Yeah, I know there are times when you need to mention race, like if there’s one black person in your office and you need to direct someone to him. I don’t have a problem with it then. It’s just when it’s totally irrelevant to the situation that I do. Like with the story example: the clerk had one line in the novel. She/he is not relevant to the plot at all. You could say that the author was trying to paint an accurate picture of the scene, but the author in question… ain’t all that good at doing that. He’s the kind of dude that would write “the black woman and the Arab-American man walked down the street” and not describe anything about the street. I’m not sure if he’s racist or just a hack, maybe both.
Mostly I wish that writers would come up with more original ways of revealing their character’s race. Some are good at doing this by showing other character’s reactions to the character. And of course if a character is going to play an actual role it’s good to have a physical description (although I get more than a bit annoyed when an author spends paragraphs physically describing their character… can you tell I don’t read romances?). It just bugs me when it’s done poorly, or done repeatedly (Walter Mosely, I’m looking at you). Because when you get right down to it, just mentioning someone’s race isn’t that great a physical descriptor: there’s also height, weight, hair color/style, etc which should also be described to give us a really accurate picture of a character or real person. Race alone gives us almost nothing to work with.
Depends on the context. If they’re describing the person, then no. If they’re pointing out their color or ethnicity and it seems like extranneous information… kinda makes me wonder.
Um. This is way scary for me, because I am three months on these boards and I am disagreeing with OpalCat.
Not disagreeing in every point. Absolutely, the default is the commonest race. Absolutely, specifying the race in a story can make motivations make sense.
However. I have a problem with the default. I started having this problem when I went to medical school in the early 1980’s, when the default for “doctor” was “male”. The default for “airline pilot” is still “male”.
The problem with the defaults is not that people will usually be right when they make the default assumption. The problem is that the way the human brain works, they start legislating the default assumption. All doctors in the 1980’s are male because that’s how it’s supposed to be. Right? Certainly in the opinions of my patients back then, that was right. I had patients tell me I couldn’t take care of them because I was not a man.
If there are female doctors in the early 1980’s, they’re all trainees and young and powerless, so that means doctors who are reliable and experienced and appointed to positions of authority are male, because that’s who you can trust. Right? Default assumption. Becomes legislated.
All neighbors are white because that’s normal. All airline pilots are men because they probably have better reflexes or something. Otherwise why wouldn’t they be?
This mental legislating of the default goes on in very nice people’s minds when they have no intention of being racist, or any idea that they are. But I as a white girl dealt with the stare and the blink and the you-can’t-be-my-surgeon so many times in the 1980’s that I grew to see a whole lot of unconscious problems resulting from the default assumption.
I recently posted a bunch of true, but silly, posts in IMHO in the thread “Medical Professionals, What Embarrassing Sexual Injuries Have You Witnessed?” (sorry I couldn’t link to it - apparently I don’t yet understand the blue link symbol). It’s a long story that involves a character specified as Hispanic and a character specified as black.
There are two other characters in it. One is lovingly nicknamed Patch Adams and one is a bored but amused anesthesiologist. Their race is not specified.
Patch Adams was an African doctor from Kenya and the anesthesiologist was a Filipino. Would you have guessed? If you didn’t, does the default grate on you now that you know? Do you think it changed your assumptions to know?
Dr. Demento, who was a very bad doctor, was Italian-American. Does that change anything?
I think the default can lead to major mistakes that can result in the sin of racism against people even when no such sin is intended.
And that’s my brave but knee-shaking dissent from OpalCat.
I see your points, but I’m afraid I still feel that in a situation where description adds to whatever is being told (most especially a character in a novel), race is an absolutely valid thing to mention.
Here’s perhaps a comparable situation that puzzled me no end. The show Designing Women once had an episode where three of the women were going to lipsync/sing (can’t remember) the Supremes for some kind of benefit. The Delta Burke character mentioned darkening their skin, and everyone jumped all over her as being terribly racist for even thinking of such a thing. Mind you, she wasn’t talking about black-face buffoonery, or the old whites-in-minstrel-shows look, but rather darkening her entire skin so as to give the real illusion of being darkskinned herself. Yet these women put on black wigs styled like the 60s era Supremes, and in every other way did their best to make themselves look like the Supremes.
Now, I think the Supremes and the vast majority of their fan base realize that the Supremes were black. So it’s not like they’d be outing them or something. Why was it acceptable to try to make themselves look like the Supremes in every other way, but not skin color? Does anyone think that dark skin was not a notable aspect of these women’s appearance, just as the black hair and sequin gowns were?
