fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4978 ]

[ SECRET POST #4978 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4978 ⌋

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SA I expect tomorrow there will be all the usual knee jerk replies. Well I grew up in an English village. English village life is its own culture (both good and bad aspects ) and it is typically white, gardening orientated, gossiping about the church roof repairs, typically shite events that nevertheless bring the whole community together, going out for a walk on Christmas day and saying hi to everyone else doing the same. I want to preserve my culture and why the hell shouldn't I want that? Everyone wants to preserve their cultures.

There's nothing wrong with defending village life or rural culture. I do think there are a few things that I disagree with in what you said, though.

First, I don't understand why rural village culture is necessarily also bound up with being white. I don't understand why it's impossible for rural village culture to accommodate non-white people, or why the presence of non-white people constitutes a threat in and of itself. I don't get why non-white people are incapable of wanting a life where people gossip about everyday events and say hi to people going out for a walk. And I don't get why it's necessary to bind up that idea of rural village life and culture with an aggressive nationalism, or really ethno-nationalism. So talking about Midsomer Murders being 'a bastion of Englishness', for example, kind of bothers me.

And I also think that focusing on peoples' race overlooks larger threats to the stability of rural village life (or any other permanent social structures), especially the corrosive effects of unrestrained capitalism, which hollows out everything that it touches.

This is a very intelligent, kind, and measured response to a crappy comment.

My hometown is super white too, as a direct result of redlining and other policies designed to keep it that way. If there were a show or book set in my hometown, written more or less the same way but with a diverse cast (by which I mean the POC were not nannies, manual laborers, etc.) it would be an improvement, because it would be depicting a better version of the world.

"And I don't get why it's necessary to bind up that idea of rural village life and culture with an aggressive nationalism, or really ethno-nationalism." <-- THIS THIS THIS

America and the UK are not comparable in this matter at all.

I agree that there's huge differences between the two countries, but I'm curious what specific differences make them incomparable in this specific context

AYRT Because it's white people who have that culture. Sure if people want to move to the village and integrate great I have no problem with that regardless of skin colour. But in today's world people, people don't want to integrate, they want their own cultures which is more than fair enough. But then it leads to the erosion of our way of life. You can see that in any English city with a large population of Muslims. Look at the protests by Muslim parents over LGBTQ lessons in schools for God's sake.

Holy crap you sound like a white supremacist.

Not really. I'm not saying other cultures can't exist. I'm saying my culture has as much right to exist and there's nothing wrong with that.

But you want those cultures to say away from you and not ~erode your way of life~. If you don't want to be called a white supremacist, stop saying shit that makes you sound like one.

I mean, yeah, integration is a complicated process that takes time. But if your attitude is that it's just simply impossible, I think that's categorically wrong. Immigrant communities are not all the same. Some people are going to prefer to be in communities that stay closer to their own cultures, some people want to integrate more. Both of those things are fine, and they can coexist. You can't point to people in the specific environment of urban immigrant communities, and then say that all Muslim and Asian immigrants are going to act in the exact same way regardless of the environment they're in, even if they're in different economic circumstances and in a rural environment.

Are there adjustments, sure, is it a change to have rural areas be less white, but that's not the same as an erosion of a lifestyle. You say it yourself! Where people want to integrate, it's not a problem. You just close off the possibility that non-white people can ever integrate, for no good reason.

And then focusing on immigrants means that you don't focus on the pervasive economic forces and corporate domination that really does threaten to hollow out the countryside and erode rural lifestyles. And are you really defending LGBT people and the idea of liberal openness in society when you're defending someone who implicitly said that only rural white people really count as English? Is the attitude that we're all in favor of gay people, as long as they happen to be rural and white?

DA

And are you really defending LGBT people and the idea of liberal openness in society when you're defending someone who implicitly said that only rural white people really count as English?

"BuT tHeY dOn'T lIkE gAy PeOpLe!!!11!" is an argument I've seen from Islamophobes so many times. It's a distraction that they think will keep people from realizing they're a bigot, but it rarely works, in my experience.

They don't. And that should be a problem for you. Because eventually, it will be a problem for LGBTQ people.

