[ SECRET POST #2637 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2637 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 070 secrets from Secret Submission Post #377.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Huh. I wasn't expecting people to agree with OP, but I was expecting less of 'if all my friends are white it's normal to only think of white people when you read'.
I mean, I think that thinking of white people as the 'default' and thinking of anything else as 'other and alien' should be an...obstacle to overcome? Like once you catch yourself thinking it you should maybe think about why that is, and maybe consider the other possibilities?

[(Anonymous)]

"about why that is" Because that is what you are most comfortable with and have spent the majority of your life around. So if you spend all of your life around redheads, your default person is going to have red hair.

[logicbutton]

Right. That should be the conclusion you should come to. And then you should start trying to undo it.

[(Anonymous)]

Why? As long as you're aware that there are lots of people who don't look like that and that they are also people and don't deserve to be treated any differently, why does it matter?

For that matter, what SHOULD the 'default' person look like? Any version that a given person comes up with is not going to be good enough for a lot of other people.

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't matter. It only matters to SJWs on the Internet, who are promoting a most insidious form of racism themselves. I.e., that people with X coloured skin is different in X/Y/Z specific ways, and thinking of all people as equal REGARDLESS of skin colour is, in the perverse and twisted SJW worldview, somehow racist. It isn't. Everything fandom has fought for since the '70s is being undone whole cloth by these clueless teenagers on Tumblr (and LJ, which was where the insanity originally started.)

[(Anonymous)]

Because if everyone decided to stay within the small, homogeneous comfort zone they were born in, we'd have way less diversity of everything. Do you still ONLY hang out with six year olds like the way you did when you were a kid? Read ONLY the same books? Eat ONLY the same foods? Watch ONLY the same TV? Chances are you do a lot of different, adult things that you gradually discovered as you were growing up and expanding your horizons. Why did you bother to do that? Why does learning new things and trying new things matter?

"Any version that a given person comes up with is not going to be good enough for a lot of other people."

You say that like it's a good reason not to try at all. Is everything you do right now good enough for the world to unanimously agree upon? How about your plans for the future? Would everyone in the whole world have the same opinions as you do? Probably not. So are you going to give up because there's people out there who won't consider your future good enough?

Ahhh, but if it's something like casting people who aren't white in one's movies/stories, somehow all those hurdles you overcome every single day of your life suddenly seem impossible. Why?

[gabzillaz]

Cause it's boring as fuck.

[(Anonymous)]

Then it's as boring as fuck for Korean dramas to have only Asians in them.

[gabzillaz]

lmao this is the laziest defense in the book "but they do it too!!!11" Korea has issues with racism and colorism, who is denying that?

The media in my country also values light skinned people over anything else (even if it's not representative of the people that live here), doesn't mean it's not fucked up and boring.

But other countries having problems doesn't mean european and american media get a free pass for wanting to be all white all the time.

[(Anonymous)]

Argentina:

Ethnic Groups:
White (mostly Spanish and Italian): 97%
Mestizo (mixed white and Amerindian ancestry), Amerindian, or other non-white groups: 3%

Yes it is representative because 97% of the fucking country is white.

[gabzillaz]

This faulty ass bullshit. I live here, I fucking see what is representative and what isn't. Just because media here wants to pretend our country is a white paradise where black people don't exist, asians only live in supermarkets and Indigenous people are dying out doesn't mean it's true. There's a whole article that talks about racism in this country, have fun.

[(Anonymous)]

You are white. You do not get to criticize POC countries.

[darkmanifest]

Why? As long as you're aware that there are lots of people who don't look like that and that they are also people and don't deserve to be treated any differently, why does it matter?

There's the rub. Sometimes it's difficult for many people to regard individuals they haven't had much interaction with as anything more than curiosities rather than human beings. You see it happen both within a group and outside of it, and it's an even easier trap to fall into when said human beings look drastically different from you. It doesn't require hostility, just lack of awareness.

[(Anonymous)]

And how do you plan to "undo" it, exactly? Randomly assign races to various characters to make sure you have equal representation of all races in your fictional story? I know this comment is probably coming off as more snarky than I intended, but it just boggles my mind that the idea of someone having a personal "default" is even an issue.

DA

[(Anonymous)]

Uh, yeah? What's the problem with randomly assigning a race that's not your default to some of your characters? Having a default isn't an issue as long as you're not too lazy to change some of your characters so they don't stay as your default.

Re: DA

[gondremark]

On the one hand, nonwhite people need better representation in fiction.
On the other hand, it's rather sketchy to make a character black (or Asian, or Native American, or Hispanic, etc.) simply for the sake of including a non-white character and fulfilling some arbitrary quota.
We want characters to come in all colours, just like real people. We don't want yet another "token black" included just to give the creators brownie points.

So yes, randomly assigning various races to characters just for the sake of being diverse IS THE ISSUE.

Re: DA

[(Anonymous)]

this.

AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

I still disagree. There is absolutely nothing wrong with diversity just for the sake of diversity most cases, contrary to popular belief. Unless the story or characterization depends upon a character being a certain race, it is not an issue. Especially in fantasy where you can create the entire world yourself and don't have to think about whether a character in your setting would statistically, in the real world, be that of race.

Re: AYRT

[(Anonymous)]

>I still disagree. There is absolutely nothing wrong with diversity just for the sake of diversity most cases

Tokenism

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

I default to fair-skinned white people with dark brown to black hair. You know why? That's what my family is. My Mum is blond, but my Dad, brothers and I all have (or had in Dad's case) dark hair. Even some of Mum's photos from when she was young made her hair look pretty dark.

But it only takes a few words in a text to stop me defaulting to that. Tell me they are blonde, or red-haired, or dark-skinned, or Asian, South American or whatever else? My likely very vague mental image is instantly adjusted.

It is a lack of a few words like that which had the Harry Potter fandom debating the gender of Blaise Zabini for years, and thinking he was a white Italian as well.

[gondremark]

It's one thing to think of the people you grew up around as default. That's just how our minds work, we take what we see as most common and assume it is indeed most common.
It's another matter entirely to think of anything else as "other and alien" and indeed something you should overcome if you find yourself guilty of it.

You can automatically assume that all vaguely described book characters are white because you're surrounded by white people without also assuming that anyone described as being a different colour than your family is an outsider.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah I don't know.

I agree with what you're saying. It's not a good way to think and if you think that way you should try not to. But I'm also really tired of the conversation where thinking that way makes you objectively wrong and bad and a Big Ol Racist the way OP is talking about, and where casting people as PoC is objectively correct and necessary and the only acceptable choice. Fuck that shit.

[(Anonymous)]

So, if a bunch of characters have no description you have to make a conscious effort to arbitrarily assign them a variety of races instead of falling back to your default? I really don't get this line of thinking. It just seems so...arbitrary, especially when no (or little) description is given. There's no thought police. People can imagine the characters however they want. And yes, many peoples default tends to be what they were raised with, so yeah, white people are most likely going to imagine white characters.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I mean I get it when you're writing your own stories. One should probably think about if there are only white people in the world your story takes place etc.
But when I read a book and there is only a vague description, my brain does the rest. Sometimes the character is a POC, sometimes they're not. I'm not even thinking about it when I'm reading and if I then tried to make a fancast (which I've never done before, granted), I'd look for people who look like the images in my head.
Usually when my brain comes up with how a character looks, it sticks to it and no "But I should make this more diverse in my head" would stop it. ._.

[gabzillaz]

Pretty much.

But any secret that involves race is bound to become a wankfest here so...