Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I really don't think we ever came up with any good ideas though. We definitely tossed around ideas, I included some blatantly distasteful concepts to see what people thought - people didn't like them - and I don't recall getting any farther than that.

We could use direct surnames, or tie the characters to other Star Wars characters we know to have asian features(Jan Ors, Bultar Swan, Sarrissa Jeng, Selig Kenjenn (Leeland Chee himself), that could work, but other descriptions seem either too distasteful or too generic to ensure an accurate description.

Yeah, I do this all the time. But most the time I'm wrong

To be blunt, I can tell he is not white because I have eyes I was not surprised to learn he was of mixed heritage of course, but he does not fit any definition I would use for white characters.

Sure they could - but at least the description would clearly mean not white. Honestly the Star Wars galaxy has never had big issues describing its black characters. It is getting more nuanced that creates the difficulty. But if we aren't careful Shelley Shapiro will return to tell us that all the darker skinned characters are of mixed heritage, Lando is really part Mongolian if we want him to be, its all in our imagination.

I'd be more concerned with getting the basics covered, some way, some how. There are characters I've felt were of mixed backgrounds. Oniye Namada for instance looks to have asian characteristics in some panels of Tyrants Fist - that combined with her name is more than enough for me - but of course it falls short of proof.

 

Yeah if names matched up to their real world cultures better it would be a lot easier but when white guys can be named Obi-wan well then everything is just shot to hell. I mean for instance Cho Chang in Harry Potter its obvious what she is or should be. In star wars that tells me absolutely nothing ethnicity wise.

 

A surname could be a supporting factor though. On its own of course it means nothing.

 

'Dark skin' does not mean 'non-white' it is a totally relative term that tells you only that someone has relatively dark skin compared to the average. There are plenty of dark skinned white people, particularly southern Europeans. If a character has brown eyes, black hair, and is not particularly pale, then text is going to have a lot of trouble specifying their race - especially in parsing the difference between 'White, non-Hispanic' and 'White, Hispanic or Latino' even though the later group, should, by the numbers, be the most common minority.

Yes text is probably sufficient to differentiate between Northern European heritage and true African heritage, but that's not the diversity range that we're dealing with.

 

Please we all know Dark Skin means a tanned white person in Fantasy and SciFi without basing stuff on the real world it becomes a real problem in a text based lit to do human race and ethnicity.

 

Can't find it atm, but has anyone here read that series of NK Jesmin (I think) articles on describing diversity without reference to Earth? It was pretty interesting.

 

Hey, I didn't call them villains. I didn't say I was offended, I said I was frustrated (twice.) You can feel that I am "jumping to things to take offence to" but to be honest, I was just expressing my frustration and pointing out trends related to colorism, shadeism, and depictions of darker skinned people in popular media. There's been a lot of research on how imagery like this impacts people (including young people's) implicit biases.

...

Regarding the character descriptions, NK Jemisin's Describing Characters of Color in Writing Part 1 is a good read. I think this is something that a lot of SFF writers are still parsing out and it should absolutely be a topic of discussion in SFF workshops, conferences, and other professional spaces. I think each author has their own way of dealing with this challenge (the challenge of readers or they themselves viewing white as the default human and writers struggling to convey otherwise to the readers.) Some authors choose to stick to writing white characters, others talk about their characters of color at length outside of their writing so the ethnicity/race analogue is clarified to their readership, others give the in-text description a shot to varying effects.

You kind of have to do this with the understanding that different readers will have different reactions to your characters no matter what you say. I read Martha Wells's character Kifar Itran in Razor's Edge as Pacific Islander due to her description of his heavy features, "skin with a faint orange tint to it" and brown hair. A different reader may have simply viewed him as a white dude with a Jersey Shore orange spray tan, and the artist who did the promotional image just saw him as white (I swear the picture of the dude doesn't even have warm skin undertones). Like we've previously discussed, some readers of The Hunger Games furiously imagined Rue as white even though the author said she had dark brown skin. If Star Wars decided to make a Vietnamese-esque character and described him as having light brown skin and black hair with sharp features, maybe some readers would assume he was black, maybe some readers would assume he was white--but enough readers might assume that a character named "Derrick Nguyen" was southeast Asian for this diverse inclusion to have a fighting chance. You can't really write for the hopeless people who willfully ignore descriptions of characters of color, or for readers or are socialized to ignore diversity until they are bricked over the head with fan art. But you can write towards diversity for readers who are able to pick up cues or are interested in diversifying their imaginations.

