July 6th, 2006
by
Laura Q
Following is a long post on my thoughts on Joss Whedon et al and race in the various Whedonverses. It’s an adaptation of a wanna-be post in response to a closed listserve, so I’m not crediting individuals for the most part with their observations, but just trying to respond to them. Feel free to own up in responses / comments to a point &/or I can put your name in at that point, but since the list is closed I’m privileging privacy over intellectual credit.
The post is essay-length, but still raw and clumsy like a list post or mail post. I think it’s better to put it out in the discussion rather than holding it out until it’s more definitive.
I’ll start by saying that my sense is that Joss in general suffers from white person color-blindness. My guess is he thinks that it’s okay, even progressive, to be “color-blind”. As is well-documented elsewhere (1, 2, 3, 4, just to pull out a few), white-privileged color-blindness in a racist and racialized world is regressive, not progressive. In order to not be complicit with historical and present racism, color-blindness doesn’t cut it.
There are lots of aspects to analyzing the “color blindness” fallacy, but there is one in particular which is significant to creators like Joss Whedon. Color blindness allows one to recognize talent, virtue, skill, beauty, in the ways that seem comfortable & familiar. It’s like just doing business over golf with the buddies — who just happen to be mostly/all guys. You didn’t mean to discriminate against women; it’s just that it’s fun and comfortable to do business with your friends, and your friends all look like you. To get beyond that, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and unfortunately I think Joss doesn’t.
For example, all the writers from the Whedonverse that I know of — saw on DVD commentaries etc. — are white. Joss recognizes talent in white people, because it is very similar to his; it’s the old-boys-network thing, you can better see the people who you are most comfortable with, most identify with — and if as a white person one doesn’t make a conscious effort to avoid it, those most-comfortable-with people will be white people. This isn’t conscious racism, but it’s the individual component of institutionalized racism.
This has been a thread throughout the Whedon creations — Buffy, Angel, Firefly, plus spin-offs. So I can get why one could just react with growing anger and then at a certain point just say “enough!”.
But I think overall Whedon has been getting better, and more conscious of race and class(*), and more sophisticated, and I’m glad of it. Unfortunately, while I’m pretty much 100% convinced of the problems, I’m only, say, 50% convinced of the progression. Probably because it’s slow and uneven; not even two steps forward and one backward; more like a half forward from a not great place, and a quarter backward. So progress is not always obvious. And I am certainly not immune to the Whedon white-fan rationalizations, because he does so many, many things right, and I am such a fan, and I speak from a position of white privilege on these issues — so perhaps I am not a trustworthy accountant. But wtf, I’m going to set out my analyses anyway, because I want these discussions to continue.
(*) This is mostly about race and ethnicity but it’s also a little about language and class and gender, because I think they’re all related. FWIW: I love Joss not least because he is very good (not perfect) on gender, but I think his greatness on gender is undermined by his inattention to consistent treatment of the major intersections of race and class. And he’s so damned good at dialog and characters and world-building that he could be perfect if he would just get his shit together. It’s very frustrating.
All that said, I think there are both ways in which Joss is better than he has been credited with being, and ways which I find even more problematic than have been discussed. I guess I’ll tackle them series by series and try to illustrate my take on Whedon. And, actually, the creators & crew of the Whedonverse; because it’s hard to tell always whether Whedon was the mind-in-charge of a particular casting or writing decision. But I’ll still call it Whedon for the most part, because he is ultimately responsible, and because if nothing else, he chose the creators, for their creative skills & worldview.
Buffy (1997-2003)
In season 3 Trick wryly observed that Sunnydale is almost wholly white. One commentator fingered exactly what that was: Basically, a post hoc by that episode’s writer or Joss (who often tweaked scripts), belatedly observing that Sunnydale is too white, and adding an explanation. It’s good because it acknowledges the issue and tries to reconcile it with reality. But I conclude that it is nothing more than a post hoc justification of the whitewashed world that was created by “color blindness”. Sunnydale was indeed a parody of a rich suburb but rich suburbs in California now have a lot of Asian people and some African-American and Latino people. This kind of post hoc rationalization shows up a lot among us Joss fans: trying to find a way to make the world make sense. The problem is that you can only make it make sense by taking into account the casting and writing choices of the shows’ creators. The casting and writing choices were largely white.
However, and it pains me to say this, Joss-and-crew did include a fair number of people of color as victims or villains. It pains me, because they stand out in my mind as the people who died the worst or most inappropriate deaths. I’ve thought about but never done a head/death-count so this is subjective, but I remember very clearly that Black male vampires were disproportionately flamed. This is beyond color-blindness and into willful racial insensitivity. Remember the Black preacher from the first Season 2 episode? Flaming is the gorier way to kill vampires, staking being the relatively cleaner & less gory method. Flaming involves digital melting often ending in a horrific view of the face, with bulging eyes and heat-seared flesh. There aren’t that many flaming deaths. Too many of them involve Black men (okay, vampires), and the deaths stood out to me as hideous. Insensitivity at the least; likely subconscious racism on the parts of, probably, myriad crew members. I wouldn’t peg this one on Joss-as-creator, actually, but on the individual writers. Joss still takes responsibility as producer for choosing writers who didn’t see these issues (I guess) and for not setting out the issues in a supervisorial fashion and because he is responsible, ultimately, for the shows.
There are so few Asian people in Buffy that the couple of random Asian victims really stand out for me. The young boy, a former classmate, that Harmony is bored with eating (beginning of Season 4). The young woman who is one of the first on the blood-factory-line in the Master’s horrible alternate world (Season 3). A diverse pool of victims is to be as desired as a diverse pool of villains, heroes, and sidekicks, but when the only or most diversity is to be found in the victims and villains one must see that something is going on.
Season 7 is more diverse in terms of slayers but still disproportionately white & American & English-speaking. I like to resist the post-hoc justifications that try to rationalize the world, but one could imagine that this is because, well, they’re in the US and it’s easier to locate the potential slayers in the US. But no, it’s actually because Whedon et al didn’t make an effort to make the slayer-pool representative of the world. Props for Willow’s new girlfriend Kennedy, who I think might have been the first ethnically Latina/o character on Buffy. But Kennedy had no demonstrated ethnic identity — which again I think reflects Whedon’s color blindness.
(I’m not doing an exhaustive inventory of the Whedonverse people of color and people not of color. Just pulling out the examples that struck me, during my multiple watchings, and readings on the matter. If you, Gentle Reader, have counter-examples, please give them.)
Angel (1999-2004)
I think Joss did a better job on Angel in terms of race, although Gunn made me wince at first. His character was a revisitation of Trick — playing on an ethnic stereotype to generate a character. One could argue that Joss always plays with stereotypes to generate characters: Cordelia, Buffy, etc. But they were always transformed in really deep ways. Joss tried to do this with Gunn, and I actually really liked the knowing transformation of Gunn into a lawyer: the PTBs or evil Senior Partners (whichever) said that Gunn had the most unused potential, which I took (perhaps reading too much into it) as an acknowledgement in more ways than one. So Gunn was initially a ham-handed intrusion of an attempt to be diverse, but evolved into something that at least recognized that something was going on.
The conniving Asian lawyer — I worried, briefly, about an Asian character being so sneaky, but I ended up thinking that it was a benign effect of “color-blind” casting. All the Wolfram & Hart lawyers were sneaky, and hell, I want diversity among protagonists as well as antagonists. (I had to laugh about the working-class kid, whatsisname, being recruited from Hastings Law School initially to work in the mailroom. You know, the evil white guy lawyer who is the first W&H lawyers we see, in the first Angel episode.)
Buffy & Angel (1997-2004)
Interracial relationships on both Angel & Buffy. I would have liked them much better if Whedon et al hadn’t been so hamhanded with race in other ways. In that context, the relationships between Principal Wood & Buffy then Faith, and between Gunn & whatsername seemed like Whedon attempting to prove how race-blind he is.
In fact, the interracial relationships felt the same as Willow’s lesbianism: forced to make a point. (I know I’m probably going to piss someone off here.) The fact that the point is a good one and one I support (increased representation of same-sex and interracial relationships) and done pretty well (acknowledging but not dwelling, and therefore naturalizing; fit into the storyline very well; etc.) (pretty well, but not perfectly, but that’s a point for another time) doesn’t mean that it doesn’t stand out as a little forced. And the *reason* it stands out as forced is because these relationships are in fact used to score points, they’re token representations, and they stand out among other representations.
I say these interracial & same-sex relationships seemed forced to me, despite the fact that Joss has said of the Gunn/Fred relationship that he put them together because they had such great chemistry together. I don’t know about that. I don’t trust laying character decisions off on things that can’t be quantified or described objectively. I think chemistry can be a stand-in for just about anything. Maybe there is a real thing such as chemistry, but I’m not persuaded of the chemistry here. To the extent that I think chemistry means something real (dilating pupils, quicker breathing, other subconscious cues of actual phsyical attraction that a viewing audience can pick up) then, to me, I felt Faith & Wood had reasonable chemistry but I’m not convinced about Fred & Gunn, or Buffy & Wood for that matter.
(If I compare the other major interracial relationship, Zoe & Wash, it feels a lot less forced. Maybe because it’s accepted going in to the series. Wood wasn’t incredibly well fleshed out so that may have hampered the Buffy flirtation. Or maybe it was just that you KNEW a real SoCal girl like Buffy would have had *some* thoughts about Wood’s race. Possibly, it’s something in me, reacting to white woman/black man versus black woman/white man. But I don’t think so. I think Zoe/Wash was treated differently than B/W and F/G. F/W seems different too. It would be fruitful to look at this more in detail.)
The funny thing is that I read these relationships as Joss’s attempt to enact color-blindness and non-hetero-normativity; to naturalize interracial and same-sex relationships. But because he doesn’t fully get how his own “color blindness” in terms of casting, picking writers, etc., affects his stories, these relationships don’t work to naturalize the relationships; they make them stand out more as “progressive” relationships in the non-progressive world he creates.
There’s nothing wrong with creating a fictional world that is progressive or not, racist or sexist or not. But whatever you do, it needs to make sense. If it takes place in today’s world then interracial and same-sex relationships make real impacts on real people’s lives because of racism and homophobia. If it takes place in another or future world where racism and homophobia don’t exist — well, then, I’d like to know how we got there from here, and it better damn well be internally consistent. As one writer I know on a list has said several times, if the world of the future is white, she wants to know what was the plague that wiped out everyone else, and what other effects it had on society.
If the world is not internally consistent, if it depicts a whitewashed world, if it ends racism and sexism and homophobia without ever nodding to the fact that they used to exist or shaped the current world, if it does any of these things then it’s a problem, and not a problem that can be solved with suspension of disbelief. In the racialized and politicized world in which these works are created and consumed, the problematically unrealistic depictions of race, racism, sexism, etc., in a fictional world cannot help but be read as idealization of, normalization of, or advocacy for that flawed world. So the “show it, don’t discuss it” strategy of showing a socially penalized relationship but not showing the social penalties (the homophobic or racist responses) is just not effective. Or rather, it is probably effective in some small ways, but it is counterproductive in other ways, that neutralize its effectiveness as a progressive maneuver.
BuffyVerse / Fray (2003)
Because we’re talking a lot about Joss Whedon, I think it’s worth looking at Fray. To me, Fray is a negative illustration of the problem of color-blindness in live-action casting — meaning, the problem of color-blind attitudes in live action casting goes away in a drawn novel. So Fray is the progressive color-blind attitude in caricature. Fray is a woman of color, but she’s not raced, because race doesn’t exist in the color blind world.
Fray is created out of Joss’s imagination, where he can live a color-blind life, and not confront actual people of color in casting choices. He doesn’t have to try to translate across a lens of race (because trying to be color-blind is not the same as actually being color-blind) to see human performances. Rather, he can create the human performance in his own head. The perfect opportunity to create a raceless person of color. Looking at Fray this way leads one nicely into Firefly/Serenity, which, as a far-future world gave him some of that same cover — here’s a person of color with no racial identity or problems; it must be because in this far-future SF world, how do you know what race will look like?
Again — the same problem. Where did race prejudice go and why? Color blindness is a pleasant progressive fantasy but that blindness to reality is a product of privilege, and is ultimately counterproductive in terms of neutralizing racism.
Firefly / Serenity (2002, 2005)
A lot of the criticism of race and ethnicity in the Firefly ‘verse has come in part because Joss broke it more open than most media sf futures have done. (I would suggest “Dark Angel” as a rare exception.) But it illustrates the problem that I think comes with color-blindness: it creates inconsistency in the world-building, which is a flaw in any creation.
Language & History
In the Firefly ‘verse, everyone speaks Mandarin (sometimes; badly), but nobody looks ethnically Chinese — and because it is way more tempting to do the post hoc rationalizations about the universe in a science fiction context. (“Well maybe everyone has intermarried so there isn’t race any more.” Or “Maybe it’s the upper-class people who are Chinese.”) The fact is that the regular cast doesn’t have ethnically Chinese people, and very few of the speaking extras (maybe none, I would have to think back) are ethnically Chinese, and even in the super-diverse planetary marketplace/crowd scenes, they don’t follow any conceivable ethnic distribution pattern that one would expect given the current South Asian/Asian population distribution (what, 50% of the world?). (Hell, if nothing else, the US half of a 50/50 US-Sino future should probably be about 75% Latino, Black & Asian.)
