seeing colors
3 Mar 2008 02:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouOver the past few days, for some reason I keep ending up reading a variety of blogs focused on racism (a number of which are due to following links through fascinating conversations about the current primaries etc). I came across one blog post that -- while I'm sure there was a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek mixed in with a clearly bitter and angry attitude -- I've been turning over and over in my head.
The short version was this: when a (non-color) person says, "I don't see race," what they really mean (according to the blog author) is "I'm not comfortable with the issue so I'd rather pretend it doesn't exist."
Uh.
Excuse me while I laugh hysterically.
Okay, I think I'm calmer now. I'm over the knee-jerk response of saying, "that generalization is ludicrous," followed in rapid succession by the impulse to cry in glee, "what amazing mindreading skills you have, my dear!"
Lack of ire isn't due only to maturity; even when younger, I had a hard time reacting defensively in a "are you talking to me" way. The best memory-example I have is of being cornered by angry classmates insisting that having my nose in a book meant I had to be saying I was better than them -- and that this behavior therefore made me racist. Given I didn't want to get the crap beaten out of me by a girl a head taller than me, I gave her words careful consideration, because she was bigger than me and if she had a point, I'd rather concede it than just argue for the sake of arguing. (Hey, self-preservation can save your front teeth sometimes.)
I ended up just being puzzled. I wasn't raised with a notion of racism -- my parents kept me carefully protected from that, and our family friends were a diverse and varied bunch (as you normally find among academia, as well as the military). So even in fourth grade, I didn't get that "skin color" meant anything other than, well, "how to a person gets described, like in a story or something."
(Incidentally, the girl ended up not hitting me. I think my baffled expression was the reason she stopped and asked -- half-teasing, I think, and half-serious: "how can you read so many books and be so stupid?" To which I asked, "stupid about what?" After that, she decided we were friends. I was just glad to not see the schoolyard pavement up close, and she was pretty cool once she stopped bullying me.)
But really: you've got to damn well be clinically blind to "not see race" after two years in Montgomery, Alabama. You can't not see it, in some environs, when every bloody fool around you is doing their damnedest to not only make friends, judge people, accept and deny people based on race (any race, so long as it's not the speaker's) and they do sure as hell want you to know that's exactly why they're doing, saying, being, going, acting, believing, leaving, dismissing.
Which is part of the reason I laugh, because although I can see that I've always carried a certain prejudice, I was most definitely raised within a military environment (which does tend to be the more diverse of any environment, especially in the Deep South). I was raised to be aware of race but not necessarily to use it as a factor for how I treat people: okay, so I see race in that yes, I register it, but I remain firm in my willingness to still treat people as I was raised to treat people: equally, and fairly, and with respect. Regardless of skin color.
Oh, we live in a racist society. We live in a sexist society, too. We live in a classist, heteronormative, damn near xenophobic, society. These -isms permeate our language, our behavior, and our assumptions. One of the hardest parts of dealing with those cultural assumptions is that unwitting parroting of something that's simply a part of the culture, something you take for granted, does not necessarily mean you're a bigot. It just means you've not actively or consciously stopped to see how that assumption fits into societal prejudice. I mean, look at blonde jokes: the idea that cute, blonde, girls with blue eyes who are cheerleaders must also be ditzy-stupid, that all redheads are hot-tempered sluts, and that boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. Those are, obviously, some of the lighter-toned prejudicial assumptions in our society, along with "raised in trailer park" being shorthand for "alcoholic father and shiftless mother and pregnant at sixteen".
Which means: we all say or do things, at some point, that will reveal an -ist point of view, and this doesn't mean we're bigots. It means we've absorbed something from the culture that we need to stop (or sometimes need someone close to us to tell us to stop) and think twice about. Then we can start to consciously change, or remove, that element.
The amusing detail of all this is that while I was raised to always treat people with dignity and respect regardless of skin color or gender... I sure can't say the same about how I was raised to treat people based on their class. Because, oh, yes, I am most definitely classist. Ain't no two ways about that one. I don't mean that I'm too snobby to hang out with working-class or that I'd aspire to be mistaken for upper class, but that I'm most offended by people who act as though their family's origins/class are a source of shame rather than simply "where they came from". Does that make me classist by virtue of being someone who gets most irritated with those who attempt to deny class and/or impose a certain fluidity on it? Or am I simply noting the dishonesty, picking up on the contrived pretense?
