H.P. Lovecraft - whether we really can "read in a non-racist way" - as Dan says, it's not a matter of racist individuals, but of pervasive racist attitudes in society as a whole. Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds? Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

I think you're spot on though about modern authors not reflecting on the dubious assumptions they take from older authors. I especially felt that about Olaf Stapledon.

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Andy G

at 10:37 on 2009-04-01Oh and there's also a great example

[here]

of the Captain Planet approach to complex world issues.

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Shim

at 10:58 on 2009-04-01

I suppose there's a bit of difference there, because if I wrote about aliens (or heck, even from an "alien perspective") there's little to no chance of aliens lambasting me in the Sunday papers about my ignorance and stereotyping. Also, because they're not real, there's no objective reality that my writing would fail to reflect. A lot of stories basically take White Middle-Class Anglo-Saxons and jiggle them a bit to make them vampires or wizards (sometimes, especially for wizards, these people are 'Celts' in an unspecified way that is hard to distinguish from WMCAS).

On the other hand, if I try to write about or from WMCAS female experiences, the fact that women actually exist means my writing can be objectively inaccurate. Same for, say, writing about Indian culture. So I think the fact that there is a whole deep, complex culture there that the writer doesn't understand is a real problem; while more understanding can mean they write more convincing stories, you can end up with the situation where people understand things just enough to make massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives.

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Rami

at 11:24 on 2009-04-01

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right.

Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is

♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫

because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas -- and if we admit that to ourselves and make a conscious effort, things could be a lot better. Lots of people mistakenly

equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions

(warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

For example, it's perfectly possible to enjoy Robert E. Howard's Conan stories in a non-racist way

I was thinking vaguely along these lines recently as well, when I picked up

Triplanetary

, and had to put it down after only a few pages because it was so full of the unconscious attitudes of the 30s and 40s. It may be a classic of science-fiction and have inspired half of the current generation of SF writers and editors, but the racism and sexism were a bit too much for me. It distresses me that, as Arthur points out, lots of modern writers have doubtless picked up a few of the tropes because they "really liked it in the Lensman series" and completely obliviously dropped them, scheming dark-skinned villains and helpless blonde damsels included, into their own work.

think the key thing people forget is just to have a awareness goes a long way. Doesn't go the whole way to fixing the problem, but it's a good start.

Absolutely!

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Rami

at 11:28 on 2009-04-01

massive generalisations, or inaccurate depictions that convince the foreign readers but not the natives

IIRC, that kind of thing was at the root of the whole RaceFail imbroglio -- when people did exactly that, but refused to admit it.

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Arthur B

at 11:34 on 2009-04-01

Can we actually manage to remain a detached attitude where we're conscious of how terrible the "racist bits" are while still enjoying the "good bits" on their own grounds?

We'd better learn to, otherwise that's everything from before 1950 down the memory hole...

Or are we just deluding ourselves that we're not just indulging a little bit in some unpleasant ideas?

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene in

The Book of the Short Sun

Secondly, if the stories have any merit at all there's going to be something more to them than just bigotry. Yes, Lovecraft used the fear of the outsider a hell of a lot. But the fun thing about that particular fear is that it's always going to be with us, and HPL had a clever knack of turning the fear of the outsider into the fear of the outside itself. When Lovecraft was writing about how threatening he found immigrants (

The Horror At Red Hook

) he was being horrid; when he was writing about how the entire universe beyond this placid island we call Earth is a cold uncaring void that is completely hostile to any life that even resembles us (

The Colour Out of Space

) he was being visionary. It's not always easy to divorce the cultural xenophobia from the cosmic vertigo - they're written by the same man, they have the same experiences and agendas shaping them - but I'd submit that it is possible.

Thirdly, there's plenty of Lovecraft and Howard where racism just isn't a factor, or is only a factor if you try hard to look for it.

The Tower of the Elephant

and

At the Mountains of Madness

spring to mind.

