Unintentional Prejudice in Fiction

[Khayos]

Coolhand, I appreciated your wall of text, it was very interested to read and I also enjoyed the counter argument to the trope situation. Of course, stereotypes are just stereotypes, but surely they came from somewhere? There must be a grain of truth in it. I also agree that Rowling couldn't win here. Her book (disregarding the magical properties) was set in an English boarding school in the 90's, we must assume here, that realistically, the majority of characters would not be Chinese. Just as I would assume that any manga set in 1990 China would not contain many English school students. Obviously Harry Potter is a huge franchise so the coverage must have developed a lot of ideas about its level of PC, I can understand both views, but as a writer (not published, just enjoy writing) when inventing a character I don't go through a check list of how diverse I can make them, it just happens in my head and I would hate to offend anyone. If, however, I ever developed a series anywhere near as well know as Harry Potter, I fear it'd be impossible to avoid offending some parties.

Hex, I find that viewpoint interesting too, I never found Cho to come across as a girl in need of being recused when I read the books, and as a reader (albeit as English one) I never concentrated on anyone's race.

Anyway, this is the original Slam Poem if anyone is interested: Rachel Rostad - "To JK Rowling, from Cho Chang" (CUPSI 2013 Finals) - YouTube

I did think it was very well done and it did make me think, which I suppose is the aim of Slam Poetry.The comment section makes for quite an interesting read too.

 

[Ursa major]

Now if I do intentionally write something to offend certain ethnic groups (being ginger doesn't count)...

Speaking as a (much-faded) redhead....

While I wouldn't say that having (naturally) red hair in the UK has, or has had, the same disadvantages** as having, say, dark skin, it is something that's the result of one's DNA and so cannot be helped. And yet at the same time as attacks*** on red-haired people were being seen as nothing to worry about (by people whose hair wasn't red, naturally), the previous government was trying to say that believers should be protected in the same way as ethnic minorities. (Of course, people should never be attacked for what they believe, any more than they should for being who they are, but ideas should never be protected from criticism.)



** - I was once attacked, out of the blue, at secondary school. (The attacker admitted, but only to me, that it was because I was a redhead.) As my glasses had been broken in the attack, I felt I had to report the incident. I was told by the deputy headmaster, no less, that, "I know that redheads are hot-headed and get into fights." He probably thought he was doing me a favour by letting me off, but all I could see was that he'd decided, based on the colour of my hair, that I was at least partly to blame for the fight. This is the very same attitude from which people from ethnic minorities suffer, albeit with probably worse outcomes. (It wouldn't have been so bad, but I'd never been in trouble at school, unlike my attacker, and was the prefect on duty in the school library, where the attack took place.)

*** - Or jokes: I recall a show on Radio 5 Live discussing who should win the Ballon d'Or (Golden Ball). After a number of footballers' achievements were debated, they all agreed that one of them was ineligible: he was a ginger. How is this "qualitatively"**** different from saying it was because he had black skin or East Asian features? (Only because they would have been, quite rightly, hauled over the coals for saying those things.)

**** - Again, I'm not saying this is as ("quantitatively") bad as common-or-garden racism, but it does have the same basis in selecting someone who is naturally "other" and characterising them by, and dismissing them (or worse) for, that "otherness".

 

[Hex]

Maybe, going back to a point made earlier, if Scotty had been the mc, then making him a whisky drinker etc might have come over as lazy, even though there are plenty of Scots who drink whisky, there are plenty who don't.

I don't think aiming to avoid prejudice is automatically a way to make a work sterile and 'political correctness' is now pretty much a term of abuse for a set of beliefs that tried to move us beyond pretty astounding prejudice. You don't need to go back very far to see it being directed at the Irish in the UK or even more recently the Roma in Eastern Europe (and now the UK), and while it still exists at least it's a little more apologetic and a little less mainstream.

On the other hand, as with any series of beliefs, I don't think you can point at one stream of anti-racist thought, or one kind of feminism. Who are you going please when you write? Surely, as with everything, you're writing to please yourself and people like you and the bottom line is that if you're the sort of person who's happily intolerant and racist/ sexist or who doesn't bother thinking about this stuff, you wouldn't engage in these discussions -- and, unlike (for example) Mark Lawrence, you wouldn't care.

The fact that we care and we try to avoid prejudice is about as much attention as the subject deserves, I think.

 

[svalbard]

Speaking as a (much-faded) redhead....

While I wouldn't say that having (naturally) red hair in the UK has, or has had, the same disadvantages** as having, say, dark skin, it is something that's the result of one's DNA and so cannot be helped. And yet at the same time as attacks*** on red-haired people were being seen as nothing to worry about (by people whose hair wasn't red, naturally), the previous government was trying to say that believers should be protected in the same way as ethnic minorities. (Of course, people should never be attacked for what they believe, any more than they should for being who they are, but ideas should never be protected from criticism.)



