#it’s like seeing people insist that JK Rowling is the best author of all time

[mylowmilo]

Personally, I hate her because of her obscene wealth and private jet usage

i'm a taylor swift centrist. she makes perfectly tolerable pop music that i can't imagine really getting into. dunno what it is about her that makes so many people go insane

[msclaritea]

JK Rowling is right: a trans woman is not a woman, and it’s not wrong to say so

It is absolutely extraordinary that transgender activist India Willoughby reported J K Rowling to the police for a hate crime. The Harry Potter author this week referred to the newsreader and Loose Women host as a man in an argument on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

Northumbria Police has now confirmed that it is dropping the investigation. Why did it take so long? It should never have been given the time of day.

Quick law refresher: “misgendering” is not a crime.

The researcher Maya Forstater successfully brought a case to the employment appeal tribunal in 2021 to establish that gender-critical views are a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act 2010.

So while hostility to someone based on gender identity can be an aggravating factor if a separate crime is committed, misgendering is not in itself an offence. Moreover, Rowling and those who agree with her are completely within their rights to refuse to believe the fiction that you can change biological sex.

As Rowling herself put it: “No law compels anyone to pretend to believe that India is a woman.” Quite.

Now, I’ve got no objection to using people’s preferred pronouns so I’m happy to refer to Willoughby as ��she”. But “a woman”? No. It is a simple fact that she is biologically male, regardless of any gender reassignment surgery. She’s a trans woman but she’s not a woman and never will be. 

Trans activists have tried their hardest to turn a feeling into fact when they insist: “A trans woman is a woman.” But the truth of the matter is that a trans woman is a man who identifies as a woman. 

Willoughby and her supporters might dislike her being described as a man. They might find it at best impolite and at worst deeply offensive. But it is not “hateful” to believe that men are men and women are women. You cannot change biological sex and under the Forstater ruling, it isn’t “illegal” to say so. 

This is what happens when a vocal minority creates such an environment of fear that the police think they can’t immediately call out an attention-seeking time-waster when they see one.

J K Rowling is not a “transphobe”, either – as inconvenient as that might be to those seeking to label any woman who thinks biological sex is immutable as a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (Terf). 

It’s far from “radical” to believe in just the two sexes. Nor is it “exclusionary”, since Rowling has never denied the existence of trans people nor their rightful place in society – alongside men and women.

She’s simply a gender-critical feminist, who is justifiably concerned for the corresponding rights of women, which she believes are being eroded. I and many other women (and men … and even some trans people) agree with her. 

This is what the gender fanatics continually refuse to acknowledge: that there are competing rights here. It’s not all about them, whatever the likes of Willoughby seem to think. 

Rowling has been a heroine in all this, because she’s not only refused to be cancelled, but has emboldened many others who feel the same way as her to bravely speak out.

But let’s look at what is really “hateful” about this debate. There is no doubt that Rowling and others like her continue to be the victims of terrible misogyny. Just look at the appalling comments made about her on social media by people who purport to be defined by kindness and progressive values. 

Indeed, it is really quite striking that, on International Women’s Day yesterday, when we should have been celebrating female advancement, there was little public celebration of gender-critical feminists like Rowling. The Left hypocritically talks up the importance of “diversity” and “inclusion” while at the same time actively seeking to shame those who have an opposing point of view. 

The definition of bigotry is being “obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group”. So radical trans activists are guilty of exactly what they accuse gender-critical feminists of. Yet still they arrogantly assume they can occupy the moral high ground, while carrying out these modern-day witch trials.

If stories of gender-critical women being hounded out of their jobs, their universities, and in the recent case of Newcastle United fan Linzi Smith, their football club, aren’t already disturbing enough, we now hear word of a Canadian proposal to impose house arrest on someone who is believed likely to commit a hate crime in the future – even if they have not done so already. 

The proposed clause in the country’s new Online Safety Bill would see suspected “hate criminals” forced to wear an electronic tag and banned from going outside. In Willoughby’s world, that would include anyone who thinks she’s a bloke. 

But this former Big Brother contestant has got her own form when it comes to sharp remarks on social media. 

I had to block her myself when she responded to one of my posts highlighting a pretty innocuous story I’d written about Prince Harry with the words: “Garbage. Harry has your metaphorical number – while the grubby British Media had his ACTUAL number, and hacked it.”

Referencing my role as royal editor of an ITV daytime show, she added: “Someone else you keep platforming @ThisMorning. Have a clear out.” Nice.

If this is supposed to be what the “sisterhood” is supposed to look like in Willoughby’s eyes, then I’d genuinely rather be a “Terf”. %n

[vivithefolle]

I loved your ranking of character arcs (for the main seven)! Would you mind going into more detail about Ron's character arc, and how he developed from the first to the last book? I apologise if you've already answered a similar request! :)

[Ranking of character arcs]

Well, during the first three books Ron is rather static - he’s awesome, but he doesn’t has much in the terms of “character growth” moments. He does epic stuff like the chess match, following the spiders et all we know, but that isn’t character growth as much as it is freaking badass.

The first three books serve to sow the basics for Ron’s character: he’s a devoted friend, he can face death with a laugh, and in spite of his bouts of rudeness or temper he’s fundamentally kind and doesn’t take himself too seriously - something two people like “boy-who-lived” Harry and “child prodigy” Hermione desperately need.

But what the first book does is introduce Ron’s emotional baggage.

"I'm the sixth in our family to go to Hogwarts. You could say I've got a lot to live up to. Bill and Charlie have already left -- Bill was head boy and Charlie was captain of Quidditch. Now Percy's a prefect. Fred and George mess around a lot, but they still get really good marks and everyone thinks they're really funny. Everyone expects me to do as well as the others, but if I do, it's no big deal, because they did it first. You never get anything new, either, with five brothers. I've got Bill's old robes, Charlie's old wand, and Percy's old rat."

This introduces us to Ron’s inferiority complex and its origins.

And later on, The Mirror Of Erised helps elaborate:

Harry stepped aside, but with Ron in front of the mirror, he couldn't see his family anymore, just Ron in his paisley pajamas.

Ron, though, was staring transfixed at his image.

"Look at me!" he said.

"Can you see all your family standing around you?"

"No -- I'm alone -- but I'm different -- I look older -- and I'm head boy!"

"What?"

"I am -- I'm wearing the badge like Bill used to -- and I'm holding the house cup and the Quidditch cup -- I'm Quidditch captain, too."

Dumbledore will then add his grain of salt -

Harry thought. Then he said slowly, "It shows us what we want... whatever we want..."

"Yes and no," said Dumbledore quietly. "It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate desire of our hearts. You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you. Ronald Weasley, who has always been overshadowed by his brothers, sees himself standing alone, the best of all of them. However, this mirror will give us neither knowledge or truth. Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

Something to know about Dumbledore - he’s JK Rowling’s mouthpiece. When she wants to tell us something, she puts it in him.

And... well, this looks like a rather... selfish interpretation of Ron’s desire. Especially the “standing alone” part. It somewhat implies that Ron is selfish - especially compared to Harry’s desire which is oh so pure and oh so sad because boo hoo orphan family stuff. (I may be letting all the times Harry fans have pulled the “butt herry iz an orhpan!! :’((” card colour my perception.)