I honestly don't think that reading Lovecraft or Howard is necessarily going to feed anyone's inner racist unless they actually

want

to be influenced that way ("Oh man, I totally agree with that but I could never say it in public..."). It helps that they lived in a time when many people simply didn't know better; it doesn't excuse them, but it does mean that both the attitude of the society they came from and their own personal quirks are well-known and out there for all to see. As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

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Rami

at 12:00 on 2009-04-01

You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards; I really like Gene Wolfe but I'm not going to convert to Catholicism just because there was a nice mass scene

Depends how much you disagree with them, I guess, and how evident that is in the text. I agree you can't dismiss an author entirely because of their attitudes, since as you say there's got to be something other than bigotry -- but if the bigotry is omnipresent it does get pretty difficult. Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face. On the other hand, he's only peripherally bigoted (xenophobic, but in a more understandable way) in The Whisperer in Darkness, and that's much easier to appreciate for what it is...

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Dan H

at 13:18 on 2009-04-01

Crap, sorry about that. It's probably deeply ironic that in an article entirely about the subconscious effects of prejudice on our everyday thoughts and actions, I managed to forget that using "went to Oxford" as a synonym for "knows what they're talking about" is, itself, kinda offensive.

Sorry folks.

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

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Dan H

at 13:39 on 2009-04-01

Lovecraft is a good example: I'm sure there were interesting ideas somewhere in The Horror at Red Hook, but because every other paragraph was about the demon-worshipping foreigners I found it impossible to get through and kept wishing I could punch ol' HP in the face.

I suspect this is one of those examples of White Privilege in action. It's easy for me and Arthur to read Lovecraft (well, easy for Arthur to read Lovecraft, I don't actually like his writing) and say "gosh, this is very racist but I still appreciate it as an artifact from its time." We're in a position where we can condemn racism without it actually harming us. There's a world of difference between reading an old work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be black people" and reading a work of genre fiction and saying "hey, those monsters are supposed to be *me and my family*."

My favorite line from "Everyone's A Little Bit Racist" is ♫ If we all could just admit / that we are racist, a little bit ♫ because I think it strikes toward the heart of a sensitive issue in pointing out that pretty much no one is free from racist ideas

Yeah, I can see that. It's just that a lot of the way the song presents itself is in the language of racist apologism. Remember that the very *next* line is "and we could all stop being so PC!". The more I've thought about the actual sketch, the more I've been bothered by the way it's presented - remember it basically starts with a minority character (Kate Monster) calling out a non-minority character for being racist, and the non-minority character using "well you're racist too!" as a defence (and in fact citing the "but minority rights groups are racist as well!" argument).

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

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Shim

at 14:16 on 2009-04-01

Lots of people mistakenly equate racism with blatantly racist speech or actions (warnings: PDF, racefail), after all.

Interesting linked article... overall I tended to agree with the arguments, but at times it gave me the feeling that they were interpreting things in the way that supported their expectations, i.e. seeing racist attitudes that

might

not be there. Given how complicated some of the topics were, and how much discussion of racial issues goes on, it's not surprising to me (for example) that people sometimes argued from several sides, or were less coherent on more personal, complicated questions. I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take. Oh, and I'd have liked some counter-examples of answers that were

not

seen as hiding racist attitudes.

Also, it could really do with proofreading. But enough digression, back to Dan's article!

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Arthur B

at 14:48 on 2009-04-01

For what it's worth, I don't actually enjoy

The Horror At Red Hook

; I was raising it (not very clearly) as an example of a story that I'd usually just skip because the motivations behind it are entirely too obvious and entirely too ugly.

At the Mountains of Madness

is nice in that the monsters don't resemble

any

identifiable people - not physically, and not culturally - so that's at the other end of the spectrum.

I do think that a certain amount of white privilege is inevitable, but I don't necessarily think it's a problem so long as you're aware that it might be happening and that other people might not see your favourite author in the same way. (It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".) The most important thing is to read with your eyes open, and to read diversely; I think an exclusive diet of Lovecraft, Howard, and the various descendants and imitators is vastly more unhealthy and likely to blind you to problematic elements in their stories than a more balanced reading range.

A tangent: it dismays me sometimes to see the amount of uncritical fanboyism that surrounds

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

, which granted is a decently-written story but it again has massively problematic undertones; any interpretation of it which doesn't at least acknowledge that part of the point Lovecraft was making was KILL THE HALF-BREEDS is wilfully blinding itself to a really major component of the story, and there's a distressing number of authors who keep reusing the Deep Ones without even considering that angle.