Joss said that the Chinese influence came in large part from his wife, who lived or taught in China or something. It’s clear to me that he wanted to make the future ethnically diverse in a way that would be surprising. Surprising to whom, is a possible issue: Clearly he’s not addressing the Chinese audience; he’s addressing the US or English-speaking sf audience, and possibly a white audience. But it shows that he’s thinking about ethnicity & nationality & language. I expect and believe from what I’ve seen that his vision would be more successfully bilingual than what he was able to actually do on US TV, and this is an area where I cut him some slack in terms of getting a program on TV. Maybe I’m too forgiving, but I don’t think he could have gotten any substantial amount of Mandarin, with or without subtitles, on the show. I would have liked to have seen it, though, his characters talking with the presumably 30-70% of the world that speaks Mandarin, not English, as first language. My own post hoc / rational world rationalization for the main characters is that the story follows primary-English speakers (b/c the audience is primarily English-language) and that the universe still has ethnic/linguistic divisions. But that doesn’t explain how there are no primarily Mandarin-speaking worlds that we’ve seen; that can only be explained, I think, by decisions outside of the framework of the story — casting, writing, practicality, and/or racism.
Casting
The cast is more successfully multi-racial than any other cast Joss has had. A third of the cast — Book, Zoe, and Inara — are visibly not white. Also, Joss said that he had originally wanted to cast the Tams as Asian (or maybe it was just Simon he wanted to cast as Asian, I don’t quite recall. I’ll have to watch them again to know!). But that the actor for Simon was just right for the part. Summer Glau, who plays River, was with Joss on Angel, so I’m not sure I’m remembering the casting discussion correctly. I kind of like having white people with Asian names; it’s just that, again, without Asian people it kind of stands out, and makes the world internally inconsistent.
Casting decisions are not race-free exercises in recognizing talent. It’s hard to pick apart any one casting decision, and maybe impossible. All you can do is look at the overall composition and say that there’s a trend and something is wrong with the trend, and the wrongness is probably present to some degree in most or all of the individual casting decisions. I would just say that it’s easy to recognize talent in your comfort zone, and if whiteness is part of your comfort zone, then it’s easy to recognize talent in its various forms in faces that read white. And, if you’re going to push your conception of a character beyond its preconceived notions, then I imagine it’s easier to push it in one direction at a time. So as casting, someone comes in and plays a character in some way you’re not anticipating. Your responses: “Hey, maybe this character should be really femmey, not really butch” might be easier if you’re not also stepping outside your race comfort zone. By comparison, “Hey, maybe this character can be Latino *and* fey, instead of a kick-ass butch white guy” might be a more difficult leap to make.
Characterization
The casting is one thing; the characterization is another. Joss’s Firefly characters may be multiracial, but it’s just skin color, because of Joss’ color blindness & believe that you should normalize, not discuss. None of them have issues with their skin color. One wonders: has racism gone away? But that seems so unlikely in a world rife with classism and sexism. In fact, if one insists on the unnatural reading of the ‘verse as a verse in which racism, unlike classism and sexism, has gone away, then that poses a real problem for the one thing that we can mostly agree on: Joss’s feminism. Because if racism has gone away, but not sexism, then that suggests that gender bias is somehow more deeply-rooted or inherent. But it strains credulity to read the ‘Verse that way. The ‘Verse is much more suggestive of Whedon & crew’s take on politics: generally progressive, comfortable with feminism, interested in but a little clueless about class, and deeply uncomfortable with dealing with race and racism. So the racelessness of the people of color is the white boy version of racial utopia: color-blindness, where we can all just appreciate each other for the color/texture of our skin and hair. The color-blindness of not wanting to deal with it. Hey, maybe that’s a good vision for everyone (it’s not my utopia but I don’t think I’d be looking to change or leave such a place), but you have to make some nods to consistency if you’re implementing it — make it consistent with your view of sexism and classism and exploitation, make it consistent with the history of the ‘Verse, make it consistent with the cast, etc.
The characters apparently all have non-racial identities, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not racially figured. Zoe, as a kick-ass warrior woman, I adore. But I am not blind to the fact that a lot of white boys like to have a Black Warrior Woman in their work to demonstrate how cool they are with the race thing. The weird thing to me is that it’s so deeply problematic and emblematic of white boy issues, at the exact same time that it is hugely empowering and exciting. Typical of these difficult issues, maybe. Having a Black Warrior be a woman is less threatening to white people. Making the warrior woman Black further exoticizes her and taps into stereotypes of Blackness as wild, primitive, fierce, and stereotypes of Black women as butch. These are general issues with stereotyped exotic characters, and not necessarily appropriate to each instance of those characters, of course; Zoe is her own character, because Joss is actually really good with characterization in terms of personality (just not so much with figuring out characterization in terms of social aspects of race/class). The deadly-but-beautiful Asian martial artist/assassin seems to me to have very much the same issues.
Book is a preacher, the magical negro. He has considerable more complexity than that, but it’s too unexplored. I would say that about all the characters though — perhaps not surprising in an ensemble cast of 9 with only 13 episodes and one movie. We *only* know the background of the Tams, and the war background of Zoe & Mal. We know nothing about any other background of any of the other characters.
Inara, one could complain about the fact that a mixed ancestry (possibly South Asian) actress has a geisha/Asian-sex-arts-based character. I cut Whedon et al little slack here because the universe feels consistent to me in its depiction of companions — they are multiethnic and multitraditional as one would expect. Maybe it makes more sense because, as sketchy as it is, it is more fleshed out than most aspects of the ‘Verse’s society.
Deep breath. Here is the thing that bothers me the most; especially in context with earlier discussions about flaming Black male vampires. The saddest thing for me about Serenity was the bounty hunter. A great actor, a great concept, but — The Serenity bounty hunter is virtually the same character as the bounty hunter in the last episode of Serenity. And given the fact that they are both solo bounty hunters, with special skills, secret, uniquely menacing, likeable in their own crazy ways, etc. — with all those similarities the fact that they are both Black men cannot be a coincidence. I would like to believe it is, because I would like to believe my progressive narrative of Joss Whedon’s consciousness on race and racism. But I can only conclude that Joss et al felt that the Blackness was an intrinsic part of the menace in those characters. And it’s got to be Joss, because these are critical stories and critical characters.
That kills me, because why? Why, if you have the skills to create such fascinating and deep characters, and you have the access to the really talented actors to play them, why why why did you exercise that talent and access in a way that I can only read as racially coded to play on the menacing Black man thing? Unlike most of the color-blindness, this is willful stupidity, or a knowing attempt to cash in on the stereotype. I find that deeply problematic. It was problematic at the end of Firefly, but you think, well, TV show, multiple villains, diversity in the cast of villains, etc. But to duplicate that character for the movie says to me that there is something much more fundamental and much more serious going on with Joss and race.
Humans Are the Other
I really like what Joss has done in his ‘verse of keeping all the people, people. He has said that there are enough monsters and aliens within humanity that there is no need to make them up. To me, this is about race. (edit for clarity: To me, when universes move the monsters & the Otherness & the problematic traits of humanity, outside of humanity and onto alien species, this is about race. Avoiding that problem — of literally racializing character difference — is one of the things I like about Joss.) As others have pointed out, Star Trek & Bab 5 have largely made “other species” a stand-in for races. I find that entire move to be really troubling. People argue back and forth over whether the Ferengi are racist depictions of Jewish people, for instance. This is actually not that bothersome to me, largely because I think the question it presupposes (“Is the ‘other’ species a faithful non-racist depiction of a race/group of people?”) just doesn’t work, and my problem is with the creation of these species to begin with.
I’m very troubled by the move, itself, of creating an “alien” species/race that is intended to represent some set of human traits, whether represented by an ethnic or religious or racial subgroup or not. The entire notion of having a “violent” species (Klingons) or a “philosophical” species or a “gentle” species (or a blonde toga-wearing species) is, to me, an offensive working-out of the view that there are “types” within humans, including a normative middle type. The presumed normative middle type is the one that all the writers and viewers and cast members are supposed to be part of, or supposed to be trying to be part of. All the struggles over “what is humanity” that Data, the bucket-of-liquid guy from DS9, 7 of 9, the half-humans undergo, are really “what is normal humanity”; how do I learn to “feel” like a normal human. There is something useful in this exploration, I’m sure, but to me it feels like a very conservative narrative of people having an essential identity and having to learn to overcome it to fit in.
And other species are all uniform with no internalized “racism” based on headshape or whatever — this also annoys me. It’s refusing to see diversity within the “other”. “Don’t all [big category like "Asian"] people think/look/dress alike?” “They” wouldn’t have diversity within their group; diversity is just what is other/not-me on the categories I think are important — arggh. (Oh yeah except for the Very Special Episodes where a culture’s treatment of gender or slavery provides a great teaching moment.) Well, I could go on with my problems with bumpy-headed aliens as depictions of “other” but this is enough to give an idea of why I have a distaste for the bumpy-headed aliens.
I think the externalizing-human-attributes-onto-other-species happens in part because liberal / progressive white writers want to create a color-blind future without doing the hard work of tackling race or racism on the show or in the universe’s history. Externalizing evil in this way makes it easier for SF writers to then unify humans, because humans, despite their racial & gender & sexual & class differences, are all HUMAN, in comparison with the Klingons or whatever. But as Le Guin showed in The Lathe of Heaven, that’s such a cheap way to get humanity unified that it makes one wonder whether it’s even worth it.
By comparison, Joss Whedon’s Firefly ‘verse gave me a lot of hope, because he doesn’t externalize human qualities and traits and diversity in the Firefly ‘verse. They are there to be struggled with, potential problems. I think he *could* take on race in the Firefly ‘verse and I wish he would! It wouldn’t feel unnatural and weird; it would feel right. Even his Buffy & Angel verse didn’t externalize evil & human qualities in the way that Star Trek does — as soon as he created races of demons and vampires he started peopling them up. (Although there’s a lot of analysis that could be done with the demons/vampires and the ways they’re present the same problematics as bumpy-headed aliens.)
I guess I remain hopeful for Joss Whedon, then, for these two primary reasons: (1) I do see a progressive narrative in how he’s cluing into race/ethnicity/linguistic diversity. Am I rationalizing or making it up? (2) The worlds he’s created, while they don’t handle all issues well, seem open to handling issues well. It wouldn’t be internally inconsistent to have them growing and handling issues beyond what they do already; they are not inherently racist, not structurally defective (like bumpy-headed aliens). Again, I wonder if I’m rationalizing.
Some of what I’ve written here is stuff I’ve been thinking about for as long as I’ve been into Whedon (winter of 2002/03)!!!! But some of it is fairly new, synthesized and in response to all the very good discussions and points on the list discussions and in the recent related/relevant blogosphere discussions. I’m fairly confident about my sense of Whedon et al as intentionally and problematically color-blind, and the various examples I give. But I’m somewhat less confident of my sense of the overall progressive arc and how it all relates to bumpy-headed aliens, and the relation between various oppressions/hierarchies (class, race, sex, sexually confirming behavior, appearance). So I may well be rationalizing because, goddammit, I really love what Whedon et al does. I just want him to do it better.
PS – Back in the Real World
Of course there have been excellent media groups monitoring the whitewashing of TV for years. I commend to anyone interested in these issues some of these groups (some may be out of date; it’s been a few years since I worked on this issue) — GLAAD (gay & lesbian alliance against defamation), Screen Actors Guild (SAG) collections of statistics on ethnic & minority actors, NAACP‘s media diversity work, Asian Pacific American Media Coalition (APAMC), Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA), National Hispanic Media Council (NHMC), National Assn of Minority Media Executives (NAMME), Children’s Media Project work on diversity & representations of women & minorities in children’s programming, Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), UNITY (Journalists of Color), ADC (American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee), Media Access Project, and FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). whew! In the legal scholarship world Len Baynes looks at FCC minority/race issues; he’s not alone but is my favorite.
This is not just a matter of available pools of actors, economics of tv, etc., but very much a structured regulatory choice on the part of conservative rich white men (Republicans). Back in the day the FCC had diversity policies that made TV stations look at who they hired and what they broadcast; and we got shows like Sanford & Sons, The Jeffersons, etc. Yeah, okay, oblivious to race other than as a Black/White thing, but still. The attack on affirmative action that we’ve all heard about in the context of schools has been playing out just as importantly in attacks on affirmative action policies in federal regulatory agencies like the FCC (US Federal Communications Commission). So we don’t have any real affirmative action policies requiring the airwaves to represent the public interest or look like the public or include the voices of a representative portion of the public. Everything is “color blind”. The ownership rules that were changed to permit greater consolidation also negatively impacted diversity, both of subject-matter and ownership. The loss of the fairness doctrine impacted diversity of subject-matter and content.
