[amphibian]

Gust Hubb, on 25 April 2012 - 04:37 PM, said:

Hehe. so now because I disagree with you I am untrustworthy. Interesting.

No, it is not the dissent that makes me look at you differently. It is that you do not seem to recognize that there is a problem at all. It is as if you look out on the landscape and do not see a swamp over to the right, as we all do.

QuickTidal, on 25 April 2012 - 05:26 PM, said:

Everyone seems to be talking about phantom books and no one is naming names.

Who can name books that are seemingly guilty of being racist in their execution of fantasy worlds.

Also take into account location on the planet (melatonin levels in the skin) and ease of travel/migration at the time.

Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Eddings, Goodkind, Brian Jacques (although he's more animalist than racist), Rudyard Kipling, Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games author), Dean Koontz doesn't write about people who aren't white very much, Danielle Steel (and quite a few other romance novelists).

John Irving kinda veers into strange areas due to his fixation on wrestlers, New Hampshire and sexual variety, but I don't think he's ultimately eschewing black people out of a malicious or lazy thing. He just wants to write about those things

I'd argue Heinlein was a bigot and possibly many other things, but he had so many screws loose or was messing with his readers that I don't know what he is in the end. All the incest in the later books was really weird too.

The Harry Potter books have strands of tokenism, but are really meshed into the English schoolboy culture, so I can let that slide.

[amphibian]

To put this in a different light, take a look at this article by Jenna Wortham on the HBO series Girls:

Quote

My chief beef is not simply that the girls in Girls are white. I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember – which, in mixed people speak means biracial. But the problem with Girls is that while the show reaches — and succeeds, in many ways — to show female characters that are not caricatures, it feels alienating, a party of four engineered to appeal to a very specific subset of the television viewing audience, when the show has the potential to be so much bigger than that. And that is a huge fucking disappointment.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough. This is more than a stock photo op, it's more important than that. Cause here's the thing about Girls: as much as I wanted to dislike the show, I couldn't help but love it. And that made it worse.

I wanted to write Girls off, file it under a category my girl Mary calls "White People Shit I Don't Care About" (which is different from the "White People Shit I DO Care About, which includes Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, MSCL, Game of Thrones, King of the Hill, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Jerri Blank), I couldn't.

Because the show (at least the first three episodes) is actually good. It gets So. Many. Things. Right. It's on point again and again, hitting at the high and low notes about being in your twenties, about being on your own and still so far from grown. Getting involved with the wrong guys, saying the wrong thing to your boss at work, trying — and failing — to relate to your parents, flinging your arms around your best friend when Rihanna comes on in the club, pressing your lips into her sweaty cheek and feeling triumphant, thinking we're going to make it through this year if it kills us. The show is painfully self-aware of its characters' entitlement and tries to use the vantage of privilege as a mirror, intended to bouncing back their flaws and their potential for growth to those us at home watching, and nearly all of it works the way it's supposed to. (Except for the tubcakegate. I have taken the following things into the shower with me: a beer, two beers, an iced coffee, and a mixed drink. Food? Never. Doesn't it get wet? Where do you put it while you get undressed? The sink? The edge of the tub? The top of the TOILET?! Does not compute.)

At least that is a relief, as others have pointed out. Girls is good for girls. But which girls? If this show succeeds, what other shows will get made because of it? Probably a half dozen just like it. Who wins, then? And who loses? Girls was supposed to be for the people, by the people. It is for people like me — weaned on Sex and the City, amused by the simple charms of Gossip Girl, and weary of the bromance comedies that rolled through theaters the last two summers like a never-ending heatwave — who were hungry for something relatable, something real. It's a tricky time in America to talk about race and belonging, but deep down, I'd hoped that this should would somehow get past the same challenge of all the BIG shows that came before it — Friends, Party of Five, Sex and the City, Gossip Girl — that failed to weave a main black character at the show from the jump.