Granted, the angle that people imitate most frequently is the "Oh no, it turns out I am a Deep One too" revelation at the end of the story, but - like Lovecraft himself - nobody ever makes the leap to "wait, surely that means the Deep Ones can't be all bad".

Even people who admit that Lovecraft was a racist

do this. And nobody calls people on it or says "hey, you're just repeating Lovecraft's slurs against miscegenation", presumably because everyone's kidding themselves that the fish people are fish people and can't possibly be a metaphor for something else.

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Arthur B

at 15:06 on 2009-04-01

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

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Andy G

at 15:57 on 2009-04-01@ Arthur: I did enjoy Lovecraft for the kinds of reasons you said (otherwise I wouldn't have kept reading) - and felt that I could "pick and choose", appreciating and analysing without necessarily condoning. But equally, I was aware that some of the bits I now found uncomfortable I would never even have noticed a few years ago - because I only really imagined racism to be overt KKK-style hatred, as Dan terms it (and Lovecraft does occasionally go there) - and yet even back then I would have prided myself on being able to detach myself from condoning the "racist bits" of the stories, which I now realise are far more pervasive. That's why I hesitate a bit before saying I can definitely remain a detached, objective attitude without colluding in the questionable ideas and imagery. Even if we can distance ourselves from stories by regarding them as historical artefacts, I'm not sure that we can do that completely successfully while still enjoying them as stories.

I also wonder whether it's sufficient to find the bad bits "unpleasant", "uncomfortable" or "distasteful" (from the perpsective of white privilege) but keep reading anyway - I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position?

Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:11 on 2009-04-01

To clarify, all I meant was that it was absurd that I find myself ignoring my friends' university educations or other relevant qualifications in place of easy stereotypes about race and gender.

Sorry, Dan, if my hackles got raised. It's one of my buttons.

This. People have different levels of privilege (white, class, education, etc) and that's such a big deal with regard to how their mileage will vary at what they will personally be able to deal with in texts.

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Gina Dhawa

at 16:19 on 2009-04-01That's not to say I condone racism or any other kind of bigotry in texts, just that I find it understandable that people who don't themselves necessarily hold bigoted views can find things to enjoy in texts that do.

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Arthur B

at 16:33 on 2009-04-01

It varies for me. I have, in fact, stopped reading Robert E. Howard stories because they were pure out-and-out bigotry. On the other hand, I read

The Horror at Red Hook

all the way through. When I do keep reading, it's normally for one of two reasons (or a mix of them):

- The story has something more to it than racism.

Red Hook

is awful for many reasons, one of them being that there really

isn't

anything more to it than the racism.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth

is, in many respects, just as racist, but it also features other ideas which are sufficiently interesting - and have exerted a sufficient influence over the horror genre - that those ideas are both worth salvaging and engaging enough that reading the story doesn't

exclusively

evoke discomfort.

- The story is useful for understanding the author, and I'm interested enough in the author to want to understand them.

Red Hook

as a story is terrible, but as an insight into what Lovecraft was thinking during his brief and unhappy tenancy in New York it's valuable.

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Dan H

at 18:11 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

I see what you did there.

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Dan H

at 18:44 on 2009-04-01Also:

Just reading the article you linked to Rami.

It's kind of terrifying, isn't it.

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Shim

at 18:45 on 2009-04-01

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Hmm... I reckon there were enough references to his tousled mop of hair, and looking pale, to make that problematic.

East Asian descent? Native American? Inuit? Totally possible.

(this leads me to something Dan mentioned once; racism discussions always leap on to Black/White dichotomies even though it's not the most obvious one for everyone. I'd argue in Britain that Chinese or South Asian ancestry is much more common, certainly in the north)

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Arthur B

at 18:49 on 2009-04-01look he's albino with really messy hair

you are racist against albinos you are

you want to kill them and turn them into

medicine

and that's wrong

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Shim

at 21:56 on 2009-04-01What a wasteful idea! Everyone knows that albinos are best used as ruthless assassins.