And the reason we have all those decisions is that all those court-packing judicial nominations that Reagan, Bush I and Bush II have done have been aimed not just at the Supreme Court but at the D.C. Circuit which handles most of the litigation aimed at FCC, EPA, and other federal agencies.
retiring now to silence
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Laura Q at
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I agree with your writing about Joss Whedon, however I noted a change with the last season of Buffy, much of his work on Angel, and in respect to his work on Firefly and Serenity…at least in terms of casting. What goes on behind the scenes is another issue and really needs to be addressed by Hollywood. But while we are on the issue of race…have you seen the new movie Superman Returns? 2 minorities share 3 lines in the whole film. The person I saw the movie with was heart broken, and kept pointing this out to me. Someone else I know is boycotting the film. The movie is almost 3 hours long, and is almost entirely ethnically cleased of minorities. This isn’t Superman…at least not the way it is supposed to be! This is Superman if the nazis won World War II. This is Superman, if the South won The Civil War! They spent close to 300 million dollars on this film and couldn’t get something as simple as the casting right? I mean, it would have been nice to see the real world reflected for a change. To witness an Asian doctor…a Latino astronaut…a Black reporter, etc., in the film with speaking parts. But no…racism crept into the casting office and the executive office suites at Warner Brothers. And if things were that bad in front of the camera on the film…you can imagine what kind of utter and complete ethnic cleansing went on behind the camera! The world that Superman Returns to plays like a place where an ethnic genocide has occurred…And there’s nothing super, or heroic about it! Superman is wearing a KKK pillow case as a mask! He’s no hero…he’s a bully and a racist! The “S” on his chest stands for segregation!
I haven’t seen Superman — this is good to know.
As for Joss Whedon — yes, I think I too sensed a change for the better, but I’m not 100% convinced. But it’s nice to hear some confirmation from elsewhere, too.
Just wanted to mention that Morena Baccarin, the actress who plays Inara, is Brazilian. I’m not sure what her racial identity is, but it’s likely that she has ancestry from at least two continents.
I have a lot more to say, when I get a chance.
I’m going to concentrate on Firefly because I know it better than Angel and Buffy, and it’s my favorite of the three. I think that a lot of my interpretation of race in Firefly has to do with my own ideas about what might happen to race in the future, to wit: It seems highly unlikely that 500 years in the future the same racial categories will exist as in contemporary US. It also seems highly likely that the concept of race, or something similar, will exist.
What I think is most ludicrous (and you see this in Star Trek and other film/tv sf all the time) is a society that doesn’t seem to have any racial barriers, but that also is made up of people who are all racially identifiable according to our contemporary racial categories — that is, despite the purported lack of social barriers, there is apparently not a lot of (ahem) physical mixing going on. An example from a Firefly episode would be the one in which River almost got burned at the stake: there was a small, insular group of people who looked homogenously white, except for one very black woman. In small communities, it just doesn’t work that way — after a few generations, people look pretty much alike.
If you took the entire human species and mixed thoroughly, there would be a few people as “white-looking” as (for example) Mal, but most people would not fall into any of the racial categories we use now. One question in thinking about the future is whether you want to assume increasing mixing or not. Casting a show with nearly all ethnically ambiguous actors would be a nightmare. If that’s what Joss was aiming for (and I don’t know that it was), then it would have been very difficult to do a good job of it over the life of the series.
I have more to say, but I fear that this comment will have to come in installments.
I’m new to your blog having come here via a link to this entry. You’ve certainly given me much to think about. I accept, on the whole, your argument that colour blindness can be regressive but I question how you’ve applied it to Buffy and Angel (Firefly/Serenity no so much – though I feel unable to quibble when we got on;ly 13 episodes of something that was intended to have a 7 season run).
You invite counter examples of people of colour in Buffy. I’m not sure whether to class these as further or counter, but I’m wondering how might you fit into your analysis
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Forrest – Riley’s friend we saw plenty of him. He became evil but I found him neither unrealistic nor stereotypical – and far more believable than Riley’s other mate Graham.
Olivia – did you discount Giles’ girlfriend because she was British?
Kendra – Her portrayal bugged me -especially the accent. I thought she was somewhat clumsily handled and her death a little unrealistic (how come Drusilla didn’t do that to everyone). On the other hand I wonder how much different things might have been if Bianca Lawson had accepted/been able to accept the role of Cordelia.
Daniel Dae Kim is the actor who portrayed Gavin Park (the W&H lawyer). Given Joss Whedon’s propensity to reemploy the actors who give good performances on his shows I imagine (just my guess) that he would have wanted to take him to Firefly if he hadn’t been snapped up by other shows (Enterprise, ER, 24 the movie Crash and now Lost) after his death and zombiness on Angel.
Interracial relationships
There were plenty albeit not literal in the everyday sense. All you have to do is see the vampires, werewolves, demons and general ‘others’ as symbols of race. If we the audience, however we self identify, identify with any one of the main teenage characters we sooner or later deal with some kind of ‘forbidden love’ or in Xanders case the decided non exotic interactions with a foreign love interest of the week in that hark back to Captain Kirk way.
Buffy/Angel; Buffy/Spike; Willow/Oz; Xander/Anya and also in a more literal rendering Cordelia/Doyle and Doyle/Harry (his ex wife) all fall into this category. We never did see Lorne get it on and I’m not sure what that says (fears of accusations of bestiality perhaps!!)
I would have been very angry if, despite the growing up she had done over the previous 6 seasons Buffy had voiced concerns about Principal Wood’s race. I would have felt let down by the writers. I saw Buffy/Wood as a mislead designed to tease the US audiences; by which I mean US audiences in particular because white woman/black male pairings seem to be more of a ‘taboo’ in the US than in any of the countries I’ve lived in (we have our own versions of racial prejudice and constructs and current day interracial relationships do not seem to attract the same attention that they do in the US – a point which Giles/Olivia was perhaps intended to highlight).
The shows are watched in many parts of the world. Watching Buffy from outside the US I completely skip by any question of whether Sunnydale is a realistic depiction of a small Californian town. How would I know? Plus, it has a hellmouth, vampires, a huge numbers of demons and an enormous death toll – how realistic can it be? I don’t think I expect the surface of a US to reflect my life and I go straight to the storytelling, the relationships and the interactions. Oh, and the allegory and metaphor!
As for Gunn/Fred, I felt they did have chemistry and though I found aspects of their relationship annoying or amusing it was in a ‘roll your eyes at the love birds’ kind of way.
You say
How about the fate suffered in the Selfless (Buffy season 7) by Rachel, played by Jennifer Shon. She is the Asian girl whose humiliation prompts Anya to cause the deaths in the frat house that lead D’Hoffryn to say “It’s like somebody slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog”. I certainly read her humiliation as having a racial element that reflected the attitude of the frat boys to not only women but asian women.
There were also several episodes which addressed ‘mixed’ relationships and in most cases they showed social penalties.
Hero (Angel 1:9) where you get Cordelia denying the SoCal girl attitude/prejudice that both the audience and Doyle attribute to her.
Are you now or have you ever (Angel 2:2) and the impact on the character Judy suffers for trying to ‘pass’
Wild at Heart (Buffy 4:6) where Willow loses Oz to one of his own kind. She’s conscious that at first that they don’t share a musical culture – and then realises later that there are things that Oz and Veruca have in common that she will never understand.
A couple of other points. I find your discomfort with Chiwetel Ejiofor as The Operative odd. Jubal was not one, he was a bounty hunter. If we are to imagine anyone from Firefly as an operative it would be Book (though he could have been something much more senior than that).
The Operative had more in common with the ‘hands of blue’ guys and the Alliance ship commanders or Inara’s female client than he did with Jubal (apart from his blackness). In the comics that link the TV show to the movie he takes over when the independent contractors Dobson (the Alliance guy from the pilot) and the blue handed guys fail. I read nothing into these two men being black except that the comic ends with a black hand holding a picture of River. The fans can wonder if there’s to be a return of Jubal – but goodness, no, there is in fact more than one good black actor available!
So much is in the eye of the beholder. I was already aware of CE as an actor. When I first saw the trailer the cliché that sprang to mind was that of the antagonist having a British accent!
Well that’s more than enough. I came to your blog via Whedonesque where the thread for your link http://whedonesque.com/?comments=10799
has generated heaps of discussion. It also contains some references to various articles about vampires, werewolves and monsters representing different ‘others’.
Thanks for putting this essay up – it’s made me question whether I’m being an apologist for Joss on questions of race. I’m not sure of the answer there but I enjoy the shows too much to beat myself up about it.
Just because I don’t want it to get lost in the above post: There’s a lot of discussion at whedonesque. Still working through the thread; at some point in the next few days I’ll try to respond to the points that made me think.
A few really quick points:
1) Hey SoddingNancyTribe, I can’t post to Whedonesque but drop me a line – I think I may know who you are but can’t be sure from the pseudonym. Mod3? You can use lquilter at feministsf.org or any of the other old email addresses you may have for me.
2) Tiresome: Yes, Joss is better than many other directors; Yes, I love Joss. I didn’t go picking out Joss to tackle on race; it was just that over many, many viewings of Whedonverse adventures some things kind of struck me. The fact that I am a Joss fangirl does not immunize him from criticism. It makes him *worthy* of criticism.
Being criticized is not a bad thing. It is a good thing, because it’s an opportunity for growth. It can be painful, and it can be wrong sometimes — like maybe I’ve been wrong in some of my guesses on the motivation and reasoning behind the Whedon team — but I gotta think that it’s helpful in all cases to know how people are taking your work. So if I like Joss’ work, then I want him to know the areas where I think he could stand to improve.
3) Critiques about sloppiness of my writing: Thanks for all the writing tips, professors. (Especially Professor Red-Ink on Whedonesque, who was laugh-out-loud patronizing. Not necessarily wrong, just incredibly patronizing.) If/when I ever work this into a more formal piece of writing I’ll keep all these interesting critiques in mind. (FWIW I think of blogging more as conversation than formal writing.)
As for lack of familiarity with the material, no, that’s wrong, I’m actually familiar — way too familiar — with the material. (Though probably not as familiar as many of the folks @ Whedonesque.) I just suck at names. And I didn’t bother to look up Lindsey’s name (which always slips my mind for some reason) because this was a conversational piece.
4) Responding to & adding a couple of specific examples/counterexamples. First of all, my initial post didn’t attempt an exhaustive cataloging of all the people of color / people not of color. It was just examples that struck me as particularly wrong or off, or occasionally, in response to someone else’s critique, as not as particularly wrong or off as someone else had said. That said, a few others got mentioned on Whedonesque & above.
a) Some people freaked out because i said that the Operative and the Bounty Hunter were essentially the same character, and pointed out their many differences in fighting style/career/personality. (Basically, “You just think that because they’re both black.”) Please. As my friends and I used to say when describing a distinction without a difference, “Operative, Bounty Hunter; Santa Claus, Jesus.” Hell, yeah, I totally noticed that both of them were black men, because it is impossible to not notice it, if you are in the US and have any race consciousness (good or bad) at all. Both of them are the central antagonist. The Bounty Hunter was just one antagonist in one episode; but he really stood out as a character. I would say only Niska stood out as much as a villain. (Saffron was more of a comic relief kind of villain.) Between Niska and the bounty hunter, the bounty hunter stood out just a little more for me because of the dvd commentaries, where Joss talked about the centrality of this episode summing up his vision of the series, and therefore a good one to finish on. That and as one Whedonesque commenter pointed out, the congruence between the last thing you see in Firefly and the first thing you see in Serenity. (No, the comic doesn’t count; it’s just filler and there wasn’t even really a stand-out villain.) So the characters were central villains; and they were uniquely inscribed as menacing; and menacing to a “little girl” (who is white or sort of white).
b) Kendra. Two possible things to bring up with Kendra, that I see: One that she was an ineptly drawn person of color; two that she was killed off. I agree with but cut Joss some slack on the first, and race didn’t stand out for me as a factor in the method or fact of killing her off. I think Kendra was an early attempt of Joss’ to be more diverse. Killing her served the plot. And also I think people weren’t drawn to her as a character — she didn’t resonate enough. Possibly because she wasn’t given enough screen time, but she just wasn’t a hugely interesting character — we already had someone who was shy & awkward with boys (Willow); we already had a cute girl who kicked ass (Buffy); we already had someone who was a little pompous & know-it-all to antagonize and annoy Buffy (Giles, Cordelia). And while it would have been interesting to develop her history, the responses of her people who apparently knew & honored slayers, that sort of thing, it wasn’t done. So Kendra didn’t stand out as a character. Contrast with Buffy & Faith: Faith was also brought on as a short-term character, like Kendra. But Faith had chemistry with Buffy, because Faith pushed Buffy in a different direction. So I think Kendra was actually a good-faith effort on Joss’ to be more diverse, both ethnically and linguistically (although interesting isn’t it with the weird/bad accent again! like in Firefly), and for plot & character reasons it didn’t develop. I know some folks will say I’m giving Whedon et al too much credit here: That had they worked harder on Kendra they could have made her work. That’s probably true, but I give them credit for making the good faith attempt, as they do with many characters, and responding to what works and what doesn’t. That doesn’t mean there’s not an affirmative obligation to go further.
c) Forrest & Olivia (Buffy s.4) and Gavin (Angel) don’t really shift my analysis all that much. I think they show that Joss makes a good faith attempt to create diversity in cast; but doesn’t handle race & ethnicity particularly realistically. Not once was the race of any of those characters ever mentioned or acknowledged by themselves or anyone else. The Buffy world showed people dealing with sexism, but almost never dealing with racism. (I’m going to do a counterexample in one minute). Female characters were not just inscribed as female, they had to confront what that meant to them. But characters of color were visually described as such with no attempt at all to deal with what that mean for them in terms of identity. In the real world, individual people of color may or may not want to be treated as representatives of an ethnicity in a given situation; sometimes they want to and sometimes they are forced to whether they want to or not. But in the Whedonverse, individual people of color largely have no ethnic identity at all.
d) Gunn & Fred’s relationship – I *liked* having Gunn have a relationship with Fred, plot-arcwise, and in terms of representing greater diversity of relationships on TV, and even in terms of how the lack of jealousy was presented in S.5. I just felt it seemed a little forced. So my problem is not the relationship; it’s that such a relationship felt forced, in light of the lack of realistic treatment of race and ethnicity elsewhere in the Buffyverse. I raised the chemistry argument because Joss himself brought it up to explain the relationship. (DVD commentary.) I think chemistry is a little easier to say or believe than, “I did it to have more interracial relationships on TV,” although I would have been fine, happy, even, if he had said that he did it to have more interracial relationships on TV. Again I think of the Willow/Tara relationship. I think that was forced, too. The writers & cast have talked a lot more about that, but the story I get seems very muddled: Sometimes it’s talked about as an intent to increase representation, sometimes not so much. (No, I don’t have cites, ferchrissakes.)
e) A couple of people talked about class — Xander as working class. Yeah, well, I appreciated that there was a working class character & family. But there just wasn’t ever much done with it. I really appreciated it when it was. But again, I think, like race, it’s an example of Joss trying to show, not tell, but not doing enough showing to make it work.
f) Jewish characters – Willow & Mr. Universe are the most prominent examples of Jewish characters. I think it illustrates the “getting better” thesis, because Willow is said to be Jewish but it has virtually no impact on her. It’s mentioned in a couple of episodes (3, maybe? one about crosses, one about Christmas, and I think Thanksgiving “Pangs” episode?) but no Jewish identity. Shrug; that slides by, because frankly I know lots of very secular, assimilated Jewish folk who slide in and out of Jewish identity (like my partner). Mr. Universe in maybe 10 total minutes of screen time dealt more with Jewish identity than Willow Rosenberg did in dozens of hours of screen time. Again, I think that progression shows Joss getting a little more tuned in to these issues.