“The best of all of them”. When Ron sees himself being both Head Boy and Quidditch Captain. He’s combining his brothers’ successes into himself. His belief is that this is how he could stand out and be loved - by combining his brothers’ accomplishments.

Anyway.

Goblet of Fire then makes us see Ron’s main problems - his insecurity can lead him astray. First he believes that Harry left him behind during the Triwizard, because why not? After all Ron has already seen that betrayal can come from the craziest places (Lockhart, aka adults/authority figures, Ginny being the Heir Of Slytherin aka family even against their will, and last but not least, freaking Scabbers, aka SEEMINGLY INNOCENT THINGS YOU FEED AND PROTECT). Add to it his budding feeling that he is overlooked in favour of Harry (the twins giving Harry the Marauders’ Map...) and Ron’s emotions get the best of him, which isn’t helped by Harry’s entitled attitude and his acting as though Ron is stupid for questioning him. And then Viktor Krum appears as a prop show us what a catch Hermione is and to be all that makes Ron insecure. The Yule Brawl serves to foreshadow Romione but also to show the negative aspects of Ron’s insecurity, namely jealousy and how he lashes out when he feels betrayed. However, at the end of Goblet of Fire, Ron symbolically outgrows his jealousy by asking Viktor Krum for his autograph.

Order of the Phoenix will then go on to show Ron being jealous of Krum, although being a bit less vocal about it... and it also gives Ron half of the things he’s dreamed of in first year: he’s made a prefect, and joins the Quidditch team. But those are immediately made hollow by the... lackluster reaction of his loved ones and by Malfoy being a vile piece of pond scum. The fact that he’s prefect could have been used to make Ron take on more responsibilities and showcase his motherly side more, but Rowling only used it to again pit him against Hermione by making Ron look like “the immature one” and making Hermione “the responsible one”. And then, to REALLY drive home the point that Ron isn’t allowed to have anything for himself, she has Dumbledore say “oh yeah Harry, you were supposed to be prefect, even though you’re basically allergic to rules and authority and also are emotionally stunted”, and so in a symbolic way VALIDATING Hermione’s reaction to Ron being prefect. Yeah fuck you too Rowling. And the Quidditch debacle could have been used to give Ron confidence in himself. Actually, it does somewhat give him confidence once he trounces Slytherin in the last match of the year. But the fact that Harry and Hermione weren’t present means that Ron’s victory is an afterthought, a background event, a minor thing. Yet, Ron still proves his maturity and patience by just accepting that his friends weren’t here to see him play. They don’t deserve him, seriously. This year also marks a drama-free year for Ron and Hermione, which could have then been built up to make them grow even closer in the next book... but oh, the faults of TERFs...

Half-Blood Prince basically takes all of Ron’s progression through the last two books and says “see that? All that? Well let’s pretend it never happened and do it again, but shittier!” The thing is, Rowling wants Ron to “make himself worthy of Hermione” like the very progressive person she is. But she is also aware that Ron is kind of a naïve romantic who wouldn’t date around while he’s in love with someone else. Unless... Unless she resurrects plotlines that have already been finished, thus bringing Ron back to square one. Now he’s back to not being able to play Quidditch properly and Hermione acts the saviour because girl power. Now he’s back to being enraged by Viktor Krum’s name. Now he’s even less mature than he was in Philosopher’s Stone because Plot Be Like That. JKR did do a pretty good job at setting up the whole argument, not gonna lie. Since Ron is so sensitive to betrayal, finding out that Hermione had lied to him about Krum would indeed make him furious, especially when he finds out that Ginny knew about it and (apparently) so did Harry. Basically, the entire sixth year is built to undermine Ron’s growth and character, both because Harry must be in love with Ginny and in order to properly appreciate Ginny he has to appreciate Ron’s qualities less, since Ginny and Ron basically have the same qualities Harry appreciates but he can only be in love with Ginny; and also because Ron “needed to make himself worthy of Hermione” courtesy of double-standards, sexism and general immaturity from our author.

Finally DH closes the horrible loop. Rather than letting Ron grow secure and confident, Rowling instead insists on pulling him down, and down, and down, then gives us Harry saying “she’s like my sister, I thought you knew” as if that somehow would fix the self-esteem issues and the self-hatred and the sheer abuse Ron is subjected to by his friends - and for someone as obsessed with "love redeems” as Rowling is, it probably is, but those of us suffering from depression know better. Even though the Epilogue shows us Ron being happy and confident enough to joke about fame, it still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth when you realize that Ron-bashers take the “Confunded the instructor” lines to absurd levels and use it as “proof” that Ron is a bad husband / lazy / a cheater / etc... when it’s immediately followed by -

"I only forgot to look in the wing mirror, and let's face it, I can use a Supersensory Charm for that."

This is basically Ron doing the wizard equivalent of the rear-view camera. But of course, bashfics have been written to make it so Ron causes a horrible crash accident and Hermione calls for divorce and blah blah blah sigh.

[anchanted-one]

Harry Potter Talk

Settle in everyone, this is going to be a long one.

So a couple of days ago, I saw a massive anti-HP (the character) rant that really irritated me that I wanted to address.

Before I do, let's address the transphobic in the room. Rowling. Transphobia is detestable, and not wanting to support the series while that directly benefits and enriches her is a super valid stance. Also my personal stance, we support the trans people in this house!

Now that that's out of the way.

"Harry Potter, jock from a wealthy family" or something to that effect.

Regardless of how big his bank account is, remember how Harry was brought up? And by whom?

The Dursleys. The magic-hating child-abusers. Who forced Harry to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs for eleven years. Who gave him Dudley's things secondhand. His mother's sister was so unwilling to spend a dime on him that she was dyeing some of Dudley's old things gray to use as Harry's school uniform.

His cousin Dudley, who delighted in tormenting him, and whose gang joined him in beating up Harry whenever Dudley felt bored enough that he wanted to beat him up for fun.

Is this the upbringing of a "rich jock"? He never used much of his wealth in the Muggle world and even in his school years he seems to know the importance of restraint, and sharing (in book one, he's delighted to be able to share with Ron, and in book four he gives the Twins a thousand galleons without a second thought). Dudley was the one who got thirty-six presents on his birthday and threw a fit coz it was less than what he'd got the previous year. Harry got a used tissue for Christmas. He was the one so not expecting any gifts at all that his best friend's mother packed him a hand-knitted sweater for him, and made his day.

Jock? He played the loneliest position in the Quidditch team. The Chasers and Keepers work together as a team, and the Beaters too, but Seekers are ignored by everyone--including the team--until it becomes apparent that they've spotted something.

Harry was quite popular when he joined the school, but that popularity mostly manifested as people pointing at his scar and whispering about him. Most made him uncomfortable. He only ever had a few friends he was comfortable with.

There were long periods when he was in fact an outcast. That time he lost fifty points for the thing with the dragon, or the time when the Ministry and the Newspapers had turned the entire Wizarding world against him. The time his name came out of the Goblet of Fire, all Houses except Gryffindor treated him like shit, and even the Gryffindors, while they were cheering for him, weren't paying much mind when he was saying that he didn't do it, or that he needed support. That one time, even Ron didn't stay by his side. He was all alone but for Hermione.