Buried within that oversight is a kind of uncomfortable exclusivity, an othering of the people who are not included, by default, stirring the same kind of unease that's evoked when scrolling through those racist Hunger Games tweets or the first time you read that ESPN headline about Jeremy Lin. For a show so sharply cognizant of the shortcomings of its characters, it is shocking that the only drops of a black girl is a contestant on a reality show (not pictured, by the way) who spends $1,000 on her weave and describes it as "un-be-weavable."

In a way, this matters more than the shows that came before it. When those shows were on the air, there was more diversity on screens all around, so we didn’t notice it as much, it didn’t seem as glaringly missing. There was Dionne in Clueless, Moesha, Kadijah James, Tia and Tamara Mowry, and most of the WB. There were Gina and Pam, all of the Cosby daughters, and Ashley, Hilary, and Will's girlfriend, Lisa, plus Mom 1 and Mom 2 on Fresh Prince. Tyler Perry wasn't around yet, so the theaters, too, were abundant with a broad spectrum of different kinds of black people: Love and Basketball, The Wood, Best Man, Friday, Soul Food, Poetic Justice.

It makes it feel all the more egregious to see that while Girls missed so many of the other traps of its forebearers, it failed to account for this one. Plus, back then it was pre-internet, so we didn't really know what the world did and didn't look like beyond our window. But now, we know better. We can see hundreds of thousands, millions, of other people out there, just like us, blogging, tweeting, posting makeup tutorials, comedy skits, and Dance Central videos on YouTube, so that we could see more of the world is like us.

Because these girls on Girls are like us, they are like me and they are like you, they are beautiful, they are ballsy, they are trying to figure it out. They have their entire lives ahead of them and I can’t wait to see what happens next. I just wish I saw a little more of myself on screen, right alongside them.

Does that break through in a way that my somewhat ticked off words didn't?

[QuickTidal]

D, on 25 April 2012 - 05:59 PM, said:

Weis/Hickman I don't recall as having any "evil black people" but that's because I don't recall there being any non-white ethnicities in it at all, despite it covering an entire large continent with numerous races.

Yeah, I can't much argue that one. So there you go. A good example. Though how much of their Dragonlance writing was set out ahead of time. But I think the same non-white thing applies to the Deathgate series, which is a much harder pill to swallow as it is their original series.

Any others?

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 25 April 2012 - 06:39 PM

[QuickTidal]

No. Not getting further involved in this.

Have fun all.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 25 April 2012 - 08:08 PM

[worry]

I think stone monkey and I both mentioned Eddings, who created a whole world peopled with different "races" -- then made them all white people anyway -- and then went and used racist stereotypes of the Easterners anyway. He used stereotypes for the Westerners too, but they were obviously loving, tongue-in-cheek literary caricatures, while the evil Eastern peasants might as well have been called Chinamen and their even more evil far east social superiors Japanese slurs. Not to mention the sneaky merchant class/race, plus the distinctly sinister treatment of desert peoples and jungle peoples.

I'm not having as virulent a reaction to Gust Hubb's argument as amph is, but I might be equally flustered by his positions. First, his weird cynical (even defeatist, it seems to me) attitude towards what can be accomplished in Science and/or History, is inexplicable to me. Maybe GH gone crazy, I haven't read the Insanity thread yet! Amph was right to contradict the part of GH's post he bolded, it's a patently false claim. I mean we can and do know plenty of appreciable info about a lot of historical cultures...if GH is merely stating we don't have a time machine level of accuracy, that's true, but that's also self-evident. It doesn't mean we jump to the other extreme of we can never be sure about anything. And History isn't all narrative history anyway, there's different questions and different problems depending on the context, just as there is in science. There's questions on the level of "Why is the sky blue?" -- distinctly and definitively answerable -- and on the level of "What caused the Big Bang?" And plenty of historical knowledge falls into the former camp. I mean, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but GH's objection seems to be on the level of "Can we truly know anything?" and my answer to that is an emphatic yes, yes we can. We can know why the sky appears to be blue to the human eye, and we can know that there existed locations and times where ethnic differences weren't socially relevant or primary sources of strife. And stating the fact that there were black Roman emperors isn't the same level of difficulty as composing a thorough biography of one of those emperors.