** - I was once attacked, out of the blue, at secondary school. (The attacker admitted, but only to me, that it was because I was a redhead.) As my glasses had been broken in the attack, I felt I had to report the incident. I was told by the deputy headmaster, no less, that, "I know that redheads are hot-headed and get into fights." He probably thought he was doing me a favour by letting me off, but all I could see was that he'd decided, based on the colour of my hair, that I was at least partly to blame for the fight. This is the very same attitude from which people from ethnic minorities suffer, albeit with probably worse outcomes. (It wouldn't have been so bad, but I'd never been in trouble at school, unlike my attacker, and was the prefect on duty in the school library, where the attack took place.)

*** - Or jokes: I recall a show on Radio 5 Live discussing who should win the Ballon d'Or (Golden Ball). After a number of footballers' achievements were debated, they all agreed that one of them was ineligible: he was a ginger. How is this "qualitatively"**** different from saying it was because he had black skin or East Asian features? (Only because they would have been, quite rightly, hauled over the coals for saying those things.)

**** - Again, I'm not saying this is as ("quantitatively") bad as common-or-garden racism, but it does have the same basis in selecting someone who is naturally "other" and characterising them by, and dismissing them (or worse) for, that "otherness".

Point proven.

 

[Ursa major]

Point proven.

I think you're going to have to expand on that a bit; for instance, letting us know what the point was that you think has been proven.

 

[HareBrain]

The fact that we care and we try to avoid prejudice is about as much attention as the subject deserves, I think.

Yup, I agree. Though I still keep coming back to this thread with more popcorn (which I myself popped using the heat it's generated, though I have to use a torch to eat it by).

I'm happy my eyes were opened a while back to the possibility of thoughtless writing causing offence, but as long as that thoughtlessness-detector is running in the background, I'm content -- I don't want it using up resources and sapping creativity by running on top all the time.

Besides, I wouldn't mind betting that Joe Abercrombie got more kudos out of addressing his apparent thoughtlessness than he would have done if he hadn't displayed it in the first place. So what's the lesson there?

 

[Mouse]

This is a musing, rather than my actual opinion: is 'straight white man' more likely to not find anything offensive because there rarely is anything prejudiced written about 'straight white man'?

I hear lots of stuff about women that I find offensive. Sometimes I can't be arsed with it, sometimes I get wound up by it.

Going back to Cho Chang. I've not read Harry Potter, I've never even heard of the character Cho Chang before this thread. But about names... I do look up where names come from before I use them to make sure they fit where the character comes from but... I have a Polish friend who's just married a Malaysian guy (called Adam) and they've just had a baby. The baby doesn't have a Polish name, or a Malaysian name. He's called Jayden.

 

[svalbard]

You took issue with what I considered a throw away remark about ginger haired people(I may have tinge of red to my own hair). It was genuinely meant as a jest and was referring back to a number of posts about ginger hair begun by Ace earlier in the thread.

The point is that just about anything can be found offensive or prejudicial by anyone. Most of us(including myself) have a story about how once this happened to me or I witnessed such and such.

If I was to second guess every prejudicial thing in my writings then I would end up producing a very sterile piece of work. So I do not.

 

[Ursa major]

Fair enough (a comment not aimed at blond(e)s, by the way), but a smiley would probably have helped us see that you were meant to be joking.




(Note that throwaway remarks don't automatically count as jokes and can, as some people have found to their cost when their private emails have become public, be career limiting.)

 

[svalbard]

You took issue with what I considered a throw away remark about ginger haired people(I may have tinge of red to my own hair). It was genuinely meant as a jest and was referring back to a number of posts about ginger hair begun by Ace earlier in the thread.
The point is that just about anything can be found offensive or prejudicial by anyone. Most of us(including myself) have a story about how once this happened to me or I witnessed such and such.

If I was to second guess every prejudicial thing in my writings then I would end up producing a very sterile piece of work. So I do not.

Or it could be looked at another way. I knew exactly what I was saying and deliberately went out of my way to cause offense. Then I deserve censure.

 

[Ursa major]

Oddly enough, I wasn't accusing you of being offensive (intentionally or not), mainly because I can't see how you were being so; though I'm sure someone might imagine that you were. (But that's up to them.)

 

[svalbard]

I understand that you were not.

 

[Brian G Turner]

This is a musing, rather than my actual opinion: is 'straight white man' more likely to not find anything offensive because there rarely is anything prejudiced written about 'straight white man'?

You mean aside from the fact that - for some people - all straight white men are presumed to be closet sexist, racists, homophobes, who's sole intent in life is to dominate every other person on the planet?

 

[Hex]

This is a musing, rather than my actual opinion: is 'straight white man' more likely to not find anything offensive because there rarely is anything prejudiced written about 'straight white man'?