The only time he fit the bill of the jock was in book six, when he was too obsessed with what Malfoy was doing to give a damn about his newfound popularity. That was also when he chose the company of outcasts like Neville and Luna over popular hangers-on.

Yes, there are legit reasons to hate the character; he has a massive hero complex. He routinely gets his friends into trouble because of it. He has a very narrow and myopic perspective because of which he doesn't notice much outside of his mystery-hunter track (there was a time when I could illustrate that point better, but it's been a decade and more since I read the last book. I wanted to better read up before talking about this, but I can't bring myself to binge-read like I used to)

By contrast, yes James Potter was a 'jock'. But that's reason to hate him, not his son. Harry, when he sees Snape's worst memory, is rightly horrified. When Remus tries to make the "we were just fifteen" excuse, Harry reminds him "I'm fifteen!". (It should also be noted that Snape's memories obviously show his nemesis at his worst, whereas Remus Lupin--the Werewolf--tells Harry repeatedly that James and Sirius were there for him when no one else was. James risked his life to fight Voldemort, whereas Snape was happily on Voldy's side until that one person he cared about was marked for death by the Prophecy©. Snape was also an abusive bully well until he died--just ask Neville. Dumbledore has also told Harry that memories are fickle things, which can be changed, so the chances that Snape simmered in this memory and unconsciously distilled it to make his old nemeses seem even worse--or himself seem like the angel who wouldn't hurt a fly--also exist. As someone who's experienced bullying, mockery, etc, I know this self-serving tendency of memory quite well. Though this bit is speculation on my part. )

Regarding the sillier names like Pansy Parkinson, and mean descriptions

In addition, when the series began, it started as a children's series, hence the Roald Dahl-like non-villain bad guys of the early part, and the "hate-me-I'm-nasty" names they were given. The Dursleys. Dudley Dursley aka Dudders. "Pansy Parkinson". Everyone was more caricature than character. That's how they are in children's books.

Many people are also described in a way to make the reader immediately dislike them. Malfoy is pale, with a pointy chin. Snape is an oily man with a large beaked nose and greasy hair. Rita Skeeter has a mannish jaw. Umbridge has a face like a toad. All of this is again in keeping with the Roald Dahl theme. Whether it's Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Mike Teavee, Violet Beauregarde or their mannerisms and descriptions make readers feel an instant dislike for them.

When the series became more... Mature, those caricatures can start finding their critics. Never mind that such caricatures and worse can be found in thousands of other works, like Superhero comics for instance. Yes, no one names their children "Pansy" but Slytherin was an allegory for white supremacist type people. Back in those days, JK wanted them to be hated without reserve, much as she wanted bigotry and racism to be (irony, considering where she stands today).

Death of the Author

In the text there is no real transphobia that I can remember, other than that description of Rita having a "mannish jaw" (I admit that I haven't read it in ages, but I am still certain of this). Once the material is out in print, everyone is free to interpret it as they choose. Whenever JK comes out with clarifications or retcons or something--as she is known to do anyway--it's still more of her headcanon than in-world truth. If there is no outright mention of something in the text, then it doesn't matter what meaning the author intended to convey. What matters is what each reader makes of it. In the case of Harry Potter, the enemy are clearly folks obsessed with blood purity: Purebloods.

Lazy names

I'm going to speak specifically about the Indian names here: Parvati and Padma Patil.

While India is a large country and the name is more common in certain regions than others, I had heard that Patel/Patil surname is quite common in Britain. And really in Indian cinema the most common girls' names are Priya (Big Bang Theory as well) or Pooja, many girls in this side of the screen have goddess names. Like "Parvati". Many people also keep the same first letter for names for twins, or even in families (for instance, my parents, sister, and I, all have names starting with "A"), so "Padma" is a nice choice of name. And really, Padma and Parvati Patil are much better names than "Khan Noonien Singh" (now there's a lazy name).

Everyone insists that Star Trek's Khan is supposed to be of Indian origin, but with a name like that and an actor with a Mexican accent... I don't really think so. It was because of this silly character generation that I didn't particularly mind him being played by the very white Benedict Cumberbatch.

But the Patil twins. Them I can feel that connection to.

Races of the main cast

Now this might be something contentious, so I apologise for that in advance.

No one cares what Harry is, though since Petunia is noted as being pale, and Lily has red hair, the unknown factor is James Potter. Was he black? That would make Harry biracial at best.

Ron is written as a freckled boy with red hair, and all Weasleys share that look.

As for Hermione... She is the poster child of the blood-purity bigotry bias. When reading her, people are supposed to understand that the prejudice against her is certainly her Muggle-born origin; not her skin color, not her nationality, not her sexual orientation. Which is why I feel it's necessary that she stand out as less as possible in those other ways. For this reason I think that it was a good idea to portray her as white.

Here are characters who are specifically noted as black: Dean Thomas, Michael Corner (both of whom were Ginny's boyfriends), Kingsley Shacklebolt, Angelina Johnson, Alicia Spinnet, Lee Jordan, Blaise Zabini (who's noted as being very handsome, and quite popular). Aside from these we have a few token people of Indian and Chinese origin. Speaking again as an Indian, I don't really mind. This is a British story set in a mid-nineties British school only accepting students from the British Isles. It makes sense to me if there are few Indians.

What does all of this translate to? There are legit reasons to hate both the character and the series. So don't make stuff up, especially if you're ignoring the text to do it. Don't confuse the author and their work, even if you have resolved not to buy that work and thereby support her.

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn't Black

Blogger’s Note: This particular article is kind of funny in retrospect, now that drawing black!Harry and black!Hermione has become so common in the fandom.

Last year (or maybe the year before, time flies doesn't it), the Sci Fi channel produced an adaptation of Ursula le Guin's Earthsea stories. It caused something of a furore, because most of the main characters were white. I mention this for two reasons. 