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Dan H

at 22:15 on 2009-04-01

I'm also suspicious of suggestions that arguments like "I'm not a black person, so I don't really know" should be lumped in as ways to conceal racist attitudes, and the idea that it might be a valid point in some circumstances wasn't considered. Ditto, say, ambivalence over 'affirmative action', which people still can't decide whether it's beneficial overall and exactly what form it should take.

I personally found it fairly clear from most of the examples that the actual opinions of the inverviewees were, if not racist, more likely to be perceived as racist than the opinions they tried to express.

It's things like the fact that pretty much all of them disagreed with affirmative action (which I'll admit can't be taken as racist in itself - it's a specific government policy and there's probably several reasons to disagree with it) but that none of them actually felt that they could *say* they didn't agree with affirmative action.

One of the things I've noticed in my recent Rambling Thoughts About Prejudice is that there's a lot of things that people are willing to condemn utterly (or support wholeheartedly) in the general case, but not in the specific. "I have nothing against interracial marriage, but I'm a little bit worried about the children" or "I support affirmative action, but obviously you can't let a better qualified white guy lose out to a black guy if it's a job he actually wants."

Ironically the person that comes out best is the seventy year old woman who says straight up "I'm against interracial marriage, but if my daughter married a black guy I'd still support her."

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Shim

at 22:44 on 2009-04-01

Indeed. Sorry, I'm not clear enough... it was the way the arguments were presented that I found dodgy, rather than anything in the analysis of the examples given; it seemed like they might be generalising from "this person said this, and in context of everything else they said which I have only partially printed here, they seem racist, so I think it may be tactical" to "this kind of language is a tactic to cover racism". The usual extrapolation problem arises. That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I found the paper a bit rambling (ooh, diminutive) and sometimes incoherent - for example, as basically a scientist I'm used to things with statistics and explanations of the experiment, rather than launching into an argument peppered with examples. Also I think it mixed up the names in at least one place (Andy/Mickey)?

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah".

Back on the article... I remember the Captain Planet thing coming up in a PSE class about ethics, on the lines of whether there were actually specific Evil people. A surprising proportion of the class (upper sixth) were really set on this idea and did

not

respond well to questions like "so do you honestly believe that Pol Pot never did a single good thing?" or "exactly what characteristics distinguish between the Evil people and everyone else?".

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Dan H

at 23:17 on 2009-04-01The paper is a bit rambling, and does make a bunch of assumptions (you can't really go from "these white people said this" to "white people say this") but I think it highlights some interesting points. I thought the example with "there is a firm which is 97% white" was a really interesting one, because a lot of the arguments people made were basically "you can only say their hiring policy is racist if you have met their HR guy and you know that he, personally is a racist".

Which brings us neatly back to Captain Planet and the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil.

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Wardog

at 23:24 on 2009-04-01I'm not saying anything constructive here because I'm quite frankly *terrified* since it's such an incredibly complex issue. But I just wanted to mention that I found the article interesting and the comments equally so.

I was also really worried we were going to have our own small-scale racefail but I'm relieved we only had a highereductionfail instead.

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Rami

at 00:04 on 2009-04-02

That's kind of why I'd like to see a comparison with non-racist people discussing the topics.

I don't remember exactly where I was linked to this paper from, but the two studies mentioned in the paper (from which the interviewees were drawn) tried to measure prevalence of racist attitudes based on survey responses, and found very few sets of responses that appeared minimally prejudiced. I think it's because of this that the paper makes the assumption that the interview responses are evincing racist attitudes, even where the responses themselves could be seen as ambiguous.

I've had three goes at articulating why I agree with you about the old woman, and can't get one that covers all my feelings, so I'll leave it as "Yeah"

I'd say it's because she was honest ;-)

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do; I think that, as you say, the problem with Captain Planet et al is that they encourage the belief that the little actions of every day (not turning off the lights properly, etc) are perfectly OK, and that the Badness is distilled into the Evil People and that they are the only ones to blame.

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http://roisindubh211.livejournal.com/

at 03:50 on 2009-04-02The Tarzan books are a little horrifying- I was pretty young when I read them and completely believed that racism ended in the sixties, but even then I understood that something strange was up with all the beautiful blonde women (and beautiful, blond Tarzan, of course). Why the hell would any ape (except humans) think a blonde was attractive? Later on in the series the racism gets more overt but its still ridiculous when its just "look how pretty and superior we are!"

