saellys
Inkling
Well saellys in some places, I get the impression that we mean to say the same thing and talk past each other because of different wordings. Just to clarify, I never claimed that racist prejudice exists only in the US and I never would do that.
There is the idea that one needs to be an expert on slavery in the US and its ramifications to write a non-offensive PoC in a fantasy stoy in some places though and I'm opposed to this.
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that, and I have yet to encounter anyone, even in the most militant social justice circles on the Internet, who thinks that makes sense.
The fantasy characters needs to be true to the situation he or she is in within the story and if her people's background didn't include slavery, she won't be influenced by it. On the other side, there are people claiming that a group is "white" because it's strongly patriarchal and oppressive towards minorities, even if it's non-human or similar. Seriously, I don't get this, as if there wasn't oppressiveness and brutally patriarchal systems in other ethnic groups.I also don't see why there should be a law that dark skin tones has to be a reason for oppression in every coneivable society and that everything else is called "colour-blind."
I dig it when stuff like that gets inverted, actually, like in Jabrosky's example about one or two Europeans visiting ancient Kush.
This is the kind of thing that leads to the "to hell with everything else"-attitude because it seems impossible to do it "right" anyway and limiting it to characters who look similar to yourself seems the easy way out.
Oh, we definitely agree on that. As I said, no one has to be an expert on civil rights from the slave trade to the present in order to write a person of color in a fantasy story who isn't a stereotype. They do need to be aware of and sensitive to certain issues so they know how to avoid mistakes that will get them called out by communities who have seen writers perpetuate the same harmful things for years and years.
For some reason, there is a lot of resistance among writers to the idea of doing research for their characters. These are people who extensively read about medieval horse breeding, or swordsmithing, or what have you, so they can write about it competently and they won't get an angry letter from an expert on the subject about how much they screwed up. (A friend of mine wrote Age of Sail stories back in the day when they were distributed to communities by e-mail, and she would get absolutely skewered by the group if she mixed up her topsail and mainsail or some such. And this was one of those "easy" settings, since sailing ships were crewed almost exclusively by white men, which is a group of people no one at all has any problem writing as well-rounded individual characters.)
But apparently there's something sacred and untouchable about a writer's "artistic vision" for their characters, so when they do write a person of color, they haven't looked around at the opinions of actual people of color enough to know that they're really tired of seeing their skin described with food metaphors, for instance.
Upbringing makes a huge difference in such matters. I'm probably writing things you've learned to consider offensive while I can hardly bring myself to type the term "race" for humans even though I see that it's deemed perfectly acceptable in the English-language discussion.
Sure, but upbringing is not a terminal condition.
On the other hand, I find science fiction stories all the time that aren't self-published and do something daring. It can be as major as The Golden Oecumene's embrace of a future society with vastly different mores, or as minor as the occasional mention that the protagonist of The Hunger Games has brown skin, but more than any other genre I read, science fiction feels free to do something different.
I know a similar sentiment has been expressed elsewhere on this forum with varying conclusions, but do you think that might be in part because we see the future as a wide-open field of possibilities, where fantasy is perceived as being stuck in our very limited historical template? I know you and I don't see it that way personally, but I feel like this is a prevalent misconception.
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