Metacolour and other matters

[winter]

I'll be acquiring a fyrie this evening for a week, so LJ presence will be sporadical (though I'm planning to post some backlogged fic). Still, I thought I might as well ramble now:

I've been following the kerfuffle over writing "characters of colour" on metafandom for the past few days, and my eyebrows have slowly headed upwards. Okay, I get the attitude of the "fans of colour" like thete1 - they look at fandom and even if there are characters from their own culture in the source material, those characters are underutilised or mischaracterised in fandom. I get this: I also squee each time someone in a creative work has Polish or Russian roots, and facepalm if said character is stereotyped.

What I don't get is the defensive attitude of the other side. The whole approach of "I don't write characters of colour because as a white person I can't write them". The hell? Last I checked, the fact no-one on LJ is an elf didn't stop a whole lot of great LOTR and Silmarillion fanfiction from being written. I'm not a man, but my characterisation of males has been praised by Actual Guys. We do this kind of thing all the time.

And yet, for some people skin colour is a different characteristic. Which might stem from oversensitivity and being guilt-tripped to hell, but seems kind of like a racist attitude to me. Why should skin colour matter at all?

What matters to me is the cultural background of a character. If writing Gunn, say, I'd consider the impact poverty had on his life, the vampires, and yes, being part of a minority that's discriminated against. But those are the exact same issues I consider when writing Dima, a Roma thief who will appear in Roses for Lucifer. And I don't assume I know exactly how to write someone just because they're white - for writing British characters I research that culture, for writing Spanish people I tackle their popular tropes. Culturally conditioned responses are what I'm interested in, not skin colour. The members of a certain culture might have a skin colour in common, or be conditioned to respond in a certain way to one, but it's just one characteristic among many.

I guess what I mean is this: if we let skin colour be the end-all and be-all for a "character of colour", that seems racist to me. We're all human, people.

And part of the Polish culture is drilling Latin sentences into pupils. One from Terentius has just occurred to me:

Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.

I am human: nothing human is strange to me.


And on that note, I'm going back to writing about a mad and repressed Austrian crown prince being molested by a graphomaniac vampire. Peace, all.

Comments

[fyrie.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that the race-thing was hugely different to that of Europe when I was over, which was really odd. I mean, I come from Scotland - not exactly cultural melting pot of the world, but the divide and the clinging to ethnic roots thing startled me a lot.

I've actually got a family friend from Ghana who was bitching out about black people in America, because they kept calling her "sister" and spouting garbled racism against the whites and going on about the oppression of their brothers in Africa when she was over there. She said it got to the point that she turned to them and said "excuse me, I am not your sister. I am not of your family. Just because I'm not white doesn't mean I want to be related to an idiot like you".

Babbling now. Better stop :)