That's my biggest personal -ism. Naw, I don't judge people based on their skin tone (and in fact I'm more likely to see gender first, class second, and skin color third) but I sure as hell find myself struggling to keep a pleasant expression when my host offers me cheap American beer... and no glass. Oi!
So, with that slight tangent on my own issues of classism aside... to get back to the original issue: skin color. These are the thoughts bouncing through my head over the past few days. As a natural evolution of that contemplation, I started thinking about yet another essay, which called for more 'people of color' in the SFF world. I'd say it fell into the essay-category I consider "diversity now!" -- that is, any cry for more of a variety in our fiction. Anything other than Fabulous White Men With Perfect Hair (which is part of the reason a lot of the quasi-super-hero hard-SF bored me, until Gibson came along and reintroduced dirt).
I also know that we tend to overlay assumptions based on what we're used to seeing. How else to put that? I can give an example: while at the house of one of my two best friends in HS (AQ), we were talking about my other best friend. AQ's mother asks about T, and in the midst of explaining whatever funny thing had happened to T and myself, AQ adds, "she's the black girl."
I don't know for certain but I certainly hope my reaction didn't show on my face (and I don't recall any reaction from A or her mother), but I remember being suddenly and completely uncomfortable. Why was it necessary to add that T was black? Did it change somehow the value of the funny story? Did it add a facet to the retelling that I was missing? Was there some kind of clue in there that I'd never caught before, because I'd never thought to clarify about anyone's skin tone? I have never, in my life, said to my parents, "and so-and-so is white," any more than I've said, "and so-and-so is black" or any other color. I have said, "so-and-so is from X country," if the person is immigrant or first-generation and the information's pertinent to the conversation -- like saying, "Mitha gave me this recipe, and she's from Bangalore, so this is a regional dish from that area." If T had been from Kenya, I'd probably have seen reason to say, "she's from Kenya," but she was from the suburban neighborhood just north of us, in which case I said, "T's family lives right near the high school."
For a long, long, time, after that (up to through my days in the city), I listened to how people described other people, and paid more attention to how characters were described in books, too. I confess a lot of that attention has a lot to do with my own upbringing, as well: perhaps, thanks to the oddities of a dysfunctional family, we were also dysfunctional in that we didn't give out this apparently-important information when communicating and that this is what normal people did?
(I eventually decided, in my early twenties, that I'd have to remain abnormal, at least in that respect.)
I'm getting closer to the point, here, so congratulations for sticking with it this long... and that's that if you read a number of books, the narrative descriptions are often rather paltry. We get hair color, eye color, and outside the tags of ways of speaking, maybe a dose of backstory, maybe a surname (because chances are somewhat good that unless the author says otherwise, a character named Maria Antonelli is probably not of Chinese descent) -- but we don't often get skin color. Or the author might mention it once or twice, assuming it's a color that occurs in nature (as opposed to SFF stories where the blue skin or green skin is relevant to a plot or characterization element).
Thing is, sometimes, if you ask someone afterwards what skin color a character was, more often than not they're going to say a color that's pretty close to their own or is close to what they see around them the majority of the time. I know I've read essays and/or studies about this perception thing (along with the old joke of "all you ___ people look alike"), and I also came across it when I asked several friends what color was Ged's skin, in LeGuin's books. Most of the answers were "white, what about it?" and the kicker is that he's supposed to be black, and my mental image was always more of some Bollywood-style kinda rugged squarish looks. (Well, I read it before I knew what Bollywood was, but you get the idea of what I mean, and it's possible that's also because I read LeGuin right after reading Kipling...)
Okay, so we see what we expect to see -- even in cases where the author describes a character. I know I've read books where the author may've dropped a clue, and then halfway through mentions the character's blond and I'm sorry, but it's too late: the image in my head is not a blond. For the rest of the book, I mentally adjust any mention to make the character brunet, or darker-skin, or lighter, or bluer, or whatever 'fits' the image that popped into my head when I read the character's opening dialogue. (I did that through the entirety of Flewelling's triology, making the young hero mentally dark-haired because he just didn't feel like a blond to me, whatever that means.)