My mom used to laugh whenever I watched Captain Planet and said I was being brainwashed.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 03:53 on 2009-04-02Andy G.:

I mean, at what point does the text simply become so irredeemably bad that the only thing to do is just not to keep reading? Again, I didn't feel that with Lovecraft, but is that a defensible position? Hmm ... basically, I do kind of agree with you, but am niggled with doubt, because I wonder whether what I'm really trying to do is give myself an excuse to enjoy books and films that I really shouldn't.

I enjoyed Taming of the Shrew when I saw it performed twenty years ago in college. Then I watched it again within the last two years. It sickened me. When Katherina obeyed whatshisname, I booed, but only loud enough for my wife and maybe a nearby audience member could hear.

Unless the play is promoted/listed as one of the tragedies, I won't see it again.

Perhaps the harder question is: is it making an excuse for the racism rather than for the enjoyment of the read.

The language the theater used excuse the production of TotS was that it may *appear* offensive to the modern audience and that it was the norm for the time. But that's donkeyshit. Disney's Song of the South won't be 're-released on dvd/blueray for only a limited time' even though it was the norm for the time because it *is* offensive to the modern audience today.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/x4HhAM1souauxovBXQn5IheyvJm6KIO2jP8MPvM5#590f1

at 04:14 on 2009-04-02

It all comes back to branding.

But the people that do the branding are members of the dominant culture.

Though arguably, that has been changing especially within last couple of decades. Well, at least to some degree though not quite for the better. Fucking BET.

- F.Dillinger

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 20:01 on 2009-04-02

But perhaps I'm overthinking it...

Honestly, thinking about it at all lead to overthinking, because although that song from Avenue Q gets quoted *all the time* in discussions of race, it doesn't really seem to be saying anything simple about race at all except in the title. It includes characters talking about actual racism that they experience (Gary Coleman "can't even get a taxi"), apologetics ("stop being so pc"/"ethnic jokes are based on truth") and some things that honestly sound like they know perfectly well they're defending racism: people make judgements about race not about "big things like who to buy a newspaper from, but little things like thinking Mexican busboys should learn to speak GODDAMN ENGLISH!"

In the end the song is kind of a big mess of things you've heard people say about racism, but without a clear pov. The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay, but there's other stuff in there too...and also racism is such a hot button word it's hard to imagine using it to be completely positive. Also yes completely about the way it starts off with the idea that a minority is being "racist" to ever focus on its own group without including the majority, the "reverse racism" claim. Blech.

And regarding the rest, yes--in some of the discussions about sci fi I remember somebody mentioning the mystery genre and that shows a real difference. Where sci fi and fantasy has in many ways stuck to their traditional white guy roots, I don't think any mystery fan would say that they really expect the detective in any series to be white or male. I'm not a huge reader of mysteries, but even knowing the genre a little it seems like creating detectives from different backgrounds has become totally common. I guess since the detective is always going to have certain standard qualities (smart, analytical, observant, insightful etc.) people are eager to branch out in other ways looking for how they are different and how their differences affect how they solve crimes.

Where as fantasy seems still so stuck in the whole colonial project mentality...you've often got the race that's our pov race, who seemings white and British or American, and then you've got these other races who are all far more alike than the main race is. To us HP as an example, you couldn't really say what a Wizard was like personality-wise, but you could do that for a House Elf or a giant or a goblin or a centaur...

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Arthur B

at 20:57 on 2009-04-02

I think sometimes it is colonial, and sometimes it is an attempt to be pseudohistorical. People have this odd idea that in the medieval period nobody travelled at all, and while it's true that 90% of the population never travelled much under normal circumstances a) that's still kind of true today in many places, and b) even though that was the case, you never had a situation where you had the English people who lived exclusively in a place called England whose borders were always much the same as they are today, and neighbouring them the French people who lived in a place called France with borders much like today's, and so on. People moved around: rich folk travelled and became merchants and sometimes settled in cities where the money was, poor people went on pilgrimages and were drafted into their lord's militia when time came to go to war, and enormous numbers of people ended up becoming refugees from plague, famine, and war - and that's just in medieval Europe.

