it's not that it's hard; it's that you're not thinking

[kaigou]

Reading urban fantasy. What book? Doesn't matter, because this isn't the first time I've seen this or similar. (Aside: publication date is 2008.)

White witches weren't so bad, though maybe that was only because most of them [weren't very powerful]... Black witches gained power by killing or torturing things: from flies to human.

Yes, I do find those adjectives to be hugely offensive. A writer's stock in trade is the power of words, and thus one best equipped (and possibly expected) to ask: is this really the best word for my purposes? Especially when, as in this case, the answer is a resounding FUCK NO.

I mean, let's say you argue that white and black are 'just colors'. Why must it be those two? What about Orange Witches and Purple Witches: what's your first impression of which must be good and which must be bad? How about Chartreuse Witches and Puce Witches: no value judgment and probably even less of any meaning, thus demonstrating color in and of itself does not dictate a thing's morality.

The story even adds that on the whole, witches are untrustworthy regardless; the only reason White Witches aren't scary Black Witches is because the former type isn't all that powerful. Implication being that if a White Witch could be more powerful, s/he would immediately fall into Black Witch territory and go haring off on torture and death sprees, which takes the fail to even greater levels.

Plus, this good/bad division ultimately makes no sense in context; the good guys don't even like witches. They consider witches a necessary evil, and the operative word here is evil, though they may cooperate with certain witches when needed. What's the logic here, then? Good guys can't ally with (bad) witches, so we must minimize the evilness of the not-worse witches? Hmm, let's call them white — because white is automatically less-bad/better than black. Righto!

This is like saying, "well, he murdered, but y'know, it was just that one time — it's not like he murdered lots of people!" Even when we have need (eg for state's evidence), we don't dance around with euphemisms: a murderer is a murderer, be that once or many (serial) times. We don't label the former as less murderous; we label the latter as more murderous.

That's why I say it's not just racist, it's racism by dint of inertia. It's falling back on the status quo, same as defending the use on historical grounds (black magic and white magic). It's equally historical to use left-hand/right-hand, sinister/dexterous, dark/light, night/day, even clockwise/widdershins, to name a few. The black/white dichotomy is hardly the only cultural set of monikers to designate magical morality. Furthermore, I'd say it's ingenuous (if not outright disingenuous) to protest that 'history' justifies ignoring a term's modern meaning. 'Cunt' may have once been a compliment, but that was a thousand years ago — and if you call a woman that now, don't come crying to me after she punches you in the face.

TL;DR version: the predominant rationale for white=good and black=bad is based in racism.

It's not that hard to try something else. It just requires a few seconds' thought (although that does require a willingness to be arsed enough to be aware of the need). In this story, frex, if a witch gets power from controlling life, call that a Life Witch. If it's via torturing living creatures to death, call that one a Death Witch. There, see? Two seconds' thought and I came up with a descriptive term that actually tells me something — and doesn't require I tap into racist slurs to grasp the text's meaning.

Our language has millions of words. I refuse to believe that the inadequate and essentially bland color-adjectives are an author's only freaking choices to describe bad and more-bad, and I further resent being made to feel a silent accomplice in the text's racist undercurrents. If the combined gatekeepers+author never stopped to even realize what's being said in the text, that's idiocy. If they realized but didn't see it as worth addressing, that's reprehensible.

But if they didn't see reason to change it because they figured I'd never realize or care, I find that the most offensive of all.

---

note: if you comment anonymously and don't sign your post, I reserve the right to ignore your nitwittery. Have the decency to stand behind your words.

Comments

[reileen]

What about Orange Witches and Purple Witches: what's your first impression of which must be good and which must be bad? How about Chartreuse Witches and Puce Witches: no value judgment and probably even less of any meaning

I feel like Pratchett must've done something to this sort in his Discworld novels. That sounds like a very Pratchettian thing to do.

[kaigou]

I've seen a variety of dichotomous pairings, including ones made-up by the author -- it's not like we can't get it in context, after all. But what really gets me is that in the context of this story, it didn't even bloody well apply -- because all witches were bad, and it was simply that some of them were worse. I mean, really, the sheer laziness of the labels is astounding.

[ivoryandhorn]

I have nothing to add because you're right on all accounts. Though looking at all the other dichotomies you've pulled up I can't help but feel that there must be loads of interesting stories waiting to be told about them.