But going back to my discomfort over the notion that I have to explain the anomaly -- and the assumption that any character/person who is 'non-white' is therefore as much an anomaly as the blue-skinned tattooed lady at the helm -- I realize that this is why I could have two different crits tell me that my own writing's cast doesn't feel "diverse enough". At the time of the crit, I'd seen what they meant: I'd not clarified who was what, but much of that was because I felt like if I said "this guy, over here, has dark brown skin," then I should also mention that this girl has pale skin and freckles, and does that mean I should describe my Asian character as 'sallow' or 'yellow-skinned' and just how unattractive can you get short of "sallow" skin? I mean, really: eww.
And since I just plain couldn't come up with ways to describe all the different skin tones -- and I worried that clarifying it for every character would suddenly make it into an obtrusive issue for readers ("this is the eighth character for whom skin tone is given along with hair and eye color, what is this author's hangup, anyway!?"). So I just ditched it altogether, and stuck to describing hair and eye color and letting folks overlay whatever they wanted on top. I mean, if someone's comfortable seeing the cast as about 75% non-white (assuming 'asian' and 'hispanic' both = 'non-white'), then more power to them. If they really prefer to visualize Rat as a tall white guy with a shaved scalp and dark brown eyes because to them that's more handsome or more recognizable or more fitting, then more power to the reader.
And that brings me around to the next issue derived from this long mental path. (Well, not long for me, since this is only a few days' rumination, and not a month's worth.) That is: if I don't clarify each character's ethnicity or skin color or culture or whatever, and someone overlays not their own face but that of the dominant culture (in this case, white/anglo), does that mean when the reader gets irritated at "one more book with a cast of nothing but white people!" that this is a failure on my part? Is it a cop-out somehow to say, "oh, but I left that out because I figured it'd give more room for your mental picture," or to even say, "I didn't want to describe every blooming character's skin so I didn't do it for anyone"?
What's really amusing to me is that when I look back at the notes I had on the supporting characters, the lists contain hair color, length, and quality (curly, straight, etc), then eye color, and then educational level. Most of the notes don't even specify ethnicity or skin tone; the ethnicity I sorta note from the character names (mostly). That is, three characters are Norse, one is Welsh/Scottish, two are Japanese-American, a handful are Hispanic -- and for all those, the names identify them: Ericsson, Ross, Arakawa, Roderigo, etc. But boy are the classes apparent when you look at education: sixth grade, tenth grade, versus "doctoral student" and "master's degree". But I digress. Again.
Next, I'll be discussing antimacassars. Stay tuned!
The short version was this: when a (non-color) person says, "I don't see race," what they really mean (according to the blog author) is "I'm not comfortable with the issue so I'd rather pretend it doesn't exist."
Uh.
Excuse me while I laugh hysterically.
Okay, I think I'm calmer now. I'm over the knee-jerk response of saying, "that generalization is ludicrous," followed in rapid succession by the impulse to cry in glee, "what amazing mindreading skills you have, my dear!"
Lack of ire isn't due only to maturity; even when younger, I had a hard time reacting defensively in a "are you talking to me" way. The best memory-example I have is of being cornered by angry classmates insisting that having my nose in a book meant I had to be saying I was better than them -- and that this behavior therefore made me racist. Given I didn't want to get the crap beaten out of me by a girl a head taller than me, I gave her words careful consideration, because she was bigger than me and if she had a point, I'd rather concede it than just argue for the sake of arguing. (Hey, self-preservation can save your front teeth sometimes.)
I ended up just being puzzled. I wasn't raised with a notion of racism -- my parents kept me carefully protected from that, and our family friends were a diverse and varied bunch (as you normally find among academia, as well as the military). So even in fourth grade, I didn't get that "skin color" meant anything other than, well, "how to a person gets described, like in a story or something."
(Incidentally, the girl ended up not hitting me. I think my baffled expression was the reason she stopped and asked -- half-teasing, I think, and half-serious: "how can you read so many books and be so stupid?" To which I asked, "stupid about what?" After that, she decided we were friends. I was just glad to not see the schoolyard pavement up close, and she was pretty cool once she stopped bullying me.)
But really: you've got to damn well be clinically blind to "not see race" after two years in Montgomery, Alabama. You can't not see it, in some environs, when every bloody fool around you is doing their damnedest to not only make friends, judge people, accept and deny people based on race (any race, so long as it's not the speaker's) and they do sure as hell want you to know that's exactly why they're doing, saying, being, going, acting, believing, leaving, dismissing.
