Lit Ignorance is Bias: The Diversity Manifesto

His family and friends had British accents because it makes sense from a production standpoint to have them sound like Picard. I know there was one early episode of TNG (when Will was sometimes Bill, the Klingons had joined the Federation, aliens built Data and a bunch of other wonky stuff happened) that said French was a dead language, but enough French popped up afterwards to make me think it's still a living language in the 24th century. The bar Tom Paris recreated in the holodeck was in France and the recreated owner had a distinctly French accent. Chateau Picard wine labels were in French. The kids in TNG all knew Frère Jacques.

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Even if French isn't dead, Trek heavily implies, if not outright states in an episode I haven't seen, that English is the standard Earth language (a kind of "Basic," if you will). The Federation uses it internally and in all external dealings, and it's the Human language that other species learn to speak for their dealings with Starfleet if they want to go beyond simply using the Universal Translator. When Picard is back at his Chateau speaking to his family, maybe they're actually speaking French to each other and it's just being translated for the benefit of the viewer, but regardless of whether or not that's the case, English is definitely a language that everyone on Earth learns from childhood by the time of the 24th century.

If we want to be anal and painstakingly discuss an In-Universe reason why Picard's accent is so British instead of accepting the reason as "because he's Patrick Stewart," fine, what the hell let's do it, I guess that's been Lit's MO for years, but only if everyone understands that it's not at all an issue of representation. @Darth_Duck suggested that maybe most of the English instructors in 24th century France are British. Great! I'll take it. You see it all the time with young Koreans who go overseas to study English; they come back to Korea and speak English with an Australian accent for the rest of their lives.

But anyway, Picard is definitely still proud of his French heritage:

There is Alpha Flight... they had both a First Nations and an Inuit character.

Let's all celebrate how awesome Alpha Flight is.

 

Yeah, a British guy playing a French guy is absolutely not a problem in any way whatsoever. To say it's at all similar to a Chinese actor playing a Japanese person is either a bad faith argument or, well, ignorant.

 

Who is their Inuit member? Also, they have at least had two First Nation characters (Shaman, and Talisman).

Alpha Flight is wizard and deserve their own MCU movie, and better treatment in the comic.

Just to be clear (sorry I guess but I feel I'm not certain what you mean), when you say "Chinese actor" and "Japanese person", do you mean both actors/characters who are directly from those countries and diaspora of later generations (like a fourth generation Brazilian-Japanese playing a Spanish-Chinese character of unspecific generation) or just the former?

Also, just so there is no misunderstanding here, we are only talking about Asian actors and characters in productions from the Americas and Europe here, right? Things like Chinese actors in Chinese productions that are playing Japanese characters is not part of this discussion, right?

 

People who are ethnically Chinese, no matter which country they are a citizen of, should not play people who are ethnically Japanese, no matter which country they are a citizen of (and vice/versa and this goes for Koreans, etc as well).

And yes, I have a Western perspective on things and I can't speak to productions within countries like China. The problem I'm talking about is generally perpetrated by white casting directors who think "all Asians are the same".

 

Snowbird. Also, googling her led me to an article discussing the time that she morphed into a polar bear and fought a snowstorm for five straight pages of... speech bubbles on a blank white background. Fantastic.

 

Diversity folks I need your opinion... currently I am annoyed by fancasting choices on twitter and knowing how fandom can influence real casting choices, I worry for Doctor Aphra not being asian anymore if she gets a tv show one day. Why do so many fancasting choices go to latinas for her? I mean there are many talented actresses and I am sure the fancast choosen actress could pull it off. But isn't Aphra set as asian (despite whatever drove Hasbro to depict her as non asian on her vntage collection card?)

Likewise with Tiya Sircar voicing Sabine Wren, folks fancast her for any liveaction cameo yet Sabine was asian or part asian too most people thought. While I love Tiya as an actress ever since before SW even, I here too worry that asian characters get "whitewashed" into latina/indian-american or other ethnicities.

 

That's a fair concern. I hadn't seen that happen for Aphra. It is certainly frustrating that people dismiss her being Asian, but I have no doubt that she will be cast as Asian. She is very definitively set as such by now, even if some art has been finicky, which early on I say is the fault of Larroca being unable to not trace

 

Spoiler tagged for strong language in the image but LOL WHAT

Spoiler

 

Well, the last line of that graphic is correct inasmuch as the graphic itself is concerned.

Interesting that the casting of Aphra should come up just after a discussion of (mis)casting Asian ethnic groups, because given varying artwork depictions, we all know she's space-Asian and should be cast thusly, but would we be able to say much more than that? In a made-up universe with no cultural signifiers that can be mapped onto real world ones and with only line drawings in a number of styles to go off of (or CGI images in cases like Sabine) could there be any determinant as to whether a character is more likely ethnically Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or something else?

