#our issues as a community are issued inherently in misogynoir homophobia transphobia etc

[veridium]

when you say a white writer has no business writing a POC, do you mean due to our world's inequality issues, or under absolutely any circumstances? e.g if there was a fiction AU world where there was no differences between the races whatsoever and never had been, would you apply it to that as well?

You know. I sat back and thought about this, and TL;DR my answer is those two reasons are inextricably linked. White creators have no business writing POC in stories because of our world’s inequality issues and because their liberty in doing so is won after centuries of international, settler-colonial genocide and abuse. 

And I’m just gonna have this out in the open: one of my characters in my fiction is a Black woman. I do not talk about this with the presumption that I exist outside of this situation. I also know that we as fandom creators make characters of different races and ethnicities all day, every day. My critique here is with the industry, the flow of economic and social capitol that functions to privilege whiteness, neurotypicality, heternormativity, etc. I don’t get paid to write Naomi, and I don’t get industry clout for writing her in my fanfic as a character. I still try my best to consider how her world could be shaped and how her life happens with all facets of her identity configured, but I never ever claim nor want to claim that my writing her is an organic meditation on racism through a closed read. 

CW: racism, settler-colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia.

Here’s the thing – universes and worlds are places of endlesspossibility, right? But if we are talking worlds with societies, cultures, andother staples of anthrocentric environments, a utopia is inherently paradoxical.You cannot have a world of groups, societies, and governments without identitiescoalescing and diverging from one another in both interest and history. No matterwhat, whether it be on the basis of skin color, origins, traditions, norms,values, ambitions, social organization will manifest itself.

And here’s another thing: 99.99% of the time in games, movies, tvshows, utopian worlds where race, class, gender, and sexuality are “unimportant”is a half-assed narrative style. Why? Because we don’t know what that actually lookslike without getting our perspectives and experiences on them like muddyfingerprints. If we’re simply talking Dragon Age, and specifically Inquisition,we have one Codex entry – “Sexuality in Thedas” – that discusses sexualidentity in several different cultures as being more behavioral quirk than anything.And yet:

1.       Dorian is threatenedwith blood magic as a form of identity conversion therapy,

2.       Cassandra objects toromance with a F!Inquisitor due to her gender and her faithful morality, and

3.       We see social stressorstake place wherein people who are LGBTQ+ are seen as philandering, sexuallypromiscuous, etc.

It is a similar botching when it comes to race, because eventhough skin color isn’t supposed to be theoretically consequential, Vivienne isfaced with misogynoir that gets violent from the Imperial Court, and Elves areoppressed by virtue of their race.

Creating fictional worlds where identities marked by skin color, anatomy,economic class, etc. is nice to think about because it removes the stress ofhaving to construct and reckon with the violences of inequality. And who doesthat most benefit? White people of Anglo-European descent. It is no surprisethat in media industries unjustly dominated by white, cisgender, heterosexualmen, utopianism is an uncritical broad-brush tool used in narrative to removeresponsibility for the creators to flesh out and consider alternative perspectivesoutside their positionalities.

These worlds, these narratives, come from us, and we are in thisworld. This planet, wherein colonial white supremacist genocide has wreaked havocglobally for centuries and continues to do so. I don’t care if Steve Stevenson fromGlendale, CA with his Prius and polo shirts can write his pants off for acharacter who “just happens” to be a person of color. The fact is and willalways be that he gets money deposited into his bank account for it that couldhave gone to a Creative of Color to write, construct, design, illustrate, etc.instead of him.

More often than not, Utopian AUs are the playgrounds of privilege.We dissect this in social theory and ethnic studies, how the concept of a “Utopia”presents itself as disconnected from past and futurity, suspended inegalitarian stasis. It proposes a place where generationally inherited anger, poverty,abuse, cultural erasure, etc. have no bearing on the community or the individuals’identities. Who has the most to benefit from that? Who has the most to benefitfrom subjugated identities not having reason nor evidence to thedisorientation, persecution, and estrangement they feel from the body politic?

So, no, I don’t think white creators have any business writingcharacters of color. I don’t think cishet creators have any business writing LGBTQ+characters. I don’t think able-bodied or neurotypical people have any businesswriting neurodivergent and/or disabled characters. But that’s the thing: theydon’t have the business, but they still do it, and get paid and awarded for it.Because societies do not exist without someone being more susceptible than theother, and more apt to be exploited and marginalized.

In the United States alone, Black families on average have afraction of saved wealth that white families do, due to hundreds of years ofunpaid labor. Their descendants have less inherited wealth to invest inhousing, education, healthcare, and travel. That means generations of Blackcreatives have had a starting line dozens of miles behind their typical White peer.Indigenous peoples in this country are the descendants of communities activelytargeted with genocide and are still enduring tactics of it in environmentaland land-grabbing public “policies.” Trans women of color’s average expectedlifespan is ~35 years.

There is absolutely no fucking reason why characters who look likethem, who come from experiences they have had, who are products of theimaginations in this world, should be coming from anywhere else but them. Thetalent and skill are out there, the content is out there, and they are workingtheir asses off in a system that does not serve them and in fact repressesthem.

But I think all in all, my statement should be more precise: Thereis absolutely no fucking reason why white cishet people should have theliberties they do in creative fields to write racism, racial sexism, colorism,misogynoir, that they do. The fact that a white person can make a movie, writea book, make a TV show about racism, or a cishet person can make content about homophobia/transphobia,and be paid for it, and take credit for the work those communities do, shouldtell you they have no business. And yet. People from those communities andgroups die in the streets, in detention centers, in prisons, etc. and yet theirexperiences don’t matter as much as the hot new story on the movie posters orin the game trailers. This is the social product of hundreds of years of imperialismtaking stories, taking cultures, and taking heritages, and claiming ownershipover them. Popular culture and media does not exist outside of theseideologies, and in fact they are blunt results of them.

#asks #anon #cw: colonialism #cw: racism