Which is part of the reason I laugh, because although I can see that I've always carried a certain prejudice, I was most definitely raised within a military environment (which does tend to be the more diverse of any environment, especially in the Deep South). I was raised to be aware of race but not necessarily to use it as a factor for how I treat people: okay, so I see race in that yes, I register it, but I remain firm in my willingness to still treat people as I was raised to treat people: equally, and fairly, and with respect. Regardless of skin color.
Oh, we live in a racist society. We live in a sexist society, too. We live in a classist, heteronormative, damn near xenophobic, society. These -isms permeate our language, our behavior, and our assumptions. One of the hardest parts of dealing with those cultural assumptions is that unwitting parroting of something that's simply a part of the culture, something you take for granted, does not necessarily mean you're a bigot. It just means you've not actively or consciously stopped to see how that assumption fits into societal prejudice. I mean, look at blonde jokes: the idea that cute, blonde, girls with blue eyes who are cheerleaders must also be ditzy-stupid, that all redheads are hot-tempered sluts, and that boys don't make passes at girls who wear glasses. Those are, obviously, some of the lighter-toned prejudicial assumptions in our society, along with "raised in trailer park" being shorthand for "alcoholic father and shiftless mother and pregnant at sixteen".
Which means: we all say or do things, at some point, that will reveal an -ist point of view, and this doesn't mean we're bigots. It means we've absorbed something from the culture that we need to stop (or sometimes need someone close to us to tell us to stop) and think twice about. Then we can start to consciously change, or remove, that element.
The amusing detail of all this is that while I was raised to always treat people with dignity and respect regardless of skin color or gender... I sure can't say the same about how I was raised to treat people based on their class. Because, oh, yes, I am most definitely classist. Ain't no two ways about that one. I don't mean that I'm too snobby to hang out with working-class or that I'd aspire to be mistaken for upper class, but that I'm most offended by people who act as though their family's origins/class are a source of shame rather than simply "where they came from". Does that make me classist by virtue of being someone who gets most irritated with those who attempt to deny class and/or impose a certain fluidity on it? Or am I simply noting the dishonesty, picking up on the contrived pretense?
That's my biggest personal -ism. Naw, I don't judge people based on their skin tone (and in fact I'm more likely to see gender first, class second, and skin color third) but I sure as hell find myself struggling to keep a pleasant expression when my host offers me cheap American beer... and no glass. Oi!
So, with that slight tangent on my own issues of classism aside... to get back to the original issue: skin color. These are the thoughts bouncing through my head over the past few days. As a natural evolution of that contemplation, I started thinking about yet another essay, which called for more 'people of color' in the SFF world. I'd say it fell into the essay-category I consider "diversity now!" -- that is, any cry for more of a variety in our fiction. Anything other than Fabulous White Men With Perfect Hair (which is part of the reason a lot of the quasi-super-hero hard-SF bored me, until Gibson came along and reintroduced dirt).
I also know that we tend to overlay assumptions based on what we're used to seeing. How else to put that? I can give an example: while at the house of one of my two best friends in HS (AQ), we were talking about my other best friend. AQ's mother asks about T, and in the midst of explaining whatever funny thing had happened to T and myself, AQ adds, "she's the black girl."
I don't know for certain but I certainly hope my reaction didn't show on my face (and I don't recall any reaction from A or her mother), but I remember being suddenly and completely uncomfortable. Why was it necessary to add that T was black? Did it change somehow the value of the funny story? Did it add a facet to the retelling that I was missing? Was there some kind of clue in there that I'd never caught before, because I'd never thought to clarify about anyone's skin tone? I have never, in my life, said to my parents, "and so-and-so is white," any more than I've said, "and so-and-so is black" or any other color. I have said, "so-and-so is from X country," if the person is immigrant or first-generation and the information's pertinent to the conversation -- like saying, "Mitha gave me this recipe, and she's from Bangalore, so this is a regional dish from that area." If T had been from Kenya, I'd probably have seen reason to say, "she's from Kenya," but she was from the suburban neighborhood just north of us, in which case I said, "T's family lives right near the high school."
For a long, long, time, after that (up to through my days in the city), I listened to how people described other people, and paid more attention to how characters were described in books, too. I confess a lot of that attention has a lot to do with my own upbringing, as well: perhaps, thanks to the oddities of a dysfunctional family, we were also dysfunctional in that we didn't give out this apparently-important information when communicating and that this is what normal people did?
