Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Oh, cat GIFs, you complete me.

Why, because the clones are a metaphor for illegal immigrants overrunning white America. As is, y'know, just so obvious when you really look.

Meanwhile, while not busy reinvigorating the OT era, Brian Wood is now doing an all-female X-book. It feels like Marvel have been trying to do something like this for a while, so good on 'em, but I'm sure Wood being a man himself is going to be a thing.

 

...People seriously said that? It's like the people who said that Revenge of the Sith was an anti-Bush film.

 

If that comparison is true, the immigrants numbers will swell and eventually they'll all become grossly incompetent.

 

Sadly, even some hispanic critics jumped on board that one...

 

This is why I hate dealing with people in a public setting. Every bit of stupid that comes out of their mouths makes me want to smack them.

On another note... You know what would make TOR better and make me actually consider playing it? If you can be a Gand character, and if your Gand character can have wild interspecies relations. Because the GFFA needs more interspecies relations and playable insects.

 

Jorgan is romancable

 

No reason to assume Gand can’t learn accent free basic.

 

I have made audio versions of Yavin Vassilika and a couple Wookieepedia articles and have done dramatic readings of quotes with character voices. One of those character voices is Zuckuss. Want to know what his voice sounds like? High-pitched with a "slushy" lisp (working with mandibles) and a slight Fargo accent. Basic-speaking Gands don't bother me.

 

I find that picture an unfair representation. mara is HUMAN and they are at her funeral, so of course her family is HUMAN and frankly white, because she is.

 

It's the Jedi Order. Most of it is not her family. Unless you think the Skywalkers spawned a whole bunch of cousins while we weren't looking. Her funeral is a Jedi funeral, attended by the Jedi Order. Much of that Jedi Order has been used for protagonists and main characters. And most of them are white humans. Are you following this?

Unless you are seriously prepared to argue that in becoming Mara's surrogate family, the Jedi Order signed a charter forcing them all to comply with her skin-tone, I suggest you re-examine that picture.

 

What the hell is with that "outrage" over Jango? Can latinos not be antagonists without being racist caricatures somehow?

Except, you know, her direct extended family includes not even ten people. A couple of whom ain't even there.

Unless you're implying that it's standard practice in the GFFA to only let people of the same species as the deceased into public funerals. In which case citation needed.

 

More to the point, Landostrip, in their haste to cry 'Latino stereotype' they are running roughshod over a different minority group. But of course Maori people don't matter, they're not American! Why would you even have a Maori guy in a film, unless you were using him to suggest an American minority?

 

Being somewhat more reasonable on this subject, it should be more or less impossible for a Gand to have physically intimate relations with pretty much any humanoid (and actually probably most other insectoids, intermittent organs in insects get kind of crazy).

The romances in TOR are pretty good about the interspecies thing actually. Out of twenty-one possible romances six and a half (Vector is a Killik Joiner, I'm calling that a half) are aliens. No they aren't wildly exotic aliens, Togruta Ashara Zavros is probably as far from humanity as you can get in the game, but that's probably the extent of how far actual intimacy might go anyway.

You can also make flirtatious comments towards SCORPIO, even if she isn't exactly romanceable, which ought to count for something.

 

Romance isn't all about sex, you know.

 

Never mind that Jango's "son" is the most over glorified person in the entire GFFA. More invincible than Palpatine.

As for Mara, there's Luke, Jacen and Ben, they are family, and Kyle, Corran, the people who cared the most for Mara, at her funeral. Why should a parade of non humans that she didn't know be there just because some busy body wanted them there?

Warning OPINION: (At my funeral, there will be people of my choosing as friends and family. Since i am white most will be white. Is this even an argument? I would guess if you're Latino that GASP, MOST people at the funeral will be Latino, right? Is even socializing with whom you are comfortable and have things in common with in RF "racist" now? Only "minorities" that are NOT so minor anymore, are allowed to have veto power about their own lives, whom they spend time with? Huh. This is political correctness run completely amok.) *

Mara is not the Jedi Council at it's height, it was her funeral. So using it for a "proof" of any kind is just plain lame IMO. I guess thank God (or whatever entity is approved of), Han and Leia didn't show up, or they'd have to have worn cone hats, I guess. Nevermind that they are in laws.**


* ** Yes, this was pure sarcasm, of course we have to take the fun humor and spontaneity out of everything, it's okay: The Force Net doesn't necessarily agree with this opinions contained herein. And doesn't take any responsibility forthwith.

