First thing's first: KEEP. THIS. SHIT. CIVIL. If you can't talk about race without resorting to childish insults and rude generalizations or getting angry at people who don't see it your way, leave the thread.
With that said, I bring you to what can hopefully be the general thread about race.
First, a few starter questions.
- How, if at all, do you feel your race affects your everyday life?
- Do you believe that white people (or whatever the majority race in your area is) receive privileges simply because of the color of their skin. How much?
- Do you believe minorities are discriminated against for the same reason? How much?
- Do you believe that assimilation of cultures is better than people trying to keep their own?
- Affirmative Action. Yea, Nay? Why or why not?
Also, a personal question from me.
- Why (in my experience, not trying to generalize) do white people often try to insist that they aren't white? I can't count the number of times I've heard "I'm not white, I'm 1/4th English, 1/4th German, 1/4th Scandinavian 1/8th Cherokee, and 1/8th Russian," as though 4 of 5 of those things aren't considered "white" by the masses. Is it because you have pride for your ancestry, or an attempt to try and differentiate yourself from all those "other" white people? Or something else altogether?
edited 30th May '11 9:16:04 PM by Wulf
so i made a new avatar
He kinda does sound minstel-y. Or is it just me?
To pity someone is to tell them "I feel bad about being better than you."
Disasturbator
And he's got big lips that stick out too
New theme music also a box
Oh, bother.
The Boondocks once had a Sunday strip playing up Jar-Jar's minstrelish portrayal. A later Sunday strip had Jar-Jar reinvent himself as a Malcolm X like socialist revolutionary named Jabari Jabari Binko.
edited 13th Jun '18 4:59:05 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
You know at some point I was considering making Minstrel my username due to Pyre having a character I really liked called The Lone Minstrel (he was basically an bard, likely referencing the old definition).
I then discovered the shitty history behind how that word got twisted to fit some old racist fucks perception on African music.
Episode I has a lot of problematic characters; while Jar Jar is the most obvious case, he is by far not the only one. :/
edited 13th Jun '18 6:15:15 AM by DrunkenNordmann
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Tbh, when I see "minstrel", my first thought is medieval musician rather than racist entertainment. Maybe because the latter is specifically American and has fallen out of favor, while the first still pops up in medfan works.
Oh, bother.
Watto, right? The Neimoidians too, though they were more of a Space Asian stereotype.
Star Wars has a lot of entries on the Space Jews page.
edited 13th Jun '18 6:54:41 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
Witness the might of Jabari Jabari Binko.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Isnt hilarious how people complain about forcing diversity in fictional stories?
Apparently, I am bad for not having a White MC despite being non-white myself and I have ruined my story changing a interesting MC for a Author Avatar....when I only changed his skin color to match something closer to me. And the one that told me that was a black guy.
The whole "stop forcing diversity, is not realistic" is laughable, in a setting like a Urban city, Diversity is the norm. Textbook example of Reality Is Unrealistic
edited 13th Jun '18 4:39:27 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
And even if it was forced, so what? It's not like diversity is a bad thing. It's like complaining about a forced setting or forced use of a first person narrator. No, actually worse because the lack of diversity is harmful whereas the lack of a certain setting or use of a first person narrator is just down to taste.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Uh...those are valid complains. Why you are comparing them to it?
To be fair. To those people, forced diversity is a forced setting.
This is the thing, diversity is not really forced. Unless you do something as making all white people villains, then is effectively good.
Forced diversity can be a genuine complain...except that it takes borderline parodical levels to reach that point, but they choose to complain for things as a Trans Girl being a Magical Girl because The Powers That Be decided that, yeah, dont matter what her bullies say, she is a girl.
edited 13th Jun '18 6:11:42 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
By definition authors are the one's who choose the setting and narrative style, thus they're all forced.
It makes little sense to complain about them being forced when all of them are.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Call me Stick
What do you consider "borderline parodical levels"?
Hopefully I'll feel confident to change my avatar off this scumbag soon. Apologies to any scumbags I insulted.
Ahr river
Also "forced diversity" is silly because for anything else we downright assume or even demand all the characters be wholly different and unique. Everyone dresses differently, has different skills, different interests, with SOME overlap, but enough differences to keep everyone wholly unique and easily picked out.