This is not to say that our cultures aren't more diverse today than they were back then. But they were significantly more nuanced and heterogeneous than the sort of fake-medieval societies that sub-Tolkien fantasy hacks crank out. Writing realistically diverse societies is

achingly difficult

, and many people just don't try. (Which is wrong of them.)

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Dan H

at 02:04 on 2009-04-03

The clearest point actually is that everybody's racist and that's okay,

It's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with. Or rather, it's the way *in which* it's supposed to be okay. I'm okay with the idea that "it's okay" to have racist attitudes in the sense that everybody has them, and having racist attitudes doesn't make you a bad person, just somebody who needs to be a bit more aware of race issues. The song, though, seems to imply that racism is just plain acceptable.

This might be a bit overly-analytical, but the song basically involves a bunch of minorities complaining about racism, then being revealed to be hypocrites. There's a fine line between humour about racism, and humour that is just plain racist and I fear that EaLBR strays into the latter camp.

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http://sistermagpie.livejournal.com/

at 02:35 on 2009-04-03

t's the "but that's okay" that I have trouble with.

Sorry, I wasn't clear there--neither am I. I don't think that the clearest message being "everyone (including minorities) is racist and that's okay" is a particularly good thing.

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http://descrime.livejournal.com/

at 17:52 on 2009-04-03re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

I thought the firm question was stupid, to be honest, if the only information they are given is that a firm is 97% white! Draw inferences!

I once worked for a small business that employed 5 people. It was 100% white. By the paper's logic, the owners were horrible racists. But the population size of the firm is too small to use statistics like that.

Also, what industry is this firm in? If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

If a hospital's nurses are 97% female, does that mean the hospital is discriminating against male nurses? To figure that out, you need the percentage of male nurses in the area to compare with.

Now, I did do an internship at a ~170 person, publicly traded company and every single position of importance was filled with a white male, and that did seem suspicious.

If a firm is 97% white, all that statistic tells us is that is could be racist, not that it is racist no matter how obvious the author of the paper finds that conclusion. Similarly, even if the company has reached that magical percentage that means diversity, it doesn't mean the company /isn't/ racist.

My aunt works for a large "diverse" company, 600 employee, and she told me about a month ago how a group of white coworkers had hung voodoo dolls from their desk lamps (as in mimicking lynching) in response to a black coworker reporting on some previous misbehavior they had done (I don't really remember the details). The company had no real policy to deal with the situation and basically tried to sweep it under the rug.

I thought the paper was interesting in that it showed some examples as to how people have developed a method of speaking around an issue that is impossible to discuss in our society.

I also thought it was interesting that people who reported having friendships with someone who was part of a minority group were much less racist towards that group. Which would suggest to me that diversity in elementary schools is probably one of the most important things we could do to help promote understanding.

I thought his methodology was a little suspicious for what he was trying to achieve--an honest discussion of racial prejudices. A stranger asking you questions to your face on a sensitive topic (which he obviously have strong feelings for) is hardly likely to promote honesty and is probably a large factor in the nervousness and stuttering the subjects showed.

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Arthur B

at 18:11 on 2009-04-03

If a 20 person video game development company employes 19 males and 1 female, is it sexist? The population of video game designers is heavily skewed towards men and 20 is still a rather low number to be applying statistical inferences to.

Wait, what? I know it isn't very fair to blame individual game companies for an industry-wide bias, but wouldn't it be completely fair to criticise them if they made no effort to address that bias?

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Dan H

at 19:31 on 2009-04-03

I think you're actually making a classic mistake here, which is to make the focus of a discussion about prejudice the question of whether or not specific *people* are prejudiced instead of whether prejudice is at work in a given situation.

If a games development company is 95% male, whether they have 20 employees or 200 there's something wrong. Is it partly the fault of the industry? Probably, but not entirely. Roughly one in six

World of Warcraft

players are female, the proportion of women in your hypothetical company is one third that size.