The first reason is that the TV company, with typical mealy-mouthed style, insisted that they had practiced "colourblind" casting and in a stunning manipulation of middle class guilt, immediately implied that it was somehow racist to expect them to cast a Native American in the role, just because that was the real world ethnicity which most closely approximated that of the people of Earthsea. Obviously the white guy just happened to be the best guy for the role, obviously he stood out by a mile over the other contenders.  The second reason I mention it, though, was because when I read the books (many years ago now) I had completely failed to notice that Ged wasn't white. With the white middle class man's ingrained fear of being labelled a racist, I immediately constructed for myself very much the kind of justifications that the Sci-Fi channel had. "Oh well it's all about the character isn't it, Ged's character is the same whether he's black, white or whatever".  The thing is: it's natural for people to assume that a fictional character of unspecified race is the same race as them. Similarly I have a strong memory of seeing a picture in my year nine RE class of a depiction of Jesus from a church in China. Their version of Jesus, of course, looked Chinese, which broke a few of our tiny fourteen year old brains. Jesus is Chinese in China, black in Africa, Caucasian in England. He might even be Jewish somewhere, but that seems rather unlikely.  But there's another thing. I, yes, will generally assume that a non-racially-specific person is white. And I'm pretty sure that a Chinese person reading a book written in Chinese by a Chinese author will assume that a non-racially-specific person (who will probably have a vaguely Chinese sounding name and live in a fictional setting that looks pretty much like medieval China) would be ethnically Chinese. My girlfriend pointed out over lunch that, when she reads Haruki Murakami, she imagines all the characters as white, even though they're presumably mostly Japanese. It gets more complicated when you put minorities into the mix.  Put simply, I cannot put my hand on my heart and say that a black person living in England has the same luxury that I - and Chinese people in China, and Indians in India - enjoy. I, and I would imagine a great many other people who read the Earthsea books at a similar age to me, assumed Ged was the same race as me. I sincerely doubt that there are any black fantasy readers who made the same assumption about Aragorn when they read Lord of the Rings. Currently, then, I'm in one of those horrible situations where I think there's a point to be made, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. It's one of those "individual instance versus general trend" problems. I don't think you can look at any single work of fiction and say "that character, right there, should have been black". It's all very well saying that non-whites are underrepresented in Fantasy, but that's partly just because ninety percent of fantasy is set in a world that's functionally identical to medieval Europe. Most fantasy worlds do have black people in them, it's just that because they come from the Hot Continent In The South. Indeed most fantasy worlds seem to assume the existence of exactly four races: White Anglo Saxon, Black African, Asian (the Asian culture will invariably be a vast Empire in the East, and usually look like Han Dynasty China, plus Samurai, plus ninjas) and Arab (the Arabic culture will be either very religious or very mercantile, or both).  In fact, the races that are the most underrepresented in Fantasy are - arguably - the non-Anglo-Saxon "white" races. A remarkable number of Fantasy settings include quasi-Venetian city-states, quasi-Roman empires and quasi-Spartan warrior cultures, who none the less manage to look remarkably like they were born in Colchester, nary a Mediterranean complexion in sight. I can just about accept a quasi-European world with no black people in it (Fantasy worlds don't haveimmigration after all). It's rather harder to accept a fantasy analogue of Florence in which nobody looks Florentine. (This weird omission applies almost universally in fact: when was the last time you saw a Roman Emperor actually being played by a Roman? Why when it is unthinkable for a white man to play Othello does nobody bother to find a Venetian-looking Desdemona).  Of course I might be making a fuss about nothing. As I say, it's easy for me to assume that everybody I read about is white (even when there's textual evidence to the contrary). I don't really have any evidence that Locke Lamora isn't Latino, or that the men of Westeros aren't Hispanic (the Dornishmen are, of course, Generically Arabic but like most fantasy worlds, Westeros seems to have an invisible line across the equator, with the people going from "white as milk" on one side to "coffee-coloured" on the other with no in-between). So maybe it isn't a problem with the genre, maybe it's a problem with me. There is, after all, nothing stopping me from imagining Robert Baratheon as looking like a Greek Cypriot, or Ron Weasley as being a black kid who just happens to have red hair. If I assume that a character of unspecified race is Caucasian, that's my look out.  The problem is, though, that if I am making the assumption that J Random Character is white, just because I am white, then it seems overwhelmingly probable that the white middle class writers of fantasy are making the same assumptions. And I think this is an issue. When JK Rowling was designing her boy wizard (and I really don't mean to single her out here, it's just a good, well known example) I'm sure it didn't even occur to her that Harry Potter could be a black kid, any more than it occurred to me that he would be. When she was designing Ron Weasley, she imagined a character that would be her ideal image of an honest, supportive friend, and what she wound up imagining was a boy with red hair and freckles.  And it's that more than anything else that causes the trouble.  The problem with "race" in fiction in general and fantasy in particular, is that it has two very distinct implications. The first implication is the social and political one " "black" and "white" carry tremendous social connotations in the real world, and that bleeds over into created worlds as well. The second implication of a character's race, though, is much more prosaic. A person's race affects what they look like.  Well, duh.  But actually, it's the cosmetic implications of race that wind up being the most important. It is considered absolutely and unambiguously wrong in the modern world to judge somebody by their race. It is considered totally okay to judge somebody by their looks, particularly in a work of fiction, where somebody's physical appearance is often expected to tell you something about their personality. Ron Weasley has red hair and freckles: the average reader knows instantly what that is supposed to imply about him. He's boyish, a little impetuous, but basically a good person. He has "hero's sidekick" written all over him. The problem is, having "red hair and freckles" effectively precludes Ron Weasley from being black, because very few black people have red hair (although it isn't unheard of) and black skin tends to freckle far less visibly than white skin.  Again, just to be clear, I'm not saying that JK Rowling is "a racist" but I am saying that when JK Rowling formed in her mind the image of a true and decent friend, she deliberately gave that person particular physical characteristics which she felt created the appropriate image, and those traits are traits you are very, very unlikely to find in a black person.  Try to write a description of a beautiful woman, and the odds are better than even that you'll make her tall and slender with long, golden hair. Chances are, you'll make her tall and slender with long golden hair even if you're more into brunettes. "Tall and slender with long golden hair" is our cultural shorthand for beauty - it's what Cinderella looks like, it's what Rapunzel looks like, it's what Laura Fairlie looks like, Sweeney Todd's dead wife and lost daughter are both "beautiful and pale, with yellow hair". Snow White's a brunette, but she's still got skin as white as snow. No writer would dream of suggesting that a black person couldn't be beautiful, but our "generic" idea of beauty is pale and blonde, just like our "generic" idea of boyish charm is a freckly redhead and our "generic" idea of a wise man is a white guy with a long beard and a pointed nose (I'll talk about noses more in a bit).  The "race affects how you look" issue is also another strike, I think, against the idea that I only assume that everybody in Fantasy is white because I'm a white man myself. When people talk about "race" they tend to just think in terms of skin colour, but of course it actually affects a whole lot more than that. I can't think of a single point in the Potter books where it explicitly says that Dumbledore or Harry are white (so you could argue that it's just my preconceptions coming into play), but race isn't just about skin colour. Harry Potter is famous for his messy, floppy hair (again, it's a characteristic that makes him seem more like "a regular kid" - or at least a regular white kid). Dumbledore, of course, has his long, pointy nose. Even if their skin colour isn't mentioned explicitly, neither of these physical characteristics are terribly likely to be possessed by a black man. There are exceptions, of course, but in general black people don't have "floppy" hair or pointed noses. All in all I feel confident that, when I assume a character in a fantasy novel is white, the author is making the exact same assumption.  I've just spent about 1700 words slating Fantasy writers for not including enough black people in their books (and certainly not including enough Latino or Greek people despite a great many settings looking a whole hell of a lot like Spain, Greece or Italy), but I'd like to spend a moment backpedalling. The thing is that what I said at the start, about it being natural to assume that a person of non-specific race looks pretty much like you still holds. If I was a Fantasy writer I am damned sure that I'd make my protagonists white, just because it wouldn't occur to me to do otherwise. If I had to write about a beautiful woman, you can bet your arse I'd make her tall and slender with long golden hair, because that's how I instinctively think of a "beautiful woman" looking (even though I do, in fact, far prefer dark women in real life).  The other problem with race in Fantasy is that, because it's not our world, you can't use nationality as a short hand. It's actually remarkably hard to describe many non-white races without resorting to (a) cliche or (b) rather dubious ethnic stereotypes. You can get away with it fairly easily in something set in the real world, because you can just say somebody is "Chinese" or "Azerbaijani" and either people will know what you mean, or they can look it up on the internet. In a fantasy world you don't have that luxury. This is probably why there are only four races in most fantasy worlds. Anybody whose race isn't described is white. Anybody who has dark skin is Generically Arabic, anybody who has very dark or black skin is black, and anybody who has a long moustache or does Kung Fu is Asian. Some fantasy worlds similarly include a quasi-Mongolian culture, who we know to look Mongolian because they have a close relationship with their horses. You might, if you're very lucky get "olive skinned" people (who are presumably therefore green) tending Big Fields of Ancient Wheat, but that's about your lot. Again however, I wonder how much more Fantasy writers can realistically be expected to do.  The simple fact is that the real world is unimaginably complicated. A fantasy series is praised for its worldbuilding if it contains more than six moderately well realised nations. The CIA World Factbook lists the real world as containing over two hundred and sixty. Similarly, while fantasy worlds may grossly oversimplify the concept of ethnicity, it would be impossible to do otherwise - just looking at the CIA world factbook again, we see (for example) seven distinct ethnicities depicted as existing within Albania alone (Albanian, Greek, Vlach, Roma, Serb, Macedonian, Bulgarian) while the entry for China lists eleven (Han Chinese, Zhuang, Uygar, Hui, Yi, Tibetan, Miao, Manchu, Mongol, Buyi, Korean). The complexities of real-world ethnic diversity are beyond even the most talented of fantasy authors, never mind your average Quest-and-McGuffin merchant.  In the end, then, the thing I find most upsetting about the appallingly whitewashed nature of most fantasy settings is that I can absolutely understand why they're like that. Even though I'm a thoroughly modern, thoroughly liberal man, even though I work in an international school am therefore able to feel smug and cosmopolitan because I know what people from Kazakhstan look like and have a reasonable chance of identifying an Azerbaijani accent I still, deep down, instinctively assume that "person" means "white person", and I can't ultimately condemn JK Rowling for giving her white protagonist a white best friend and a white mentor, and having them marry a couple of nice white girls and have nice white kids who they named after their dead white relatives. I know I'd do exactly the same.  The sad fact is that most white people don't think about race that much, because we simply don't have to. While this is arguably better than being actively racist it's still kind of a sorry state of affairs, and it's unbelievably pathetic that after all these years, Ursula le Guin is still pretty much the only person in the industry who seems to give a shit.

