Comments on Building Peace: Avatar, the White Race Fantasy and... er... My Nov...

And what's fascinating about many of these com...

2010-05-28T15:43:38.968+03:00

And what's fascinating about many of these comments is the assumption that Americans are white. Just consider Reach 364's comment: "What made my original draft racist wasn't the fact that white people were saving non-white people. That happens all the time in the real world. As Jacobsenra points out, Americans are leading the disaster response in Haiti." Hello, people, not all Americans are white! Until you can check your own racism, stop trying to lecture others about theirs.

RJS: Your definition covers only the most overt ex...

2010-01-28T07:00:46.289+02:00

RJS: Your definition covers only the most overt expression of racism. Racism has many more subtle and insidious manifestations.

What made my original draft racist wasn't the fact that white people were saving non-white people. That happens all the time in the real world. As Jacobsenra points out, Americans are leading the disaster response in Haiti (as they have with many other natural disasters). What made my original draft racist is that I was incapable of conceiving local characters who could play a meaningful role in their own lives. I created a world where the Westerners were flesh-and-blood characters with hopes, dreams, feelings, and abilities, and where almost all the locals were cardboard cutouts. The process was entirely subconscious.

What scares me is that this subconscious process isn't limited to my fiction... I see it all the time in the real world. When many Americans think about our role in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Yemen, or any of the other places we get involved, they think of Americans as the primary actors and the locals as a part of the landscape. We get it exactly backwards. These aren't our wars to win or our problems to solve; we can only succeed if we help empower these governments to solve their own problems. We can't do that if we see through this subconscious lens.

As for my wife, she isn't racist; she just has an eye for irony. She noted that a white author was coming to the defense of minorities by writing an article critical of white people who come to the defense of minorities. You're right, her ethnicity doesn't affect the validity of her argument, but it certainly creates an interesting juxtaposition with her thesis.

Sounds like you've been brainwashed . . . your...

2010-01-27T15:30:07.835+02:00

Sounds like you've been brainwashed . . . your novel-in-development isn't racist because the main characters are white. What would be racist is if you propagated the belief that the color of their skin made them superior and others inferior. That’s the definition of racism. Having characters that happen to be white and which happen to help a non-white people doesn’t do that.

What was a racist response though was your wife’s immediately checking to find out the color of that author . . . then remarking that she must be a white person based on her piece, as if the color of her skin, and not the ideas the Newitz was trying to get across, was what mattered.

Let’s say I read a piece advocating more welfare and drug treatment programs and then said oh, that author obviously has to be black. Would you or your wife think that is racist? I would.

When people make false claims or engage in poor thinking about racism to feel less guilty about themselves they end up harming the cause of civil rights, not helping them. In your piece of fiction, I suspect the would-be victims of genocide could care less about the fact that it is a white man saving them than the fact that they would actually be saved.

Beware the monolenticular life.

2010-01-17T08:04:18.156+02:00

Beware the monolenticular life.

While I agree with your concepts and comments abou...

2010-01-17T03:46:33.459+02:00

While I agree with your concepts and comments about Avatar it is very interesting to view it through the lens I saw of a news broadcast of the Hatian earthquake tragedy. A reporter was talking to a large group of uninjured people who were wondering what was taking the Americans so long to get here to help. They were uninterested in even trying to band together as a group to do anything at all and seemend resigned to sit around and wait until help arrived. While I realize the Avatar/Pocahontas concept of saving a people by becoming a part of the group is different than helping people who have been struck by a tragedy, the concept of the "whites" as the savior of helpless people nontheless remains and even reinforcess the overall woldview that we think we are the only ones who can save the people.

As a point Avatar is a movie designed to really do one thing in the end and that is to make a LOT of money. The fact that it helps to highlight some of the issues you have mentioned (as well as others) and encourages people to openly discuss them is just an added benefit.

Why do white guys write scripts like this so often...

2010-01-15T17:48:31.178+02:00

Why do white guys write scripts like this so often? Because it's so damn easy, that's why :)