How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

There is nothing white people have ever accomplished good.

There is stuff German, English, and more have accomplished.

"White" people are always people who are oppressing brown people.

It's an identifier with nothing good, IMHO.

More than that. If you define white people the way white supremacists do, it's actually very hard to point to a period in time where Eastern Europe didn't have many non-white people.

The Eastern European (especially, but certainly not exclusively, the Balkan) region has been a melting pot of Germanic, Celtic, Turkic, Hellenic, Semitic, Persian, Dravidian and Central Asian Steppe peoples since before the Romans even founded a republic (let alone empire) and threw themselves into the mix.

There was some evidence of a Persian working in the Heian court as a diplomat of some sort. Nevermind the Chinese.

Most of the outrage is manufactured anyway, and any real criticism comes from people who don't like established settings changing in a way that has been inconsistent to what came before.

Reality Is Unrealistic, especially when a lot of the older media that influences fiction to this day was written by people with bigoted worldviews.

Dracula: The Series got flack for the fact a black man was treated not only as an urban professional (who did get some flack from people) but that he existed in Victorian London at all.

Which...is stupid on multiple levels.

HBO's Boardwalk Empire got a better breadth of it, showing the importance of black labor and also the few rich black people in the community as well as how they lived and related to others.

Few things about that - first of all, how do you define "white" in this case? Because very often with the people I ran into this boiled down to "black Africans" - which there really weren't that many in Eastern Europe.

What there were not few of were Turkic groups, for example. The Bulgars, the Cumans, the Pechenegs and later on the Tatars and Mongols.

That was actually something that annoyed me when people claimed Kingdom Come had only white people in it - because it felt like an incredibly Amerocentric thing to say. Apparently Cumans people are "white people" now?

What type of ethnic minority you were likely to run into really changed depending on the location. Spain - at least during the Moorish period - was more likely to have people of African descent, mainly North Africans who were more tanned. Same goes for parts of Italy and maybe parts of the Southern Balkans, depending on the period . The Byzantine Empire's trade network was a thing.

Not to mention that boiling diversity down to skin colour can end up being extremely reductive - again, Turkic people often have very light skin and somehow they end up being dismissed as "white and therefore not an actual minority" a lot. Not to mention that Jewish communities are also a thing - Ashkenazi Jews might be white, but they were still an ethno-religious minority.

And then you had the tensions between white Christian people, mainly German minorities settling in areas like Bohemia, the Baltics or Transylvania and the main groups in the perspective areas.

Minority characters in medieval Eastern Europe can definitively be pulled off, but first you have to consider: What do you actually consider minorities, what groups were you likely to run into, what religions were they most likely to belong to (Jews were tolerated more in some areas than others, Muslims less so) and how did they or their descendents end up living in the area you're setting your story in.

That's why I said boiling the whole thing down to only race can be awfulle reductive - because again, some people define "white" as "European", others as "everyone not black or heavily tanned" - the latter would also include European ethnicities like the Greeks, for example.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 19th 2018 at 1:15:47 PM

Ask Kazuya. He is the one who initially brought up the whole white heritage thing.

My point was simply that even if “white” people — however one defines that — were the vast majority in whatever time and place Kazuya was talking about...there was still some diversity, cultural and racial alike. So it would not be unrealistic to have media set in those places and times to have a bit of diversity too.

At the very least, the work should not fall into Monochrome Casting.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2018 at 7:25:26 PM

I don't think you're going to have much luck getting chromatic diversity in medieval Britain.

Having NO diversity at all is the issue.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2018 at 8:29:10 PM

I disagree if historical accuracy is maintained and not just used as an excuse.

The only context in which I could see a "historical accuracy" justification for not having any diversity in the cast not be horseshit would be if it's set in a time and place that has outright isolationist policies. So maybe a work set in Japan during its Sakoku period. And even then Japan was not completely isolated.

I'm just saying trying to use "historical accuracy" as an excuse doesn't really fly if something like Othello exists. If a work of Shakespeare has more diversity than your work, you've got a problem.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance? Ooh boy, that's a can of worms. To explain why though, I'd have to bring up something that's not really allowed in these forums.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2018 at 8:37:35 PM

I could understand it, if you were also in a place where there's no immediately detectable difference between the various ethnicities. I mean, if Vikings can basically sneak a Finn past literally everyone except Finns...

Edited by TerminusEst on Sep 19th 2018 at 5:40:44 AM

I have read that genetic tests of burials from Britain in the Roman period and the Early Middle Ages (what used to be called the Dark Ages) have found individuals from Turkey and Mesopotamia/Iraq so some diversity is possible.

You'd genuinely have to find very isolated populations (geography etc.) to not have anything else in you.

Not just isolated, but also outright isolationist. So not only is it hard for foreigners to visit and move there, said foreigners are banned from entry.

