Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I'm sorry, but I really don't understand what you're seeing here. I'm looking at the comic right now and Jango's father looks strikingly like Jango, maybe even a little too much for a relation that's intended to be natural and not cloned. And as for why Jango's sister Arla is white and blonde, his mother is also white and blonde. Interracial marriage, where Jango took after his father more strongly, while his sister took after their mother.

I think the main visual discrepancies are based on the particular artist's style, similar to how Tor Vizsla's appearance in the comic is noticeably different than Joe Corroney's artwork of him in The History of the Mandalorians article.

 

Jango's mother is brown-haired, I think.
And in my opinion Fett Senior looks very little like Jango; there is no way I would look at that face and go 'yep, based on Maoris.'

Maybe the artist just isn't very good at portraying Maori features.

 

Looking at the internal consistency of the comic itself, Jango's father looks quite a bit like Jango himself when seen as an adult without his helmet in the later portion of Open Seasons. And his mother appears to have the same hair color as Arla in the one panel you get a look at her.

An artist's particular style has been the root of many a similar issue, so that may very well be the problem here.

 

Let's all get on the same page here:

 

I look at Fett Snr there and he definitely does not look Maori to me. If anything, he looks to have blue-ish eyes and be a Generic Craggy-Faced Tough Guy.

 

Space Maori can have blue eyes.

 

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised though that some artists can't draw Maori features, everyone knows New Zealand didn't exist until Lord of the Rings was filmed there!
How are they supposed to know anything about its people under the circumstances, I ask you?

 

Maybe his sister dies her hair cus she's going through a rebellious phase?

From a genetic perspective, blue eyes are the easiest to explain in someone who otherwise appears non-caucasian because the genes that determine our eye colour are simpler than, say, our hair colour. Someone with blue eyes has kids with someone with dark eyes, a recessive blue-eyed gene will be given to every child they have, and has a 50% chance of carrying on to any children they have. As long as each of their descendants have two kids, that blue eyed recessive gene is going to continue indefinitely and spread throughout the population. Two people with that gene are gonna have a 25% chance of a blue-eyed kid. In a non-white culture, it's unusual to have blue-eyed people for sure, but pretty likely and possible that there are a fair number of people carrying the recessive gene for blue eyes. Err, or green. Obvs.

As to how they look, Mia already noted that people of mixed heritage don't all inherit features evenly. My husband, for instance, has a mixed race father (adopted with unknown parents, but probably half or quarter black) and a mother who's half Romani gypsy, and he looks white. His sister, on the other hand, looks much less so and could probably be mistaken for Latina if she lived in the States.

Having said that, this is a piece of fiction, and I'm not sure what we need to be doing is finding excuses as to why it's genetically plausible that lots of people with a tailor-made reason to be not-white are suddenly looking whiter.

So yeah. Genetically plausible? Absolutely. Narratively justifiable? Less clear.

 

It should be pointed out that Jango Fett's actor has real-world relations that look quite fair, since he's of partial European ancestry.



Temuera Morrison's uncle is first on the left.

 

Yes, this is exactly what I mean. This is the important bit.

Jango's family are not the results of genetic chance. They are the result of narrative choice. And that narrative choice has made them whiter.

 

Or it could be a mere coloring error

It's not that deep

 

Temuera Morrison:


Drawing pretending to be Temuera Morrison's dad:


I'm not really seeing the basis for complaint, other than the fact that he has blue eyes, which is pretty "Whatever."

 

Well, I asked a question, I didn't give a clear answer. If I saw that picture of Jango's father I probably would assume he was white, but there are other factors at play including my own cultural socialisation.

That said, if it's a "mere coloring error", even if it isn't that deep and was a genuine mistake (albeit one probably made easier by that same socialisation I mentioned above), that doesn't negate the net effect, or the fact it's then going to become part of a pattern of making people of colour in the media whiter, even if in this instance it was an error.

It's not ultimately about whether it was a mistake or even who's at "fault" for doing it, it's about whether it adds to the impression of the EU as a diverse place or the EU as a place where everything tends to trend whiter.

And, as I said, I'm not sure where the line between choice of colouring in the comic vs audience expectation falls here. It's not like the guy's a ghost. But I think even just based on the eyes, given there are so few cues to take from a cartooned portrait with basic colouring as opposed to a real human being, it's a fair question to ask.