 

...Is this truly so difficult? The people attending the funeral are members of the Jedi Order as it has been written by authors. The Jedi have turned up to honour a deceased Jedi Master. And Jedi can come from any background; they don't have to be human, and they don't have to be white. The unifying factor that has drawn them together is that they have the Force.

And yet this Order, with members supposedly drawn from all walks of life, has turned up overwhelmingly white and human. Why? Because when the authors chose, each time, to add a new Jedi character, they chose a white human, frequently a male.

Mara's funeral represents a gathering of the Jedi. And this is what the Jedi Order looks like.

 

Dude, I'll bite on the clones thing.

It does have what TV tropes would call "unfortunate implications" that this teeming mass of cloned human body (uncharitably, "meat shields") are all-look-same (literally, as clones) people of color. Who happen to be led by Jedi. Jedi like Obi-Wan and Anakin and Bardan etc., the most prominent of whom are white men. You could argue that the characters who are Jedi are portrayed as more human than the characters who are clones. Those Jedi are, again, usually white...the clones are inevitably all brown.

The EU adds some context to the shared humanity of clones and there are non-clone depictions of "irl-Maori/Pacific Islander" characters too (like Queen Apilana, Captain Typho etc. Interestingly, Typho's uncle, Captain Panaka, is not played by a Pacific Islander actor) and additional "brown" PoC characters like Quinlan Vos and Bail Organa. Not as big as Obi-Wan or Anakin, but okay, they're there. The Clone Wars series also adds some dimension to the clones. At the same time, I can understand why the "brown clones" issue would rankle. I can even understand why the Latino community could be at once hopeful and let down even though Temurra Morrison is not Latino. (For starters, if you are Pacific Islander in the United States, even if you aren't Latino you often still experience some of the racism that Latinos face in the US simply because you look Latino.) Then there's the bigger picture stuff, like how the military in the US is disproportionate in it's representation of Latino and black men...or you know, just the weirdness of seeing a Obi-Wan Kenobi, WHM Jedi, overseeing a factory pumping out faceless brown kids. Then there's the meta stuff, like maybe it is a commentary on how we view brown bodies as expendable in society, IDK.

Even thinking to the Karen Traviss books...all the clones are brown by default, right? But all their Jedi/non-Jedi human generals and leaders: Etain, Bardan, Arligan Zey, Kast Fulier, Kal Skirata, Iri Camas, Walon Vau, etc...are all white? (I could very well have pulled a "crappy Hunger Games reader" here...please correct me if I'm wrong.) So there is a weird, implied hierarchical thing here that could have been solved if there were more diverse Jedi/non-Jedi clone leaders.

This portrayal of clones isn't a dealbeaker to me... I'm thankful, for example, that the casting in Attack of the Clones "retconned" Boba Fett from our assumption that he was another default WHM and gave him this new background: He's an orphan, he's a clone, he's one of the few characters of color in the Star Wars franchise. (I mean, I could be bummed that Kittster is brown and Anakin is not and Kittster, forever the sidekick man never the hero, too...but on the other hand, yay, Kittster?) I'm thankful that the clones are people of color because then we got characters like Darman and Atin who are some of the very, very few characters of color to narrate stories in the EU.

The decision to cast an actor of color to depict Jango Fett and by extension, the clones would seriously be a non-issue if Star Wars simply had more diversity and Jango Fett was one of several, several depictions of characters of color. Seems like media creators are always worried, for example, to make villains people of color out of fear that it might be reinforcing racial stereotypes. Hello, it wouldn't be reinforcing racial stereotypes if your heroes were diverse and you provided depth to portrayals of characters of color to begin with.

 

Warning My Opinion, Too!: I'm going to speculate and assume that most people at your funeral will be white because most of the members of your family will be white and most of the people in your community will be white. Maybe because decades from now when you die you anticipate still living in an area that is not very diverse and primarily socializing with people who are white--which of course is your prerogative, and for some people who live in small towns or tight-knit communities not really an option.

You are not everyone.

