[ SECRET POST #2795 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2795 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Law & Order: Criminal Intent]


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03.
[Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers]


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04.
[Jeeves and Wooster]


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05.
[Yahtzee/Zero Punctuation]


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06.
[Markiplier]


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07.
[Jackie Chan Adventures]


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08.
[The Parent Trap]


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09.
[Alexander]


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10.
[Starsky and Hutch]











Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 012 secrets from Secret Submission Post #399.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

01. https://i.imgur.com/ArpQJEr.jpg

[peablossom]

People seriously thought he was white at any point?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah. I remember rolling my eyes at this ask, because the person who sent Gaiman the question seemed really sure that Shadow hadn't been described as non-white until the end of the book. Lots of people pointed out that no, it's obvious in chapter one unless you're really not paying any attention at all.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, you could get there pretty easily by a couple different routes:

(1) A really half-hearted reading of the book.
(2) A fairly thorough reading of the book and an assumption that Odin's son is white.

[(Anonymous)]

You're surprised? People actually got angry about Rue's actress being black.

[(Anonymous)]

I just immediately assumed he was Native American cos his name was "Shadow", but that might just be racism covered up by fortuitous guessing lol

[(Anonymous)]

popcorn.gif

[(Anonymous)]

What if I had given his ethnicity no thought and was neither surprised nor unsurprised by the statement of information?

[(Anonymous)]

I'm the anon who replied to OP right below you, and that's how I felt too. Shadow's personality was so bland that his race made no impression on me whatsoever. If you told me he was supposed to be black, ok. Asian, ok. White? Ok.

If someone asked me, I'd have guessed white but only because the author is white too and I'd assume a white guy would write a white guy, and not because of "Shadow" the character at all. But then I generally don't bothers to imagine book characters' physical features unless they make a difference, which they didn't.

[(Anonymous)]

He didn't have a personality to me in the book, so he stayed a vague no-face humanshaped blur with no race to me.

Did he have a specific race? I didn't notice.

[(Anonymous)]

Heaven forfend people default to imagining incompletely described characters in their own image/experience.

[(Anonymous)]

If I had to pick a PB or something, I'd say I personally pictured someone vaguely like Wentworth Miller the whole time. He's mixed race, but it's ambiguous enough (like Shadow) for people to be unsure, and if someone mistook him for totally white I wouldn't blame them for it.

I wonder how many people are gonna read this and go "What? Wentworth Miller isn't white?"

OK, I actually opened the book

[likeadeuce]

Guard: "And what are you? A spic? A gypsy?"
"Not that I know of, sir. Maybe."
"Maybe you got n*** blood in you. You got n** blood in you, Shadow?"
"Could be, sir."

And ahh, this gets the secret to make sense to me. He seems to be unsure of his own racial background, but he's perceived as 'not white.' So it kind of (deliberately) supports any conclusion that you want to make and OP is saying that readers who choose to perceive, "Oh, he's probably just a dark-skinned white guy" are actively working on not perceiving the protagonist as POC. Well, that's totally a fair conclusion then, and I see where OP is coming from.*

*Completely not sarcastic, since I know in a forum like this that can be unclear.

[(Anonymous)]

Everyone seems to be arguing over whether or not it was obvious that he was non-white before this late-game description. But not many people tackling the 'if you were surprised that he was non-white you have problematic worldview'

I mean. Okay. Say you LEGITIMATELY missed his being non-white. Not because your racist white brain deliberately ignored the obvious clues but because you just didn't register it. I'm a quick reader, and I've been guilty of missing non-emphasized character traits and even minor plot points because I occasionally skim paragraphs. A bad habit, but it's more a lingering trait of my inattentive ADD than genuinely being careless. ANYWAY. I haven't read this book. But say someone had. And they missed the early indications. And they get alllllll the way to the end. And this apparently fairly bland character that they maybe saw as a non-descript white dude turns out to have been a non-descript PoC the whole time. I really. I think it's okay to be surprised. Surprise doesn't equal outrage, you know? If they felt it hadn't been addressed until then, it would be surprising. I would be surprised if I got to the end of the novel and found out the protagonist had flaming red hair. And not because I'm prejudiced against redheads.

If anything, the assumption that any character is white is a reflection of popular media today, not the individual. If you read a lot of books, watch a lot of television, movies, etc. there's gonna be a disproportionately white cast in all of the above. You get used to it, you come to expect it. It doesn't make you a shit person with white preferences because you make a SAFE guess at something. And not even consciously! We're talking about a subconscious assumption.

I don't know. I don't think this is sign of a problematic worldview that needs to be reexamined. I think it's a sign of a problematic world, that has affected our views. Even the most actively non-racist, open-minded and accepting and radical person probably isn't going to assume a character is like.. black and gay and disabled without being told. They might consciously decide they are, which is super cool, but it's not where the mind goes automatically.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, well, white people have racism sort of hard-wired into them. The have to work damn hard not to accidentally slip up and show it. I can totally see where the subtleties of the African American experience might escape them. I don't excuse it, but as long as they're trying to overcome their society-guided worldview, and don't go back to burning crosses, I think I can live with a few minor slip ups.

[(Anonymous)]

Never read it but there have been plenty of times other people were surprised by the ethnicity of characters in class and most of the time, it's either due to some lackadaisical reading or tendency to read characters as white. I remember being flummoxed by those people who thought Rue from Hunger Games was white when the author specified that her skin was dark and/or brown.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh God. Fuck Neil Gaiman.

[rbhudson]

This is honestly the first time I think I've seen someone criticize SJWs in general but be reasonable about it. *golf clap*

[darkmanifest]

I definitely had something important missing from my worldview as a kid - I'm not white, my family isn't white, I didn't even come up in a white neightborhood, and still I managed always to imagine nonwhite characters as white. You know Cassie, from Animorphs? I imagined her as white until the book 4 cover showed her as black, even though the text explicitly described her as black (it didn't make a song and dance out of it, which was necessary for me back then). I'm much better about that now (I saw Shadow as mixed on the first read), but white-as-default in Western culture is so powerful that I try to give people some slack for making that mistake. I mean, so long as they don't get tetchy about it like in the "lol I didn't see it so it must not have been there" comment in the secret.

[(Anonymous)]

ITT: people assuming characters are white unless explicitly told otherwise and thinking that's not indicative of a worldview that positions "white" as the default.

[(Anonymous)]

I think most SJWs are white teenage-to-young adults who start out with good intentions, or at least think they have them, but they're also really angry/entitled and want to feel superior or find someone to bully. At least there's a good chance they'll be more chill about most things when they grow out of it, less likely to shit themselves over differences.

[(Anonymous)]

It's interesting, because I read Shadow as white. My spouse, who is Native American, read Shadow as Native American. I think it's a testament to Mr. Gaiman's skill as a writer that the character that is meant to represent all humans, is seen as white by a white person and Native American by a Native American.

[arcadiaego]

I was surprised by the question, and a little embarrassed for them, but at least them having the guts to submit it will mean some other readers will become aware of their own bias.

[arcadiaego]

This thread just proves how far people will go to prove it's the writer's fault, and not their own internalised racism, despite the fact that someone replied to Gaiman's original answer saying they didn't realise Fat Charlie in Anansi Boys was black.

[(Anonymous)]

Shadow is such a bland, non-character. I don't think his ethnicity matters because not one single line in the story made me believe he was anything more than words on a page. I honestly pictured him as a literal shadow because nothing about him ever came to life or seemed real. He was just outrageously bland.