Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

I don't think a personal dislike for somebody's politics in necessarily a reason to dismiss their art entirely though.

For example, I'm fairly conservative. If I dismissed all the music and movies from people who's politics I disagreed with, I'd be stuck listening to Ted Nugent all the time (that is an exageration, I'm actually a moderate). The same with your Chik Fil A example...why should I totally dismiss an entire chain or restaraunts because one old dude at the top says "OMG GAYS SUCK!". My 90 year old grandma does the same thing, but I still visit her on Christmas.

Anyways, are those Anti-Gay views present in the movie? I doubt it, otherwise I don't think the stars would support it. I could see boycotting hte film if it did present those views. However, as I said, OSC has been paid. He's likely not expecting any other adaptations of his books. Boycotting this film is not detrimental to him.

 

I would say that that's the distinction--money spent at CFA goes to the owner, who uses said money to support anti-gay causes. Money spent on the EG movie goes to Lionsgate, and hundreds of different people who have nothing to do with OSC and probably run the full gamut from Fred Phelps to Dan Savage. Does it still benefit OSC himself? I suppose, but only in the broadest possible sense of increasing his standing in the culture--and I would argue that speaking publicly on gay rights as he has does far more to hurt his cultural standing than a successful movie does to help it.

 

You hit the nail on the head.

As far as CFA....sometimes you just get a hankerin' for some waffle fries.

That said, I thought I read something somewhere that CFA had kinda reversed their standing on this particular issue. I know that a lot of the sit ins staged at local chik fil a's were actually supported by the local management, with instances of free food and drinks being handed out to protesters.

There is also a difference between "I don't condone gay marriage because I have a religious belief" and "I hate gays because I have a religious belief." While I don't agree with either, there isn't necessarily any vitriol in the first example.

 

There is a difference, but not when one's religious belief is then applied to secular legislation that actively hurts those in opposition to said belief.

 

Coop's distinction is an important one, I think. And believe me, I sometimes get a hankerin' for waffle fries, but so far I've been able to resist it. My first experience with this was in college when I discovered that the founder of Domino's Pizza's made big big donations to Operation Rescue. I put my money where my mouth was in that case, and I stopped patronizing Domino's. An unfortunate side-effect of that is that they are franchises - did I hurt some local guy's business because I didn't agree with the politics of the founder? I don't know.

It's not like I can always spend my dollars in a way that makes the world a better place, IYKWIM? I have to buy my kids sneakers. Is it possible to buy them from a company that doesn't use labor practices that I find less than desirable? I'm not sure. But I can at least have the conversation with them, so that they are aware of the larger issues at play.

And CooperTFN - thanks for the compliment. Parenting is often a "one step forward, two steps back" proposition at best. But I try.

 

At the end of the day, every single American--every single American--uses petroleum products that give money to Saudi Arabia, whose government is a bunch of ****s. We live in a global society now; that's just how it is.

 

For me, boycotts are lessabout hurting the companies and crappy sci-fi writers and more about getting it across that there are consequences to letting bigots come out to play. People have the right to free speech, but not the right to be spared people's outrage.

Jerkwads like Orson Scott-Card will always exist and will always figure out ways to get their hands on people's money, but they also need to learn to keep their crappy prejudices locked up inside their skull.

 

Hi! I'm the author of the Diversity in Star Wars article that got post a few pages back and was told that I should dig up my JC log in info so I could contribute to this thread. Sorry to drag the conversation back to that topic and away from the Ender's Game stuff but I thought I'd share the reaction I got today to my article/appearance on the ForceCast to discuss it. I feel like it sums up pretty neatly why discussions like this thread need to happen.

 

Oh yikes. Nice replies.

This article isn't completely about diversity, but it does mention the lack of anyone but WHMs in the Empire. http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/07/fe...bing-things-that-star-wars-slides-right-by-us

 

TFN's reader base, ladies and gentlemen. Suddenly the Episode VII forum makes a little more sense, huh?

 

What the hell? OK yeah, it's the traditional internet at work but grud-damn it's depressing to see!

