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From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-11-06:
"The thing is: it's natural for people to assume that a fictional character of unspecified race is the same race as them. Similarly I have a strong memory of seeing a picture in my year nine RE class of a depiction of Jesus from a church in China. Their version of Jesus, of course, looked Chinese, which broke a few of our tiny fourteen year old brains. Jesus is Chinese in China, black in Africa, Caucasian in England. He might even be Jewish somewhere, but that seems rather unlikely." -- Daniel Hemmens, "Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn't Black"
(submitted to the mailing list by Kelly Groves)
To my friends observing the anniversary of the Babylonian seige of Jerusalem[*] today, is "May you have an easy fast" the appropriate greeting for Asarah b'Tevet, or is that reserved for Yom Kippur and Tisha b'Av?
[*] For folks who, like me, had to look it up: 2599 years ago unless I've screwed up at the BCE/CE boundary.
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Hmm. Perhaps this is worth its own entry elsewhere. Thanks for the link.
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But they have MAGIC which can often be used to make travel easier, and they usually have trade if the author has thought about economics whatsoever. Why is it easier to imagine orcs and veelas than non-White people?
Plus, the author forgot another reason for the general "fantasy characters are White" assumption -- when Rowling revealed that a minor character was Black there was a massive outcry.
Feh. As you can guess (since I'm a Black woman who spent most of my first two decades reading fantasy until I gave up on it for all its quasi-Europeanness) I have opinions on this subject.
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Venecians, and in fact most Northern Italians, are white. Their genetic heritage is predominantly celtic and german. The general prevailing belief is that the etruscans that were there at the time of the roman monarchy and before were proto-celt, a caucasian race of about the same age as the celts but slightly different cultural aspects. That region was then conquered by Celts - the ones that sacked Rome in 354 BC didn't exactly leave.
The Romans were also conquerers of the peninsula from the north, not from the coast. While yes there should in any Roman history program be people of darker skin, the Emperors, the Senators, the heads of houses, and most of the local merchants were most assuredly white. Venice, too, was predominantly white (though slightly more egalitarian to its non-white residents than other cities were, as its ancestral roots are still germanic and greek (and there again, the darker-skin is a post Ottoman influence).
So his expectation that things never changed, that the Italians were always the dark-skinned, predominantly dark-haired people they are stereotyped to be today is, well, just that, a stereotype that pays no attention to the larger cultural and genetic heritage of the area, or, well, to actually seeing the area today. I've been through Florence/Tuscany, Venice, and Rome, and saw as wide a variety of colors of skin tone, hair and eyes as I do here in America.
I also note he gripes about productions that get it wrong, but then complains about productions that have tighter reasons for casting what they do (because of specifics of the source material) while at the same time saying nothing about those that do better (Firefly/Serenity being a great example). Saying "they're doing it wrong" without a better example of what to do right (or what has been done right) isn't saying much.
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If anything, the fascinating thing is that she relates the children to the experiences of classes and minorities in an objective manner - by using the Houses of the school, and the use of muggles and mudbloods, to show that stereotyping and discrimination can exist on ANY criteria, not just what you see in front of you. Young readers do eventually make those connections, even if it appears this author didn't.
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