*Scratches head* That’s a good point. I’m honestly not sure. Part of it in Firefly was how close together the two were in the timeline – final episode & movie. It just struck me as oddly unoriginal to give us another bounty hunter when we’d just had one, and bounty hunters weren’t exactly showing up right and left before that.

But I think I probably do notice it more when it happens to POC and women. Whether this is my racism or my recognition of the calculated racism the TV and film industries casually exhibit (“Everybody else has a Latina lesbian wedding planner character this season, so we need one too!”) is hard to say. Which is just further proof of how systemic it all is.

And yes, I’ve noticed the thing about good guys having American accents and bad guys having “other”. Star Wars is a great example of this.

I did also wonder if this character was intended to be the Jubal Early character and was rewritten because the actor wasn’t available, but I also have to ask myself … is that Joss Whedon’s subconscious racism or my own? If two white antagonists had been placed in Firefly and Serenity would it cross my mind to equate them? They are two such strikingly different characters.

(BTW my British co-workers did ask why all villains in American movies and TV have British accents and all heroes have American accents. I pooh-poohed any deep meaning to that until I noticed that the actor playing Apollo on BSG was British playing an American accent, while the actor playing Baltar was allowed to (in his words) use his own voice! )

I meant to add here “because those are the guest roles you have available”.

I agree with the initial post, but there’s one thing I feel compelled to bring up. Let’s say Whedon totally figured out his color-blindness, and what’s wrong with it, and how to improve it.

Would the industry let him?

I was taught in UCLA screenwriting classes: “That’s good, except your lead has to be a white male. Rewrite that, and it’ll be great. The audience doesn’t want anything but white males. Examples of successful lead females and lead POC, you say? La la la, we’re not hearing you.”

This extends to networks sending down “notes” about portrayals and casting. None of these network people suffer from color-blindness. Like Anna said, they think very calculatingly in terms of race, gender and other demographics, and it’s all “justified” by the fact that, hey, we’ve got to make a profit here and it’s not our fault the audience wants Mr. Whitey. (And if they don’t let anyone make a very visible experiment with alternate casting/portrayal theories, no one can ever prove that the audience might be ready for more.)

As for the two black bounty hunter characters, my suspicion is that they were intended to be the same one but Richard Brooks was unavailable for the movie. It would have perhaps been wise to go with a white male bounty hunter in Serenity to avoid any perception that POC are routinely nasty bounty hunters in this ‘verse… but then we run into another layer that I think impacts the problem: the sincere desire to cast good actors of color like you would good white actors can overwhelm one’s awareness that one is continually casting these good actors as victims or psychos or some other unnervingly consistent role.

None of which is intended as an excuse for anyone. Just further musing on all the factors that will have to change before we can see serious progress.

Funny thing (I’m American, non-white South Asian) but I spent some time working for a British company and discovered … to my amusement … that the attitude *there* was that to acknowledge an individual’s ethnicity as such was considered racist per se.

I got into it regarding a question of ham. Not ham as a code for anything. Literal ham.

An American company was releasing some new versions of ham to target market the Latino community and I wrote a document saying so and there was immediate hysterics about me making racist assumptions. I had to have the company in question fax my (white) English boss to say that indeed, that was precisely what they were doing. Even then he was deeply shocked. To single out a community because they might like a certain flavor of ham was enormously racist to him. I found this startling … after all we Americans are thoroughly used to that kind of marketing effort. If anything, an attempt to sell ham to the Latino community signified that the Latino community had *arrived* economically, right?

So the way race is treated in Whedon’s works … ie without comment … has always struck me as kind of British-influenced. I’m not saying it does not present it’s own set of problems (the UK is plenty racist).

I think that the recurring Black male characters (Wood, Mr. Trick, Gunn, etc.) were generally fleshed out in interesting and humane ways.

Gunn/Fred was good to watch. Kennedy/Willow as well (Iyari Limon is Latina). Personally I think it is healthy to show multiracial interactions where the audience isn’t necessarily beaten over the head with racial issues.

The slayers were generalyl pretty diverse. (By the middle of Buffy’s run, we’d seen 6 slayers total. 3 of them were Black, one was Chinese, and one of the white ones was crazy).

My biggest beef with Joss was how he portrays Latinos. the Buffy episode Incan Mummy Girl, and the Angel episode with the Mexican wrestlers were pretty disappointing. Other Latinos who appear on Angel tend to be really stereotypical cholo ganster types. The one ambiguously bright spot is Jasmine, played by Gina Torres (Black Cuban-American actress).

In terms of Firefly/Serentiy I was more intrigued than offended by Jubal/Book/the Operative. Maybe in this future there is some Black planet where folks are trained to be highly- skilled- and- deadly- but- philosophically- inclined assassins or agents. Even if you want to call that negative, it certainly isn’t stereotypical.