Worldcon panel: Writing the Other
Dec. 18th, 2009 01:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskite"The Other" is a concept that has been long invoked to describe those who are different from us and how those differences structure and constrain our relationships with such people. Definitions of Other range from the simple distinction that allows us to differentiate our consciousness from those of the other beings who surround us, to the frequently reported research finding that people really do notice, automatically and without thinking about it, differences between those who belong to their community and those who don't. It's the latter that is most often relevant and of interest in science fiction and fantasy, since both genres frequently explore the problems that arise from clashes between cultures, ideologies, and political structures. The clash may occur on a large scale, as in space opera, or on the very human scale of the problems that arise from being different from another person with whom we have a relationship. In our genres of writing, the Other and the related concept of alien species is often used, whether directly (with literal aliens) or indirectly (metaphorical aliens), to explore human race, gender, or other relationships.
For writers in these genres, Otherness often rears its ugly head in the form of "race fail"; here, "fail" is used in the Internet community connotation of screwing up in a truly majestic and noteworthy fashion, and the specific failure relates to treatment of other races in one's writing. A recent example of how this can start out innocently and explode can be found at the Feminist SF wiki.
The problem can be exacerbated when the fail-er responds to the fail-ee's generally valid complaints with the very natural and human desire to defend themselves, or when (as happened recently to Elizabeth Bear recently) one's friends leap into the gap to defend one even when one is clearly wrong and willing to admit it. The problem can be exacerbated to an extent that very nearly defies description when the discussion is hijacked from the actual problem to become all about the hurt feelings of the ostensibly liberal and color-blind who are doing their damnedest to justify their behavior; such people are most often (but by no means exclusively) white, male, and Christian, because in a Western context, these are the people who have the most power in society and therefore have the least empathy for those who lack this power. Elizabeth Bear handled her own race fail well by simply admitting she was wrong and showing a willingness to learn from her mistake; that gains you considerably more sympathy than elaborately and at great length playing the victim.
It's important to note right from the start that this is not about knee-jerk political correctness, as I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this essay: it's about recognizing that each of us has blind spots and prejudices we usually aren't aware of, and that we should be making an effort despite those failings to treat each other humanely and with respect. Really folks, what could be objectionable about that? It's nothing more than "the golden rule" in yet another of its many forms. I also want to emphasize that however you might feel about the biological reality of the term "race", the word has a very real existence from the perspective of social and cultural interactions. I use these two principles as my touchstones in the rest of this essay.
As a writer, racial insensitivity stems not only from what you say, but from how you say it, combined with the context. When this becomes a matter of race fail, the fact that you may have had no intention of giving offence is less important than recognizing that you gave offence and striving to understand why and what you can do to avoid this in future. It's also important to understand that you cannot possibly hope to satisfy everyone; there will always be people of whatever color, gender, and culture who reserve the right to speak of their own kind, and who reject the rights of any "non-Other" to write about them. I personally believe in Alexander Pope's notion that "the proper study of mankind is man", and that no human can legitimately be excluded from writing about the human condition—which is, after all, what it's all about when we decide to write fiction. But the right to do this does not excuse us from the responsibility to do it well, and to do it with respect.
As writers, most of us have the wit to avoid overtly racist writing. But we may border on race fail through passive racism, which is most often seen in writing that I describe as "the whitebread universe" because there are no non-white characters anywhere to be seen. That kind of passive neglect is actively painful to people who see no examples of whatever they identify as their own social, cultural, racial, or gender group anywhere in that universe. Early science fiction and fantasy suffered from a general dearth of strong female characters of any sort, and although this trend has been largely reversed by several generations of superb women writers (and a few men), that problem hasn't quite been banished forever. Gay (including lesbian, bi, and other) writers have also begun making strong inroads into what was once an exclusively a heterosexual genre. For whatever reason, there have been fewer "writers of color" in our genre; one commonly proposed reason is the lack of obvious role models that would encourage them to create their own protagonists.
My personal biggest example of race fail occurred many years ago in a bilingual fiction writing group, in which I critiqued a Chinese woman's choice of a French protagonist by wondering why she hadn't written from the Chinese perspective, since there are so few Chinese characters in science fiction and fantasy; I then pointed to the several well-known French authors in our group, and blurted out that we already had very good examples of French authors writing about French characters.
Ouch. I'll pause a moment so you can stop laughing and catch your breath.