[kaigou]

I think what got me the most while reading was the growing sensation that the author expected me to agree, or something. Like, in using the terms, the author was saying: "but of course Black means bad, see, bad witch, also known as black witch!" And as the story went on, I got more and more resentful of that attitude.

Although I confess this may not have been alleviated by the fact that the first introduction to witches in the story was the phrase "Black Witch", sans context, and my first thought was, "oh, how awesome, the author has a multicultural cast, excellent!" Yeah. This was NOT my happy face when I realized how wrong I was. Bleah.

[nykeyoung.livejournal.com]

"Black/White" in UF? Thought everyone left those behind for "Light/Dark"

Not that I like those either. I think I wrote something from the P.O.V. of the Dark users fighting against the oppressive Light users. I mean, the bad guys managed a big win and cover an area with eternal light and managed to keep it up for years. (It did manage to get taken down eventually, but I needed new protagonists to pull it off.)

[kaigou]

Dude, even the light/dark is falling behind. I think the last three or four UF I read, any contrast of good/bad was designated by made-up names, or based on some other up/down contrast (like clockwise and widdershins, seen that once or twice), or fire/wind (or maybe it was fire/ocean, whatever). There's just a good long list of modern-day baggage issues associated with colors-as-value-judgments, and no good reason for an author to take that path, or any at all if s/he can think up something that works better for the story.

Unless, of course, the author intends to make a political statement by having white witches and black witches and maybe some kind of ongoing conflicts between them on the grounds that the white witches have made more of a headway getting equality from warlocks but managed it via leaving behind their black witch sisters OR SOMETHING -- in which case, if that's an intentional implication, then by all means, use the culturally-loaded terminology.

[sans-pertinence.livejournal.com]

My brain is kind of mush at the moment, so I don't really have anything to add here aside from a resounding yes.

This kind of thoughtless, ingrained stereotyping pervades all fiction genres, not just fantasy in all its incarnations; it's one more reason I'm reading mostly nonfiction these days.

[kaigou]

It's one of the reasons I've mostly read nonfiction for the past, uhm, [censored] years. From college on, actually. I had a flush of reading fiction when I went back to college (just as a way to keep myself sane in the midst of a boatload of nonfiction), and I'm going through another flush over the past year, but soon I 'spect I'll slide back into reading mostly nonfiction. Well, anything, really, so long as it doesn't have werewolves or vampires. I am so freaking sick of the goddamn werewolves and vampires.

[starlady]

"Cunt" was a compliment?

I too have nothing substantial to add on account of your being completely right, except that I might go further than "inertia" and label it sheer (intellectual, ethical) laziness. On top of being racist, it's also bad writing and cheap fantasy; those dichotomies were shopworn at least by Tolkien, if not before.

[kaigou]

Heh. Yep. Cunt is a bastardization of kent, which apparently meant 'wise' [woman] -- you see it as the root of the name Kendra, actually. Same origin as in the word cunning.

Oh, it's definitely intellectual and ethical (and writerly) laziness. I used 'inertia' in the sense of the kind of idiocy that happens when people say, "oh, well, that's the way it's been done for a long time" as though history is justification enough, and able to overcome the gravity of the modern weight. Like people who think it's okay to say that marriage between differing skin tones is wrong, as though 'two hundred plus years of bigotry' is really just "two hundred years of Doing It This Way" and that automatically counters "twenty years of doing the right thing" which is really just "only twenty years" and therefore gets treated like some kind of upstart.

Not sure if inertia really qualifies there, but that was the thought in my head -- it's what I see among people I otherwise figured were decent folk, justifying their literary tropes within which I can see some deep racism -- because the weight/age of the literary trope makes them feel comfortable leaving it as-is, instead of asking whether this literary trope really still applies.

Or maybe I just live my icon a little too much.

[starlady]

That survives in Scots, doesn't it? Kenning, to ken = to know. Cool, I would never have realized that.

I like that icon.

I guess I tend to see it as laziness (see my icon), but it's definitely inertia, too--letting the past do one's thinking for one rather than thinking over the past for oneself. The one time I walked out of a class in college was when one of my classmates made a comment to the effect that slavery was okay because it existed (we were discussing Ephesians in the New Testament), and I just didn't feel confident of my ability to sit across the same table as him for the remainder of the time. I've never understood that impulse to abdicate critical thinking. It always seems to me that the fact that we can make judgments means it's incumbent on us to do so.

[kaigou]

I've never understood that impulse to abdicate critical thinking.

