BS? So there IS always discrimination if all the characters are white, but never discrimination of they are all black or whatever? Your accusation is total BS. The PC brigade likes to put down the opinion of the western white middle-class hetero male because he is oh so privileged, and not because the argument itself actually carries some weight. It's a cheap, disparaging remark. Yes, some in my racial and gender group are very racist, sexist, homophobic. But guess what, so are people from every culture. And that's my fucking point. We are all equal, in both our good and bad traits. It's not just the ogre of the white man that discriminates. Real cultural awareness will make this abundantly clear. Racism to the point of exploitation, violence and killing exists in various nations of various colours and riches, like Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan, India, England, Somalia, Iraq, Australia, South Africa, Columbia, and shall I go on? And often it has nothing to do with us evil white folks. I'm a firm believer in equality, both in opinion and practice. I don't see an all white cast as discrimination the same way I don't see an all black cast as discrimination. I don't see three white guys and a black guy. I see four guys. They are the people in the story. If a racial group is stereotyped with hatred or malice that's a problem. Racism isn't about non inclusion. It's about hatred. It's about denigration. It's about a being treated differently. About being vilified. About being denied dignity and safety on account of ethnicity. Some people in the PC brigade need to practice what they preach, stop seeing colour and actually treat each other, all of us, the same. Putting a black guy in a story simply because he's black is NOT equality. It's highlighting divisions.
It's not excluding if you only describe a few characters as such and such color, and leave the rest open to imagination.
part of the original OP was that they were so trained to think of white people that when the character's race was unknown they assumed them to be white. And that, in the end, is the reader's problem. I only ever include racial identity when it's clearly part of their background and the current story. For the rest of the characters I never divulge, because it's not really relevant. All that matters are actions. If people assume they are white and then call me discriminatory for not making it obvious it's a bit silly on their part.
No. And you know exactly what I mean by treated differently.Let's not start a dumb game of semantics. Every piece of fiction ever written in any culture or language can be considered discriminatory if people took that approach.
Yes, I think I do do. Being treated as less than, as inferior, as alien. Being granted fewer privileges. And being excluded from the common mythology that's produced by books and television and movies is one part of what produces that state of being treated differently. Let's imagine a movie that shows a modern classroom of college students. We could fill that classroom with all men. But it would look pretty strange. So we put in roughly fifty percent women. And, yes, indeed, we put them in there because they're women. But equal and opposite, we put the men in there because they're men. The only actual requirement was that we fill those seats with human beings of an age that can attend college. We have both men and women because we're trying to reflect reality. I suppose we could decide that we don't need to reflect reality, that since we're all equal, men can represent both men and women. While we're at it, we could decide that that white men can represent all people. But we don't do that. Except, in many works of fiction, that's effectively what we do. We don't do it for a classroom or a restaurant or any other crowd scene; that would be too obvious. But when we pluck the main characters out of that crowd scene, we quite often have a whole lot of white men. Television is sometimes acknowledging that there are other people. I just saw the second episode of the new season of Doctor Who. The primary futuristic soldier character was a black woman, and another one was a white woman. The incoming romantic interest was a black man. There was no big fuss about the race of the two black characters, or the sex of the two female soldiers. The background that the episode focused on was their background as soldiers. The futuristic soldier probably won't be coming back; the current ex-soldier probably will, and I'd guess that if and when his skin color matters, as Martha Jones' mattered in the hiding-out-in-the-past episode, they'll deal with that. If I see a TV show or movie with a number of characters, and they're all or almost all white men, I am absolutely going to see that as a problem, just as I see that classroom of white men as a problem. People who aren't white men exist. I want my fiction to acknowledge that aspect of reality. Yes, that's more problematic in written fiction, because you can't just quietly turn on the camera and see the people. But there's a whole lot of fiction that has physical descriptions and cultural backgrounds for eras when society is not color-blind, and in that case, the issue is relevant.
What if they're all Japanese? Is that a problem? Or is it only a problem if they are white? And men? And that's OK? - To only be upset about that?
Is the classroom in Japan? Does the average classroom in Japan in the period being depicted consist of all Japanese students?
That's my point. I've already discussed this at length before. It just needs to make sense. Sometimes whitewashing IS a problem and dumb. Other times it makes sense. In GOT the TV show, it makes a) perfect sense and b) isn't whitewashing at all, considering the racial mixes across the narrow sea. Edit: And besides, you didn't give any context to only seeing white folk. You just said 'if they're all white, it's a problem'. Context never came up.