Themes: J.K. Rowling, Books, Minority Warrior

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Comments (go to latest)

Arthur B at 00:49 on 2008-03-15

The amazing thing about the racial mix in Earthsea is how many people completely miss it, despite le Guin's valiant efforts in throwing out evidence pointing towards it. The only other author I can think of who's played with people's cultural stereotypes in this way is (big surprise coming here) Gene Wolfe; in The Book of the New Sun you need to pay attention to notice that Severian lives somewhere near where Buenos Aires is in our own time, that the Commonwealth it is a part of is South America, and that the Maoist-flavoured despotism threatening the Commonwealth exists in North America; the average fantasy reader (in the Anglo-American world, at least) is going to tend to assume that Our Hero lives in the northern hemisphere and that slogan-spouting Maoists are Chinese.

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Guy at 04:34 on 2008-03-15

I remember it coming as quite a shock to me when I read Wizard of Earthsea to discover that Ged was dark-skinned. I'd already formed a picture of him in my mind and it was disconcerting to be told that this picture was wrong. It did make me think about race in fantasy worlds, though... later I read an essay by le Guin in which she said she did this deliberately... the idea being to try to secure the reader's identification with the protagonist before letting them in on what that protagonist looked like. I think maybe the reason fantasy worlds tend to be so ethnically homogeneous is that they're mostly seen as (and used as, probably) an escapist outlet and we don't like difficult social questions in our escapist fluff. I imagine a similar racial mix can be found in Mills and Boon novels, for example? I think le Guin is one of those fantasy (and sci-fi) writers who is intent on doing more than providing formulaic escapism and showing what the genre is capable of extending to... it's a shame there aren't more like her. I think escapism is great, but I'd hate to think that was all the fantasy genre had to offer.

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Dan H at 10:08 on 2008-03-15

As I say, I can actually forgive fantasy for not handling race well, because it's actually very hard to do well, and I can certainly forgive purveyors of light, escapist fantasy for not dealing with complex real-world social issues. On the other hand it kind of does bug me that - say - JK Rowling has an all-white cast saving their 99% white world from all-white villains and then gets praised for (a) her sensitive handling of the issue of racism and (b) her amazing courage in having two black characters who never do or say anything, and a character who is revealed to be gay in an interview (and was therefore Never Able To Find True Love Or Happiness Because of His Unnatural Predelictions). Look! It took me all of three posts to turn this into JKR-bashing! The ethnic makeup of Westeros also seriously confuses me. Why do the blonde people live two miles north of the black people? Why?!

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Guy at 12:01 on 2008-03-15

Very crisp edges on the ozone layer?

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Sister Magpie at 16:45 on 2008-03-15

I've always felt a little lucky that I didn't read Earthsea until after the TV movie came out. I didn't see the TV movie, but I read the complaints about this, so I went into the book knowing what Ged looked like in the book. If I hadn't it's quite possible I would have overlooked it the same way. Which means the best I can say is that I'm willing to make the effort to keep non-white characters non-white--which isn't much!

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Arthur B at 16:55 on 2008-03-15

More likely the mighty efforts of the stalwart warriors manning the Kingdom's defences against the marauding hordes of dark people. :( Actually, let me nominate David Gemmell as someone who can, when the mood takes him, handle racial issues fairly well, or at least not appallingly badly. Even in Legend, his most black-and-white clash-of-cultures novel, he takes pains to make sure that both the Drenai and the Nadir civilisations have a mix of admirable and disreputable qualities, and there is genuine cultural mixing at the borders between nations; he even hints in The King Beyond the Gate that the Last Great Hope for Peace is not, in fact, the decadent, played-out, and European Drenai, but the vibrant, young and vaguely Mongolian Nadir. Then again, you do have Pagan as the Token Awesome Black Dude in The King Beyond the Gate, but I half-suspect that Gemmell introduced him simply because his publishers pressured him to and he was fed up of having his manuscripts rejected; he manages to make the dude reasonably three-dimensional and interesting later on. More importantly, he manages to make the dude three-dimensional and interesting in a manner which doesn't hinge simply on him coming from a vaguely African culture, but engages with him as a human being with very human flaws that, like all of Gemmell's heroes, he strives to overcome. At the end of the day, I suppose that giving characters from diverse races and cultures a similar treatment without stripping them of any distinctive cultural identity is the best that fantasy authors can hope for. (Which ties in, of course, with Dan's concerns about JKR. Sure, she throws in a few black and Asian kids in Hogwarts, but they pretty much never get a chance to do any of the cool stuff that the white kids do.)