Having not thought about this before I realize that I have subconsciously always considered Aphra to be space-Korean and Sabine to be space-Chinese (even though in the latter case it doesn't correlate with the voice actor). But I have no idea why I see them that way, whether anyone would agree with me, or... if it should matter, casting-wise, in the way that we were talking about regarding the problematic "all Asians are the same" casting tendencies?

 

Sabine's mother and brother were also voiced by Indian Americans, Sharmila Devar and Ritesh Rajan. Her father was played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, a Japanese American. I think the fact that the casting people at Rebels had Sabine's mother and brother also be played by Indian Americans implies a definite intentionality to Sabine's ethnicity that would not preclude Tiya Sircar playing Sabine in live action.

Of course, Ezra is definitely not supposed to be white, maybe also South Asian, and he and his parents were played by white people.

 

Honestly I kinda want Aphra to be space-Khmer. or Malaysian. Obviously the door is open since she does not have a specific real world East Asian race, but I think it would be cool if some underrepresented East Asian ethnicity even among East Asians in Hollywood was chosen

 

Okey. Could you explain why they should not?

So you would have no problem if an Asian-American producer/director casted, for example, Lisette Pagler (South Korean-Swedish) for the role of a Japanese-Swedish character in an Hollywood movie? Or, to use a RL example, Chinese director Ding Sheng having Chinese Zhang Lanxin playing a Japanese character in Railroad Tigers ? Or do I misunderstand you here?

Okey, did not know she counted as Inuit

Just wondering, why do Aphra/Sabine/Other-Asian-ish-characters need to be put in a category about what RL nationality/ethnicity they most likely are? Asking since I don't see this discussion for comics/books-only characters who we would see as European or African

 

Because Asians shouldn't be played by Asians interchangeably as if they were one sole monoethnicity. It's white-centric racism to not see the difference.

The first question, I just honestly can't see that happening. If it did, though, then yes, I think that would potentially be problematic. The second question, again, I can't speak to Chinese productions. I have no understanding of the concept of race as it exists in China or how the Chinese film industry works.

 

I honestly can't tell whether this image is meant sarcastically or not. Which is awful.

 

Regarding the whole Aphra discussion:
I think it's noteworthy that the person responsible for creating Aphra, Kieron Gillen, stated that his preferred fancast—and likely the original reference model—for the character would be actress Ellen Wong. Who, according to a cursory web search, is Chinese-Cambodian Canadian. Now, does that mean Ellen Wong is the only acceptable person to play her should a live action opportunity ever come up? No, but for authenticity's sake, it's a pretty good reference point from which all future appearances in or out of live action should really take their cue when it comes to ethnicity and general appearance.

 

Huh, I thought he mentioned Gemma Chan at some point. Must have just been Twitter.

 

I mean if Ellen is up to play the character that would be cool. No idea what she's been in but I wonder if she knows a SW character is modeled after her.

 

She's in Glow --- her character was originally advertised as an "Asian valley girl" in 1980s LA, but after she got the part and met with the producers, they wrote her Cambodian heritage into the character. In the latest season, they revealed that her character fled to America from the Khmer Rouge, which is how Ellen Wong's parents originally came to Canada in real life.

She was also Knives in Scott Pilgrim!

I think the entirety of this thread has been about Western Media --- countries like China and Japan don't have the same demographics, history, or race relations that Canada, the States, and the UK do, and their media doesn't have the same responsibilities re: diversity that Western media does. Sure, China is far more than just Han Chinese and has fifty-six recognized minority groups, but honestly, Chinese media is a whole different ball game that's really outside the purview of this thread. Western media has traditionally been very straight, white, and male, and that's what's informed the last 625 pages of this discussion.

Anyone wanna talk about Trek some more? I just saw the DS9 episode where they're 1950s sci-fi writers in New York and no one will purchase Sisko's story about a "colored space captain."

 

I love that episode. SF Debris pointed out in his review (which is currently unavailable sadly cause server issues) that it is inspired by an EC comics story, Judgment Day
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EC_Comics#.22Judgment_Day.22

All of the DS9 character equivalents are based on real writers, it is just such a freaking powerful episode with so much reverence.

 

What makes it confusing for me is that Hollywood seems to do the same with actors/characters of African and European origin/linage and I don't see the same discussion regarding them. Or is just me that has missed those complains?

Also, is it really saying that Asians are one sole monoethnicity if you have people from nightboring countries playing each other, especially if they are both diaspora decedents? Just to be clear I'm not trying to saying that actors from one Asian country/ethnic group should be used to play characters from another country/ethnic groups that they look nothing alike just because they are both Asian.

