Issues of race in Blackheart Fleet
Dec. 3rd, 2004 01:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jdblCheck out what Sloane made me! Dudes, it's Captain Blackheart!
I'm sort of conflicted about what the Okari look like. I'm very certain that the Imperials look mixed-race Black, frequently with gray eyes. And that the Okari all have black hair and black eyes. But I'm not really sure about their ethnicity. This whole thing started with a dream (literally I had a sleeping dream, not a dream in the MLK sense of the word) where the personage who eventually became Winter Spicetrader was played by Ewan McGregor, only with black hair, black eyes and the trademark scar right through his left eye. (Though at first he was called Trace, short for Bladetrace, i.e. scar, which was also a reference to his famous mother, who at that point was still called Blade - and this is all neither here nor there.)
Obviously, McGregor is white. Very, very white. One doesn't get much whiter than Scottish. I'm sort of going on the idea that this is the far future and there's been a lot of mixing of the races everywhere except where colonies were very ethnically uniform and have been isolated for a long time (which is why the Okari all have a similar eye, hair, and skin color that is very obviously not Imperial). And I wanted the Imperials to be people of color because there are a lot of Imperials in the series and when they make the movie they'll have to hire a lot of actors of color. And I like the idea of people of color taking over the world, even if they don't end up being any more humane in their disposition of it than white folks have been. If the Okari are white, though, then it's sort of the Good White People and their Token Good Black Friends vs. the Bad Black People. Which isn't all that cool. So the obvious way of fixing this is to make the Okari more like mixed-race Asian, and then it becomes the Good Asian People and their Black Friends vs. the Bad Black People and there's no white people in it at all. Which is somewhat cooler. I rather like the idea of eradicating whiteness all together, or at least marginalizing it tremendously.
The only downside is that then I can't have Ewan McGregor as my Winter Spicetrader. But by the time I finish it, sell it, sell the movie rights and it gets to casting, he'll be too old anyway. Oh, well.
(N.B.: considerations of casting are all just idle bullshitting and not at all serious, except in the sense that it helps me imagine what the characters look like.)
I realize that it's sort of cheap of me to make my Imperials dark-skinned (darkish, they tend to range from a lovely milk-chocolate color to a more cafe-au-lait), in the sense that it's a way of dealing with race without dealing with race at all. I get to write non-white people without having to worry about whether I - as a white woman - am writing them adequately; by the time of the Empire, the idea of "black" as a racial identity is meaningless. (Personally, I think racial identity is already far more problematic than it is generally given credit for being, but that's just me.) There's Imperial culture and various Outer Realms cultures, and I get to make them up. I'm tired of writing white people all the time. It's bloody boring to have every body be white, just because I happen to be (translucently) white. But I'm way too skittish (at this point, anyway) to try to write people of color in my own culture(s)/time(s). So I make them some other "ethnicity" (whatever that would mean in this particular context - they don't look "white", in other words) and I escape the critical racial smackdown that states that I can't "authentically" write the non-white experience. (Though I don't worry about being criticized for writing male characters at all and would tell anyone who said I couldn't write men to fuck off - perhaps demonstrating that I'm a lot more comfortable with issues of gender than I am issues of race.)
In theory, I escape the smackdown, any way. Perhaps there are some critics out there right now ready to deliver said. In which case, fire away. If I'm wrong-headed about this, better I should hear about it now. The depth of my critical sophistication about this issue is basically, "But dude, so many white people is BORING and wouldn't it be cool if there were a science fiction movie with no white people in it at all?"
On the other hand, in my defense, Le Guin did it first.
I'm sort of conflicted about what the Okari look like. I'm very certain that the Imperials look mixed-race Black, frequently with gray eyes. And that the Okari all have black hair and black eyes. But I'm not really sure about their ethnicity. This whole thing started with a dream (literally I had a sleeping dream, not a dream in the MLK sense of the word) where the personage who eventually became Winter Spicetrader was played by Ewan McGregor, only with black hair, black eyes and the trademark scar right through his left eye. (Though at first he was called Trace, short for Bladetrace, i.e. scar, which was also a reference to his famous mother, who at that point was still called Blade - and this is all neither here nor there.)
Obviously, McGregor is white. Very, very white. One doesn't get much whiter than Scottish. I'm sort of going on the idea that this is the far future and there's been a lot of mixing of the races everywhere except where colonies were very ethnically uniform and have been isolated for a long time (which is why the Okari all have a similar eye, hair, and skin color that is very obviously not Imperial). And I wanted the Imperials to be people of color because there are a lot of Imperials in the series and when they make the movie they'll have to hire a lot of actors of color. And I like the idea of people of color taking over the world, even if they don't end up being any more humane in their disposition of it than white folks have been. If the Okari are white, though, then it's sort of the Good White People and their Token Good Black Friends vs. the Bad Black People. Which isn't all that cool. So the obvious way of fixing this is to make the Okari more like mixed-race Asian, and then it becomes the Good Asian People and their Black Friends vs. the Bad Black People and there's no white people in it at all. Which is somewhat cooler. I rather like the idea of eradicating whiteness all together, or at least marginalizing it tremendously.
The only downside is that then I can't have Ewan McGregor as my Winter Spicetrader. But by the time I finish it, sell it, sell the movie rights and it gets to casting, he'll be too old anyway. Oh, well.
(N.B.: considerations of casting are all just idle bullshitting and not at all serious, except in the sense that it helps me imagine what the characters look like.)
I realize that it's sort of cheap of me to make my Imperials dark-skinned (darkish, they tend to range from a lovely milk-chocolate color to a more cafe-au-lait), in the sense that it's a way of dealing with race without dealing with race at all. I get to write non-white people without having to worry about whether I - as a white woman - am writing them adequately; by the time of the Empire, the idea of "black" as a racial identity is meaningless. (Personally, I think racial identity is already far more problematic than it is generally given credit for being, but that's just me.) There's Imperial culture and various Outer Realms cultures, and I get to make them up. I'm tired of writing white people all the time. It's bloody boring to have every body be white, just because I happen to be (translucently) white. But I'm way too skittish (at this point, anyway) to try to write people of color in my own culture(s)/time(s). So I make them some other "ethnicity" (whatever that would mean in this particular context - they don't look "white", in other words) and I escape the critical racial smackdown that states that I can't "authentically" write the non-white experience. (Though I don't worry about being criticized for writing male characters at all and would tell anyone who said I couldn't write men to fuck off - perhaps demonstrating that I'm a lot more comfortable with issues of gender than I am issues of race.)
In theory, I escape the smackdown, any way. Perhaps there are some critics out there right now ready to deliver said. In which case, fire away. If I'm wrong-headed about this, better I should hear about it now. The depth of my critical sophistication about this issue is basically, "But dude, so many white people is BORING and wouldn't it be cool if there were a science fiction movie with no white people in it at all?"
On the other hand, in my defense, Le Guin did it first.