I'm am speculating and hopeful that when I die there will be a broad range of people from diverse backgrounds. I hope this based on the people I socialize with (hopefully y'all will come) because I plan to live my life interacting with people from all walks of life. I would not be surprised if, when I die, my family included people from several different ethnicities. (I also plan on having more women friends than Mara apparently did...?)

You may choose to socialize with only white male humans because you are you. If you believe that those are the people with "whom you are comfortable and have things with common in" then that is your call. No one is saying you can't have an all-white funeral.

If Mara Jade, a human woman who lives in an incredibly diverse galaxy and has the option of interacting with all sorts of sentients, one of the only female characters in the franchise, etc. only chooses to socialize with white male humans--due to authorial fiat--then yeah readers are going to side-eye it as indicative of the authors not doing a good job at diversity. If her husband enrolls 90% white human males at his Jedi school in a galaxy that is supposed to be sprawling...then either Luke is super-biased against females or aliens or the authors who write him are not being conscious and observant of the verisimilitude of the galaxy they are creating.

I mean, you could be right, maybe Mara Jade really does think that white human males are the only people she is "comfortable and has things in common with" and she does have the right to have "veto power about whom she spends time with" and she has decided to spend the majority of her time making buddies with white dudes. This kind of character, of course--and the author's decision to write her this way-- must then be above reproach (?)

I don't know how you managed to take a conversation about representation in Star Wars and turn it into a conversation about your friend or funeral choices...or the gall of "minorities" (who, the men of color who are disproportionately incarcerated? The women who face wage and health care disparities? The queer kids who are several times more likely to be homeless and lack civil rights in several arenas? Oh hey, those groups of people who are totally underrepresented in Star Wars?)

To me, the real "political correctness" run completely amok is the completely unnatural and unrealistic over-depiction of white human males in Star Wars. It is artificial, forced, "political." It's outdated, shoddy character creation.

 

May as well add the mentally-ill to that "minorities" list. Many tend to fall through the cracks, and due to budget cutbacks, many residential hospitals have closed, many areas have a treat-'em-and-street-'em policy, many areas lack behavioral health resources outside of the psych ward, and thus there is an increasing number of the mentally-ill turning up in prisons who really have no idea on how to deal with them.

There's another thing that goes unnoticed in EU--mental diversity. Mental illness, mental disability, etc. We see it touched upon occasionally, or when mental illness comes into play, it's often sensationalized. And dammit, schizophrenia is not the same as dissociative-identity disorder! Official Fact Files and Official Starships and Vehicles Collection, I am looking at you.

 

also the problem of projection your real world onto a star wars universe, a universe that has supposedly no skin color based discrimination amongst humans.

 

I was thinking about this the other day! For example: "Crazy old Ben Kenobi." Whoooa let's unpack that.

We've got Force psychosis induced by ancient being. We've got Killik Stockholm syndrome.

Then there's this French research team diagnosing Darth Vader as having borderline personality disorder. (Could make sense, given he grew up in an extremely traumatic situation--slavery--and complex trauma can often look like BPD)

Can you pathologize Runt's Multiple Personality Disorder when it is a species trait or is that a human-centric way of looking at mental illness?

And the technologically advanced GFFA still hasn't found a quick fix for schizophrenia... Though there are psychiatrists...

Don't mind me, I'm just imagining the ghost of my old mentor communicating to me from beyond the voiiiiid....

 

Heh, how fitting that the three articles you linked to were the ones I had written. OCD also exists in the GFFA. Mental illness is obviously not something that had been eradicated, but it seems that beyond reference material, it's not really something that is touched upon, unless it is sensationalized or portrayed in a derogatory manner. And, it seems, as is the case with Zuckuss and his imprisonment, the mentally-ill fall through the cracks there, as they end up in prisons, rather than a proper treatment facility.

Those constant wars and threats make for budget cutback hell.

 

That's something I find highly unlikely. With all the hate and petty prejudice in the galaxy, it's hard to believe that would be the one exception. Racism is right next to sexism and "speciesism", which have both been prevalent in the galaxy. Combine that with the lack of non-whites in Star Wars, I'd say that racial discrimination absolutely exists in the galaxy far, far away.

They may not say it explicitly, but it exists, whether they want it to or not.