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sweet lion of zion!
Jul. 18th, 2006 10:12 amSo, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ficbyzee sez it's International Blog Against Racism Week. And I say, 'cool'. Although I know to some people, stuff like this is ... well, it's like Black History Month. It's another excuse for people of colour to see racism and oppression in everything and blame white people en toto for their problems when really they could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps because there's affirmative action and reverse racism and stuff like that, right? And, like, WHY did the Academy give the Oscar to yet another movie about racism when they could've given it to the movie about homophobia?!? SO UNFAIR.
And now that I've totally devolved into silly sarcasm, let me confess something: there have been times when I wished I was white. Because then, I could have an option for eye/hair colour that wasn't brown/brown. Then, I could have one of those really nifty family backgrounds, like Scottish or German instead of some convoluted East Indian whatever. Then, when I have to fill in innocuous fun questions like 'what actress would play you in a movie?' or 'what comic book character looks most like you?' I'd have trouble choosing from a vast array, not trouble *finding one*.
I'm not saying this to make white people feel guilty. Hell, I don't want that -- but at the same time, *I* don't want to feel guilty about pointing out that I don't see myself in popular media. Considering that I am a)ethnically East Indian and b)of Caribbean descent you'd think that would double my chances of finding characters who are like me in tv/movies/comics. And while I've discussed before that East Indian people (outside of Bollywood, which I feel no connection to) are usually just store clerks, taxi drivers, or random nerds/weirdos, I haven't talked about Caribbean people.
Generally, if you're West Indian on the screen/in print, you are:
1) a voodoo practicioner of some sort
2) a spliff-smoking Rastafarian
3) a headscarf-wearing mammy or a trampy 'island girl' **
Throw in a fakey half-Jamaican, half-Buster Poindexter 'accent' and voila. I can think of exactly two characters who don't fit this stereotype: Sebastian the Crab (The Little Mermaid) and Hermes Conrad (Futurama) -- and Hermes just barely squeaks in.
That's my people, y'all.
So this can make being in fandom a little weird, because, let's face it -- fandom is primarily white. And I have to admit that part of what I like about the largely online nature of it is that unlike in real life, I don't have to be a POC 24/7. (I mean, of *course* I do, but it's not the first thing people see. You know what I'm getting at.) But I find that I assume that everybody I'm talking to online is white, unless I've met them or they've explicitly said they're not, and that bothers me. Because doing that is tantamount to making *myself* invisible, and if there's anything I'm tired of, it's not having a presence. I nearly cried when I went to see Superman Returns because there were Indian people all over in the background and Kal Penn was in it in a non-ethnicized role, and I was so grateful to Bryan Singer for normalizing my skin colour that it was almost *pathetic*.
Margaret Cho kind of sums it up in this article when she says, "I am so sick of not existing, that I would settle for following any white person around with an umbrella just so I could say I was there." She's talking about Asians of Chinese/Korean/Japanese descent, but I guess I can include myself there because we're all lumped together under "Asian", after all.
None of my posts about racialized issues ever end on a definitive note of closure, and this one probably ain't gonna be any different. But that's how these things go, I suppose.
... now, to get cracking on answering backlogged comments. Sorry, y'all -- I've been bad about it lately!
**i have, of course, expressed interest in voodoo, spliffs, and headscarves my own damn self, but that's hardly the totality of my personality or interests!
ficbyzee sez it's International Blog Against Racism Week. And I say, 'cool'. Although I know to some people, stuff like this is ... well, it's like Black History Month. It's another excuse for people of colour to see racism and oppression in everything and blame white people en toto for their problems when really they could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps because there's affirmative action and reverse racism and stuff like that, right? And, like, WHY did the Academy give the Oscar to yet another movie about racism when they could've given it to the movie about homophobia?!? SO UNFAIR.And now that I've totally devolved into silly sarcasm, let me confess something: there have been times when I wished I was white. Because then, I could have an option for eye/hair colour that wasn't brown/brown. Then, I could have one of those really nifty family backgrounds, like Scottish or German instead of some convoluted East Indian whatever. Then, when I have to fill in innocuous fun questions like 'what actress would play you in a movie?' or 'what comic book character looks most like you?' I'd have trouble choosing from a vast array, not trouble *finding one*.
I'm not saying this to make white people feel guilty. Hell, I don't want that -- but at the same time, *I* don't want to feel guilty about pointing out that I don't see myself in popular media. Considering that I am a)ethnically East Indian and b)of Caribbean descent you'd think that would double my chances of finding characters who are like me in tv/movies/comics. And while I've discussed before that East Indian people (outside of Bollywood, which I feel no connection to) are usually just store clerks, taxi drivers, or random nerds/weirdos, I haven't talked about Caribbean people.
Generally, if you're West Indian on the screen/in print, you are:
1) a voodoo practicioner of some sort
2) a spliff-smoking Rastafarian
3) a headscarf-wearing mammy or a trampy 'island girl' **
Throw in a fakey half-Jamaican, half-Buster Poindexter 'accent' and voila. I can think of exactly two characters who don't fit this stereotype: Sebastian the Crab (The Little Mermaid) and Hermes Conrad (Futurama) -- and Hermes just barely squeaks in.
That's my people, y'all.
So this can make being in fandom a little weird, because, let's face it -- fandom is primarily white. And I have to admit that part of what I like about the largely online nature of it is that unlike in real life, I don't have to be a POC 24/7. (I mean, of *course* I do, but it's not the first thing people see. You know what I'm getting at.) But I find that I assume that everybody I'm talking to online is white, unless I've met them or they've explicitly said they're not, and that bothers me. Because doing that is tantamount to making *myself* invisible, and if there's anything I'm tired of, it's not having a presence. I nearly cried when I went to see Superman Returns because there were Indian people all over in the background and Kal Penn was in it in a non-ethnicized role, and I was so grateful to Bryan Singer for normalizing my skin colour that it was almost *pathetic*.
Margaret Cho kind of sums it up in this article when she says, "I am so sick of not existing, that I would settle for following any white person around with an umbrella just so I could say I was there." She's talking about Asians of Chinese/Korean/Japanese descent, but I guess I can include myself there because we're all lumped together under "Asian", after all.
None of my posts about racialized issues ever end on a definitive note of closure, and this one probably ain't gonna be any different. But that's how these things go, I suppose.
... now, to get cracking on answering backlogged comments. Sorry, y'all -- I've been bad about it lately!
**i have, of course, expressed interest in voodoo, spliffs, and headscarves my own damn self, but that's hardly the totality of my personality or interests!