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Arthur B at 16:56 on 2008-03-15

whups, Magpie and I cross-posted "More likely the mighty efforts of the stalwart warriors manning the Kingdom's defences against the marauding hordes of dark people. :(" was a response to Guy's comment about the ozone layer.

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Rami at 20:08 on 2008-03-15

It is really quite annoying how not that many fantasy series ever have an equivalent to South Asia ;-) but then, I'm a little biased...

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Guy at 07:37 on 2008-03-16

Incidentally, I saw a bit of the TV series of Earthsea... and I think with a certain amount of harrumphing I could have accepted the racial changes, if it weren't for the fact that it was a badly written, badly acted, utterly generic "McMagic" blancmange with no real reason to have the Earthsea name attached to it.

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Arthur B at 09:26 on 2008-03-16

Incidentally, does anyone know whether the Studio Ghibli version of Earthsea is any good? I know that le Guin was disappointed that Miyazaki gave the directing job to his son rather than doing it himself, but I also seem to remember that she isn't nearly as upset with it as she was with the SciFi channel version. Of course, anime has its own problems with dealing with racial issues; in most of Ghibli's films all the human beings seem to be of exactly the same race, whereas when other anime studios try to do non-European, non-Japanese characters it doesn't always work well.

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Jen Spencer at 09:48 on 2008-03-17

This is reminding me of Jazz in the Transformers movie. That hurt my brain.

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Rami at 11:56 on 2008-03-17

Jazz in the Transformers movie Oh, God, he really was just gratuitously ethnic, wasn't he? Just like in Not Another Teen Movie, which despite being a bit crap did hit the nail on the head with their Token Black Guy.

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Andy G at 19:54 on 2008-03-18

Interesting sci-fi / fantasy comparison here - are there any fantasy settings with heterogenous societies? I can only think of Ankh Morpork in the later Discworld stories, where he is deliberately focusing on the issue. It seems to be a much more common feature of sci-fi - Firefly, Star Trek, the Foundation series etc. Fantasy is perhaps still taking a Tolkien world-view as a point of departure, rather than the modern world - whereas the visions of the future in sci-fi have changed along with the visions of the present? More generally on all genre fiction - since sci-fi is only COMPARATIVELY progressive - perhaps it's also significant that the world-view in them tends to be much more white-centric in the assumptions on the part of the author and reader because we don't read from fantasy, sci-fi, detective stories, romances, thrillers from authors outside the UK and US? I can think of Night Watch from Russia and that's it. Even in Germany they tend to read just English fantasy / sci-fi.  Oh and a final thought that just came to me - what about the whole question not just of characters' appearances but their accents - isn't that quite revealing about our assumptions too?

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Dan H at 10:56 on 2008-03-19

I think there's two distinct things to think about here actually. One is the comparative homogeneity/heterogeneity of the *setting* and the other is the application of the same principles to the actual *story*. Ankh Morpok is "heterogeneous" chiefly in terms of its non-human races, and the presence of the odd Klachian. In this sense it's actually not much different to JKR's world (where we're told categorically that Dean Thomas Is Black). Firefly basically has one black chick, one Mysterious Old Black Dude (who skates dangerously close to what tvtrops.org would call a "Magical Negro" at times) and that's about it. For a world where society is supposed to be fully 50% chinese, they run into surprisingly few Chinese people. Original trek was well done by the standards of its day - it was massively tokenistic but it was the sixties for crying out loud. TNG was actually far worse (there's what, one black guy on board, and he's an alien). Again, I'm not saying that there's anything *wrong* with white writers who write for mostly-white audiences in a mostly-white country in a predominently white industry writing stories where the protagonists are themselves mostly white. It's when they start making a big song and dance about how totally racially diverse they are it gets to me. Firefly does reasonably well in including a just-above-tokenistic proportion of non-white characters but when you remember that it's supposed to be set in a society where the chinese are actually a majority they start to be notable by their absence.

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Andy G at 12:38 on 2008-03-19

Absolutely, I think that's a much clearer explanation of the qualification I was trying to get at when I said sci-fi was only 'comparatively progressive.'

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Jamie Johnston at 11:01 on 2008-03-24

Very interesting stuff. I find myself wondering what is the best way for a writer to deal with the fact that his readers will make these assumptions. The Rowling approach of simply relying on them (and probably sharing them) and therefore not bothering to specify anything about a character's ethnicity unless it happens not to conform to them (e.g. Dean Thomas Is Black) reinforces the assumptions at least in as much as it doesn't challenge them. On the other hand, if a writer carefully specified the ethnicity of every character it would (1) get very tedious for the reader and (2) give the reader the impression than ethnicity is very important to the story, even if it isn't. Then again one can do what Gaiman does in 'Anansi Boys', which is to wilfully ignore the fact that your readers are making these assumptions and just to write the thing on the basis that *you* know all your principal characters are black and your readers will figure it out eventually. That may in principle be a very noble way to go about it, in that it doesn't indulge your readers' unhelpful ways of thinking and in fact makes them feel they've been rather silly and faintly racist, when the penny finally drops, for thinking in that way in the first place; but it also means that at some point around page 100 your readers will be massively distracted from the story you're telling them by having to make extensive retrospective mental adjustments while feeling they've been rather silly and faintly racist. Which doesn't really make for a satisfying aesthetic experience. P.S. Andy raised the point of science fiction from outside the Anglo-American sphere: I haven't read any, but I heard on the radio the other day that there's a big boom going on at the moment in Indian sci-fi. Might give an interesting angle on things, especially since (as has already been pointed out) fantasy and sci-fi tend to ignore the Indian subcontinent altogether because there's only room in The East for one civilization and it's usually Vaguely Chinese.

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http://draxar.livejournal.com/ at 20:50 on 2011-07-14

A very late comment, but one book that purposefully plays with this idea is Anansi Boys, where the majority of the main characters are black, and if I recall correctly, it mentions when a character is white, but not when they're black.

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Cammalot at 23:50 on 2011-07-14

I adored the hell out of that book for just that reason. It felt... refreshing. :-) Basically everywhere else in life (in my experience of Western culture, anyway) the opposite is done. "A woman walked own the road" followed by actual detailed description, versus "A black man got out of the car." The end. (Not even "A man got out of the car; he was black..."