 

By the way, have you guys seen the Gendered Advertising Remixer? We've discussed how Star Wars is marketed to kids in the past and this one is relevant because one of their options is a Clone Wars toy ad.

 

On first glance I thought you said that OT Mon Mothma and Mon Cals look similar (trying to get a like from Jello )

 

I imagined Gantoris as American Indian, actually. Kirana Ti I pictured as more...I don't know, Mediterranean. I have trouble picturing Tionne despite the many visual depictions of her...or maybe it's because of those visual depictions, considering how different they all are from each other.

 

From that Jemisin piece:

I have to ask...is there any good reason for them not to just go ahead and establish IU names for human races? They did it for Twi'leks, and even humans at least have "Korun" as one possible code word for "black". To pull an example out of thin air: if Bultar Swan had been described initially as a "floovi human", and everyone henceforth understood that "floovi" was the GFFA term for "Asian", would there maybe be more established Asian EU characters by now? It could even open up a wider range of potential looks by allowing characters to be described as, say, "softer-featured than the average floovi". It's kind of silly, I suppose, but if it gets the job done...

 

I think this is why they don't do it

Also, if we establich establish IU names for human "races" how do we explain that a character looks non-white if he is from a planet that already exist in the GFFA and the other people that we have seen from there have been white f.ex. Corellia

 

Because it wouldn't be planet-based; any more than "Rutian" and "Lethan" are.

 

I'm not sure I see the 'unfortunate implications' here. Also, I don't think Cooper's idea was to have each human race tied to a specific planet. Twileks have different names for those with blue skin and those with red skin, right? Despite the species being present everywhere in the galaxy? Why wouldn't the same exist for humans?

 

Isn't that (establishing an in-universe name for human "races") where "Epicanthix" comes from?

Also, you guys may appreciate this piece analyzing the gender/sex structure of the societies in SW. The conclusion is that while they are depicted by humans in the films, the actual species is probably something closer to hive insects.

 

Aha, I see. I misunderstood, my fault

 

Due to the convoluted nature of human heritage in Star Wars, I'm not sure there's a functional way to do this. Human racial groups in the GFFA would have had to diverge prior to the Celestial/Rakata/elder races et al. meddling that generated the species mix we see and scattered humans across the stars. Therefore it is functionally impossible to trace the origins of the human subpopulations (or in fact the subpopulations of any widely scattered species).

There are two words for Twi'lek sub-populations, though they are applied inconsistently and are basically just colors, and it's only two colors out of more than 10 that we've observed. You could refer to Star Wars humans via color too, but unfortunately that sort of thing has a lousy history.

It's worth noting that the population genetics of human ethnic groups in the GFFA are going to make absolutely no sense pretty much no matter how you slice it, unless you go the completely monochromatic route; which hasn't occurred so that's not an option either. Diversity above the planetary level - planets can represent isolated self-contained populations and you can generate scenarios that make sense there - is essentially something that we are imposing on the setting by fiat. This works because Star Wars is designed to be color-blind with regard to human ethnic traits and therefore it does not matter, for storytelling purposes, what ethnicity any character belongs to. However, because this is all so wildly arbitrary it's probably always going to be difficult to describe and represent, at least from a viable in-universe perspective.

I would say this, regarding novel characters, for the most part we just have to wait for illustrations. Disney is the new master of the GFFA and the days when the novels drove the buss of the EU are rapidly coming to an end. A greater and greater proportion of new characters are likely to originate in visual media (TOR and Galaxies already contain as many characters as all novels ever), so this issue of characters who lack visual representation is going to fade away.

 

If anyone should be so inclined, feel free to pop over to this thread that's come up on the TV forum and voice your opinion via vote or comment on whether Rebels should repeat TCW's portrayal of an all blonde-haired, blue-eyed, white human-only Mandalorian society, or if diversity is the better way to go should the Mandalorians appear again. The thread's creator specifically mentions the inclusion of aliens, but since the problematic appearance of the New Mandalorians as an aryan society has already come up, some discussion of real human ethnic diversity wouldn't be entirely out of place.

 

I would actually be pretty happy if they just steer clear of Mandalore completely, as during that time they are all supposed to be enslaved anyway.

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1877121452/take-back-halloween-0?ref=popular

 

Do we have any ide about twi'lek day to day culture?

 

In what regard?

 

Food, entertainment, art, etc., etc.

 

Or to put it in an other way: When you you are on Ryloth (or in a twi'lek ghetto somewere else) what do you see; what do you smell; what do you hear?

 

Twi'leks.