There is, actually a serious issue here. An interesting statistic is that when people are asked to judge what a "balanced" gender mix looks like, they tend to settle on a male:female ratio of about 2:1 with anything more than that being perceived as unfairly biased towards women. Even

Buffy

follows this pattern, with the core cast of the first series being two girls (Buffy, Willow) and three guys (Giles, Xander, Angel) for a 60-40 split in one of the most female dominated shows on mainstream TV.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance. You actually

can

take the fact that only 5% of a company's employees are women as evidence of sexism. Evidence isn't the same as proof, but if your first reaction to the suggestion that your hiring policy might be sexist is to go on the defensive, you're never going to make any progress.

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Shim

at 22:54 on 2009-04-03@Dan

agreed. I do think the response depends on exactly what question is asked (and due to editfail/vagueness of the article I'm not sure) and how the interviewees interpret it; someone might say that racism was definitely at play (in the industry as a whole, in the education system...) but not necessarily conclude that the company itself is definitely racist. But as you say, it would be a pretty good place to start.

Re: gender balance; a similar rule applies to time-per-student in the classroom. Teachers of either gender judge a "balanced" lesson as one that gives far more time to boys (cf. "Language Myths", Bauer & Trudgill - let nobody say I make airy claims). Observers, students etc. also follow this pattern. Giving equal time is a major problem for teachers even when made aware of it and leads to people claiming the lesson is dominated by girls.

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http://arkan2.livejournal.com/

at 22:30 on 2009-04-06Another excellent essay, and great discussion, too.

Yeah, it's scary what advertisements can do, without being able to influence people through “subliminal messages.” Ever seen

The Ad and the Ego

? Heavy stuff.

And then of course, there's Naomi Klein's

No Logo

…

You're right, Dan, this is exactly how racism works. And sexism, heterosexism, classicism, ableism and all the rest. Until those types of oppression are completely eradicated, they'll be with us to some extent, but the first step towards making the solution is identifying the problem.

I also agree that you can't learn Japanese culture by watching anime, but that's not the same as saying you can't learn it at all. You can't learn everything about Japanese culture, or even just a subsection thereof—but then, this applies even if

you yourself are Japanese

. Nobody can know everything about a culture, their own or anyone else's.

Fortunately, authors don't need to do that much, any more than honest anthropologists do. How should an author in the United States go about writing a story set in modern India with modern Indian characters? To which I would reply: the same way said author should go about writing a story set in medieval Europe (or a decent knock-off thereof): research. Of course, cultural imperialism and cultural misappropriation are dangers that rear their ugly heads in the former case, but I think if the author comes at it with the right mindset (including but not limited to sympathy, sensitivity, awareness of probable pitfalls and a continentload of caution) they can pull it off (though you can't please

every

one).

I have the same problem with Whedon's Misogynist-Of-The-Week depiction of sexism as you do. Audiences in my experience tend to process characterization first, symbolism second. (A strongly feminist friend of mine who is also a major Whedon fan once tried to sell me some argument about how incredibly feminist the symbolism of the female characters in

Firefly

is. I'm betting she'd say the same about

Dollhouse

. My reply would be that even if so, the straightforward characterization is rather less feminist, to put it charitably, and that counts for a lot more.)

I'm sure

Harry Potter

could've sold if Harry had been black, or brown, or any other known shade of human skin. Whether it would've been such a cult phenomenon is a different problem. (Who knows, it might've been. And yes, that would've done more than probably any ten government initiatives. And what if he'd been Arabic …?)

people making well-intentioned efforts to move the discourse forward are actually good and important, even if they fail in all kinds of ways to live up to the ideal of what they intend to attain or represent.

That's a very good point, Guy. I believe I maybe try harder than Roddenberry to be progressive on issues of race, sex, sexuality, class and all the other -isms, but if in 100 years' time people aren't looking at my fiction and finding a dozen holes in it at first glance, I'll be one disappointed ancestor. I'll be disappointed because it will mean that a) the culture will not have progressed so far as to outpace anything I could even imagine at my most radical, or b) that I never ended up actually publishing any fiction (or at least none worth looking at). To some extent, whatever I do will be a product of its time, just like the

Star Trek

OK with writing aliens and vampires and wizards, but can't write a black man? Right. Indeed, I've always found that particularly grating. Mostly that no one seems to even make the effort. And situations like RaceFail can make it worse for white authors who mean well and would like to make the effort but are scared off because the Wrath of the Public might descend on them.

