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
You wouldn't even have to go that far south, the Moors were a big group for a long time were they not? Plus if it's just past the fall of Rome you'll have the children of groups the Romans moved around. That was a Roman tactic, have troops serve far from their homelands, so you'd get Syrians serving in England and they would presumably then at times have children and families.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranIt could be, though I don't think the Romans ever got that far west, maybe it hopped to England and then got from there to Ireland?
That or it came about by itself in two places naturally.
edited 21st Jan '16 12:03:47 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranSo, I was thinking about a batch of notes with a lot of character ideas for a superhero setting I am working "at the moment" instead of just straight up writing, and I realized a possible reason of why people would disagree with me. I was thinking I have a large number of characters already, and since I don't care what ethnicity they are to begin with, I could probably work some nice representation in there. However, having some characters of a few underrepresented ethnicities and some aracial characters would make it look as if the aracial characters are white. Conversely, having some white characters and some aracial characters would still contribute to a lack of non-white characters. Having some white, some non-white, and some aracial characters would likely work, although it's possible to "screw it up". Now, if anyone was disagreeing with me because having a cast of aracial and... racial characters would contribute to the trend of not having non-white characters when their ethnicity isn't important, I add that I meant casts exclusively of aracial characters.
@Historical Fiction: Yeah, there's a problem with realistic works that overblow prejudice. And also "realistic" works that could even avoid all kinds prejudices but don't, despite not touching them in the story.
@Mousa: I think most people in anime... are asian, not white. Uh, I don't know enough academic jargon for ethnicities, so I could be wrong.
@Victin, you missed my point. It isn't what they actually are but how one from a point of ignorance might perceive them, especially from child age to growing up. Unless informed the shows are from Japan and characters were supposed to be Japanese, you think one would immediately assume they're Asian people or, as I speculated, one might think because they look vaguely white they would default them as such?
The Blog The ArtI know, fully aware, just with certain media saturation a it feels like that sometimes that it comes off as such in places where once would not suspect it to was what I was trying to get across.
Maybe my sister and u just grew up in that weird spot where anime was in regular TV in the US alongside all other cartoons but the Internet was not what it was so information was not as readily available so it all comes off as the same and it seems like certain local cultural stuff like say the supposed expectation of white as the tabula rasa accidentally seems that way in something that wasn't even made in the US but we wouldn't have known that at the time it for a good portion of our upbringing so what is actually a Bach of Japanese characters looks like every other white character in all the other cartoons we have.
The Blog The ArtI think also white appears more standard then it is because Japanese characters who are meant to be Japanese are often shown as so white that they are almost identical to European/North American white.
So white in standard in much of media, but that's in part because Anglo-Saxon/Slavic white, Japanese white and Mediterranean/Hispanic white are actually three very different groupings all being lumped together as "white".
Though even without that, Anglo-Saxon white itself has a pretty dominant position within the media environment.
edited 21st Jan '16 4:59:17 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI certainly wouldn't classify any of the Japanese kids that went to my boarding school as white, and our school population was around one third East Asian (Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese and in later years also Chinese).
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran@Mousa: I wasn't sure if that was your point or not, so I made that comment. The thing is that assuming that white is the default isn't the work's fault. I'm not saying there shouldn't be more characters of underrepresented ethnicities in positions in which their ethnicity isn't a theme of the work, I'm just saying that writing aracial characters... isn't the same as "following the trend of only writing those characters when it's a theme while otherwise writing only white characters, period.
If we are not arguing that, then I'm not sure what we're arguing here. So, well, if anyone else is arguing something else, please point it out. Maybe I'm just burned out today @_@
Anyways... I think anime, manga and Japanese media is a whole other can of worms. I mean, I was speaking in a broad sense, which is the whole reason I'm using "characters of underrepresented ethnicities" instead of "black" or "asian". I am saying "white" even though I shouldn't, because despite the broad sense being my focus, there's a more specific target to my argument which is a simplified abstraction of the West, the Americas, my country and your countries. Furthermore, back in the thread this discussion started, I was talking about writing, mostly, but any non-Live-Action Media in general as Homestuck was one of my examples. In any case, I brought this discussion here to listen to other people's opinions, so... uh... I should just go to sleep already, shouldn't I? @_@
Should an author who has no idea of races and ethnicity (possible example could be Japan, pretty much everyone in Japan is Japanese and there's not much of the black/white/etc thing that occurs in America, hope I'm not too far off as I just wanted an example) even try to include different ethnicity?