If humans all died and aliens discovered our artifacts, they may very well be confronted with a skewed sense of our history, but they would also discern the fact that we were able to develop the technologies we used to record those stories, that we were apparently able to grow our population to fairly staggering numbers, that we had societies in which at least some people had the ability to spend time writing and consuming all sorts of media (including fiction), that we built buildings that stretched into the sky with mechanisms that could take us to the top with little effort. Historians and related fields focused on antiquity don't have to take things at face value, and a responsible historian identifies educated guesswork, gaps in knowledge, conjecture, and likely fact just as certainly as a responsible scientist does.

In terms of the intersection of history and fantasy, there's a big IF/THEN situation here that we might be talking past. No author has the responsibility to do anything they don't want, by decree of god or man, sure that's a fact. But IF you're going to create a fantasy world that is sourced in actual history to a substantial degree, THEN it's problematic if you get that history wrong, especially if it's deliberate. And IF you're creating your fantasy world whole-cloth with little or no historical background to inform it, and IF that fictional world is somehow still populated with important white people and very little else, THEN maybe that's problematic in and of itself and you should examine why exactly your imagination works that way. Maybe it turns out there's nothing to it, and that's just a milieu you enjoy thinking about; but maybe you'll find something worth thinking about (for instance: Why does the world I fantasize about and escape to in my imagination only have white people in it?), and maybe there's something worth changing.

[Black Winged Lord]

QuickTidal, on 25 April 2012 - 06:36 PM, said:

D, on 25 April 2012 - 05:59 PM, said:

Weis/Hickman I don't recall as having any "evil black people" but that's because I don't recall there being any non-white ethnicities in it at all, despite it covering an entire large continent with numerous races.

Yeah, I can't much argue that one. So there you go. A good example. Though how much of their Dragonlance writing was set out ahead of time. But I think the same non-white thing applies to the Deathgate series, which is a much harder pill to swallow as it is their original series.

Any others?

Dredging through the memories of a mispent youth reading DL. Wasn't there the whole island chain off to the west (ergoth or something similar) that was populated predominantly by darker skinned natives, and after the cataclysm mixed with the exiled knights?
Also pretty sure the one armed smith that built the dragonlances was black.

Also pretty sure that the pre-cataclysm world empire had a good racial mixture co-existing. Can't recall any overt mentions of asian/arab culture, although the plainsmen down south could be a comparison to native notrth american indians?

[Black Winged Lord]

Double post, but just trying to think of Weis's deathgate cycle. Can't recall any overt multi-racial mentions, so that may be a better example?

[QuickTidal]

Black Winged Lord, on 25 April 2012 - 09:59 PM, said:

QuickTidal, on 25 April 2012 - 06:36 PM, said:

D, on 25 April 2012 - 05:59 PM, said:

Weis/Hickman I don't recall as having any "evil black people" but that's because I don't recall there being any non-white ethnicities in it at all, despite it covering an entire large continent with numerous races.

Yeah, I can't much argue that one. So there you go. A good example. Though how much of their Dragonlance writing was set out ahead of time. But I think the same non-white thing applies to the Deathgate series, which is a much harder pill to swallow as it is their original series.

Any others?

Dredging through the memories of a mispent youth reading DL. Wasn't there the whole island chain off to the west (ergoth or something similar) that was populated predominantly by darker skinned natives, and after the cataclysm mixed with the exiled knights?
Also pretty sure the one armed smith that built the dragonlances was black.

Also pretty sure that the pre-cataclysm world empire had a good racial mixture co-existing. Can't recall any overt mentions of asian/arab culture, although the plainsmen down south could be a comparison to native notrth american indians?

A very good point. I'd totally forgotten that. In fact the whole LEGENDS trilogy (Time Of The Twins, Test Of The Twins, War of the Twins) is basically a pre-cataclysm Roman allegory with many races intermingled in the major cities.