I confess to grappling with race fail in my own writing. Like most of us, I'm most comfortable writing about what I know, and my experience is predominantly male, white, and heterosexual. Fearing race fail, I therefore tend to avoid writing about the Other. Some writers claim that leaving the race of their characters unspecified is perfectly benign, particularly those who claim "the race/gender/whatever problem has been solved in my story world of the future". There's some justification for this from a literary perspective, along the same logical lines that it's a valid literary choice to not overdescribe your protagonist so that readers can imagine themselves or whomever they like playing that role. But not engaging with the issue of the Other, even if logically justifiable, is less ethically justifiable: it's not benign because the default assumption in Western culture is that characters are White until proven otherwise, and not mentioning race reinforces that stereotype. It's a valid and defensible choice, just not one that is necessarily ethical or realistic.
Even if we want to claim that race is no longer relevant in our fictional universe, we should find ways to implicitly or explicitly cue the reader to understand that we have made this choice. You can do this simply enough just by ensuring that some of your characters have African, Asian, and other ethnic names; if everyone in your society has become so absorbed into that society that their only cultural distinction is their name, that would be sad, but at least you've acknowledged that potential diversity. Most of us are conditioned to believe that noticing or speaking of race is rude, but failing to do so makes us complicit in protecting and preserving the stereotypes. Explicitly describing a character's identity (if you can't find a more subtle way to do it implicitly by "showing, not telling") is an ethical act because it fights the stereotype and opens our reader's eyes to the broader, more diverse, and more interesting world that we live in. If you're more ambitious, you can extrapolate from a modern ethnic culture to a future version of that culture that remains recognizable, but that has changed over many years of cultural evolution.
The biggest problem that arises when we try to become all liberal and enlightened and throw in a few non-White characters for color is not tokenism, though that's bad enough, but rather the risk of parody or doing injustice to human diversity by failing to recognize that people are individuals, not representatives of their specific race (or other cultural or philosophical or other group). Identity is more than just the color of one's skin or the religion of one's parents: it's a multidimensional mixture of education, social class, sexuality, age, nationality, profession, body image, health and level of disability, and infinitely many other factors. All of these factors exist simultaneously, but only some of them are relevant at any given point in time. For example, when I travel internationally by air, only my identity as a Canadian (i.e., my passport) is relevant. At work, only my identity as a word wrangler is relevant. If we neglect these characteristics and choose a character only to serve as "the Black guy", "the dyke", or "the Muslim", we're doing a gross injustice on both a literary level (to the character and the story) and on an ethical level (to people who might otherwise identify with that character).
Although we often interpret race through the lens of skin color—probably because in Western culture, White is the dominant color in our ethnic mosaic—race becomes far more complex than that. For example, if I use the phrase "racial profiling", odds are good that most of you immediately thought of differences in how Blacks are treated by White police, or of how Muslims are treated by airport security. You probably didn't think of the anecdote that English science fiction writer John Courtenay Grimwood provided during the panel: his wife, who is clearly and stereotypically redheaded Irish, endured endless hassles when traveling through British airports during and after "the troubles" because she was considered a potential terrorist.
An ironic failure in some science fiction is to assume that intermarriage (a mildly less offensive word than interbreeding or miscegenation) has largely eliminated racial diversity, leading to everyone being a homogeneous and uniform shade of light brown. That works fine if you're mixing paints, but not so well if you're mixing genes. Though some loss of diversity would inevitably occur, certain genes would only disappear if there was some form of strong selection pressure against them. Thus, the more likely result would be a fairly broad spectrum of skin colors and other racial characteristics—with more intermediate "blends" than we see now. Occasionally, random recombination of parental genes would lead to "pure" White, Black, Asian, or other distinctive appearances. It would be interesting to speculate about how a largely "light brown" society that resulted from hundreds or thousands of years of intermarriage, which might well lead to homogenization of appearance if we wave our hands hard enough, would react to these unusual people. Personally, I'm not optimistic, but it would be an interesting story—particularly if the protagonist were White. (On a global scale, people who self-identify as White are in the minority, foreign those this notion may be to most Westerners.)
One of the best ways to understand what it feels like to be the Other is to travel in another country with a different culture or ethnic heritage. In India, a primarily English-speaking country, I was an Other by virtue of my skin color and my wealth; in China, I was an Other by virtue of my language and my inability to speak more than a few score Chinese words and phrases. But in both countries, I was a White male and a wealthy one (even though I'm not even remotely rich by Western standards), and that gave me certain privileges and a certain feeling of confidence I might not otherwise have had. One interesting way to gain a sense of what non-White people feel like when they encounter themselves in White fiction is to watch or read Japanese animé or manga that includes white characters. The exaggerated "White" characteristics make for an interesting education in how others see us, and what it feels like to be stereotyped.