5) One of my central points was the notion that Joss has actually been getting *better* on issues of race & ethnicity over time. The examples I add below are mostly from Angel because I think Angel was an improvement over Buffy in terms of ethnic diversity and sophistication in looking at issues of ethnicity:
a) Gunn – Gunn actually had an ethnic identity and not just a skin color. I think Gunn shows Joss getting more sophisticated with these issues. I still have some criticism because I don’t think it was handled brilliantly, but again, I think it’s a progression.
b) No one mentioned the kick-ass Asian woman in Angel in “She”! The female-genital-mutilation episode.
c) Several people mentioned “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been”, which I really enjoyed.
d). Also Doyle’s coming to grips with his “interracial” background I think was a better use of demon-as-other than alien-as-other in the half-breeds on Star Trek. There’s actually a lot that has been written & could be written about this. It feeds into the overall picture of Whedon et al on race, but it just needs more discussion. Suffice it to say that (A) Alien species (ST) and demon species (BTVS/ATS) are definitely some representation of “other”, which can be more or less racially coded, as well as coded for all sorts of other Othernesses (gender sexuality, language, culture, etc.); and (B) I really like what Whedon et al does with his “others”, and I don’t really like what Star Trek has done with its “others”; but (C) If/when I sit down and think about it I expect I’ll conclude that Joss is not perfect and his uses of “others” show the markings of having been produced by a man of his time and class and race and culture.
e) Nobody brought up the Buffy Thanksgiving episode “Pangs”, which i loved, exactly for its forthright dealing with political correctness, race, imperialism, etc. The characters expressed all kinds of different views. I could look at that episode just by itself and say that Joss et al try to deal with issues of race & imperialism & political correctness and they do so in a smart & savvy manner. And that is true, even if I assess the episode, derive some putative “authorial” view (maybe that Spike speaks with Joss’s voice), and disagree with it. Joss was so smart in this episode that I wish he would do it MORE, engage these issues MORE.
6) The central area I’d like to work on if I write on this more is describing better the peculiar dance between portraying characters without ethnicity (which is a white-skin privileged color blindness) and giving characters ethnicity (via skin color or actually referencing the issue in the plot or characterization) but doing it poorly.
The progression that I see in Whedon et al — from whitewashed works not dealing with race in any way, to works with race and ethnicity and linguistic diversity that nevertheless still have problems — makes sense to me. I take it that Whedon et al started from a fairly white centric, non-racist but not actively anti-racist, color-blind place would have a lot to answer for in casting and characterization. (If you don’t understand why I describe color blindness as not progressive, then I refer you as a start to the readings I listed in the early post.)
So from that starting place, if Whedon et al are making progress, then an attempt to increase diversity in casting and deal with the issues in characterization, that there would be missteps and some hamhandedness. Nothing that I’ve seen in the debates on Whedonesque or elsewhere has shaken my initial take on Joss et al as operating from a somewhat cluelessly position of white privilege, but I don’t think there’s actually much disagreement on that point from people who seem to look seriously at the issues of race and aren’t knee-jerk defenders of Joss.
It’s interesting to me that so many people read the essay as just critical. I felt like I was more of a careful apologist: (1) acknowledging the ways that Whedon has fallen down (general lack of casting diversity; flaws in characterization; notable failure in world-building in Firefly); (2) while trying to show that over time (Buffy, earliest show with most problems; Angel & Firefly, later with less problems) he has made some progress in approaching these issues with both greater awareness and sophistication; (3) but putting out for discussion a couple of issues that seem to trouble that progressive narrative (the black bounty hunter/Operative; continued hamhandedness at giving characters realistic race/ethnic backgrounds & identities).
I see myself as an apologist because I’m responding to the conversation from folks who have been, I think, rightfully really critical and turned off of the Whedonverse by the issues with race.
Hmm. That actually is a much more organized & coherent explanation than I started with, so this has been a very useful conversation for me, anyway.
Wow, you really get Joss coming and going don’t you.
Not enough blacks in featured roles? He’s a racist (of the “color blind” variety).
Create a show with TWO black characters in featured roles? Not good enough. Turns out he’s still a racist cause one’s a warrior woman and one’s a mystic who we never learn anything about (even though that’s the POINT of Book is wondering what’s up with him).
And of course, if you cast black guys as villains, you can apparently only do it once, since you bring up both the bounty hunters being black.
What bothers me about arguments like that last one is that race is ALL that matters to you. The bounty hunter from the series was psychotic, sadistic and not all there. He’s also more cunning than smart, as witnessed by the fact that the cerebral Simon and River handle him better than the ship’s bruisers.
The one from the movie was methodical and calculating and *much* more highly educated. In other words, he’s more of Simon and Inara’s world than Mal’s (or the first bounty hunter).
But they’re both black, so despite the fact that they’re nothing alike, that’s all that matters.
Geez, Laura, you have a lot of gall, being remotely critical of Saint Joss Whedon, the most brilliant and talented individual in the history of television and motion pictures! And don’t think that you can get away with it by claiming to like and admire his work — liking and admiration cannot be tempered by criticism of any kind! You should be ashamed of yourself. Let this be a lesson to you never to write anything that might be seen by the fine folks at Whedonesque!
I find it interesting that the folks at Whedonesque are in full denial about this issue, even seemingly making jokes about it within their posts on that particular web site. Not all, to be fair, but a large number of their members were making jokes or just seemed very uncomfortable about the subject. I find that strange, but…in respect to myself, I’d rather tell the truth, than to dance around the obvious! Interesting, still, those who responded to your essay, failed to address the problems going on behind the scenes (behind the camera) in the industry…save for my post, here…and a few people posting on Whedonesque…who have referenced the documentary footage of the making of Serenity, which can be found on the DVD. All in all…I felt that you were more than fair on all points…and covered both the bitter, and the sweet of the issues impacting race in the entertainment industry!!! You should be proud of yourself for shinning light, were there is darkness. While others may shy away from addressing the hard truths of life, if those among us who have the clear vision to recognize these evils fail to do so…well, we will all be lost. I thank you for your essay, and encourage the creation of more brave works of this type, by you, and others!!! But there is a related subject that didn’t come up here…The matter of race is considered to be so incendiary in the entertainment industry, even among the progressives, that openly dating someone of another color is actively discouraged…to the point that many of your favorite stars, black and white, feel forced to date in secret, fearing that news of their interracial relationships may harm their careers. Need I remind you of the reports that Buffy star, Sarah Michelle Gellar, was secretly dating NBA basketball superstar Shaqille O’Neal sometime during the run of the series. Both denied it, but Hollywood insiders say different!!!
I find it interesting that, by disagreeing, we must either be rabid fanboys or in “full denial”.
No chance that we have a valid point about some of the counter-arguments we’ve offered?
Have you perhaps noticed a trend in some of the counters to the essay? In my case at least, I didn’t argue about Buffy or even Angel (though there are some points I would make in the case of Angel).
I basically disagreed with her assessment of Firefly and Serenity.
So if I disagree with 1/3 of her premise, I have to either be a rabid fanboy or in denial?
Tone, not content, was my beef. We are in big trouble if reasonable people can’t disagree. Perhaps I was overly influenced by the tone of cwrice’s first comment here, which I found obnoxious. I have to admit, after taking another look at the discussion on Whedonesque, that the tone was by and large a lot more constructive than it seemed to me on my first skim through. In fact, there are a number of posters trying very hard to keep the discussion from escalating.
I responded passionately. Sorry if that came off as rude.
That said, I made replies to specific points she raised, I didn’t just call her names. Which is pretty much how my post was responded to, assuming both the “rabid fanboy” and “full denial” bits were directed at me.
I’m also not sure why Joss has the responsibility to address all social ills in the framework of his television programs. He addressed sexism repeatedly and offered a lot of good messages and role models for young girls (I can attest to this because I watch the show with my 8 yr old neice more often than not and she loves it).
The idea that Joss alone is responsible for tackling both sexism *and* racism strikes me as a little bit unfair.
In short, sorry for my tone, I responded looking for a discussion. If someone would like to discuss, I’m game.
Warning – most of this post is about meta-level stuff — discussion of the discussion — and not actually about illustrating the original point. But it addresses some questions that may help to understand the original point.
Re: tone etc. – I was pretty ticked off by the tone of cwrice’s messages 1 & 2 and almost responded out of heat. In the end I decided to not engage in a pissing match and instead turn that energy toward developing some communication guidelines. (Now linked as “Communications 101″ on the front page of the blog.) I want to study the jlafler’s response to cwrice to see how it got conversation back on track, instead of devolving further into a pissing war. (Thanks cwrice for your demonstrated desire to participate in conversation and your apology.)
Part of such a communications guideline includes looking at humor and when conversations veer into “meta-analysis” rather than substantive discussion. Sometimes meta-analysis is appropriate — as when someone is actually being sexist or racist or inappropriate and you need to call them on it — and sometimes it’s a waste of time, as when on Whedonesque people started arguing about whether or not I was defensive. (I will now defensively state that I felt only just a little tiny bit defensive and mostly amused, but humor is hard to convey. I should have conveyed my sense that bitching about my writing is avoiding the issue and a sort of ad hominem attack — but that I wasn’t particularly bothered by it so those who hoped to bother me shouldn’t bother to keep it up, and those who didn’t need not bother to apologize.)
I believe that most people are not aware when they’re veering off the subject, failing to address the substance of an argument, responding to tone rather than substance, etc. We’re not well-trained by primary schools in critical thinking or critical analysis, or communicating…. I could go on but I shan’t; anyone interested can go here and follow the links and add their thoughts to the Talk page, or their edits to the guidelines.
One other quickie that’s not substantive – Yo, cwrice, I don’t think anyone here actually ever said anything about rabid fanboy. So if someone was directing that comment at you, it wasn’t anyone here.
To respond now to a few more substantive points:
1) In several places on whedonesque I saw responses to a critique about racism and racial dynamics that oversimplifies the discussion, and then disputes it. For instance comment #100 on Whedonesque says, in response to someone saying that Jubal Early’s threats to Kaylee could look like racism, “These are the only choices? Racism or racial amnesia? The only possible ways Joss could ever have written Jubal to do the things he did were either racism or racial amnesia?” Notice what’s going on here. The comment above pointed out how a possible reading of the work (“it might look like racism”) given the history & social milieu in which we all live. The respondent simplified the argument in order to try to reject it. (“These are the only choices? … The only possible ways…Joss could ever have written”) (emphasis added).
Look, every work carries many messages and is subject to many analyses, even internally inconsistent messages. For instance, Heinlein’s women — strong & sexually liberated, two cardinal hallmarks of feminist portrayals of women. Yet also emotionally dependent on heterosexual sex, tied to their biology, and they are not exactly fully individuated as characters. So some people have argued that Heinlein’s works are a feminist; many others that they are sexist. I would say that both are true.
Similarly with Firefly. cwrice complains that I tag Joss’ characterizations of Zoe & Book on Firefly with color blind racism, and suggests that I therefore don’t respect them as efforts to increase diversity, provide legitimate representations or interesting characters. But one can totally respect & love Zoe & Book, and be happy that they represent, among other things, two African-American actors, and think they are very interesting characters & really well-drawn — one can feel all those things, and still critique the ways that the characters fall short of what they could be, or represent racial stereotypes, or are placed in raced situations, or are treated differently than other characters of different races, or are not treated coherently as characters, etc.
Likewise one can really be taken with the Serenity ‘verse and still note that it is inconsistent. Fans spend, collectively, thousands (maybe millions) of hours figuring out the ways that the backstory is inconsistent or plots are inconsistent etc. And then thinking of additional backstory etc. to make it more consistent. I’m spending a little time thinking about how it is inconsistent in its depiction of race & ethnicity. And more than that, why it would be inconsistent.