You're a problem for LGBTQ people

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2020-08-23 13:01 (UTC) - Expand

would you be okay with people of Irish or Polish or French descent playing the roles of the English villagers or must they be 100% English? would a DNA test be required to confirm the actors' Englishness? and what would be considered English enough? 50% English? 90%? or must it be 100%?

If you can do a convincing English accent then great. Don't care where they come from.

So it's accents that bother you?

If you're depicting a typical English rural setting then most of the residents are going to be actually English. Especially true of MM where the location is based on a real life county whose population is 97.6% English white. It's not rocket science.

Seriously.

If you want a cute little mystery series set in the rural UK, 99% of people are going to be white. Especially if it's pre-war up to the 2010s.

If you want a diverse cast of characters with different ethnic backgrounds, religions and heritage, in a big multicultural melting pot, set it in Birmingham. Leicester. Leeds. And that's not counting London and Manchester.

There are loads of these places. Force-diversifying areas that lack diversity is ridiculous, because there are so many places to choose from that hardly get looked at.

However if you want that quaint village look? It's going to be white. Closest you can get to that and move away from the primary white village demographic is going to be like... Oldham and that's less "quaint rural" and more "hollow ex-mining/mill region 60 years behind the rest of the country".

There's at least 2 different levels of conversation here that are getting actively mixed up. On the one hand, we're talking about rural villages as they actually exist; on the other hand, we're talking about rural villages as they are represented in popular culture and as they should be represented in popular culture. And people are switching back and forth between those things - we've gone from a conversation about how the actual lived culture of rural villages is threatened, to a conversation about what depictions of rural villages on the TV should look like.

I think those two things are related, but they're not identical to each other. In other words, a TV show that depicted rural villages as being multicultural in the same way London is would not directly threaten the rural way of life. The depiction does have broader effects, and to the extent that it created an incorrect image of what rural villages are actually like, that would be bad. But when OP comes in talking about preserving English rural village culture, having Asian characters on Midsomer Murder is not a direct threat to English rural village culture.

I do think that there is an argument that you can make that depicting rural England should be done in at least a semi-realistic way. But, as far as I am aware, what was at stake in the Midsomer Murder controversy was not that Midsomer should have exactly the same racial demographics as Birmingham. It was about whether there should be effectively any sympathetic non-white characters cast on the show; and it was about the specific things that the producer said.

Personally, I think it's reasonable that there should be some non-white characters on the show - rural areas are overwhelmingly white, but not 100% white. And also, it's not like Midsomer Murders is some kind of exemplar of social realism to begin with. It's a ridiculous, corny show with an often unrealistic background and overly complex, lurid crimes. It's good fun but it's in no way realistic. I think that what the producer said was wrong. And I don't think that anything about it is really related to OP's arguments about the preservation of rural village culture, as it actually exists and not as it exists in Midsomer Murders.

If they're playing the role of an English person from an English village ... yes?

Having a non-English accent, or even the *wrong* English accent, would bother me and a lot of other people, for certain.

Like having somebody with a thick Southern drawl claiming to have lived all their life in, like, Oregon or New Jersey. It just wouldn't fly.

You can't have a character that claims to be from a little village in Herefordshire whose family has lived there for generations talking with a Newcastle or Cockney accent, let alone a Polish one.

English people are funny about accents.

An American might not be able to distinguish London from the Midlands from Liverpool, but you can bet English people will.

It gets worse if they're from the region in question.

You speak with a Black Country accent and claim to be from Birmingham and the Brummies will get pissed off. Somebody with a Yorkshire accent saying they're from Lancashire will reaaaaally annoy people from both places.

People outside of the regions might not be able to tell. The above distinctions might well be lost on somebody from the West Country, or the Greater London area, but those from there will know.

Accents are important.

Especially if you're aiming for realism.

That's why all the classic British multicultural media is set in the big, multicultural cities and not a little village of 2000 people called Henley-over-Wode or some shit.

Have you watched Midsomer Murders?

It's definitely not aiming for realism.

Nayrt: it's a series where people get killed by cheese ffs.

The plots may not be aiming for realism but the setting is aiming to be typical rural England.

But none of that has anything to do with being white

Spot the person who didn't read the thread.

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