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http://keysersose.blogspot.co.uk/ at 16:41 on 2017-03-16

I had a similar argument with my writer chums the other day, and Harry Potter was the example we used as well.  Generally, fantasy writers treat white as default (consciously or unconsciously), and expect the readership to assume characters are white unless otherwise specified (again, consciously or unconsciously). That annoys me, so I have a somewhat petulant policy of mentally depicting all characters as black unless their ethnicity/race is actually specified. Harry Potter actually deserves some praise for never specifying the race of characters, which is a thing a lot of authors do dp. Rowling implies ethnicity through character description, or with stereotypical "ethnic" names, but she never goes so far as to tell you that Hermione is white British or Dumbledore is Persian. This is better than when a writer tells you a character is black (when skin colour has no apparent significance to the story or setting). I assume this is a middle-class, white guilt thing where they feel it necessary to indicate there are indeed people of colour in their book, but it kind of backfires because they only mention a character's skin colour when they are not white, implying white is the default setting. It is also usually the case that these POCs are relegated to support characters, and the author has reinforced the fact that the protagonist is lily-white. If I was a non-white reader, I might have imagined the protagonist up to a point of matching my ethnicity. The lack of mention initially communicates that I can imagine what I like. But then this stupid rule about pointing out the brown people asserts the white-is-default rule, and that means my mental image must be wrong. This issue also came up when reading the Kingkiller series, in that one of the characters is meant to be non-white, but it wasn't apparent to most of the readership because the character was described as "dusky" skinned, which could be used to describe anyone from Megan Fox to Grace Jones. Qvothe has the red hair, and the references to pubs and lutes imply a generic European medieval setting, but now there is this weird alternative problem where the description is so vague, it is basically pointless description except to imply everyone else isn't dusky coloured (and so therefore white). Qvothe himself has read hair, but is also from some cultural equivalent to Romani/Travellers. Fine, I think. Qvothe is black too.

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Arthur B at 17:31 on 2017-03-16

Interesting to see this one pop out of the archives, seeing how, whilst Ron is still not black in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Hermione is. I am with you on the utter uselessness of "dusky" as a description of someone's skin colour. So far as I can make out, it can apply to anyone who is not an actual albino.

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Orion at 19:47 on 2017-03-30

There's actually a quite sensible reason that Ron Weasley isn't black, and indeed why he has red hair, which is unrelated to the character-type-signaling.  The Weasleys are an aristocratic old-money family that has been active and well known in Britain for a long time. They're not wealthy any more (or at least neither they nor the Malfoys would describe them as wealthy), but they're blood relations to many of the genuinely powerful families and have intergenerational rivalries with at least one. I think it's a pretty safe assumption that most (though perhaps not all) of the wizard families with ancestral estates in England and blood relations to other wizard families with ancestral estates in England are white. I suppose they could have been the descendants of a foregn merchant house that transplanted to England or it could have been one of Ron's parents rather than Ron who married a black outsider, but I think those changes do lead to different stories.  Given that they're white, it makes sense that the Weasleys have red hair. It's because of their hair that everyone knows who they are and what they look like and can spot them across a room. One assumes that Ron might not be so cripplingly self-conscious if he weren't so easy to spot and recognize. Also, while everyone has to acknowedge that the Weasleys are wizard highborns, many think the Weasleys are somehow "not as good" as the other highborn families. I'm an American and liable to be mistaken about this kind of thing, but I'd expect that when English people in the UK see a family of redheads, they would assume that family was probably the the UK, but more likely to be Scottish or Irish than English, and that English nobility would feel that Scottish nobles are definitely nobles, but not really as good as English nobles.

[theliterateape]

How Free is Our Speech and Who Decides?

by Don Hall

"Donald! If you say one more word, I'm sending you to the Principal's Office! Just. SHUT. UP!"

Third grade. Mrs. McWilliams. As the resident 'new kid' I was isolated to begin with but I had ridden this roller coaster before. Two boys in class decided that I was their enemy (or rather the object of their boredom) and they had taken to stealing any toys or books or games I'd grab during in-classroom recess. This was the third time and McWilliams had had enough of my gift for non-stop verbiage.

There it was. They had ripped the CandyLand game out of my hands and aside from just marching across the room and beating them to death I had no options but to sit there and take it. McWilliams had completely cut me off at the legs. If I say one more word, I’m screwed.

Except…

I grab some construction paper and a crayon. I draw what looks like two parentheses with a line through:

( | )

Sort of like an early emoji before there even was such a thing. In my brain, it was a butt. Then I drew the same butt with lines coming out of the crack and another with several circles coming out. This was my best guess at drawing the litany of profanity I wanted to yell. My nine-year old imagination couldn’t come up with anything quick for ‘cocksucker’ or ‘motherfucker’ which, all things considered, was probably a good thing.

I walked over to the boys and flash card style, held each one up to them making a stern and angry face.

The boys ratted me out. McWilliams fished the paper out of the trash and LOST. HER. MIND.

Two hours later I’m underneath my mother’s dining room table waiting for her to come home and belt me. McWilliams was apoplectic; the Principal was horrified. They sent me home early and called my mom at work to tell her what a perverse and awful monster I was. I had drawn pornographic pictures in class!

In hindsight I get it. I was an obnoxious kid. I was smarter than most, was full of more energy than five teachers could handle, and I thought nothing of breaking the rules for the sake of breaking them. 

It seems that we are at an impasse when it comes to our personal rights to free speech. Laws against hate speech are already a violation of the First Amendment (which sets out that the government cannot create and enforce laws abridging speech) but we get around it by using the old chestnut of yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater. The idea that by uttering racial slurs is somehow in the same ballgame is tenuous but still sticks.

The other side of the debate is accountability for words spoken or written. Call it whatever you choose—cancel-culture, public shaming, mob justice—it amounts to groups of people with no individual authority but the power of populist organization to effectively shame companies into firing offending employees. It also, on a far smaller but more destructive level, harbors a revenge justification against those who err in public for any reason (Amy Cooper is a solid example).

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit.

The Critical Race Theorists who advocate curtailment of speech offensive to minorities insist that individual instances of hate speech are never the isolated, unpopular speech of a dissident few. Rather, they are manifestations of a deeply ingrained cultural belief system, an American way of life.

Hate speech is so dangerous because it plays melodies that are so deeply rooted in the culture as to be structural parts of everyday life for large numbers of Americans—perhaps even a majority.

“Your motherfucking son spray painted my house, bitch!”

The woman was a good six inches taller than my mom and outweighed her by at least seventy pounds. Earlier that day she had decided that I and my other eleven-year old friends were too loud just outside her window.

She screamed at us through her window. We cussed her and then ran off. I had come back with some red spray paint and had tagged the side of her house with a defiant “FUCK YOU!”

“What makes you think you can accuse my son of vandalizing your fucking house?” Mom was tiny but the Irish made her think she was much bigger.

“The little dumbass signed his name.”

She was right on both counts: I had signed my name because I was a little dumbass.

When a homophobe uses an anti-gay insult, he's signing his name to it. When a misogynist says something obviously anti-feminist, he's a dumbass. Things get stickier when the racists aren't dumbasses and refuse to provide an incriminating signature.

The question that some would prefer we check off in the “Answered” box is likewise a tangly mess. Is the n-word (a word so thoroughly aggrandized that, like He Who Shall Not Be Named in the JK Rowling books, the utterance has increasing and horrifying power) “hate speech” or just hateful speech? Is it racist or merely racial? Queer used to be a slur but when GenZ kids regularly describe themselves as such, no one calls the language police.

The lack of any clarity along these lines is resulting in a quandary for everyone involved in words or merely dealing with other people and being in a position to have to communicate with them.

In the film Dangerous Liaisons The Marquise de Merteuil (Glenn Close) plots revenge against her ex-lover by ruining his young fiancée. There’s a lot of betrayal and a duel that ends in the death of a dude who duels and all. In the end, she is boo’d a bunch and she is disgraced. Now imagine if her big sin was to call someone something on the hate speech spectrum or espouse an ideology deemed wholly immoral. Sure, booing her then seems appropriate but for her to be completely eviscerated for it? To have the booing crowd pressure her work into firing her? Putting her behavior on social media so that she can never be hired again? Seems like an overreaction.