I have no reason to suspect, nor have ever accused, Joss Whedon & his camp of overt racism. But a lot of people have been taught and believe that color-blindness is the right attitude for white people to have regarding race. I think, looking at his work, that Joss Whedon et al does too. But as demonstrated elsewhere (see original post for links), color-blindness in a racist society will lead, unfortunately, to racist outcomes. So the question for me is, is that true in Joss Whedon’s work? Would this explain why I sometimes feel that there is a racialized dynamic going on? (And I’ll note that I feel that even without being particularly sensitive in terms of race. I’m white; I have white-skin privilege that lets me be unobservant of race issues.)
So from my own position of white skin privilege, I can tell you that it looks to me like Joss has adopted the white privilege perspective of color blindness. But he wants to be progressive, so he does some good things. But the color blindness makes it hard; and that shows up as inconsistencies in his world-building or characterizations.
2) Several commentators on whedonesque & cwrice here said why is Joss responsible for addressing all the social ills? This is a misunderstanding of the critique. Analyzing how racism is read in Joss Whedon’s work (and suggesting that color-blindness is responsible) is not the same thing as suggesting that he has to make anti-racism his theme, as he has chosen to make empowering women his theme. But we *all* have a responsibility to not be racist or misogynyst. I wouldn’t let off a show that tackled themes of race if they were being consistently misogynystic. I think you can deal with one issue or problem, while not perpetuating the other.
3) A number of commentators on Whedonesque & here have said things that question why pick on Joss? For example cwrice above said “The idea that Joss alone is responsible…strikes me as…unfair.” Well, I pick on Joss for a lot of reasons
a) because I like him;
b) because I think he wants to do the right thing & can benefit from constructive criticism;
c) because I’m familiar with his work; because I’m a fan & write fannishly about him & therefore have a responsibility to fully engage and acknowledge the problems that he has;
d) because I’m distressed to see people of color who I think of as friends or allies get frustrated and give up on Whedon’s work.
And I certainly *don’t* think “Joss alone” is responsible. I think *EVERYONE* is responsible for not being racist, misogynystic, or stupid in other ways. And EVERYONE is responsible for improving their own stupidity. (To repeat myself: provisionally, I think Joss has been improving his stupidities.)
Constance Ash at Deep Genre (highly recommended!) corrected me about Inara & Companions, who are primarily inspired by the Hindi Temple Dancer tradition, not Japanese/geisha. More from her below — I’m quoting some of what she says wholesale because it’s fascinating. (This isn’t a straightforward dialog; I’m responding to some of what she says in my comments below, as well as trying to summarize and give a flavor of what she was responding to in my original comments.)
1. Inara is an Indian name.
2. Morena Baccarin, the actress who plays Inara — Morena is a variant of Inara. Morena’s family are Brasilaros. Constance points out that Brazil was colonized by Portugal, which also was one of the colonizers of southern India, and that there are a lot of Southeastern Indians in Brazil. Constance thinks this historical background “probably also contributed to the inspiration for Whedon’s idea of the SERENITY universe.”
3. Inara’s style is Indian:
4. Joss is pretty aware of Bollywood:
(Y’all remember Willow watching Bollywood one night with Buffy & Xander? B&A Trivia Guide says it’s “Kshatriya” 1993 dir. by J. P. Dutta, btw.)
5. Companion training & profession generally:
me: I guess I saw the hostess/prostitute angle and the example that I’m most familiar with that is sort-of that is geisha. (I always noted the Indian influences – clothing and fabrics, particularly — but sublimated that to my assessment of her social role. Talk about missing the forest for the trees.)
Me: Tea ceremonies? Possible mash-up of various traditions?
I think my biggest disagreement with the essay is that you could take the logic you use with regard to Zoe and Book being portrayed a certain way (as a more primitive aspect) and Jubal and the Operative (both being black bad guys) and apply it to just about any recurring character on the show to prove Joss doesn’t like any race or nationality.
Niska is much more over the top as a bad guy than Jubal. He’s like a caricature of a James Bond bad guy. He’s also sadistic, stuffy and just really creepy. He comes across as a sort of Joesph Mengele/Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man type guy- the little old man who runs the concentration camp vibe.
Badger is also a much larger than life character who borders on caricature. Where Niska is the Bond-esque bad guy, Badger comes right out of Dickens, right down to the accent.
Using some of the same types of arguments you made, I could say Joss really has it in for the European Union in general, and European men in particular. Every man on the show with a European accent (Niska, Badger, Atherton Wing, the Operative) was the worst sort of person you could imagine.
So with the bad guys being European and the good guys American, is Joss making a covert political statement? I don’t think so, but then again I don’t see anything racist in his portrayal of Book or Zoe either.
I have to admit that after my last post I was afraid that I’d scuttled the conversation for good, so I’m glad that it was received with such grace. Thanks for sticking with it, cw.
Laura — That’s all totally fascinating about Inara. I had no idea. I did notice that the cast iron teapot she uses for her tea ceremonies is a Japanese pot (I recognized it because we have a similar one). It’s funny the things we notice! But I agree with Constance about mixing it up, and that’s one of the things I like best about Firefly: the cultural mixing, and the fact that it’s taken for granted and left for the viewer to notice. That’s one of the things that makes it good science fiction, as far as I’m concerned. But the cultural mixing goes with the point I was trying to make, above, about racial categories. Given the cultural mixing, to the degree that characters don’t necessarily think of, say, using chopsticks as a Chinese custom, in the same way that we don’t think of having a Christmas tree as a German custom, I would not expect people to see races in the same way that we do now. So how DO they see race, or phenotypes, or the convergence of culture and phenotype? (One of the problems in this discussion is that “race” as we use it in the US today is a slippery, innacurate, and subjective concept. Obligatory sigh.) My problem with the portrayal of race in Firefly boils down to this: we see characters that we automatically identify, according to our own racial categories, as “black” or “white” or whatever, but we have no idea how the characters see or interpret race. Does race not exist as a concept in this future? That seems unlikely. But maybe Joss is attempting to portray a future in which race is unimportant or doesn’t exist as a concept. For that to be believable, I think that most of the characters would have to be racially unidentifiable according to our current categories, and as I pointed out above that would be really hard to achieve giving casting realities. But it doesn’t even look to me like something that was attempted.
cw — That’s a very interesting point about the European accents. I would add the baddies in the “Jaynestown” episode — at least, the overseer had what I interpret as a Russian accent. I think it bears repeating that nobody is accusing Joss of conscious racism, or of “not liking” any particular race or group of people. I think where the problem (if any) lies is in not recognizing the potential racial meanings of certain situations. Here’s an attempt to explain, by analogy, the kind of thing that I think Laura has been talking about: In more than one episode of Firefly, we see Kayleigh acting fearful and cowardly about physical violence. If I said “hey, this is a stereotype about women,” the obvious answer would be “it’s part of her character, and it’s consistent with what we know about her.” From Joss Whedon this would be a completely satisfactory response, but from another director it might not be. I think that, in the case of race, Joss is in the position of the second director. Does that make sense?
I do see your point, though I have a different take on the reasons for it. Joss isn’t the “master of all situations”. His shows, when they present a message at all (and I tend to think they’re mostly light-hearted entertainment) it’s one of feminism.
I think that’s where his interest lies, and even if he *had* an interest in discussing race, I’m not sure he’d be the guy I’d pick to lead that discussion.
So I do agree with a point Laura made (or at least addressed- not trying to put words in her mouth) that for the most part Joss ignores race. She mentioned that a lot of the characters don’t have a strong ethnic identity, even when they have a stated ethnicity (Jewish, African American, Hispanic, etc etc).
It’s just that where she sees this as a form of subconscious racism, I see it as a neutral thing. He just isn’t talking about the subject, but he is talking about other worthwhile subjects (and entertaining).
Some very interesting stuff about Inara. The post also set me off on a bit of a tangent to some observations about language and race.
Constance Ash’s reference to the word Bint reminded me of how use of the word by Spike in BtVS was one of the things that kept me from warming to his character. He uses it in several episodes (see this link to the Buffy dialogue database for context)
http://vrya.net/bdb/search.php?lookfor=bint&maxepno=144
The writers managed to sneak quite a few British swear words or obscenities past the US censors. In most cases I found that practice amusing but these instances had a different impact. I saw them as the use of a racial epithet to reveal more about his character than misogyny on its own would have done.
The word may have been used in English India but I wonder whether that’s where the derogatory use of it began. In Arabic and Swahili the literal meaning of ‘Bint’ is daughter. The related word Binti means ‘daughter of’ and is similar to ‘Miss’ in the sense of a young woman; past puberty but ‘not yet’ married. As I teenager in East Africa and the UK I heard it – when used in English rather than in Swahili – as a supercharged version of slut with strong racial overtones. It carried a two very different meanings depending on context – but more specifically on the language in which it was used.
The OED online definition reads: A girl or woman (usu. derog.); girl-friend. The term was in common use by British servicemen in Egypt and neighbouring countries in the wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45.
Spike’s use of this insult can be contrasted with the similar sounding, but very different, word he uses for Dawn. He calls her ‘little bit’ – the missing consonant turning the meaning of his chosen word (back) into something closer to its original Arabic/Swahili meaning.
I started making this link after almost mishearing the line “I hope you dance till you burn. You and the little bit” in the episode Once More with Feeling. When I’ve watched the DVDs again since I can’t hear his affectionate nickname for Dawn without thinking of his confusion over his feelings for Buffy (How does he se her? Whore or Madonna and which does he want?).
Writers
I’ve worked out what’s been bugging me the last few days about your mention that all the writers that you know of from the Whedonverse and the commentaries etc are white. ‘Normal Again’ (the episode where Buffy thinks she’s in a mental institution and the gang are all part of a hallucination) was written by Diego Gutierrez and he and the director do a commentary on the DVD. It appears that he was Joss Whedon’s assistant from 1999 to 2002.
On writers – Good catch on Diego Gutierrez; and a on Whedonesque billz added
The writers I most associate with Whedon\’s work (all had more than 10 episodes) are Jane Espenson, David Fury, David Greenwalt, Tim Minear, Marti Noxon, Doug Petrie, & Joss himself.
Other writers of 3 or more episodes include Dean Batali, Jeffrey Bell, Elizabeth Craft, Steven DeKnight, Rob Des Hotel, Sarah Fain, Tracey Forbes, Drew Goddard, Drew Greenberg, Rebecca Kirshner, and Mere Smith. (from vrya.net, which only lists Buffyverse not Firefly, apparently).
cw and others said things like
If aliens from outer space who had never ever seen an Earthling TV show, and had never talked to an Earthling, and hadn’t had any exposure to Earth-generated space trash, radio waves, and/or spaceships, then, yeah, they could watch Firefly and not pick up on any racial dynamics. I don’t think that’s the position of you, me, Joss, or anybody else in Joss’s audience. We all come from a highly racialized society: The US is one of the most racialized societies, but virtually all societies that I’m aware of have some experience with race or racial dynamics or racialized xenophobia.
So it’s not the same to talk about portrayals of white people and people of color. Roughly analogous: Consider for instance the critique of objectifications of women’s breasts on comic book covers, and the response: but we show Superman’s chest too! Then check this out.
We do not live in a color-blind society. White people may sometimes act as if we do. But we don’t. And stereotypes of white ethnicities/cultures (the drunken Irishman) typically don’t have the same bite as stereotypes of non-white ethnicities. (Stereotypes of Jewish people, to the extent that Jewish people are considered “white”, are one of the few.) Maybe a hundred years ago in the era of “No Irish Need Apply” and Irish gangs the stereotyped portrayal of Badger would have had more of an edge. Now it’s like the stereotypes of librarians or lawyers or Germans: Something the group can get a little pissy about but not something that has real social implications.
Okay everything below is redundant but perhaps better phrased than previously:
When you’re trying to make sensible characters & plots then you have to make them make sense. Real people in today’s society all engage with race. (White people get to pretend it doesn’t affect other people’s lives, but that’s still engaging with it — because it’s a privilege that people of color don’t have.) So if you make a world that is based on our world, or comes from our world, then you would need to have some kind of narrative about race to make the worldbuilding and the characters make sense.
Worldbuilding — Joss *does*, actually — it’s clear from his world that there was an Anglo-Sino unification. He’s pretty thoughtful about it. It’s just that he wasn’t consistently thoughtful, and it left some fairly major gaps. First, in all English-speaking worlds, lack of consistency in treating what a real universe that was 50% Chinese-speaking would look like, etc. I cut him some slack here because I think it’s probably hard to get, on mainstream TV, substantial amounts of Mandarin with or without subtitles. (The lack of subtitles was intentional, and I think an interesting choice.) But Serenity could have done better, I think, although again maybe Universal wouldn’t go for it.
Characterization — Janet has talked about racial categories in the far future. I hear that. I agree, on the one level. But I haven’t seen enough from Joss on the issue of race to make me assume that that’s what he’s doing. Rather, from everything else I’ve seen from Joss on race, it seems more like he doesn’t do a good job of inscribing ethnicity onto characters, and so it’s not surprising that Zoe & Book & Inara would never address their ethnic identities and would act like all the white people do today: As if none of them have an ethnic identity.