On an entirely irrelevant note, how the *hell * did lip-syncing ever get to be considered a valid form of entertainment???
Once in high school, I had the assignment to deliver a soliloquoy from the point of view of a character in one of our texts. I chose to appear as the devil from a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, dressing in character, obtaining a twisty staff like the devil carried–and blackening my skin with crushed charred wood.
My girlfriend was mortified, and refused to speak to me or acknowledge me until I washed the ashes off. Until this response from her, it genuinely hadn’t occurred to me that appearing in blackface as the devil might be offensive.
A well-written novel would not want to rely on stereotypical extremes. I was once the obese girl with thick glasses, greasy hair and an overbite. But I have had fairytale romances and a happy marriage to a handsome man. You just never know.
And the blackest man that I’ve ever met was a graduate student at Yale. Race and skin color reveal nothing about character.
And my own experiences have been just the opposite. Most of my friends (who also hate racism) have spent their careers teaching in inner city schools. I still think that it is racist to hold a negative view of a particular race just because a few people of that race have done specific things to harm you. What if all of the people who harmed you were wearing T-shirts or blue jeans or baseball caps? Would you be forever judgmental about those items of apparel? What if they all drove Chevrolets?
If someone is looking for an excuse to be racist, they will always find one.
Yes, I have been beaten, threatened, and held up by black men. It wasn’t because they were black or because they were tall or because they were Baptists. It was because they were thugs.
Today I’ve been moping around all day because I’m losing a man in my life that I’ve become attached to. I’ve met him only once, but seen him a thousand times. Everyone in Nashville loves the man and our loss is Baltimore’s gain. Do you think that it’s ever mattered to us what race Steve McNair is?
sigh Yes, but I think that an author also has to think about what people are likely to assume and take that into consideration. Sure there are plenty of stories about people who aren’t the typical “attractive” who have great romances–I’m not saying it never happens or anything like that. But at the same time, most people are going to assume that a beautiful person will have had more relationship experience than an ugly one. Right or wrong as their assumption may be in any given situation, I guarantee you that if you showed a picture of a beautiful person and a picture of an ugly person to 10,000 people and had them circle which one they felt had probably had more romantic experience, the attractive person would be the one circled most of the time.
Sure, an author can go totally PC and ignore every facet of human nature that isn’t perfectly magnanamous, but they’d be an idiot to do so.
I detest the assumed “default” in speech because it has a way of creeping into thinking. Being in the majority does not mean everyone else is invisible.
People on the Straightdope do it all the time. The “default” poster is not male. Female posters should not have to have “ette” or “-girl” in their usernames to be recognized as females. I also try not to assume a poster is white or American, or that the “audience” in a particular thread is white or American. I know why people generalize, but I still wish they wouldn’t.
As far as dropping racial descriptors casually, it bothers me when race is not relevant to the story AND the person doing the dropping already has skeeved me out before in a racial way. But if I’m not already suspicious of the speaker and they mention race, I’m willing to ignore it. Sometimes race, while not relevant to the plot of a story, provides context and humor.
I’m a white person, I live in a predominantly white city, my family and friends and co-workers are predominantly white. My default for all posters is white until I find out differently. I don’t think that makes me racist. I just think it means my worldview is coloured by my own life experience. Am I aware that some posters are not white? Of course. Do I care? Not at all.
I think we’ll be a helluva lot closer to being done with racism altogether when casually mentioning someone else’s race fails to bother anybody else - when it truly becomes the non-issue it should be.
Amen to both paragraphs, but especially the second. No-one gets offended if I mention that someone had brown hair and was 5’8"!
And, no, folks, while I recognize that there is some making up to do before all things are equal (i.e. Affirmative Action, although I’m not sure it’s had the effect intended), this issue ain’t one of 'em! This is an area (mentioning someone’s race) where unless someone is mentioning it for racist reasons, it is absolutely silly to get offended - PC taken too far.
I’m sorry if it offends our minority posters, but at this point in the U.S., the majority where most (not all, but most - I, for example, live in a completely mixed area with a slight plurality most likely held by Hispanic) of us live and work IS white. And the economic and show business majorities are still white. That will, we strongly hope, change over time, but demanding that people change a perfectly innocuous habit of speech isn’t going to help at all - just convince people that the whole business is utterly stupid.