Good fiction helps us to understand and empathize with another person's subjective reality. Since race, gender, ethnicity, and other Other characteristics are all important aspects of that reality, it's important to think about how we can include Otherness as an aspect of our characters' identities. The first step is to take our courage in hand and recognize that failure is a very real risk, and that even if we don't plunge face first into race fail, we won't please everyone. If we've done our homework and treated our characters and their heritage with respect, we can present one example of that heritage, not a stereotype that pretends to represent everyone of that heritage. If that character plays a role in the story, and plays it well, that's good enough for most readers, provided you're willing to learn from your inevitable mistakes and do better the next time.
For writers in these genres, Otherness often rears its ugly head in the form of "race fail"; here, "fail" is used in the Internet community connotation of screwing up in a truly majestic and noteworthy fashion, and the specific failure relates to treatment of other races in one's writing. A recent example of how this can start out innocently and explode can be found at the Feminist SF wiki.
The problem can be exacerbated when the fail-er responds to the fail-ee's generally valid complaints with the very natural and human desire to defend themselves, or when (as happened recently to Elizabeth Bear recently) one's friends leap into the gap to defend one even when one is clearly wrong and willing to admit it. The problem can be exacerbated to an extent that very nearly defies description when the discussion is hijacked from the actual problem to become all about the hurt feelings of the ostensibly liberal and color-blind who are doing their damnedest to justify their behavior; such people are most often (but by no means exclusively) white, male, and Christian, because in a Western context, these are the people who have the most power in society and therefore have the least empathy for those who lack this power. Elizabeth Bear handled her own race fail well by simply admitting she was wrong and showing a willingness to learn from her mistake; that gains you considerably more sympathy than elaborately and at great length playing the victim.
It's important to note right from the start that this is not about knee-jerk political correctness, as I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this essay: it's about recognizing that each of us has blind spots and prejudices we usually aren't aware of, and that we should be making an effort despite those failings to treat each other humanely and with respect. Really folks, what could be objectionable about that? It's nothing more than "the golden rule" in yet another of its many forms. I also want to emphasize that however you might feel about the biological reality of the term "race", the word has a very real existence from the perspective of social and cultural interactions. I use these two principles as my touchstones in the rest of this essay.
As a writer, racial insensitivity stems not only from what you say, but from how you say it, combined with the context. When this becomes a matter of race fail, the fact that you may have had no intention of giving offence is less important than recognizing that you gave offence and striving to understand why and what you can do to avoid this in future. It's also important to understand that you cannot possibly hope to satisfy everyone; there will always be people of whatever color, gender, and culture who reserve the right to speak of their own kind, and who reject the rights of any "non-Other" to write about them. I personally believe in Alexander Pope's notion that "the proper study of mankind is man", and that no human can legitimately be excluded from writing about the human condition—which is, after all, what it's all about when we decide to write fiction. But the right to do this does not excuse us from the responsibility to do it well, and to do it with respect.
As writers, most of us have the wit to avoid overtly racist writing. But we may border on race fail through passive racism, which is most often seen in writing that I describe as "the whitebread universe" because there are no non-white characters anywhere to be seen. That kind of passive neglect is actively painful to people who see no examples of whatever they identify as their own social, cultural, racial, or gender group anywhere in that universe. Early science fiction and fantasy suffered from a general dearth of strong female characters of any sort, and although this trend has been largely reversed by several generations of superb women writers (and a few men), that problem hasn't quite been banished forever. Gay (including lesbian, bi, and other) writers have also begun making strong inroads into what was once an exclusively a heterosexual genre. For whatever reason, there have been fewer "writers of color" in our genre; one commonly proposed reason is the lack of obvious role models that would encourage them to create their own protagonists.
My personal biggest example of race fail occurred many years ago in a bilingual fiction writing group, in which I critiqued a Chinese woman's choice of a French protagonist by wondering why she hadn't written from the Chinese perspective, since there are so few Chinese characters in science fiction and fantasy; I then pointed to the several well-known French authors in our group, and blurted out that we already had very good examples of French authors writing about French characters.
Ouch. I'll pause a moment so you can stop laughing and catch your breath.
I confess to grappling with race fail in my own writing. Like most of us, I'm most comfortable writing about what I know, and my experience is predominantly male, white, and heterosexual. Fearing race fail, I therefore tend to avoid writing about the Other. Some writers claim that leaving the race of their characters unspecified is perfectly benign, particularly those who claim "the race/gender/whatever problem has been solved in my story world of the future". There's some justification for this from a literary perspective, along the same logical lines that it's a valid literary choice to not overdescribe your protagonist so that readers can imagine themselves or whomever they like playing that role. But not engaging with the issue of the Other, even if logically justifiable, is less ethically justifiable: it's not benign because the default assumption in Western culture is that characters are White until proven otherwise, and not mentioning race reinforces that stereotype. It's a valid and defensible choice, just not one that is necessarily ethical or realistic.