Characterization, making your characters whole people including dealing with their socially relevant attributes (like ethnicity, class, gender) is different from noting when a character resonates with stereotypes / archetypes. You could have a complexly drawn character who is wholly stereotypical. You could have a completely non-stereotypical character who is wooden & not realistically fleshed out.
Zoe & Book are (a) complexly drawn characters, who do not deal with race the way today’s characters & people of color would have to; and (b) also reflect certain racial archetypes in literature & media.
As for the ways that Zoe & Book avoid dealing with their race, there might be several reasons: perhaps because Joss draws them like color-blind white people today (my theory); perhaps because of a far future world with different ethnic categories (Janet’s proposal); perhaps as characters they both happen to truly not care about their own ethnicities (I think I saw this intimated on Whedonesque in a couple of posts); or perhaps for some other reason.
Zoe & Book & Jubal Early the bounty hunter reflect certain archetypes (black warrior woman, the magical negro, menacing black man) for several possible reasons: Because the audience reads them into it (but I would argue that the director is in part responsible for obvious readings); because the director put them in consciously (I doubt it in the case of Whedon & Zoe/Book); because the director put them in subconsciously or without consciousness of the racial aspect (I think this is likely in the case of Zoe & Book; I would argue that a director or writer ought to know what they’re doing and to consider themselves socially responsible ought to take into consideration the social conditioning, including racism, that they might tend to reflect in their creations). Through the latter rationales runs the concept of color blindness.
So — I think this comes back to the concept of color blindness. The concept of color blindness is not the same thing as the concept of subconscious racism. Rather, the critique of colorblindness is based on the notion that white people have the privilege (white privilege) of being color blind; but people of color do not. Therefore analyses which say “race is irrelevant” or “I don’t notice race” are likely coming from white people who have the privilege of not noticing race.
What I’m trying to do here is understand Joss Whedon’s approach to race, and why I sometimes am uncomfortable with him, even while I can identify things he does right regarding race. The analysis that makes the most sense to me is that he is operating out of white privilege and colorblindness. I like to think that he’s been getting more sophisticated — but “I like to think” it, so I recognize that I may be deluding myself out of fannishness.
Really, if people who are unfamiliar with the concept of color-blindness think I’m way off base with this, I would encourage them to read more about colorblindness and anti-racist theory and white privilege. And then come back to the table and talk about it. My critique of Joss Whedon is not a new critique: some people of color and anti-racists have been making these observations for a while.
I wouldn’t say that Joss has to *discuss* race. But I expect him to *represent* race in non-racist ways, and if he doesn’t, I think he should be critiqued. The point I tried to make here (and many others have made better, other times) is that mere color-blindness is not sufficient to be non-racist.
Hi. I disagree with your assessments of the relationships between Gunn and Fred and Wood and Faith. I thought both were realistic and made me very happy to see them. Yes, race is something that most couples would explore, especially one like Fred and Gunn, however, Faith and Wood just represented two very horny, aggressive people who hooked up. There was no real hint of a long term relationship between them.
Finally, you said that Inara is non-white. The actress who portrays her, Morena Baccarin is white. She’s Italian. Read her biography on Wikipedia..
Summer Glau, however, is mixed-race–Asian and Caucasian. So, I thought she had a good luck River Tam.
I do agree that the lack of Asians in Firefly/Serenity was a big irritant for me. After all, if all of these people are acculturated with Chinese language, customs, etc., shouldn’t there be some actual Chinese people around?!
Well, IconRed, you might want to reread that Wikipedia bio. It says that Morena is “Italo-Brazilian”, and that she was born in Rio de Janeiro. A quick search of the internets did not reveal her parents’ native countries or race, but it did reveal that her mother, Vera Setta, has been known in Brazil for quite a while as an actress.
So the question of Morena’s race is still unanswered. I’m also curious about your Summer Glau trivia. I’ve never read anywhere that she has Asian ancestry.
I feel strangely suspect niggling about people’s racial backgrounds. Maybe because “it’s not supposed to matter”? Or maybe because it reminds me of the American South and the incredible sensitivity of people’s backgrounds and ability to pass. One word keeps popping into my head as a symbol: “octaroon”. Any society that invests so much energy in ferretting out someone’s one-eighth black ancestry and creating a name for it has some serious damage.
I could go on about that for some time, but I am late for an appointment. More later.
To Laura: I agree that Joss needs to not be racist as he’s not discussing race. Where we differ is that I don’t think he is being racist.
You might disagree with my assessment of the negative stereotyping of ethnic white European men, but with you bringing up two African-American male baddies, it really is wrong of you not to point out the much more numerous white Male baddies in the series (Niska, Badger, Atherton Wing, the MIB guys with the blue gloves).
In other words, whatever the effect of the stereotyping, you’re talking about African-American villains that constitute about 10% of the total universe’s villainy that we are exposed to. I don’t think that is conclusive enough to base an argument on.
Moreover, even if we restricted the discussion to men after River, Jubal and Operative are still a minority of that subsection of the bad guys on the show.
There just isn’t enough African-American bad guys to bear out the importance you’re assigning to them in my opinion.
And a final point about Zoe the “black warrior woman”… Buffy and Faith were “warrior women” too, so he obviously isn’t looking for African American women specifically.
To IconRed: My impression of Firefly “verse” is that everyone was a mutt racially speaking. Which also would explain the lack of characters identifying themselves racially.
What I see when I look at Firefly is a world where race and gender don’t seem important. Look at Zoe being a soldier and no one batting an eyelash. Sure Joss is known for his warrior women (beginning with Buffy), but what seems to matter in Firefly is Social Class (ever notice how Mal can’t get along with Simon and Inara much better than he got along with the Alliance?), pro or anti-unification, Reaver not Reaver.
Re: only Firefly/Serenity, as I’ve never seen the others.
I haven’t done the research, admittedly, but I assumed that the casting of Black men for Early and the Operative was intentional and reflective of worldbuilding … and representing racism,yes, in that future-’verse.
After all, the major powers in this future are the U.S. and China before we go offworld. Leaving Africa/people of color… where? We don’t know, really.
My instant impression in the last Firefly ep was that Jubal Early and River were analogous. That he was, perhaps, the result of earlier (ahem, unintended pun or CLUE?) brain-modification projects. So with that assumption, I definitely didn’t thnk his race was happenstance. Who, after all, have been on the front line for unwilling experimentation in U.S. history?
And if we consider that this isn’t a utopian universe, might we guess that a lot of black kids still grow up disadvantaged? After all, Jubal had some psychological problems, so he was *shipped off* willingly… imagine that a kid like Simon Tam showed sadistic tendencies – think his parents would just send him off rather than trying to treat it, help him get sane? (Once Blue Sun/whoever further developed their mind-screwing, of course, they were happy to recruit River… but then, the programme may have changed. Or maybe they just got overconfident. Anyway…)
The Operative I know less about, but I have the impression he didn’t grow up on an estate with access to the best schools, etc., and again I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And Book’s unknown previous Alliance connections were obviously high level, but whatever he did for them, he doesn’t seem proud of it.
And obviously, this may very well have been my reading-in, and something Whedon never thought about. thought I’d toss it out regardless.
SiftE, very interesting thoughts! This is the first time that I’ve seen someone suggest that the use of race was intentional for progressive purposes. I’m not sure I buy it, but I’ll think about it. (Direct to DVD, Joss — let us try out our theories! (2 and 3))
and cwrice – I totally agree with you that class is more on Joss’s mind than race. We should write a lot about Joss & class! Because I think it’s important to him and he’s doing more with it. (Also Joss’ mommy & daddy issues – hello!)
cwrice – just one (relatively) quick response and one (as usual) not so quick:
1) I don’t disagree with you on Zoe. Since many of Joss’ characters are warrior women, one wants some to be women of color and I’m happy that Zoe is because she’s awesome. (My favorite character.) So I’m more just noting that the only two major Black female roles have both been warrior women, which is a particular character who crops up a lot in sf. I have mixed feelings about the character. I wouldn’t say that having a Black warrior woman means the creator is racist; but, given how often those characters crop up, and where there are not a lot of other Black women to compare her with — well, it makes me wonder if race plays a role in developing the character or hiring the actor for that role, as opposed to another role. NOT a complaint about Zoe the character or Gina Torres the actress – again, they’re my favorites in the Firefly cast.
2) Just want to be clear, I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that Joss makes Black men his villains a disproportionate number of times. My issue with the Operative & the bounty hunter is more with the characterization and particular role they play in the ‘verse. (It’s good you’re pressing me on it and making me articulate.) Of all the villains in the Firefly verse, only 3 stand out as well-drawn characters who are also memorably villainous: Adelei Niska, Jubal Early better known as the Bounty Hunter, and the Operative. (I am tempted to include Saffron but she’s a trickster character, memorably traitorous, not memorably villainous, if you get the distinction.)
Yes, there are lots of other white people (no Asian or apparent Latino villains), some are well-characterized, some are villains, but none of them have Badger’s interesting, but not really a villain: he’s also an ally. Atherton Wing doesn’t stand out as particularly villainous; just an asshole. Blue Hands certainly don’t stand out – one has no sense of them as characters; merely menacing agents of the government. Dobson had more character than they do.
I think Niska, the Bounty Hunter, & the Operative all have intensely drawn characters & were well-acted. Niska is interesting: the vaguely Eastern European torture thing smacks of Mengele. The Bounty Hunter initially troubled me, not because of the mere notion of having a Black villain, but largely because of the rape threats with Kaylee, that resonated a little too closely to the traditional Southern white fantasy of Black male rapists attacking white women. That explicit use of him to enact that very traditionally racist fantasy also highlighted the similar menace, not sexualized, that he was to River. But, shrug. As you say, just one character. I think the rape threat was in bad taste and unnecessary: there are ways to heighten the menace that are not about rape, and while the racist dynamic would still have been echoed it would not have been evoked nearly as strongly.
Joss described this episode, in the DVD commentary, as a good one to end on. I don’t remember the specifics (and I’m away from my DVDs this week) but basically he said something like this episode summarized the conflict, talked about River and her directions. So I was left with the sense that the Bounty Hunter represented a sort of quintessential villain: individual menace coupled with the force of the State.
But now comes Serenity, and surprise, the villain is also Black. Yes, of course there are significant differences in the characters; they are both well-drawn characters, and beautifully acted. But similarly to the Bounty Hunter, the Operative represents a sort of quintessential villain: individual menace coupled with the force of the State. (How nice that our Browncoat gets to defeat the government’s representative in a fair fight, then, hmm? guile & trickery on Mal’s part, and assumptions on the part of the Operative…)
Now of course Joss probably cast Chiwetel Ejiofor because he’s a kick-ass actor and did a bang-up job with the part. I don’t know if he was looking for Black actors to play that role. But centrally casting two villains, that essentially played a very similar role (representing the government forces hunting down River, but bringing their own unique menace to the role), both with Black men is interesting. I felt that Joss was in part trying to hearken back to the conflict of “Objects in Space” to provide emotional & conflict continuity, even though storyline continuity had to account for a greater lapse in time and shifts in the characters’ lives. If that’s the case, then it makes me question whether the race of the characters/actors was intentional. Particularly in light of what I viewed as a misstep with the Bounty Hunter and Kaylee, I couldn’t help but wonder whether Joss was playing on the menacing Black man thing.
Put this all in context. My initial post was a response to people who have gotten frustrated with Joss Whedon over the years and given up on him because of the way he has handled race in Buffy/Angel/Firefly/Serenity. I was saying: Look, I know he has had problems; I think his problems are color-blindness not willful racism; and I think that he has been making progress in becoming more sophisticated in dealing with race. But I have to acknowledge that there are a few aspects that make me question my assessment: primarily, the lack of ethnic Chinese actors in the Firefly cast/extras, and the use of a Black actor in Serenity as the villain, creating a continuity in opposition from the use of a Black man that I found quite troubling.
I wanted to talk about whether this progressive arc was true, and instead I’ve mostly been defending the original position. That’s been useful to me in shaping my arguments more clearly and hell, maybe I will write something about it, but I kinda suspect someone already has. The best part, I guess, is that this has provoked debate and thought among people who haven’t been thinking about Joss’ handling of race. (I’m resisting saying “white people”.) Even if people totally disagree with my analyses/thoughts/suggestions, chewing over the ideas has got to be good.
Well, if you notice, I chose my field of battle carefully. I haven’t mentioned Buffy or Angel once. Not because I’m not as huge a fan, I am and can quote chapter and verse on them.
But in the case of Buffy and Angel, I might be convinced, especially Buffy. In Angel, Gunn doesn’t bother me that much because I see the process (the craft) that was involved in him being a stereotype.
When you talk to the actor who played Gunn, and Joss, his character was meant to be a one-episode side character who kept getting called back because of the great chemistry he had with David Boreanaz.
This isn’t an excuse, but when you intend a character to only show up once, making him an instantly recognizable trope (and I am ok with substituting the word archetype or stereotype here) is a quick and dirty way to “shortcut characterize” an individual.
There’s a lot of *process* reasons why this is desirable. If a character is throw-away(as they thought Gunn would be) you don’t want to take away time from principal actors.
So once they had decided he was coming back, they had to move gradually from the initial starting position they had set. Again, not an excuse but I do enough writing to understand that the process is as important as any creative impulse. An essay has structural differences from a screenplay just like a chair has structural differences from a table.
So where I have the strongest disagreement is Firefly, which might put me in your “getting better on race” camp I suppose.