 

As a New Zealander -- although pakeha (aka, non-Maori) -- this is a surreal conversation to read. Let me just add that there is a lot of diversity in appearance across Maoridom, including in relation to skin tone.

 

So I thought we should address Cloud Atlas, which opens tomorrow. I'm nearing the end of the book as we speak, and very excited to see what the Wachowskis did with it. It's relevant to this conversation, I think, in that the entire main cast plays several roles each, most crossing at least one racial or gender line, if not both. Given the obviously heated subject of cross-racial casting, I think this could be a very interesting case study in whether such a thing can ever be done acceptably. Going by the IMDB credits, at least two white actors play asian characters at one point, while at least one asian actress, Doona Bae, plays what I understand to be one hispanic character and one white character, and one black actress, Halle Berry, plays at least one white character. I'm sure there's a lot more than that; this is just what I can tell for sure based on my reading of the book. I'd also add that all the early reviews I've seen have characterized the makeup as impeccable, which could easily have gone the other way and destroyed the whole enterprise out of the gate.

Aside from the fact that the race-crossing goes in several different directions, the main theme of the story is the universality of human experience and desire, which strikes me as the most anti-racist thing a story can possibly say - that not only are we all equal, but in some ways we're all the same being, constantly floating from one experience to the next while retaining our inchoate human nature.

I'm making a point of bringing this up prior to the film's release, because I don't want to get bogged down (at least not right away) in whether this moment or that was reflective of this stereotype or that. I'm sure that conversation could be had upon close analysis of the completed film, but right now I'm more interested in whether, in the abstract, this type of thing Can Be Done At All.

 

I don't think it was a particularly good idea, but I can understand why they did it.

 

I've found that lots of people seem to assume white no matter what colors appear on the comic page

When getting into shades of color and the like things do get rather muddled.

 

Oh god, Cloud Atlas. *hides head under blankets* All I can say is that using yellowface kinda sabotages your noble goal of talking about the universality of human experience, especially after Asian American advocates strongly urged you not to do it.

 

Some people once attended my school. They were brother and sister. The brother was obviously African-American, but his biological sister, same parents and everything, looked completely white.
There's some relatively simple genetic stuff I don't feel like explaining here. But this "problem" does happen. In real life.
Brothers. Same parents. Twins.
http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/t...wins-celebrate-third-birthday-84229-24222453/
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/27...s-are-actually-twins/?xid=rss-fullworld-yahoo

 

Yes Indeed. Yellowface turned me off that is for sure.

 

This reminds me of this one grandfather who was arrested for being with his granddaughter because he was obviously white and she was Black

 

Oh no!

 

I kind of think you guys are missing the point...

As said before, Jango's family is not the result of genetics. It is the result of narrative decision. As beccatoria pointed out, they had a prime opportunity there to make a family that was clearly and obviously not white.
They chose not to do so. And here are you guys, tying yourselves in knots trying to justify that. Honestly, what is this thread for if not to point out things like this?

Jango Fett has a blonde sister because the person designing his family gave him a blonde sister. Genetics = chance. Design = intention. I think it's safe to say the artist didn't blindfold himself and throw darts at a colour wheel to choose Arla's hair colour. Her hair colour was chosen. She could have looked more like Jango. She doesn't.

 

Does she have to look like Jango? Does their mom? I know that when I first read the series, and I saw that both Arla and their mom was white, all I thought was "Oh, well that's cool." As in, here we have an explicitly shown interracial relationship in Star Wars that's by all appearances perfectly normal and a welcome part of society. Let's not forget that before Karen Traviss dug Arla out of Star Wars limbo, she and her mother both appeared for all of a page and a panel, existing basically to die (or worse as was implied in Arla's case) as part of Jango's tragic backstory. The artist could have made both of them Maori-based, sure, and their roles would have been no less interesting, nor any more fulfilling. But in making them a noticeably different race, there was a statement that was made in an instant, without the need for any words, left plainly on the page: here's an interracial relationship and it's a normal thing.

 

As mentioned all adopted works fine here just as well

No way Karen gets a pass on this one, what she did to the character is so much worse it is not even funny, as it includes the potential unfortunate implication from Open Season and actually plays it out fully. Her having had a quick death would have been the nicer end.