And yeah, the smith who built the Dragonlances WAS black. Theros Ironfeld. I'd forgotten that as well.

Plus the elvish in the DL books were of different skin colours and cultures weren't they? the Wilding elves were nut brown skinned as I recall and the sea elves are green or blue skinned...

and yes, the plainsmen/women (Riverwind) were definitely a native American allegory as well.

and then there was Raistlin...who was bloody well gold skinned. But he was a dick, so we don't count him.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 25 April 2012 - 10:58 PM

[Gust Hubb]

In response to worrywort (amph is much too vituperative and I will leave that line of debate to an unsatisfactory end), do you know that everyone sees the same color when they label blue? Do you know how our brain translates "color" into perception? When I say we know little and we seem to know far more than we actually do, this is what I mean.

And you do keep over looking the point I keep making. I'm not arguing archeology or population studies. I'm arguing that we can't know behavior, motivation, and worldview. I will argue about archeology and population studies if you would like. However, my main point is how can one claim fantasy inaccurately represents the multicultural prejudice/tolerance of past times when all we have to work with is writings and maybe, if you stretch it, artwork (but people still love to argue over the interpretation of art, so I'm not sure that is a solid source of information). A limited sampling of human perspectives all from those educated enough to pen their thoughts.

Do you disagree with me there?

And the insanity thread is talking more about the words you put in my mouth (but well said, I must say ). Plus this is the discussion forum. Isn't it supposed to be lively

[QuickTidal]

I'm gonna just leave this article/interview with Morgan Freeman here. He sums up my thoughts about black and white.

Morgan Freeman says the concept of a month dedicated to black history is "ridiculous."

"You're going to relegate my history to a month?" the 68-year-old actor says in an interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" to air Sunday (7 p.m. EST). "I don't want a black history month. Black history is American history."

Black History Month has roots in historian Carter G. Woodson's Negro History Week, which he designated in 1926 as the second week in February to mark the birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln.

Woodson said he hoped the week could one day be eliminated — when black history would become fundamental to American history.

Freeman notes there is no "white history month," and says the only way to get rid of racism is to "stop talking about it."

The actor says he believes the labels "black" and "white" are an obstacle to beating racism.

"I am going to stop calling you a white man and I'm going to ask you to stop calling me a black man," Freeman says.

This post has been edited by QuickTidal: 25 April 2012 - 11:41 PM

[Illuyankas]

Oh Morgan, the other eleven months are white history month, you silly actor. Now he's going to be taken out of context and used to justify racist opinions just like (and luckily to a lesser extent than) Chris Rock's 'black people versus niggers' sketch that he publically and permanently retracted due to all the bigoted white supremists and assholes using it to be virulently hateful because 'a black guy said I could'.

We're a long, long way from getting rid of BHM, I'm afraid.

[worry]

As to whether we see the same "blue" -- and I truly don't mean to be dismissive -- but it's not a question that interests me (not just cuz you asked it right now, but as a general subject of debate, beyond our discussion). That the color we all call blue is essentially constant is what matters. I'm inclined to answer pretty much yes anyway barring occasional individual mutations, since we all evolved from the same common ancestor, but still it's the constant that matters.

I'm not disagreeing with the notion that history is a foggy lens, even opaque at the worst of times; I'm disagreeing with the absolute, monolithic way you're addressing it. After reading your Insanity thread, I imagine a good example for the case you're making is the four gospels of the New Testament. That's four sources, all making the claim that a divine son of God walked the earth and definitely performed supernatural miracles. And you would argue...that is FOUR whole sources, all written by people who believed what they wrote, but that doesn't make what they said true. I get that. But the historical record is a lot more variable than that, some locations/events/time periods have a glut of info, some have scant to none. And I don't think it's impossible to create a fairly good, accurate tapestry of some of them...you just always have to be responsible and honest in the attempt.

[worry]

http://quigleyscabin...elders-end.html

[QuickTidal]

WW and Amph.