(I eventually decided, in my early twenties, that I'd have to remain abnormal, at least in that respect.)
I'm getting closer to the point, here, so congratulations for sticking with it this long... and that's that if you read a number of books, the narrative descriptions are often rather paltry. We get hair color, eye color, and outside the tags of ways of speaking, maybe a dose of backstory, maybe a surname (because chances are somewhat good that unless the author says otherwise, a character named Maria Antonelli is probably not of Chinese descent) -- but we don't often get skin color. Or the author might mention it once or twice, assuming it's a color that occurs in nature (as opposed to SFF stories where the blue skin or green skin is relevant to a plot or characterization element).
Thing is, sometimes, if you ask someone afterwards what skin color a character was, more often than not they're going to say a color that's pretty close to their own or is close to what they see around them the majority of the time. I know I've read essays and/or studies about this perception thing (along with the old joke of "all you ___ people look alike"), and I also came across it when I asked several friends what color was Ged's skin, in LeGuin's books. Most of the answers were "white, what about it?" and the kicker is that he's supposed to be black, and my mental image was always more of some Bollywood-style kinda rugged squarish looks. (Well, I read it before I knew what Bollywood was, but you get the idea of what I mean, and it's possible that's also because I read LeGuin right after reading Kipling...)
Okay, so we see what we expect to see -- even in cases where the author describes a character. I know I've read books where the author may've dropped a clue, and then halfway through mentions the character's blond and I'm sorry, but it's too late: the image in my head is not a blond. For the rest of the book, I mentally adjust any mention to make the character brunet, or darker-skin, or lighter, or bluer, or whatever 'fits' the image that popped into my head when I read the character's opening dialogue. (I did that through the entirety of Flewelling's triology, making the young hero mentally dark-haired because he just didn't feel like a blond to me, whatever that means.)
But going back to my discomfort over the notion that I have to explain the anomaly -- and the assumption that any character/person who is 'non-white' is therefore as much an anomaly as the blue-skinned tattooed lady at the helm -- I realize that this is why I could have two different crits tell me that my own writing's cast doesn't feel "diverse enough". At the time of the crit, I'd seen what they meant: I'd not clarified who was what, but much of that was because I felt like if I said "this guy, over here, has dark brown skin," then I should also mention that this girl has pale skin and freckles, and does that mean I should describe my Asian character as 'sallow' or 'yellow-skinned' and just how unattractive can you get short of "sallow" skin? I mean, really: eww.
And since I just plain couldn't come up with ways to describe all the different skin tones -- and I worried that clarifying it for every character would suddenly make it into an obtrusive issue for readers ("this is the eighth character for whom skin tone is given along with hair and eye color, what is this author's hangup, anyway!?"). So I just ditched it altogether, and stuck to describing hair and eye color and letting folks overlay whatever they wanted on top. I mean, if someone's comfortable seeing the cast as about 75% non-white (assuming 'asian' and 'hispanic' both = 'non-white'), then more power to them. If they really prefer to visualize Rat as a tall white guy with a shaved scalp and dark brown eyes because to them that's more handsome or more recognizable or more fitting, then more power to the reader.
And that brings me around to the next issue derived from this long mental path. (Well, not long for me, since this is only a few days' rumination, and not a month's worth.) That is: if I don't clarify each character's ethnicity or skin color or culture or whatever, and someone overlays not their own face but that of the dominant culture (in this case, white/anglo), does that mean when the reader gets irritated at "one more book with a cast of nothing but white people!" that this is a failure on my part? Is it a cop-out somehow to say, "oh, but I left that out because I figured it'd give more room for your mental picture," or to even say, "I didn't want to describe every blooming character's skin so I didn't do it for anyone"?
What's really amusing to me is that when I look back at the notes I had on the supporting characters, the lists contain hair color, length, and quality (curly, straight, etc), then eye color, and then educational level. Most of the notes don't even specify ethnicity or skin tone; the ethnicity I sorta note from the character names (mostly). That is, three characters are Norse, one is Welsh/Scottish, two are Japanese-American, a handful are Hispanic -- and for all those, the names identify them: Ericsson, Ross, Arakawa, Roderigo, etc. But boy are the classes apparent when you look at education: sixth grade, tenth grade, versus "doctoral student" and "master's degree". But I digress. Again.
Next, I'll be discussing antimacassars. Stay tuned!