Me neither, and I like it even less when the person argues that they're doing enough elsewhere that they don't see reason to turn the microscope on this part, too. Yeah, okay, so I've had my moments of that as well, but I'm also inherently lazy -- I just need a bit to get over the reluctance to get motivated that forms the bulk of my inertia, and then I'll tackle the question. Mostly, I do a lot of fixing to get ready.

But people who refuse to think at all... well, now. Can't say they're much on my favorites list, if ever.

[starscream]

God, I can never find the reply button on this site.

I don't really disagree with anything here, but I wonder where the whole White/Black thing truly originates -- surely it was racial to begin with, but where did it start? I never put much thought into it, though for as long as I can remember everything in media portrayed evil magic as "Black magic" and things like holy magic as "White magic," then in games there's also "Blue Magic" so...

Actually, I'm not really sure if there's a point I'm trying to make here. I may just be rambling.

[kaigou]

Okay, slight history lesson. Caveat that it's been a damn long time since I've studied this, and I was never all that interested in the system anyway, so this will be a highly glossed and generalized version, but it's roughly how things developed. About 2500 years ago, Greek philosopher ... I want to say Plato but maybe he was just responding to someone else's stuff, but whatever -- someone introduced a dualistic system. Has to do with Forms and, uhm, something else, and Plato called it the Great and Small, but whatever. Upshot is that what started out as a metaphysical discussion ends up getting bastardized into a dualistic sorting of the universe. Up, down; male, female; day, night; left, right; big, small; black, white; strong, weak; etc, etc.

Over the next few hundred or more years, the notion of this dualistic system began to cross-pollinate, you could say, so that what had been just "these are all the divisions of our dualistic world," became "stuff on this half is good, and stuff on the other side of the line is bad (or weak or unnatural or evil)" -- male is good, female is bad, male is strong, female is weak, day is good, night is feminine and weak, so on and so on. This also meshed nicely with Xtianity's developing dualistic undertones, as a mostly unrelated side-note about the metaphorical use of the expression "very god very man" being an indication of the christ-figure rising above our poor beleaguered dualistic world. And, a'course, the dualism continued all the way up to the Cartesian system and beyond.

Anyway, the black=evil wasn't actually all that far on the tails of any metaphysical discussions of the color, that is, the conflation of skin tone with color-associations, though over time it became more and more prevalent. It gets applied in a number of places over the past two millennia, in which to call someone evil (or unnatural or weak or sometimes even ultra-feminine) we call them 'black' -- you see stuff emphasizing how Jews are dark-skinned, swarthy, black black black emphasized, and of course the justification that black races are (insert all so-called bad halves of the dualistic system here, including 'savage' and 'inferior' and so on) and thus it's in their best interest to be colonized, enslaved, or both. Throw in some paternalistic colonialism here for good measure, and continue this black=bad, savage, inferior, weak (including weak-minded), animalistic (as opposed to human), blah blah blah up through all the centuries to now. Hell, it's even encoded in Mormonism, where in the original you can see the black/white dualism taken to its extreme (but an extreme that was very much the mindset of Smith's time in terms of how dark-skinned peoples were viewed).

I'm not a gamer but I have run across stories & games that use color-appellations outside the historical Western dualistic system -- like "blue" magic -- and you can probably see why, now. It stands outside the historical connotations, where we can't see "black" as simply "the absence of light" (or even as "the combination of all pigments", its other definition) -- it's entrenched with all these other layers of meaning, many of which are now resoundingly negative, or assumed to be so. Maybe after enough work in the opposite direction, black in-and-of-itself, will no longer have a negative meaning, but we're not there yet. So unless an author wants to tap into those additional meanings, it's best to start fresh. Plus in fiction & games, you may have POV characters working within that (blue, black, etc) system, and given the negative connotations, it's unlikely someone would really prefer a negative-laden label if they sincerely see their system as a positive, valid, and valuable option -- which is why folks I know these days, who practice magic and/or its modern equivalents, don't refer to themselves as black magicians*, but as "using the left-hand path". Reminds me of a history professor who came by my bookstore and while we were chatting I referred to myself as a heathen, and he said, "isn't that a lot like calling yourself an asshole?" -- because heathen has always been an insult, not a moniker one would adopt for one's self as a positive label. (Bwah.)

*with the exception of satanists, who are more likely to call themselves 'black magicians' with the specific purpose of claiming that 'black=evil, etc' half for their own, given their entire system is based upon -- and of which they are often quite proud -- a negation of someone else's system, and that in turn is why I don't consider satanists to be a separate religion/system so much as an inversion of Xtianity, so really they're just (inverted) Xtians, but still xtians all the same.