One of the best pieces I know of is Priest's laying out of how he reinvented Black Panther - there's only 2 trades and you may find them hard to find now, I heard about them due to their sheer rep a few years back and they were not easy to get then - in the late 1990s. I have no idea how he does it but reading Priest on representation and race always ends up being as entertaining as it is educational and I know I've read some of it before, but don't take my word for it:

http://digitalpriest.com/legacy/comics/panther/start.html

I can't quote it but one of Priest's ideas was no white man was going to follow a black character that just makes him feel like crap, the solution? Make said black character so cool and in command that the reader ceases to care about the ethnicity angle altogether.

 

Thinking about reactions like that I think that, beyond malice, bigotry, and the like, one of the reasons behind this sort of visceral anger has to do with issues of possession.

There is a class of white males in the US (and presumably other Western nations), the one traditionally labeled as 'nerd' or 'geek' that strongly believes that structures such as Star Wars, D&D, and many comic books are specifically targeted for them, and therefore they should not have to be concerned with a appealing to a diverse audience.

The tricky part here is that such sort of deliberate targeting is done all the time, and in contexts applied to anyone other than white men, generally considered perfectly okay. I don't generally believe there's any sort of push to broaden the demographic appeal or presence in Tyler Perry movies, or Lifetime original films. Speaking personally, I'm part of the American anime fan community, a group that has displayed, over the past decade and a half or so, sufficient economic clout to influence anime production choices in Japan on occasion. I've never seen anything in that group that calls for more white people in anime, or any major objections to the rather regular America-bashing present in a great many anime (not entirely undeserved I'll admit, but still...).

So I would submit that, targeting something towards young white males of a certain persuasion is not somehow wrong, or that a company shouldn't be encouraged to make that marketing choice if it makes sense for the product they are producing.

Now, the really important part here, is that many of the traditional 'nerd' features, including very much Star Wars, have long since outgrown their particular niche. Star Wars arguably never occupied it in the first place (though the EU, being born of Marvel comics and D6 WEG might be a different case), however, the nerd community has not really come to terms with that in a great many cases. The mainstreaming of nerd culture, and with it the need to represent a more diverse fanbase within the product itself, is something that those who took to that particular subculture as a refuge may find very threatening.

'Other' people takes what's 'ours' applied to white males may be a rather new role-reversal in recent human history but even if you think that turnabout is fair play, that doesn't make the fear any less real.

I believe that the solution here is to show the mostly white, mostly male components of the 'traditional' Star Wars fanbase that other people really do like their stuff is a critical step towards making change palatable and therefore desired, far more important than making demands. Telling a group of almost entirely white authors that they are somehow obligated to produce more characters of color is always going to be less effective than finding an author of color who absolutely burns to write (or act, considering the ST) for Star Wars and is more likely to produce such a work completely on his or her own.

 

It's a realistic strategy given how crappy people are (sorry you had to go through that, CodeName_Targeter!) but a part of me also rails at this concept that women/poc/lgbt characters have to be so kewl and so in command that the reader (eg. white dude readers) in spite of the fact that they are women/poc/lgbt etc. Hope that makes sense. Like there's this extra burden, this extra layer of having to prove yourself to the audience.

Take Pacific Rim, for example. While I don't like that the WHM's exposition was often at the expense of the character, a lot of viewers are being really hard on the character of Mako Mori, which also happens to be the only significant woman in the story (okay, so those are the two critiques I feel comfortable levying at the character.) But then there are also a lot of viewers saying she was too frightened of the kaiju monsters (but it's okay when Bilbo/Frodo Baggins is afraid of monsters) and too traumatized from losing her parents (uh, but it's okay when Batman is traumatized from losing his parents) and she wasn't strong enough because at some point she got knocked out of the fight. And I think it's this weird divide where so often the WHM lead characters are depicted unrealistically and so in order for depictions of non-WHM characters to feel equitable we want them to be depicted unrealistically as well....so does that mean we don't allow the characters to have human traits?

 

That would be the whole 'Twice as Good' issue (not my term, Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, has written about it at some length).

In entertainment I think it has a lot to do with stereotyping. If a character acts in some way that reinforces a minority/gender/sexual orientation/etc. stereotype, even if that stereotype matches a perfectly normal and rational response to a situation, it is viewed negatively.

White male leads are expected to live up to a set of ideals and expectations dictated primarily by male machismo and they get plenty of harassment when they don't, Harry Potter being a good recent example.