I just want you both to know that I feel like you both contribute really well (in different ways) to discussion material and always make me think.

So thanks for that.

[worry]

Well thank you kindly, but I've been considering going back to being really snide, abrasive, and self righteous all the time again. I'm getting soft. I noticed Abberon posted again today, maybe if he continues that'll help kickstart my devolution.

[amphibian]

We can make reasonably good estimates as to what behaviors, motivations and worldviews were present from archaeological remnants, garbage, documents or historical records.

Seeing an ancient, now buried city with a very thick wall base, lots of garbage around the wall itself, permanent housing within, wells, temple complexes and so on can tell us that this was a city that placed a ton of priority on protecting the rich central parts of the city, that they had this or that religion and that the poor people lived outside the main stone walls. Seeing the pattern of wells, cisterns, canals (my own grandmother specialized in this type of archaeology) can tell you who had the financial resources to bring water to their own houses (which could be altered or designed to their own specifications, which suggest certain behavioral choices of the inhabitants - up to and including funeral practices [ie. burying dead people inside their own houses and continuing to live there]) and who didn't have the resources to get that water.

We do leave these rather permanent traces of ourselves behind. I've renovated a few houses and seen the original layouts of the 1900s era gas piping, crappy electrical done in the '50s and '70s, set aright the idiocy perpetrated by whoever knocked out a load bearing wall and thus caused the second floor to sag three inches, seen where the initial closets and bedrooms were and so on. Whoever owns the house my parents live in 50 years from now will likely remodel it even further and see the mix of original and modified things and see how the house changed over the years.

Historians do similar things and they quite often get things wrong initially, but the general arc bends towards approaching the truth and gaining accuracy, rather than political/pseudo-science nincompoopery, such as that which leads to thousands of children not being vaccinated due to autism scaremongers.

Anyways, the point of this is to say that if we can reconstruct such complicated behaviors from the permanent/preserved potsherds (Erikson word-love) of the past, surely the possibilities for SF authors working today can be as complicated or even more so than these due to the authorial ability to pick and choose what they want to use and even go and invent more.

Not every book has to be the Malazan series in scale or complexity. An enormous market exists for the simpler, easier to digest books and the sales reflect that. However, we can avoid having books like the often racist/misogynist Hunger Games (which is ironically being cited as being woman-empowering, which it is not) and we can have books like A Wind in the Willows or Wayside School series (kind of drawing a blank on the actual teen-focused books).

You can have these awesome books that are built to either sidestep intentional or unintentional racial/ethnic/gender prejudice or confront it head-on like To Kill A Mockingbird, Shabanu or Things Fall Aapart while delivering great stories to the audience.

I am somewhat vocal (to those who will listen))in my criticism of the Hindi movie industry which has continually pushed the prejudice of "lighter skin = better" upon the billions who watch their films. It doesn't stop me from enjoying awesome Hindi movies, but every now and then, it really does bug me that every actress in the big Bollywood movies is fair skinned, while the guys have more leeway in skin color, but never actually get all that dark themselves. This type of thing is a part of many cultures and is a problem we all have to continually grapple with and sort of keep in the back of our heads.

This kind of debate is why I'm kind of drawn to True Blood, the trashiest, skin-tastic, monster-iffic tv series out there right now. The characters and storylines are actually pretty progressive and the writers have somehow found a formula that gets people of all kinds of backgrounds interested, watching it and enjoying it, while perhaps taking in the progressiveness in terms of gender/sexual identity/empowerment and so on. Boobs + Monsters = the ideal teaching tool.

[Gust Hubb]

Holy shit Amph. That was an amazing post. Rep coming your way when my stores have recharged.

I will start with a question: why do you think there are few complex, well thought out books on the markets these days, or in other words, why are authors not stepping it up especially when SF literature can be so cookie cutter?