How about race-not-defined characters who happen to have darker-than-pale skin? Sometimes it occurs not for racial representation, but for the sake of aesthetics.
edited 21st Jan '16 9:37:21 PM by hellomoto
Actually, Japan is known to be pretty racist even considering Asian standards. That's a large part of WHY they have so few minorities. Because people who did their research know that Japan's imperialism has a HORRIBLE past with other Asian countries, and their current mindset isn't much better.
As a Filipino-American specifically, I know have a pretty good chance of being SERIOUSLY looked down upon by Japanese-from-Japan if they don't know I was born in America. The Philippines were one of the many nations Curb Stomped by Japan in World War II, and then there's East Asia's general superiority complex to... North, West, Central, and South Asia, but South Asia most of all.
edited 21st Jan '16 9:42:24 PM by Sharysa
So that explain something I saw in shadowrun....
Actually I have seen something in some fiction(and people actuallY) where the whole "White is standar, evertyhing else is special" create the ilusion that your on culture is dull and boring compare to others, hell even in the typical mediaval european fantasy land it get lock into this:
Fantasy england Fantasy france Fantacy italy(comes in two flavors: Ancient rome or just venice because fuck the rest of italy) Fantasy Russia
And....that it, suddenly the rest of europe can go to fuck themselves as fantasy is concern, I decide to create a counterpart of findland and poland just to give a little more variaty(also because is just fun)
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"There were studies on asking Japanese and westerners on if an anime character is asian or white. Each basically saw what they could relate, Japanese saw Japanes and westerners saw white.
However in anime a true American or European will almost always be a person with blonde hair and very likely blue eyes i.e. Phenotype Stereotype. Half westerner will most likely be blonde but different eye color. There are exceptions to that rule but in general that is the case.
![]()
Maybe from older folks but the younger ones and areas with tourism not as much.
edited 21st Jan '16 11:05:12 PM by Memers
I usually do that as well, although I do try looking up additional character information if it's available.
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis Name Check Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea on ‘White Privilege II’
Macklemore has some words for Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea.
The rapper and Ryan Lewis have released “White Privilege II,” another track from their forthcoming album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made. Macklemore raps about racism, Black Lives Matter, white privilege, and cultural appropriation in the eight-minute song, which is a sequel to “White Privilege” from the 2005 albumThe Language of My World. “Take all we want from black culture, but will we show up for black lives?” he says. Macklemore also calls out Cyrus and Azalea, rapping, “You’ve exploited and stolen the music, the moment/ The magic, the passion, the fashion, you toy with/ The culture was never yours to make better/ You’re Miley, you’re Elvis, you’re Iggy Azalea.”
Macklemore himself has been involved in conversations of appropriating hip-hop and rap music, which were highlighted when he beat out Kendrick Lamar for the Best Rap Album Grammy in 2014.
During a 2014 visit to Hot 97’s Ebro in the Morning he said, “This is not a culture that white people started. So I do believe, as much as I have honed my craft, as much as I have put in years of dedication into the music that I love, I do believe that I need to know my place, and that comes from me listening.”
(embedded Spotify link)
In a statement about the song, Macklemore wrote, “This song is the outcome of an ongoing dialogue with musicians, activists, and teachers within our community in Seattle and beyond. Their work and engagement was essential to the creative process.” He also wrote that his company (Mackleore & Ryan Lewis LLC) will work with Black Lives Matter, People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, Youth Undoing Institutional Racism & Freedom School, and Black Youth Project 100 to increase dialogue.
We've had this conversation in this thread before, but I've never really bought that sort of cultural appropriation argument. Stealing something that someone else has done and refusing to credit them for it is one thing, but I don't think that anyone's actually claiming that white people invented rap music. White people rapping doesn't mean they're stealing rap from black people. Saying "you rap, but you don't support Black Lives Matter, so you're a bad person" is ridiculous. Saying "you should support Black Lives Matter because it's a worthy cause and all decent human beings should support it" is one thing, but saying "you owe it to black people because you perform black people's music" is something else entirely.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Berber characters would be nice, yes.