As an aside, as someone who’s grandmother was a Seminole Indian, I will tell you one thing *I* noticed immediately about Firefly, being a Western was that it had “redskins” in the form of the Reavers. Not close enough to bother me, but there.
Interesting! I never read the Reavers as the “Indians” in the cowboy genre. (Frankly the thing I noticed about the Reavers is their dreads & make-up marking them as “uncivilized”.)
It is pretty subtle… as someone with that background, my first thought when Mal says “Reavers burned the town right down” was “whoa, they have Indians”.
Maybe I’m just wired to see savages raping women in Westerns as Indians- it’s certainly possible.
Actually, I totally agree with cwrice, except that I didn’t think the resemblance was that subtle. The “western in space” concept of the show, with the crew living on the equivalent of the frontier, pretty much sets up this reading. At least the Reavers were not actually coded *as* Indians. The series and the movie had different explanations for what the Reavers were, but neither implied that they were natives of the outer planets; they were definitely exiles from the main human population, for whatever reason gone “all bibbledy”, as Kaylee once said.
What bothered me most about the Reavers was that Joss had made a point of his imagined future being free of “aliens” (i.e. non-human extraterrestrial species like the Klingons, Minbari, etc.) because he thought they had been overused and distracted from the gritty reality of our probable future, which will be made by *us*. Great! I thought. More realistic psychology, more anthropological authenticity, no externalized evils to blame all our troubles on.
But unfortunately, there, front and center, are the Reavers, who despite their technical humanity seem as much like people as some of the less articulate demons from Buffy, or the zombies in 28 Days Later, or the rapacious critters from the Alien movies. What a cheat! I can still hardly believe that Joss fell back on the schlocky horror movie monsters.
Nope, never liked the Reavers.
Now that y’all have pointed it out, it’s blindingly obvious. I like the distinction you’re making, therem (should I use your real name?), about Reavers-as-opposition in a cowboy/Indian reading, versus Reavers-as-Indians, in terms of trying to code Reavers based on cultural or physical features of Native Americans.
On the Reavers as the alien other — yes and no. The thing is that the “other” are humans. The potential is all within us. That was the thing Iliked about having the scary bogeyman be human, not demon or alien. OTOH – they are a bit overdetermined. Reavers are not redeemable, apparently, which detracts from their humanity. I liked what “Serenity” did with that: it re-humanized the Reavers again. I wonder if that was Joss’ vision of the Reavers all along? Or if that was a story he built in for “Serenity”? Probably many folks on Whedonesque could add textual support or director/writer commentary to explain ….
Right, Im with therem totally, in fact he just said it better. The Reavers aren’t really Indians, but they do serve the role of Indians.
And anyway, what the Reavers *really* represent, imo, is the inner Vandal (in the original use of the word for the barbarian tribe that raped and pillaged and burned from for days straight) lurking inside every man (matepharically speaking anyway).
Do we ever see a female Reaver? No. Reavers are male. They’re the darkest heart of male aggression on full display.
This point came up in another discussion I had with some friends about whether the survivor in “Bushwhacked” was being “converted” into being a Reaver as a way of expanding their numbers.
That was my view, but someone else asked about kids, they’re raping all the time. But that’s the problem: they’re raping all the time. Even if there were females (which we’ve never seen) they’d be unable to carry a baby to term, and the idea of what Reavers would DO to a baby is just… uck.
The folks over at btvsfigs dissent, and think I’m a moron.
Here via http://community.livejournal.com/thoughtfulfan. I’ve really enjoyed your original post and the subsequent conversation.
One point about Jubal, the Operative, and race: I don’t see the parallels between those characters as strongly as you do — partly because I don’t see the Operative as a villain, but rather as someone tragically misled who is redeemed at the end. (Unlike Jubal, whom I saw in that episode as more similar to an unredeemed River, as someone else noted above.)
That said, I also don’t believe the Operative’s race is the happenstance result of Chiwetel Ejiofor being a really good actor (though he *is* a really good actor). On the contrary, I think Joss deliberately cast a black actor to make more obvious the parallels between the Operative and *Book*.
There are hints dropped during the series about Book’s less-than-priestly past and ties to the Alliance. There’s a whole lot of stuff Book says about having something to believe in, which ties in thematically with the Operative’s loss of faith when he learns about Miranda. I’d suggest the Operative’s journey over the course of Serenity can also be seen as Book’s backstory.
I dunno, at the point the Operative says “I do” to a comment about killing children (after a scene where we have seen at least one child whose death he has ordered) I think the question about whether or not he’s a villain has been answered.
In his own words, he was a “monster”.
At the end of the movie he has begun to realize the error of his ways.
Whether one is able to be redeemed for murdering hundreds, I will leave that up to each individual conscience. People have (and continue to) forfeit their lives for ONE murder.
molly-o: with respect to the Operative’s evilness & redemption: I see the Operative as a stand-in for all the ends-justify-the-means rationalizations that statist apologists do all the time, or, for that matter, all manner of other revolutionaries, reformers, and others. He believed that the end — the better world — was worth the evil actions that he knowingly committed as a means to that end. He, himself, was misled only insofar as we are all misled into believing that the pie in the sky justifies today’s wrongful action. (cue Joe Hill)
Interesting — you & siftE & probably others who see the parallels between the Bounty Hunter (Jubal Early) & River. Must think about that.
I completely agree that Book is coded as a likely former Operative. But I didn’t really think that the Blackness was part of it … but both siftE and Molly-O suggested something of the sort. More to muse over …
Janet – you mentioned the Black nurse among the kidnapping hillfolk: She stood out for me too for exactly those reasons. I thought: Is this a relatively new settlement? Was she also an earlier kidnap victim/now Stockholm Syndrome? But she also stood out for me as a representative of Joss’ issues with religion. Joss reads to me very much like myself: Atheist or atheistical tendencies, skepticism and criticism of religious faith and the power structures of organized religion, and yet very interested in the symbolism, the myths, and how it affects human behavior. Religious men: The crazy vampire on the bus in Season 1 Buffy, the vampire preacher in Season 2, the demonic faux-street evangelists in Buffy Season 3 “Anne”, Season 7 preacher on Buffy … lots and lots more and I haven’t even touched Angel. Book in Firefly, such an interesting character: foil to Mal and his own lost faith. How long was he in that monastery, one wonders?
Well everything about Caleb was coded to scream “evil mysogynist”, which Joss included the Roman Catholic Church in that formulation. Which, like it or not (and most Catholics don’t) historically that’s spot-on. The church was a big factor in taking away the few rights Roman women had and making sure they stayed gone in Europe throughout the Middle Ages.
About River and Jubal- I agree with that- they were both very intuitive and both a little whimsical in the brain pan as Mal would say. Joss also says in the Serenity commentary that he sees the Operative and River being similar in that they are both the products of government training and both very intuitive.
So if River is Jubal and she’s like the Operative, maybe you have convinced me that there’s a similarity between Jubal and the Operative after all Laura ;)
[...] Laura Q of the feminist SF blog explored this subject using Joss Whedon and race, but I think it’s relevant to the subject of sexism in the comic book industry: There are lots of aspects to analyzing the “color blindness” fallacy, but there is one in particular which is significant to creators like Joss Whedon. Color blindness allows one to recognize talent, virtue, skill, beauty, in the ways that seem comfortable & familiar. It’s like just doing business over golf with the buddies — who just happen to be mostly/all guys. You didn’t mean to discriminate against women; it’s just that it’s fun and comfortable to do business with your friends, and your friends all look like you. To get beyond that, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and unfortunately I think Joss doesn’t. [From Joss Whedon & race by Laura Q] [...]
[...] Laura Q of the feminist SF blog explored this subject using Joss Whedon and race, but I think it’s relevant to the subject of sexism in the comic book industry: There are lots of aspects to analyzing the “color blindness” fallacy, but there is one in particular which is significant to creators like Joss Whedon. Color blindness allows one to recognize talent, virtue, skill, beauty, in the ways that seem comfortable & familiar. It’s like just doing business over golf with the buddies — who just happen to be mostly/all guys. You didn’t mean to discriminate against women; it’s just that it’s fun and comfortable to do business with your friends, and your friends all look like you. To get beyond that, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and unfortunately I think Joss doesn’t. [From Joss Whedon & race by Laura Q] [...]
I found this article through btvsfigs.com, and felt the need to say that not everyone disagrees with this critical analysis: I haven’t commented on it there because there doens’t seem to be a space for critical dialogue right now. I really appreciate the ongoing dialogue here, espcecially discussion of the Reavers. I never read them as racial stand-ins, but the Western genre does suggest those undertones. All of this makes me (again!) regret Firefly’s cancellation–I think many of this issues could have been richly mined with even a few more years on the air. Plus–a SF Western?! It was awesome!
I also wanted to offer an action figure anecdote (although this is completely beyond Joss’s control). Fans have been asking for years for a figure of Gunn, and have been told repeatedly that he is not expected to sell well. Fans have of course discussed the racial implications of this, with no real consensus reached. While I do think it has been implied that a nonwhite character wouldn’t sell, I have hope that DST, the company who bought the liscense from MAC, will eventually make him. (They made Joyce, after all!)
Now I must rewatch Firefly!
This has been a simply fascinating read, on several levels. Thank you to Laura for writing and managing this discussion, and thanks to all who commented for giving me many, many wonderful things to consider. I’m currently in a role-playing game based in the ‘verse, and I hope to learn and apply much from this discussion both there, and in my own life. I say this because I see now I’ve been color-blind through white privilege myself. I’ve got to learn more about this.
However, perhaps most impressive to me was that throughout this entire discussion everyone remained on the whole polite and courteous — even in disagreement. I am in awe! ;)
I came here through Collie Cillier’s ‘Firestarter’ website, and this has particular interest for me because I’m running a Firefly/Serenity RPG set a few years before the TV series (but not depicting any of the characters in the series or movie.) There have been some fascinating ideas discussed here. (The discussions of Inara’s occupation being of Hindu origina rather than Japanese ‘geisha,’ and of possible shared heritage of Jubal Early and the Operative (and also of Book.) Of course of primary interest is the non-addressing of race in the Firefly/Serenity setting, and for me how I can address it in the game.
Thank you very much for many very thought-provoking observations!
[...] Laura Q of the feminist SF blog explored this subject using Joss Whedon and race, but I think it’s relevant to the subject of sexism in the comic book industry: There are lots of aspects to analyzing the “color blindness” fallacy, but there is one in particular which is significant to creators like Joss Whedon. Color blindness allows one to recognize talent, virtue, skill, beauty, in the ways that seem comfortable & familiar. It’s like just doing business over golf with the buddies — who just happen to be mostly/all guys. You didn’t mean to discriminate against women; it’s just that it’s fun and comfortable to do business with your friends, and your friends all look like you. To get beyond that, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone, and unfortunately I think Joss doesn’t. [From Joss Whedon & race by Laura Q] [...]
A few follow-up comments:
Many people have complained about Gunn being a stereotypical character when he was first introduced. I don’t agree. Sure, he may have been a bit of a simplified homeboy at first, but at least he was aware of his blackness and proud of it. Once he was “integrated” into Angel Investigations, it seemed like he forgot his entire past and ethnic identity, and the show consequently lost its opportunity to take on some of the race issues that his character initially presented. That bothered me.
Regarding the Reavers thread of the discussion: yes, they are technically human, so still “us” in a way, but their crazy destructiveness is entirely out of the realm of possibility for a society. How can they keep spaceships flying and cooperate with one another enough to stay alive when they are supposed to be raving mad with aggression? They just don’t pass the plausibility test, and thus pass out of the bounds of humanity.
Oh, and about my name. You can use it if you like, Laura, but it might confuse people who just see my nickname in the comment thread. For the record, I am Janice Dawley. (Not a “he”, cwrice!)
When I was growing up in the 70′s overseas I assumed that the US did not have any black actors outside of Flip Wilson, Julia and Lt. Uhura, because the world I saw in films and TV was white. I also assumed there were no black actors in the 30′s, 40′s and 50′s because the movies rarely featured black actors. It wasn’t until I was in my 20′s that I discovered Cabin in the Sky, Imitation of Life and other movies that finally showed a wide range of races. It’s sad to see how segretated some shows are, with wholy black or white casts. The sitcoms are the absolute worst; the only white characters on Girlfriends have had to play the fool, and the only black characters on the What I Like About You is the jive talking sidekick. The instances of Hispanic, Asian and Arabic characters on some shows is relegated to one stereotype or the other. But if you step onto the studio lot and see the white faces behind the camera and in the business offices it’s not hard to imagine why their idea of the world is an exclusive country club.
I came here through Whedonesque, but nevertheless found it to be intelligent and thought provoking.
Sunnydale is not just a Californian suburb, it is a caricature of a Californian suburb. As such, it is reasonable to make it even more white than the real thing. The emotions in Buffy are real, the setting is not. I don’t believe it is fair to blame it for not tackling race, the show really wasn’t about that.
Angel moved to LA where race and races is obviously an issue which the show had to handle, and it did, with Gunn’s background. But it never felt natural, and I’m therefore glad they didn’t do more of it.
I never saw the Gunn/Fred relationship as “interracial”. It didn’t occur to me before I read your blog-entry, I probably suffer white-boy color-blindness myself. I saw it as an awkward plot device to create some more angst for Wesley.
The Willow/Tara relationship made me wish I was lesbian, which seems to be a common reaction for all genders and sexual orientations. I can’t imagine a relationship (regardless of genders) being done much more convincing.