The reason I asked was that some of the statements made felt like they implied universalism.

As a Mainland European do I feel left out of your list of Western countries

 

There's a neat nod to DC Fontana with Kira's character in it that works very well.

 

It's not a one to one comparison to white actors of European lineage, and there are a number of factors as to why the two situations aren't the same --- the most prominent one was elucidated by vnc a few days ago:

On top of that, there's also the fact that a lot of white people in Canada and the States have ancestors who have been here so long that they descend from a whole whack of different ethnicities. My paternal grandmother is the daughter of Belgian immigrants to Canada, but other than that I descend from English, Irish, and Scottish farmers who have been in Canada for seven or more generations. I'm overall pretty WASPy, but when people ask me what my background is, I can't really give them a good answer. I cheer for Scotland in international sports because of my family name, but it's not that accurate for me to say "I'm Scottish!" Any white guy could play me in a movie, and nobody would or should blink an eye over it.

As for actors of African descent --- I can't pretend to be an expert, nor can I make any definitive claims with confidence here, but I will say that generally, a lot of black people in the States aren't entirely sure of their exact heritage because of slavery. And the relatively recent 20th century influx of immigration from East Asia means that there are still a lot of mono-ethnic Korean-Americans, Vietnamese-Americans, etc, compared to the huge number of black Americans today who have lineages far more mixed than mine. Black identity in the States (and other Western countries) is a very complex topic in which I, a dude whiter than rice in a coconut, am not a scholar by any means --- and the conflation of African countries by white people (and the generalization of "Africa" that treats the continent like a country) is definitely a very bad thing. Basically... I've very tentatively started to answer Gamiel's question, but if anyone wants to take the baton and do a much better job with it than me, please go ahead!

 

Great point about personal heritage. it reminds me of something Ollie aka Philosophy Tube talked about, how no one asks him as a pasty white British dude
"where are you from?.....No I mean where are you from"
At the end of the day what I think Gamiel is missing is that this is not about a simple equation of "ethnicity + passable as another race = ____" Different ethnicities have vastly different experiences. They deal with a lack of inclusion, with stereotypes LITERALLY being used to justify enslavement, ghettos, racist housing laws, Jim Crow, internment camps, etc. The reality in which they inhabit is vitally different from one that I do as someone 75% Italian and 25% mix of British Isles and German. We could be of the same exact makeup in terms of when each relative came to the states, and my experience would still be super different. I mean as commercialized and pointless as it is, St Patrick's day is something celebrated, Columbus Day started to appease Italian Immigrants, those two holidays cover my heritage pretty well, but people who can't assimilate as easily even if they speak better english than my Grandpas did when they came over simply cause of the color of their skin are given so little recognition.

Even just representation on screen is minimal for East Asians in general and disproportionately small. I can pass off as British about as well as someone who is 75% British Isles and 25% Italian. But living in America or the UK or Sweden, I am given no disadvantages or made to lose my culture or have it commodified to be sold for white people to feel "cultured". Neither of my ethnicities are underrepresented in the West, nor are their similarities used to diminish and lump together me and my kin. Profiling does not affect white people the way it does people of color, regardless of if they even ARE a member of the race they are being profiled as.

All the questions of "in this case would it be this or this?" with really uncommon examples fail to see the core of this which is that you don't need to be taught a mathematical equation or a hard and fast rule. Just feel, just listen to the objections of a Korean who was casually cast as Japanese and feels uncomfortable with that, let yourself empathize with them. That is first and foremost the goal. Really get the objections on an emotional level not a "but what about this irrelevant case" this is not about logic it is about empathy. I remember a year ago when we discussed the term Latin American, that was answered in one comment but dragged on for like 3 pages over unrelated comparisons and points that had no bearing on the fact that the people in question said what they preferred to be called.

They are the authority, and if nothing else we should be way more willing to listen. That is the complaint, not that there is not some set rule for every situation involving casting people of an ethnicity the character is not, but of a lack of awareness towards why it is different for some ethnicities and not at all for others.

 

Agreed that while it's not definitive, it gives a lot of insight into the intent and probably even collaborative discussion with the artists who established the character.

Meanwhile the Sabine discussion seems to have gotten if anything a little foggier here -- I most definitely read the character model as East Asian but it seems possible that voice casting of her family members might be honoring Tiya's IRL identity, so I'm not sure at all there. By comparison it seems pretty clear that Kaz on Resistance is meant to appear ethnically Japanese like his voice actor, and even his name seems vaguely space-Japanese. Resistance has been particularly weird on that faux-ethnic naming thing, though... I only recently noticed that Doza's first name is "Emmanuel" which not only sounds real-world Latino but also has some odd OOU religious connotations that make it a stranger GFFA fit than the other instances where real-world names are used.