Western philosophy is like an old subway tunnel, really. Someone went in and slapped up some graffiti, and then someone else snuck in and added to it, and over time hundreds of graffiti artists adapted the original design and layered on top of it and altered things here and there, until it's almost impossible to see the original design without being influenced by the aeons of later edits, additions, and negations. Meanwhile, the rest of the populace sees it daily flashing past outside their subway-train window, never giving it much thought but used to the general shape overall, and thus vaguely familiar/aware but missing nearly all the nuances.

[reileen]

Western philosophy is like an old subway tunnel, really. Someone went in and slapped up some graffiti, and then someone else snuck in and added to it, and over time hundreds of graffiti artists adapted the original design and layered on top of it and altered things here and there, until it's almost impossible to see the original design without being influenced by the aeons of later edits, additions, and negations. Meanwhile, the rest of the populace sees it daily flashing past outside their subway-train window, never giving it much thought but used to the general shape overall, and thus vaguely familiar/aware but missing nearly all the nuances.

Holy crap, that is an excellent metaphor. And thanks for the brief history lesson - I was gonna go look up that stuff when I got time after seeing the one anon comment before mine, but you saved me some time. :)

[kaigou]

(Also, I just realized what you mean by finding the reply button -- WAH. That is bizarre. Working on that right now, put in a question with a better S2/LJ person than me, see if she can't figure it out for me. Just FYI.)

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, the white=good and black=bad trope. It may not be my least favorite trope, but it's definitely up there. It's one of the most god-awful simplistic tropes out there. Don't tell that to certain published, white authors out there though. You'll just be accused of of being oversensitive. I'm not thinking of Racefail at all. After all, it's not as if a lot mediocre fantasy fails utterly at dealing with race issues, now does it? I now refuse to continue reading any new books that use that dichotomy without questioning it or twisting it in some way.


signed

kellicat from LJ

[kaigou]

It's one of the most god-awful simplistic tropes out there. Don't tell that to certain published, white authors out there though. You'll just be accused of of being oversensitive.

Simplistic, I think, hits it on the head. It really does require that we bring along the cultural connotations to 'get' the meaning, and that's a meaning I don't see as inherent in the word itself. To me, that's just freaking lazy-ass writing, along with being horrendously racist.

And no, I wasn't thinking of RaceFail at all, gee, nope. *whistles* but I'll refrain from commentary because it's not really relevant to my post here, uhm, mostly. heh.

Being accused of being 'oversensitive' -- hah, I keep thinking, because in this story, the good/evil dualism doesn't even fit. They're all bad! That just makes it even more problematic that the less-bad witches are called White. It doesn't even make sense!

[genre-savvy.livejournal.com]

I'm not big on dichotomies to begin with because only having too sides makes things too easy, but the white=good vs. black=evil has always struck me as the stupidest of the lot. Of course, I read a lot of comic books, so white and primary colors, especially on a man, have long since become visual shorthand for "good," while black/secondary colors are usually "evil." This is deeply annoying, because I don't always realize that I'm doing it. I hate this stuff, but it's so ubiquitous that I've absorbed it without meaning to. Does this remind you of anything?

[genre-savvy.livejournal.com]

Only having *two* sides. Gah.

[kaigou]

I hate this stuff, but it's so ubiquitous that I've absorbed it without meaning to.

That's what makes deconstructing our assumptions so difficult, sometimes. Finding out one has absorbed a certain perspective or attitude -- especially when that attitude has negative associations, like sexism or racism or ableism -- gets a kneejerk reaction because (I think) it goes against our notion of self-determination to find out there were things we'd done unconsciously despite our conscious attempts to do the opposite. But I think that hinges on being able to accept that habitual or cultural acts are to some degree outside our control so long as we are unconscious of them, and that upon becoming conscious of them, we must struggle for awhile to remain conscious of them. Slipping backwards into habitual/cultural unconscious assumptions what I meant, in part, by sleeping with the status quo.

[multitudeofm]

Ah. Another thing I have not missed about reading UF.

Personally, I don't like such divisions at all.

Yeah, sometimes we do have monsters, and that's fine. But every UF world seems to have a Great Evil. Why? The world is shades of gray.

I'm starting to see just how much of my current project is a product of my disenchantment with UF.