Also I just remembered this. It is from a smaller area but there is evidence of migriation in Britain as far back as the Neolithic.

Or "foreigners" (whatever that means in early histories) simply never go there, after the first migrations. Without a cut-off though it's completely meaningless. Eventually someone is going to wander in.

Edited by TerminusEst on Sep 19th 2018 at 5:52:52 AM

Well, the question is a little bit what role those people would have in society realistically and how said society would react to them.

Currently there is a need to colour correct history, but just because there have been people from across the world living in Europe for a long, long time, that doesn't mean that they were common or accepted. I am all for moving to a more realistic picture of history, but it has to be realistic. Not just plugging in a character with another skin colour and then act as if this wouldn't have drawn any attention back then.

The thing I usually object to is when people use evidence like this to overshoot in the other direction.

When people found some graves with Norse women buried with weapons in Britain, somebody tried to push for the claim that "50 % of Norse warriors were female".

When evidence was found of North African legionairies serving in Roman Britain, suddenly it was "all Britons are descended from black people", despite the fact that a) a legion having some African soldiers does not a universal genetic heritage make and b) the legionaries in question were more likely to be of Phoenician or Numidian (basically Berber) origin and not Subsaharan.

And I wish I was strawmanning here.

Nobody's saying there shouldn't be diversity in historical settings - because these regions weren't completely monolithic - but you still have to look at the respective region, figure out what people you were likely to run into and base what you're doing on that.

Europe isn't a monolith now and it wasn't back then - so I get kinda annoyed when people try to use one area of the continent as evidence for how a completely different area would have looked like. :/

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 19th 2018 at 3:12:46 PM

Except the original post that started this was talking about having any diversity at all. Kazuya didn't mention anything about overshooting it.

That's what I've been arguing against this whole time. The notion that "historical accuracy" can be used to excuse Monochrome Casting.

Edited by M84 on Sep 19th 2018 at 9:17:29 PM

Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I grew up in what is considered Germany's melting pot during a period when people were way more mobile than they were back in the middle ages. I encountered (eventually) children with immigration background, but they were the exception, not the rule, and they came from very specific regions. So back in the middle ages, I am sure that due to the crusades alone and beforehand due to the Roman army, Europe wasn't completely white. But that was still the exception, not the rule.

Frankly, I am a little bit more concerned with actually seeing a roman army which looks like an actual roman army would have looked like, with soldiers from all areas which belonged to the roman empire than, for example, having a dark skinned noble randomly popping up with no explanation whatsoever at the court of Charlemagne as his closest advisor.

But, again, currently overshooting in the wrong direction isn't really a problem we have in the media, it's the other way around. Dunkirk for example really could have used some soldiers from the colonies, just to demonstrate that no, the UK didn't stand alone in this fight.

Edited by Swanpride on Sep 19th 2018 at 6:27:20 AM

Othello is nominally set in Venice and is beyond the normal conception of the middle ages, so it's always going to be an odd case.

When it comes to early medieval Britain, you have... basically some of the legionnaires as a foreign influence. The whole influence of the migration period on western Europe is characterised by the mass movement of the Germanic tribes. So unless you're focusing on those soldiers that became Romano-British after the empire pulled out, it's not exactly a scenario that's high in visual diversity—and then it wraps around to the "what is white?" thing. Would probably be an even stranger situation if dealing with early Scottish history because then you have celts, some slightly different celts, and vikings...

Though I must admit I'm not sure how xenophobic middle-middle ages England was, though between "corner of Europe about as far away from anyone that looks non-white as possible" and "expulsion of the Jews by Edward I", at least somewhat.

Depends on what period of the Roman Empire we're talking about. During the expansionist phases, the legions were exclusively drawn from the citizenry, which meant everyone was more or less from Rome and nearby. The auxilia were obviously more varied but for the most part everyone would've been middle eastern or from the Mediterranean. It never extended down into the interior of Africa beyond the bounds of Egypt.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 19th 2018 at 2:28:53 PM

Regional clusters of interesting colours and cultures have been a thing from century to century in the UK.

Every wave of people has brought something different and interesting. And, for a long time, there were no people whatsoever in the Isles.

The first people who came from Doggerland? Looked a lot like Heidelburgensis. Because... they kind of were... Which means "North Africa".

Edited by Euodiachloris on Sep 19th 2018 at 2:34:21 PM

I find the concern of "overshooting" to be an incredibly baseless fear when the opposite has been reality for so long. And why are we saying that media like games must be "realistic" when it comes to diversity when we don't extend that to too many other things? And techincally speaking, we will probably never have a completely accurate understanding of history since details are lost or obscured, not to mention new discoveries, so the "historical accuracy" concern strikes me as being asinine.

Go back far enough and that's objectively true. At our source, we're all from East Africa.