Read my stories!
Shin Megami Tensei IV
All white men as evil bastards, minorities being perfect, etc. Of course, no one write stuff like that, so is not something to complain about.
Call me Stick
So... something analogous to a Lifetime Movie of the Week?
edited 13th Jun '18 7:55:45 PM by TroperOnAStickV2
Hopefully I'll feel confident to change my avatar off this scumbag soon. Apologies to any scumbags I insulted.
Anytime someone writes anything even close to that these days people flip there shit.
Cause the neo-nazis gotta get their panties in a twist over something.
edited 13th Jun '18 7:54:34 PM by Wispy
Forced diversity. I love that.
As an author I will force diversity because I'm writing the kind of stories with the kind of characters I've always wanted to read when no one else would do it.
Isn't that what they say when we complain about the lack of diversity? "If you don't like <X> character being white/straight/sexual/male/etc you should write your own".
Well, I did.
Now if someone can't accept that my works reflect what I want to read first and foremost, then maybe they should go and write their own god damned best selling novel themselves.
In short, representation matters because the ones being represented matter. So diversity, forced or not, is not a bad thing.
Call me Stick
I think "forced diversity" comes down to "does it make sense in the context of the setting, does it break suspension of disbelief?"
edited 13th Jun '18 7:58:45 PM by TroperOnAStickV2
Hopefully I'll feel confident to change my avatar off this scumbag soon. Apologies to any scumbags I insulted.
Sometimes that suspension of disbelief is due to ignorance on the viewers' part, e.g. black cowboys, when the majority of Westerners were freemen and escaped slaves who didn't see much of a future staying behind in the racist East coast. Or the general lack of homosexual relationships in works set in the past. Now, because that's not always the viewers' faults due to poor education, sometimes it's to the show's benefit to provide some kind of explicit Hand Wave to demonstrate that it's not quite as ahistorical as it initially seems. But while it might make sense at first and I used to be a heavy believer in it, suspension of disbelief is a flimsier criteria than it seems.
Ahr river
We're also trained to see certain things as unrealistic but not others. If someone's been assimilated into the white borg, we don't care if they're portraying an unrealistic character in europe.
Read my stories!
Shin Megami Tensei IV
To be honest, If I did a story where all White Men are evil unsympathetic scumbags, I would get critized with good reasons. And I am a Brown Latino but equality dont means saying that white men are evil.
Is certainly the case with the "Muh historical accuracy" crowd. The group that whine when Non-white White Knights appear because the White Knight HAVE to be White, not only his armor, but his skin too.
edited 13th Jun '18 8:19:31 PM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
Would that it were so simple.
"Is certainly the case with the "Muh historical accuracy" crowd. The group that whine when Non-white White Knights appear because the White Knight HAVE to be White, not only his armor, but his skin too."
I mean, in a film that purports to be historical fiction, for example, you have to wonder how a black fellow acquired enough land and money to buy a horse, saddle, weapons, and armor in medieval Europe. That's not to say there weren't places in Europe that were crowded with people of color (Spain, Sicily, Greece, for example), but if you're making a movie about lily-white medieval England, chances are there isn't going to be a lot of black people being cast. The exception is Shakespeare, where colorblind casting is a time-honored practice in keeping with the notion that the theater is for everyone, and these works are avowedly ahistorical anyway.
It's not something that's going to be possible to maintain as time goes on, though. Populations change, and what constitutes the majority skin color will as well. There may come a time when movies about Robin Hood are cast mostly with brown actors. After all, every movie about the Roman Empire is packed with pale blondes even though — at best — the average 1st Century BC Roman was an Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette, and much more likely Ambiguously Brown.
edited 13th Jun '18 8:50:43 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
My irritation more comes from how folks have written works like that for minorities. Generally in propaganda but as I said if anyone turns it around on them those very certain groups would flip their shit.
And those certain groups even now still will completely generalize a minority as all bad or evil.
edited 13th Jun '18 8:59:31 PM by Wispy
Because I'm a hate-filled human being, here's a clip for reference:
There are three more parts too.
Disgusted, but not surprised