I think the reasons are two fold: first of all, complexity doesn't usually sell. I believe TV gives us the clearest examples here. Recently we have seen several series have one or two seasons before getting canceled (Fast Forward, Happy Town, V, Better off Ted). While some of this may be due to deficiencies in acting and story line, it also seems that the more complex a TV series is, the worse ratings it gets and the faster networks put the series. I mean there are plenty of contradictions of course (BSG, Lost), but in the end, I think the reason is people don't watch TV to think, which is the second reason there is little complexity on the market in SF. They want entertainment, the more spoon-fed the better. If one has to sit up and pay attention closely to work out the plot, less people are willing to persevere.

In terms of books, one could see this as smart fantasy books don't sell. Again, exceptions such as the ones mentioned in your excellent post. However, I believe that people don't want to think. They don't want to put the effort into scrutinizing and mulling over their SF fiction. They want boobs, explosions, and clever one liners (more so in TV... but still). And publishers recognize this. And without publisher backing, the intricate novel either takes a long time to break through or never sees the light of day.

I agree Amph that ideally I wish there were more books of SE quality on the market. Some of the pulp out there is nauseating. But on the other hand, there are numerous clever series that don't reach the depth of SE's books and are "lazy" in their treatment of complex issues like racism.

And that is ok. Much of the population seems to want the pulpy over the complex. It's economics, and I'm sure there are authors like SE who are not publishing because of this trend in the readership. And if authors can work through this system, putting out novels that are compelling despite their less well thought out setting, I applaud them. I will enjoy a good book even if it doesn't excel in its treatment of societal intricacies. And in the end, if anyone is to blame, it's the readership and their simple, flashy tastes.

And a quick word about history. Amph, I admire people like your grandmother, please do not get me wrong. I love the stories they discover among the potsherds. I am not arguing that archeologists and historians are lazy, imprecise or careless. I am arguing that even knowing a people evidently protected temples and rich people with walls, leaving the poor to rot outside the walls, we do not have a good grasp on how people thought. We can try to infer attitudes, such as the majority of people revered the religion of their temple. But remember that it only takes one rich influential person to create a temple, and that this sponsor could be unreligious, currying favor with someone that is, or some other motivation. We don't know. Probabilistically, the temple was build because people valued that religion. But even today, the structure of things is deceptive and in the right circumstances, the mindset of the few can determine the course of the many.

This is why I think we can never truly know the people of the past. Their setting, their weather, their movement, yes. Their personalities, their hopes and worries, their motivations, their worldview, no. Writers rarely write down all of what they are thinking and often see the world through their own lenses. And authors often are personalities, eccentric in their own way, as many academic people are. I would find it hard to dig through such bias to get to the true meat of the past.

And the superstructures, the walls, the city layout do tell us how people lived (in filth or in wealth, under protection or openly) but it doesn't get into the minds of those people.

To try another approach, look at an actor or actress. One can have a lot of opinions on what they are like. But, one cannot tell what the person is truly like until one sees them outside the movie and the media's attention, in person. Media skew things. Actors and actresses put on a show when in public even if they are not in a movie. And unless we get an interview or a post movie commentary, we really would have a hard time knowing what the person was like.

I see historical writing and archeology like this. We can watch the past and see the polished remnants of peoples thoughts and records, and see the rubble that was the world in which they lived, but we would need to be with the people to even start guessing at what they were like, what they thought, etc. And even then, I am not so sure we could truly understand them, because I don't think we can truly understand those alive that we interact with in this day and age.

The examples you give that the beginning of the post Amph are all mechanics, representations of distribution and functionality. I agree those are beautifully deciphered by archeologists and historians. But you don't mention how those things tell us what people really thought of each other, how they behaved, what their worldview was. Those things told us how we would see the past if we stood within it, but the bodies around us would be more automatons than actual people. The minds of people are far more complex than the boxes they live in.

[worry]

Can't speak for amph, but I think you and I just disagree on a few points: your use of "never" instead of "sometimes" in terms of what we can and can't do and know; you seem to have a lower opinion of the power and value of inference than I do; and you seem to think people are too complicated to truly understand, which I just don't find to be the case at all, and I don't see why it would be any more true in the past than it is now.