I also think that's silly. Why go out of your way to create contexts that make the color obvious if they just don't belong to the story? But I still want to add one thing: I chatted about representations of minorities in literature with a few other writers a long time ago regarding one character of mine who doesn't enjoy my privileges in the story's culture 'cause he's homosexual (so while not quite the same as race, there can be parallels). I felt what makes him a minority wasn't all that relevant to the story as his goals revolved around career achievements and revenge, so I didn't discuss it much. Turns out this wasn't such an admirable move from my part; I was inadvertently dismissing a huge part of him just because there were no opportunities for sex or romantic relationships the way the story was crafted at that point, as if the absence of them anulled his sexuality, or made it invisible. So T and I re-wrote the hell out of him and his storyline, and right now he is for the better (at least the feedback from our betas have been encouraging). Somewhat similarly, if a character was in my -- the author's -- mind black, I'd be wary of doing just what I was criticized of by representatives of the given group: ignoring it, purposefully or inadvertently. I'm not saying one has to make a huge deal out of it and keep talking about the skin color or sexuality or gender at every turn, of course. All I'm saying is that when you yourself aren't a part of the given group or minority -- or if you've never experienced discrimination or been forced to make yourself invisible to the rest of society -- you might want to tread extra carefully. It's not about political correctness to me. It has to more to do with sensitivity and respect towards others' experiences. And it's not about othering a group or an individual in a negative sense either, it's about being aware of their experiences, how whatever society they live in may have influenced or changed them in comparison to myself. But yeah, if the author doesn't know or care how others see their protagonist, black or white, man or woman, gay or straight, they can't really be accused of writing white or being racist. Now, if after publishing the work they came up and said "oh and by the way, my protag is a black guy from St. Petersburg, Russia," it'd make sense for the readers to look for some signifiers that'd show this background.
FYI, reality is that in public universities , the male:female ratio in 2008 was 43.6:53.4 and in private schools, 40.7:59.3, or ~2:3. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2012/02/16/the-male-female-ratio-in-college/ So, actually, it would be unrealistic to make that classroom fifty fifty. I'm not sure why you assumed it was a 1:1 ratio, or why you assumed that one would want to make the classroom all male in a movie, but I hope you're not stereotyping against us males now :\
Absolutely, but I was just talking about minor characters. Incidental characters important only for how their actions contribute to the story.
That's fine, but leaving out categories of people when they should realistically be included, IS treating that category differently in my book. I don't accept "Racism isn't about non inclusion.". Yes, it's "just" fiction, but fiction has a very strong influence on the way that people see the world.
I agree. But that's the point. Based on the GOT setting many racial groups should NOT be 'realistically included' because in that kind of historical type setting it makes very little sense to make it look like a mixed modern-day culture. Only major trading hubs (which in GOT exist and ARE depicted as mixed race) would have multiple ethnic groups. But the rest of the populations rarely moved much or traveled far, unless there was a conquest.
I guess it depends on how you perceive your work. An "earnest" narrative experience should not care about being PC or diverse. If an MC is white, and lives in a small white town, it might be silly to have other colored characters there. If someone shows up, and that person is of another color, it would make sense for the MC to observe this. All these considerations are done from the viewpoint of creating an honest narrative experience, and nothing else. If I write an adventure story, where a woman warrior is not only as frequent as a male warrior, but always as dangerous, or I write about a flight team filled with every ethnicity, I would say most likely this is not a sincere narrative, but a commercial novel with other intentions. That's not a bad thing. That's just what it is.
I may or may not agree if I consider GOT. But, again, your post made more general remarks, and those were the remarks that I was responding to.
How is 2/3 (or even 4/5, for that matter) roughly fifty fifty? Most movies are going to show private schools, because we're obsessed with the elite.
The only reason I relate them back to GOT is because that's generally the discussion I'm referring to. I have stated in several posting that discrimination does exist and is a problem, but not always and depending on context. And not only by 'whites' either. Something many people ignore. It's not always so Black and White, pun intended.
....though I'm not sure why having an unrealistically high percentage of men (those stats show more women than men) would be stereotyping against men? Is college a bad thing?
In your original post you assumed reality was 1:1, then you assumed that the offending fictional case would be 1:0 (male:female). I was simply pointing out the irony of this, considering that men are actually the minority in college. Let's face it, when it comes to discrimination, the first finger is almost always pointed at the white male. In this particular case, that finger was misguided.