The thing I see is that those 'unrealistic expectations' are a part of the story, not just the characters, and simply changing a character from white to black or male to female doesn't change those story expectations. Further those expectations aren't necessarily a particular product of whiteness or even maleness, but of a certain type of heroic or action narrative that we have adopted for mass market entertainment that is historically associated with whiteness and maleness (which has a lot to do with being drawn from early British literature and other cultural influences).

 

Honestly, I'm okay with being the person who dealt with it because I could handle all the ridiculous stuff he threw at me. I rather he acted like that towards me than someone else when it comes to this because I'll absolutely fight him on it.

That's definitely something that bothers me a bit too. I feel like characters in general should be intriguing enough to makes readers/viewers like them regardless of what they look like. I feel like anyone who saw Pacific Rim can easily say that characters like Stacker were awesome and that Del Toro didn't make conscious effort just because of Elba's race. (IIRC, white actors were also considered for the part.) Point is, I wish that people could just grow up and embrace characters regardless of race/gender/sexual orientation.

 

No reason not to view him that way. Is there any other infomation we know about him?

 

From the descriptions in Cloak of Deception, James Luceno obviously wanted the Humans from Eriadu to be "space Ottomans." A few examples:

• "A platform joined Palpatine’s at the center of the rotunda. The delegation’s dark-complexioned human members wore loose-fitting garments and cloth turbans."
• "The two of them were wearing loose-fitting robes, sandals, and turbans that concealed their head wounds."
• "Now it was a gloomy warren of tiled domes, narrow alleyways, lofty arches and towers, and open-air marketplaces, thronged with turbaned merchants, veiled women, bearded men drawing on the spouts of bubbling water-pipes, and six-legged beasts of burden, heaped with trade goods, vying for space with rusting landspeeders and aged repulsorsleds."

The funny part is that the Tarkin are Eriaduans, and yet they don't fit that description at all. I once drew a portait of a young Tarkin in "traditional Eriaduan garb," just for fun. I also remember some obscure character from a RPG book who wore a keffiyeh, but I can't remember his name.

 

Ouch. That's a good bit more awkward than I remembered it.

 

Well it's one thing to say that their cultural attire is inspired by the Middle East, and another to say that the entire planet is racially Middle Eastern. I like very much the idea of the Tarkin family dressing like that when they go home for Life Day...or, well, Ghorman Massacre day more likely.

 

I'm always happy to see a Red Sith lightsider.

 

He's described as alternatively olive-skinned and dark-skinned throughout the novel, so I'd say Middle Eastern is about right. It's how I pictured him anyway.

 

You can look at it that way but I'm not sure that's necessarily the case, although I freely confess I'm at a disadvantage discussing because I find it hard to buy into the notion that an audience will first look at what a character is rather than who they are. I don't get this notion that people are first going to tag say Lando as a black dude, then get uppity about it, rather than first being hacked off by Lando's betrayal, then later liking his turnaround - obviously it happens, but I'm at a loss as to how to comprehend it.

I suppose the other point here is the idea of an x-blind world is argued for where gender, ethnicity or sexuality shouldn't matter, with the counter-point being that people aren't wired that way. I'd be inclined to agree to a degree with the counter-point but neither should a character be defined entirely by those factors either. I tend to look at DSN's Benjamin Sisko as a good example of how to do it right. His character commands the audience attention but he's also of a particular ethnicity and heritage and DSN balanced that well. But then DSN did the whole different but equal thing very well across the board, looking back now only really shows up just what it achieved in that respect.

Surely the starting point for a character should be winning over the audience or gaining and keeping their attention - by any means necessary?

Although there's always the argument that Story X fails to go far enough on points A, B, C - and where it's a book I think that criticism has far more punch. Big, multi-million budget films are, by their nature, going to be more constrained so sometimes it does come down to taking what you can get and then hoping it'll get better. I mean look at disability, my wife and I are working our way through Fringe but one of the things that jumped out on the S1-3 rewatch, before moving onto the new S4-5 final eps, this time is how terrified Dunham was of her mobility being reduced! What if she'd been stuck with it? What then? Instead she recovers quickly and it's all forgotten about.

 

Quick Q: WHM stands for?