We might hypothesize that straight white (blond?) men are sometimes less aware of prejudice because they experience less of it, and that may lead to some of them resisting "political correctness" on the basis that everything's fine, really, can't see what your problem is -- didn't I just buy you a new apron to go with the oven glove I got you for Christmas?

Or getting angry at pesky feminist types etc.

But it would surely be shockingly prejudicial to suggest that all straight white men feel the same (!)

EDIT: @I, Brian -- but those people have not (until recently?) been the dominant voice. Far from it.

 

[Coolhand]

This is a musing, rather than my actual opinion: is 'straight white man' more likely to not find anything offensive because there rarely is anything prejudiced written about 'straight white man'?

It's an interesting musing, but isn't that in itself an example of unintentional prejudice? Assuming someone lacks empathy because of their gender and skin tone? I don't mean that in a snarky way, honest, I just use to illustrate why I fear this line of logic can tend to eat itself.

 

[Kissmequick]

I think the problem is when a character is defined only by the stererotypes.

So, if a redhead was always hot tempered and there was little else about her personality shown -- she's defined by the redness of her hair and the attribute that goes with that supposedly (an Asian girl is defined by the fact she's great at maths etc etc)

Whereas say Scotty, yeah sure he drank a bit of whiskey etc, but there was a lot more to the character - he wasn't The Scot, he was the awesome engineer who happened to be Scottish

Cho Chang didn't really get much screen time (only seen the films) so didn't have time to develop as a 3D character, leaving her just The Asian Girl.

And ofc this is compounded is they a) are built around a stereotype (intentionally or not) and b) are the only one in the story. If you have a story with 5 red heads, all with different personalities, it doesn't matter that one has a hot temper because the others are showing more diverse personalities. But if they all have hot tempers (bonus points if it's specifically because they are red heads) welllll.....

And with say female characters, that happens. All the women are passive, all the women are shrews, all the women...and that's when my eyes start rolling.

So developing a character beyond their surface traits is a cure -- we should be doing it anyway for MCs. But for minor characters, walks ons etc, it's just something to keep in mind, I think. Not to go for the obvious, if we don't have time for more development. Because we should always keep our audience in mind



.

 

[Foxbat]

Whereas say Scotty, yeah sure he drank a bit of whiskey etc, but there was a lot more to the character - he wasn't The Scot, he was the awesome engineer who happened to be Scottish

Gene Roddenberry admitted that he made the engineer Scottish precisely because he was the engineer. Would he ever have made him captain swilling away on the Romulan ale?

'Warp Factor twenty laddie,'
'The Engines don't go up that far,'
'Ach! away, ensign Kirk. Away and bile yer heid, ya wee numpty. Jist gie they Klingons the malky an fill ma glass afore ah come ower there and jib ye wi' ma phaser!'

 

[Mirannan]

But what race is a Zulu? And what race is a Swede?

I don't see the point of your question. But: Zulus are black Africans who currently (for the most part) live near the eastern coast of South Africa and have their own culture and language - which is distinct from the other black tribes surrounding them, as is their physical appearance to some degree.

Swedes live in Sweden (duh!) and some ethnic Swedes live in the USA for historical reasons. Although they do vary, Swedes typically have pale skin and a greater-than-average chance of blonde hair and blue eyes.

The point is, though, that the two groups are obviously, and drastically, different in physical appearance - not only in skin and hair colour but also in such things as the shape of the nose and the curliness of the hair.

Sure, there are spectra of differences in virtually any physical characteristic of humans one cares to name - but the two ends really are different! Incidentally, pretending that physical differences are purely a social construct can cause trouble.

An example of this is that children of South Asian extraction living in Northern England - of whom there are quite a few - have a fairly high risk of rickets, mostly because of their dark skin. Pretending that a problem like that isn't there doesn't make it go away.

 

[Hex]

Equally, people of Northern European extraction who live in Australia need a lot of sunblock.

But why is that important?

 

[Ursa major]

I don't see the point of your question.

The point is that neither you nor I can name the races to which they belong, which is rather odd, don't you think? Given that people are said to belong to different races, and that discrimination is said to be based on people being different races, one would have thought that some of us might know the names of these races. But we don't, because they don't exist outside of our brains.

I believe that the greatest human genetic variety is to be found in sub-Saharan Africa, and was there long before peoples from farther north (from the Middle East and from Europe) appeared there. If race had any deep biological meaning, rather than being based on a superficial analysis of superficial appearance, Africa would have lots of races, far more than the rest of the world combined. But I've never seen anyone say what these various races are.

So what we actually have is someone saying that a typical Swede is fair skinned and a typical Zulu is dark skinned and so they are different races. But half-a-dozen Africans selected from all over that continent could all possess the same skin colour but be more genetically different to each other than at least one of them** is from a typical Swede.

Note that the terms 'Swede' and 'Zulu', are attached to nationalities and language groups. Neither term, as far as I know, is used to identify a race.


** - The one(s) whose ancestors were directly related to those who left Africa to populate the rest of the world.