Even if we want to claim that race is no longer relevant in our fictional universe, we should find ways to implicitly or explicitly cue the reader to understand that we have made this choice. You can do this simply enough just by ensuring that some of your characters have African, Asian, and other ethnic names; if everyone in your society has become so absorbed into that society that their only cultural distinction is their name, that would be sad, but at least you've acknowledged that potential diversity. Most of us are conditioned to believe that noticing or speaking of race is rude, but failing to do so makes us complicit in protecting and preserving the stereotypes. Explicitly describing a character's identity (if you can't find a more subtle way to do it implicitly by "showing, not telling") is an ethical act because it fights the stereotype and opens our reader's eyes to the broader, more diverse, and more interesting world that we live in. If you're more ambitious, you can extrapolate from a modern ethnic culture to a future version of that culture that remains recognizable, but that has changed over many years of cultural evolution.
The biggest problem that arises when we try to become all liberal and enlightened and throw in a few non-White characters for color is not tokenism, though that's bad enough, but rather the risk of parody or doing injustice to human diversity by failing to recognize that people are individuals, not representatives of their specific race (or other cultural or philosophical or other group). Identity is more than just the color of one's skin or the religion of one's parents: it's a multidimensional mixture of education, social class, sexuality, age, nationality, profession, body image, health and level of disability, and infinitely many other factors. All of these factors exist simultaneously, but only some of them are relevant at any given point in time. For example, when I travel internationally by air, only my identity as a Canadian (i.e., my passport) is relevant. At work, only my identity as a word wrangler is relevant. If we neglect these characteristics and choose a character only to serve as "the Black guy", "the dyke", or "the Muslim", we're doing a gross injustice on both a literary level (to the character and the story) and on an ethical level (to people who might otherwise identify with that character).
Although we often interpret race through the lens of skin color—probably because in Western culture, White is the dominant color in our ethnic mosaic—race becomes far more complex than that. For example, if I use the phrase "racial profiling", odds are good that most of you immediately thought of differences in how Blacks are treated by White police, or of how Muslims are treated by airport security. You probably didn't think of the anecdote that English science fiction writer John Courtenay Grimwood provided during the panel: his wife, who is clearly and stereotypically redheaded Irish, endured endless hassles when traveling through British airports during and after "the troubles" because she was considered a potential terrorist.
An ironic failure in some science fiction is to assume that intermarriage (a mildly less offensive word than interbreeding or miscegenation) has largely eliminated racial diversity, leading to everyone being a homogeneous and uniform shade of light brown. That works fine if you're mixing paints, but not so well if you're mixing genes. Though some loss of diversity would inevitably occur, certain genes would only disappear if there was some form of strong selection pressure against them. Thus, the more likely result would be a fairly broad spectrum of skin colors and other racial characteristics—with more intermediate "blends" than we see now. Occasionally, random recombination of parental genes would lead to "pure" White, Black, Asian, or other distinctive appearances. It would be interesting to speculate about how a largely "light brown" society that resulted from hundreds or thousands of years of intermarriage, which might well lead to homogenization of appearance if we wave our hands hard enough, would react to these unusual people. Personally, I'm not optimistic, but it would be an interesting story—particularly if the protagonist were White. (On a global scale, people who self-identify as White are in the minority, foreign those this notion may be to most Westerners.)
One of the best ways to understand what it feels like to be the Other is to travel in another country with a different culture or ethnic heritage. In India, a primarily English-speaking country, I was an Other by virtue of my skin color and my wealth; in China, I was an Other by virtue of my language and my inability to speak more than a few score Chinese words and phrases. But in both countries, I was a White male and a wealthy one (even though I'm not even remotely rich by Western standards), and that gave me certain privileges and a certain feeling of confidence I might not otherwise have had. One interesting way to gain a sense of what non-White people feel like when they encounter themselves in White fiction is to watch or read Japanese animé or manga that includes white characters. The exaggerated "White" characteristics make for an interesting education in how others see us, and what it feels like to be stereotyped.
Good fiction helps us to understand and empathize with another person's subjective reality. Since race, gender, ethnicity, and other Other characteristics are all important aspects of that reality, it's important to think about how we can include Otherness as an aspect of our characters' identities. The first step is to take our courage in hand and recognize that failure is a very real risk, and that even if we don't plunge face first into race fail, we won't please everyone. If we've done our homework and treated our characters and their heritage with respect, we can present one example of that heritage, not a stereotype that pretends to represent everyone of that heritage. If that character plays a role in the story, and plays it well, that's good enough for most readers, provided you're willing to learn from your inevitable mistakes and do better the next time.