Yeah well, white privilege means that you can ignore all that and not have to worry too much. Whereas if you're a person of colour (say, Arabic) and you piss off the white folks, Allah help you. (There are exceptions like Salman Rushdie, of course, but they are very much the exception.)

I for one do care about public opinion of people of colour, but I think it better to take that risk and at least try to be part of the solution than play it safe and know for sure that I'm perpetuating the problem.

Firstly, reading isn't condoning. You can read, and even enjoy, something written by someone you disagree with and still disagree with them afterwards;

This is a good point, Arthur. I recently read Michael Crichton's

State of Fear

, and, for various reasons, have been obsessing over it for months. It's a pretty mediocre thriller, but I have an intense love/hate relationship with the discourse. Some of it I agree with, a lot of it I don't, but what really gets me is that Crichton sets himself up to make his points in a way that should get even the readers who don't agree with him thinking, then lets most of it dissolve into a tired political rant. I felt like I would've enjoyed the book more—should've enjoyed it more—even as I was disagreeing with it, but Crichton failed to try hard enough to connect with the skeptics (which is ironic considering we're presumably the one's he's addressing).

… Although, as Dan points out, there's a difference between something being disagreeable and something actually insulting you as a person because of the social group you happen to belong to, especially when there is a looong history of insult and oppression of people from that social group.

On the other hand, as we're agreed that in a racist society everyone is racist to some degree, all the fiction we produce is probably going to be racist in some way. So if we can't find any merit in racist works, then Arthur's suggestion of throwing out everything before 1950 is too conservative by half.

So basically, I guess, it all comes down to degree of offensiveness and personal taste. If you can find merit in something, I'd say there's probably some merit, although I reserve the right to withdraw my condone-ance (there doesn't seem to be a proper word for that) if the merit you find is something along the lines of e.g. “All Arabs are evil.”

As Dan points out, it's not the individuals who you can identify as being racist bastards who are the problem a lot of the time (although they're usually the ugliest symptom), it's the people where you don't necessarily see the subtext, perhaps because they themselves aren't aware of it.

Damn, you people are good at making excellent points with incredible clarity.

It helps to have a diverse group of friends and colleagues as well; "hey, that's meant to be my friend's family" is almost as shocking as "hey, that's meant to be my family".

That's my viewpoint too, and something I feel slightly guilty about not cultivating more some of the time. However, I do think there's a bigger difference than you suggest, Arthur. I have a lot of close friends who are queer, but when I see something homophobic, the fact that “they're talking about my friends” doesn't spring immediately to mind. Similarly, when I see something blatantly anti-Palestinian, I don't immediately think of my Palestinian-American friend.

I agree that it helps to have friends who belong to the insulted group in question, but maybe not as much as you suggest.

To put it another way, just imagine for a moment that Harry Potter had been a black kid.

He was, Rowling just didn't mention it in the books.

Or in the liner notes to the movie script. Dumbeldore's sexual orientation on the other hand …

the depressingly common belief that there really are Bad People out there who do self-consciously Evil things Because They Are Evil

I don't doubt there are people out there who are and do;

Well I for one, don't doubt the exact opposite, and think that's a

very

dangerous philosophical road to venture onto. Of course, it partially depends on what definition of “Evil” we're working under, but still …

re: Captain Planet clip: Oh God, that was so bad I had to stop watching at the 30 second mark. I think I watched CP as a kid. Obviously I wasn't a very bright child.

Me neither.

And yes, racism is amazingly adaptive when it comes to rhetoric.

I've heard elsewhere that positive exposure tends to dilute one's own prejudices at least. So yes, diverse elementary schools = very good idea.

Part of what I've been trying to get at with the article above is the idea that it's all too easy to condemn prejudice in general, while making excuses for it in every specific instance.

Like all other types of basically immoral attitudes/behaviors/actions. War/torture/murder/rape, people can (and too often do) excuse away the patently inexcusable when it gets down to specifics. If anyone has any suggestions on how to get people to stop doing this I'm listening.

very

attentively.

#Ferretbrain #Minority Warrior #Captain Planet #Avenue Q #Dan H

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