Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

Sing me a song.

 

This is a very good sign for Legacy Vol II:


So a female lead, a Mon Cal supporting character, and a black Imperial Knight? I think the diversity thread is working!

 

That is awesome, but it still feels kind of depressing that one black guy on a cover would be such a big deal.

 

You're forgetting it also has a sarlacc on that same cover.

Like I said in the Legacy thread: KRAKEN!!!

 

Indeed but hey I will take what I can get. Glad to see Legacy is maintaining its strong record on diversity.

 

I'm tempted to look through Wookieepedia to see when the last time that happened was, but apparantly there are 2,492 comic covers.

 

Achievement acquired: [One Black Man on a Comic Cover].
Locked achievements: [Two Black Men on a Comic Cover] [Three Black Men on a Comic Cover] [Two Black Women and One Black Man on a Comic Cover]

 

Last Time was Lost Tribe of the Sith: Spiral #1.Although its not a solo cover. Also Jariah was on a few covers so there is that.

Now I must admit I have never seen more then one black guy on a cover.

 

Jariah comes to mind.

 

Did he ever get a solo cover though?

 

Worth noting that the two black guys on a cover scenario would generally be uncommon, even in some sort of ideal diversity scenario. If black characters are ~12% of the Star Wars human population, the chances of any two given characters being black is (0.12*0.12) = 1.4%. So if you're counting covers, slightly more than 1 in 100 covers in which two humans appear, both ought to be black, statistically.

Considering how many covers have only one character, or have aliens characters, or no characters at all but ships or strange monsters instead, the '2 black characters on a cover' scenario really might only crop up at 2-3 out of that 2,492 total.

Statistically Star Wars has too many White characters and too many male characters, especially in prominent roles. Reducing these categories brings increased demographic balance - however it's spread across a wide spread of categories, so the increases that would be observed for any specific group - Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Aliens, Droids - will be small.

 

Or you could just, you know, have a comic with a predominantly black cast.

 

You could, but you'd have to justify why, in-universe that was the case. Star Wars human ethnic features are, as far as the evidence indicates, largely associated randomly across spatial constraints, with certain planets (including apparently, Mandalore) being exceptions. Therefore a predominantly black cast would have to represent some predominantly black planet.

Such a story is possible, though it would have to be handled with care to avoid carrying obvious racial overtones ie. a bunch of White Mandolorians attacking and enslaving a planet full of Black ABCans.

 

Well they do well in Legacy but yeah Luke's NJO looks pretty darn racist.

 

There is no in universe justification for why everyone is white and male in the NJO. there is an out of u reason but there is nothing in universe. Heck Windu comes from a planet where everyone is force sensitive what Luke cannot go recruit there?

So I mean in universe, I can easily make the assumption that Luke is both sexist and racist based on his NJO.

 

It requires no particular justification in or out of universe, beyond a desire to tell a story that isn't, for once, centered exclusively around snow-white faces. The probability of such a cast occurring naturally is irrelevant.

 

Just an addendum here: it's the New Mandalorian faction that is apparently allergic to anything that isn't human and white. The rest of Mandalore is quite diverse, and the clans are perfectly welcoming toward humans of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, not to mention aliens.

Please, let's not let TCW get away with whitewashing one of the most explicitly diverse societies in Star Wars. Jason Fry's fighting the good fight, let's not have him fight alone.

 

The solution of skewing the numbers in one direction is not to skew them in the other.

If a story is presented, in the Star Wars universe, representing what should be the general human population mix, and all the characters are randomly Black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or Arab, or whatever, then that is just as much of a diversity problem as having all the characters be white. The logical extension of such a program is that every story would be brutally divided (and subsequently targeted) along racial lines, and we would end up with White Star Wars, Black Star Wars, Hispanic Star Wars and so on.

The best approximation for the Star Wars human racial mix is that of the United States, since it was created in the United States and is headquartered and produced here. Just like in the United States is entirely likely that the racial mix is not random distributed across space, and that there are concentrations one way or another. However, because those spatial patterns are not implicit in the public conciousness any Star Wars scenario that makes use of them should provide an explanation as to why that distribution occurs.

Yes, there is no in-universe or out-of-universe justification. That is the problem. It produces an image of implicit prejudice. So yes you could make that assumption. Likewise, if you did the reverse, and wrote a story in which everyone held a single ethnicity and that ethnicity was something other than White, I could still make that assumption and it would still be racist.

The actual explanation for the biased NJO Jedi Council is really quite obvious. I bunch of entirely white, mostly male authors, were hired. They wrote about a bunch of white, mostly male characters. Those characters were conglomerated together. Nobody really paid any attention to it at Lucasfilm. Even assuming attitudes at the top have changed there is no easy solution - characters like Kyp, Corran, and Solusars all have fans and cannot simply vanish and be replaced, there's an element of the zero sum game to the active EU character stable for any given time period (which is one of the reasons why almost every more recent boot into other time periods that doesn't drag a lot of OT/Bantam/early-Del Rey baggage with it is more diverse).

I want to stress that my initial point was about statistical probabilities. The best proxy we have for the Star Wars human racial mix is that it might be around 60% White and 40% all other minorities and mixed races put together. The current representation is indeed highly skewed above that towards White characters. For a hypothetical illustration say its 90% to 10%. If you corrected that back to the 60% to 40% balance ultimately sought, you'd suddenly have 4 times as many minority characters as you did before, but if you divided that across say 8 minority groups that actual representation of any one group would still remain at a low absolute proportion, despite having increased tremendously. As a result the number of works where any single minority group was the dominant component of the main cast would be quite small.

 

Meh well Luke's NJO aint long for this world. ST should obliterate it.

 

I don't believe so, no. This might be our first time in a while. It doesn't help that solo covers (especially non-Vader ones) are rarer in general.

 

Yeah, I don't see anywhere saying that there are only 12% people who are black or 3% redheads in Star Wars. Also, Star Wars cover characters are not selected randomly by lotto from a genetic pool.

If Star Wars Invasion had gone as initially planned there would have been more than two black characters on a comic book cover pretty regularly since the main family of Galfridians would have been black. It's not like there aren't opportunities to put characters of color on covers. I think there is a sense that if you put in one alien or one black person or one girl then you can kind of just stop there, though. The "pair of white dudes" things shows up in Star Wars a lot cuz of the Obi-Anakin thing. (I mean, how wack is it that the Jedi Council assigned Dooku > Quigon >Obi-wan > Anakin each a white human male mentor? )

Which...by the way...just thought of this now.

Think back to all of the Jedi who turned to the dark side.

How many of them were trained by humans? How many of them were trained by men? White human men? How many of the Sith were white human men?

Do white human Force-sensitive men get racially profiled in the Star Wars universe?

 

Lol that would be good. Nah Sorry we cannot train you in the force, your white.

 

They kind of got genocided by Vader via Jedi vs Sith sourcebook