I was, like you, very annoyed over the lack of Asians in Firefly. It was the same with Babylon-5. The casting seems to reflect the US population, not the world population. I have heard OSC have big problems getting a 50% Asian cast for the kids in Ender’s Game accepted by the studio. Maybe the economic reality is that you can’t have a minority overrepresented, unless you are specifically targeting that minority.
You are right that the Firefly universe seem to have a strange lack of racism, given that it is an obviously flawed society (unlike the utopia of Star Trek), and that there is no aliens to take over the hate object status (unlike Babylon-5).
I don’t want to discuss the individual examples, it is really a no-win situation for the writer. Either the character is being accused of only being ethnic on the outside, or the character is accused of being a stereotype. It is also seems very common that the prejudice is in the mind of the viewer, rather than in the mind of the writer. If you are conditioned to do so, you will take note of every example that fits your expected stereotype, and ignore those that don’t. That seems to be a big problem in the US.
The standard fan response when anyone points out the lack of diversity in Whedon’s shows is to:
1. Say Whedon’s not racist because supporting character “insert name” was of color.
2. It’s the Hollywood standard to not cast minorities in leading roles, so if others do it, why can’t Joss.
3. Demand that the subject be ignored completely, because pointing out Whedon’s bigotry forces his fans to question their own acceptance of his bigotry.
4. Claim Joss’ use of racial stereotypes is a happy accident brought on by his color blindness, and not a fact of searching for and casting only white actors in lead roles.
Most interesting is the hate speech that slips into the Whedon themed boards whenever race is mentioned. Whedon’s fans rarely criticize the hate speech that pops up on their boards, like this comment which was posted on Whedonverse railing against the “Joss Whedon and Race” essay:
“… they all went down in dismemberment, flames or dust, a rainbow coalition of horrible screaming death! ;-) And just so long as I’m not crazy, that makes up for any feelings I might have about being a phase and a half behind you (and damn that bastardy disabled gay african chinese pig-dog anyway)! billz | July 07, 15:15 CET”
http://whedonesque.com/comments/10799
None of the posters complained about the casual use of racist remarks in the post, but nearly all defended Joss against charges of racism.
Their silence when obvious hate speech is used (Firefly/Buffy/Angel boards are full of it) and their anger at anyone who points out the racism in Whedon’s shows leads me to assume they agree with the posters who stoop to hate speech. Whedon’s fans heartily support his whites-only universe. The low viewership for Whedon’s shows proves that he is only reaching a small demographic with his work, and that demographic has no problem with the lack of diversity in his programs.
Well, I normally don’t post comments, but I had to after reading this, especially all the comments. There are 4 things you need to know about me upfront, I am female, I am a Joss fan, I am Latina (majority Rican) and I am married to a white guy.
Race has never bothered me about Joss. Ever. My husband once asked me when he sat down to watch a show where it was located and I said Cali. He then asked where are the Mexicans? We laughed and I pointed out two basic things. I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland, Elyria. My cousin grew up in GM, another suburb. In Elyria I was part of the 3% other-not white or black. I really didn’t see anyone like me, I had to go to Lorain for that. My cousin was the only other. GM would make Sunnydale look amazingly deverse. My cousin said she never felt any racist attitudes, it just was majority white. I felt more different in Etown because race was an issue than my cousin did in GM because race wasn’t brought up there. Maybe she was in denial, but there it was about money, not color of skin. And if you had money, then everything was fine.
When they did the flashbacks and showed Wood’s mom being killed by Spike, I thought that was the coolest thing. In the eighties, cool strong black woman saving the day would have been the hot button. A small blonde bubbly white girl having save everyone’s butt is the hot button issue. And that is about race. If she was Latino or black, but still as small and saracastic, it wouldn’t have been so unusual. People see latinas and black women by nature as strong, it is the stereotype that we will beat the poo out of anyone who mess with specifically our family, so why couldn’t that transfer over to save the world, oh that’s right, we already have that in the latina community, she is called Wonderwoman. Who really see white women that way? In movies they are always the victims, the helpless people who have to be rescued. You missed one HUGE commentary on race. Just becuase they are white doesn’t mean they don’t have a race. Even white bread is still bread.
As for Jewish Willow, so she really wasn’t strong in her faith, she did become Wiccan, so what? Do you know how many Catholic people I know who never once mention that they are Catholic? It wasn’t important to her, I think that makes her more real.
I understand your points, I do, but I think you are trying to find fault. Is race an issue here in the US, yes, but when I flip on the BBC and see diversity all over, or watch a foreign film and see diversity without explanation, I realize we spend to much time talking and very little time doing. Joss taking on the woman stereotypes is much more important to me in the long run. Those are encouraged by several different religions and are more dangerous in the long run.
My grandparents had to leave the state of Arizona to marry. My grandmother, Mexican and Syrian (from a point that is now Lebanon) and my grandfather English and Jewish. No one said a word about me marrying a Dutch/German guy when I married him over eight years ago, just like no one said a word to my cousin when she married Terry, a black man. Things are getting better, and yes they have a long way to go, but you can’t expect someone to tackle every issue the world has in a tv series. No one is that good.
“Maybe the economic reality is that you can’t have a minority overrepresented, unless you are specifically targeting that minority.”
Ummm, they don’t know. Hollywood executives literally do not count Asians as a separate entity in their polls (they are lumped in with whites). This happens in radio, in TV _and_ in movies. Ergo, they don’t believe Asians exist.
How do I know? Justin Lin (director of Better Luck Tomorrow, an Asian American teen indie that eventually got picked up by MTV), when interviewed, said that’s how his meeting with Hollywood executives panned out. The execs got out a pie chart saying that they don’t count Asians unless they showed different buying patterns with regards to movies (but there’s no supply, which means no demand, which means no supply…)
It’s not that it’s not economically feasible (Better Luck Tomorrow did quite well for its limited showing, actually), it’s that the executives believe it not to be so, because they’re stuck in 1950. It doesn’t help that the writers have much of the same mindset as well.
Even documentaries about Asians have to have white protagonists in them. It disgusts me.
You should be disgusted, Jay. Shows like “Soap”, “All in the Family,” “Trek” and “Mod Squad” where shattering the color barriers 40 years ago, but for some reason producers and directors like Whedon have re-erected those walls.
I now realize that those of us who watch those segregated shows without complaint are to blame for continuing to perpetuate that color-blindness.
Minorities have struggled with being “invisible” politically, socially and in the media for decades. Hollywood can keep its white on white pie charts. I will watch the many shows that do have diverse casts; BSG, Blade The Series, Prison Break, LOST — and I will no longer bother with shows that are stuck in the 50′s.
Also was linked here from another website Slayerverse to be exact
do this is going to go in no particular order
The race and joss argument has been going on for longer then you’ve evnjoyed him (first article i saw was in 2000) and for me this argument can be a little too focused on because sunnydale is supposed to be a pretty small town, and pretty backwarks if they can’t even seem to tell people are dying all over the place. And I grew up in a similar town and we had 1 asian kid, 3 black kids, and that was the extent of our diversity. Now even if you move to a bigger area it is still mihgty possible for a group of white people to never interact with anyone black in the community, sad but true.
now as for addressing the race thing, aside from a few drunken occasions me and my black friends have never sat around discussing “wow is it weird to be black?” “do people treat you bad?” so i just dont see how joss could have fit this in without it being awkward, though maybe joss could have because he is awesome.
Same goes for the lesbian thing, now I am half of a lesbian couple, and one of the cute goodlooking lesbian couples at that(which is what i would consider willow and both her girls) and the thing is people have never been mean to me (both in a small town, then in two big cities) when your two good looking women people tend to not talk. As part of an interracial lesbian couple in the past i also never received any negativity from that perhaps this comes from the colorblindness you speak of but when theres no animosity i dont see that colorblindness is a bad thing.
so as far as firefly goes if you figure the world just keeps progressing as it is eventually people will all come this way, though perhaps not the poorer class which aren’t really who we spent the most of our focus on in firefly, and perhaps these tensions would have been addressed had the show been allowed to continue
I do think your point on the assasions is valid, especially since it’s well hinted that Book used to be an assasian of sorts as well. Though since all two of those men do seem well educated i dont really see them as the black men white people are afraid of, unless that is even a bigger jab by joss on how white people are afraid of black people bettering themselves which then is turned around as a good on joss!
and Tam is also a Hebrew name, so that argument could be named. And to me River looks like she has some sort of asian in her. If anyone knows her heritage I would love to know!
and I love fred and gunn thats one of my favorite relationships in all joss’s world. It rings very true to me.
and as for how the black vamps were killed I dont know I find it hard to beleive that that was done on purpose, perhaps the one person who made the decision is a racist f*ck head but you know if I was everyone else goin “Oh yeah? you wanna burn him up? Yeah that sounds like fun, we haven’t had a burnt vamp in a while!” It just wouldn’t dawn on me that we hadn’t had a black vamp in a while either
So yes i think you have some valid points. And I think that its true that many shows dont represent the minorities as well as they could. But when they do have a bunch of people or race on the screen (greys anatomy is a show thats coming to mind as far as a wide cast of ethnicity) I dont need to know why no ones quesyioning the asian and the black man.
Pam Noles has an excellent essay on the white washing of the Earthsea miniseries and her experiences as a young black girl who grew up loving and watching all white sci fi movies and shows. Her parents asked her “Why do you love a thing that won’t even let you exist within their made up worlds?”
Those of you who are of color and defend Whedon should be asking yourselves that same question.
http://www.infinitematrix.net/faq/essays/noles.html
I ain’t a big fan of Joss Whedeon though some of his work is mildly entertaing. Anyone who socially aware and has watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer knows whats lurking behind the sets in Summerdale. You could of counted the number of black characters on the finger of one hand.
Let’s see, there was the Kendra black Slayer (The worst carribean accent I have ever heard), the rapping black vampier Absalom, the street wise entrepreneurial black vampire Mr Trick, Giles’ black girlfriend, who didn’t say or do much, Lissa the black Vamp, Rossa the argumentative black ‘potential’ slayler and possibly the most positive black character of the whole show Pricnciple Wood, tho the writers tryed to make him out the be the bad guy when Wood confronted Spike for mudering his mother years earlyer so they loose points for that!
I was amazed that after 7 seasons and nearing the end of the series, he introduces a whole tribe in one episode! (and we were treated to Buffy kicking their ass). The utter cheek!!! It’s almost as if he was trying to fill a quota or something.
They had a chance to redeem themselves with the spin off ‘Angel’ when they introduce the character of ‘Gun’ even if he was one big stereotype. For a while there it seemed that they were making an effort. When Gun and Winnifred ‘fell in love’ I thought ”Great, an inter-racial relationsip, how bold and forward thinking of Joss and the writers of the show….but that was vary short lived when I realised that the whole romance was a wry attempt at creating frustration in the viewers and in the rejected Wesley. They wanted the viewer to yearn for Winnifred and Wesley to be together and dispise Gun for getting in the way.
My views were sealed when they finally made Gun, indirectly the cause of Winnifred death (didn’t you know that the only way for a black person to become a lawyer was to use dark mysical powers??) In doing this, they ensured that Winnifred and Wesley never get togeather and it’s THAT black guys fault. But not to worry a couple of episodes later (in ‘Origin’ I think) Gun is in a ‘Hell’ dimention and the viewers are treated to a lovely and VARY graphic scene of Gun having his stomuch sliced open revealing his guts for all enjoy and having his heart ripped out over and over and over again, I really can’t imagine any of the other characters being portrayed in such a way, not even the shows baddies. So what message does this send. To me it says ”This is what happends to black savages who dare to put they paws of white women”. Well done JossWhedeon & Co. You guys really have some issues that you need to work out.
The series Charmed is vary similar in its portrayal of black people, at one point I thought it was written by our friend Joss, it definatly has his stench smeared all over it.
[...] while ago, partly in response to the discussion about Joss Whedon and race, I started a Microsoft Access database to record all the credited characters who appear in Buffy [...]
wow, i really like the discussion of this topic. i feel like i should start off by saying that I’m a person of color (black and Latino) and I’m generally happy with Whedon’s treatment of race. Not that he’s perfect. But given the way race is typically handled on television (i.e. badly) the Whedon shows stand out as way better than average from my perspective.
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.
Re: Joss’ dealings with race … I think it’s because he spent time in England.
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 came to this discussion via Recent Comments.
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.
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.
I meant to add here “because those are the guest roles you have available”.
Chiwetel Ejiofor is also made of awesome in his own right, and I was terribly glad to see him cast in an American film.
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! )
If two white antagonists had been placed in Firefly and Serenity would it cross my mind to equate them?
*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.
How many black characters were there in all of Firefly & Serenity? Zoe, Book, Jubal Early, the Operative, and… anyone else? (Oh, right. Many of the Reavers, too. But how many individuals with distinct identities?)
Even Niska has an “other” accent, you’ll notice. So he’s white, but he’s *European*.
[...] gone to bed and blog-hopping. I’ll start with a feminist comic book blog and end up reading an argument for Joss Whedon being “color-blind.” Then I think, “Is color-blind a bad thing, and why do I think that?” Are we [...]
The cast of “Dollhouse” has been announced, and all the actors appear to be white except for the Asian doll Sierra (an Australian soap actress), and the male ex-cop, who is black. It looks like a step backward in terms of Whedon’s learning curve on race. I for one am disappointed.