Seems like the permanent record one receives from going to a religious school.

Seems a bit religious.

When the religious decide you can’t do or say something, well, Holy Shit. You don’t have to go all Goody Proctor and the witches beings drowned to see if they could float to see a more recent example. Operation Rescue was the anti-abortion group in Wichita, KS when I happened to be going to high school in…Kansas. Randall Terry had a unique approach. If he disagreed with you (and if you were anything but fully anti-abortion in every possible scenario, he disagreed with you) he would yell over you instead of have some sort of heated discussion.

The local broadcasters stopped putting him on television because he’d just get on there and scream people down. As if, by drowning out their ability to communicate with anyone, he was likewise obliterating the message entirely.

He and his crew were out of control. They had determined that anyone associated with abortion in any way whatsoever was EVIL. In fact, I remember a group of them screaming at passers-by in downtown Wichita on Douglas Avenue for not joining them. They had extra placards with pictures of butchered fetus parts on them and were foisting them on people. If the person demurred (you know, maybe they had an appointment or needed to go impregnate someone so they could have a reason to slaughter the baby) the group would scream at them until they basically ran away.

At the time, I was anti-abortion but a prolonged summer of being around these religious screaming whack jobs changed my mind. Truly. My ideological change from pro-life to pro-choice had more to do with disgust over these idiots than any righteous belief in the autonomy of women.

This is not to say that I didn’t come around with a more progressive view. It took some time but a woman’s right to choose which surgical procedures she employs on her body is pretty much her business. If someone can elect to tattoo 75% of her skin, decide to stick Botox in her face, and fill her tits with silicone it isn’t much of a stretch that she should without obstacle relieve herself of a tumor that will become a human tethered to her hip for life.

The idea that human life is valued in the world is perhaps a goal but certainly not a reality. An ideal to uphold but not a realistic approach. Some lives matter. Lots of lives don’t so much.

Ideals are exactly that: goals. “I disagree with what he says but would die to ensure his right to say it” is a goal but would I really die so that someone unbalanced or religious is able to say “God Hates Fags” or “All White Americans are Racists”? Probably not.

Would I expect you to die for my right to say whatever I want? Not unless I'm a sociopath or a moron.

So no one is really going to die so that someone else can insult another person or espouse an ideology that differs from his own. Established fact. Where does that leave us as we navigate the increased opportunity to show our ass's in public more frequently (considering that social media and the whole of the digital highway is now quite public)?

Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies.

Around 2010, I was working for the public radio station in Chicago. I also had a blog from before I was hired. It was entitled (with an intentional wink at the rightwing NASCAR crowd) "An Angry White Guy in Chicago". Being fairly progressive in politic, the fun in the name was that people on the stereotypical raging caucasian dudes would jump on expecting me to parrot their ideology only to have themselves smacked in the face with articles against George W., in favor of the queer nation, and railing against the tendencies of unregulated capitalism. Also, as my mom used to point out, a lot of profanity.

The meeting was called because there were concerns about employees of an NPR station with social media and blogs. The concern was that these platforms might paint the station in a bad light if a lack of objectivity presented itself. The management had come up with a policy limiting our ability to utilize these methods of communicating and asking that they be able to censor us when necessary.

I listened.

My boss came over after the meeting.

“So, Don, what are you gonna do about your blog now?”

“Wrong question, boss.”

“Wrong question? What’s the right question?”

“What are you gonna do about my blog?”

He paused. “Probably nothing.”

“Good answer.”

I had come to the conclusion that any business that decided to censor me wasn’t worth my time working for and that has held true to this day. I suppose the fact that I’m not a racist or a sexist or a religious-type saves me from being relegated to the heap of dumbasses who sign their names to their intolerance. Being far more tolerant but more discriminating (or skeptical, I guess) has likely made me less odious.

At some point I did change the name of the blog mostly because, with Donald Trump suddenly in office, the joke wasn’t as funny as it was before. Self censorship is completely legit so the folks complaining about people being afraid to speak “their truth” because of repercussions are simply pussies. If you believe it, you can prove it, you should say it but don’t blame the mob if they don’t like it. This includes college professors, linguists, journalists, activists, and those dumb shits who think they can post memes on Twitter but shouldn’t lose their jobs if it’s anti-Semitic.

On the other hand if the best you can do in the face of language you can’t abide is scream down your opposition, you’re no better than the anti-abortionists of the eighties and you should look closely at your maturity level and how cultish your beliefs are. Chances are, if you’re so impassioned by your beliefs and refusal to hear anything that may contradict them, you’re a religious nut of one stripe or another.

“You’re a racist, man!”

The guy was in the casino I was managing, trolling around, trying to bum smokes and vouchers from paying guests. When I told him he couldn’t do that, he decided to play what is commonly referred to as “the race card.” This card has now become the rosary beads to flash around as a sort of secular religious icon.

“You’re racist, man!”

“OK. You still can’t solicit cigarettes or cash on the casino floor.”

“It’s because I’m black!”

“No. It’s because it’s against the rules. It’s a colorblind rule.”

“RACIST! RACIST!” He started screaming at me in order to what? Shut me up? Scare me away? He got loud and animated. I just stood there and watched him lose his shit like the girl who lost her shit on the white professor whose wife had written that college Halloween costumes are not the height of racist demonstration. You remember the video. I was mostly surprised at how calm the professor was in the face of such unrepentant childishness.

His accusation didn’t rile me up because I had no reason to be defensive. I know who I am and he doesn’t. He might as well have accused me of being a vampire or a Scottish lord. 

“You finished?”

“You gonna kick me out, racist?”

“I’m going to ask you to leave unless you put some money in a machine.”

“What if I don’t?”

“I’m gonna kick you out.”

“Because I’m black?”

“No. Because you’re an asshole and assholes can be any color under the sun.”

To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?

— Christopher Hitchens

It seems like an awful lot of this battle for freedom of speech is a struggle for who gets to say what without living-threatening consequence and who gets to dole out those consequences when they decide it goes beyond a predetermined boundary. The idea that those who can wield the iconography of secular religious thought are somehow the disenfranchised is a fantasy in the exact same way that the idea Christians (or Muslims) are in some way marginalized by those who do not believe.

These days political thought is indistinguishable from religious rhetoric. So many looking to assert the moral ground upon which we all must stand or be banished. The mistake made is to embrace the idea that the digital space is real life or even matters that much. As someone who dumped Faceborg a while ago and whose dick didn’t fall off and life didn’t end, social media is not the sum total of free speech.

A friend who works for Netflix recently made an off media comment that the company is noticing that the social justice crowd is fighting online for more inclusive and political content but that no one is watching it. This indicates that either they’re all just a bit full of shit or there simply aren’t as many out there as the noise of deplatforming and calling out signals.

The best form of “deplatforming” is to ignore the people who can’t understand that all speech is free but if you scream in the wrong person’s face, you’re gonna get popped in the jaw. 

Or at least kicked out of the casino.