I know my title is terrible, but my muse is off today.
OK. We all agree that using names which evoke stereotypes is bad. We shouldn’t name the bankers in our Great Novels “Shylock” and our street thugs shouldn’t all be named “Guido.”
But how do we name our antagonists in a world where someone will always find offense? Do all characters need to be named John and Mary? Is it forever forbidden for the bad guy to be African American? Can Jews only be the righteous lawyer and never the evil banker?
This is inspired by a recent story about a play where the antagonist is a banker named Hershel Fink. And I get it- it’s Merchant of Venice 2.0. I’m not suggesting these things aren’t problematic.
I’m just wondering if the pursuit of Not Stereotyping forces us into some sterile literary world where all color must be drained to ensure we don’t offend.
Again. I’m not suggesting the past (and present) aren’t littered with horrible stereotypes. But I am suggesting that a future where all marginalized peoples are only heroes is silly…
When I saw the new film on Disney+, Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, the character of Officer Ellie Steckler was, at one point, thought by one of the protagonists to be the real bad guy. But I thought to myself, she’s Black; they won’t dare do that, and I was right.
On the other hand, the Third Sister in Star Wars: Obi-Wan is Black, and she’s unrepentantly evil, at least for the moment. Hard to say if she’ll turn to the Light Side with five more episodes to go considering she’s a character original to this series.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having a Jewish banker as an antagonist in a story, as long as it’s not done in an overly stereotypical manner, and as long as all of the antagonist bankers aren’t portrayed as Jewish.
As far as movies go, an independent filmmaker can play it differently than a studio that’s trying to appeal to the largest mass audience possible.
It’s almost impossible not to offend someone, and some art is made for the sole purpose of being offensive. If you can avoid overt stereotyping I think audiences will accept it, but expect at least one person to be offended no matter what you do.
The really bad guy is usually English. We don’t have a problem with it.
I just don’t think I buy your premise that avoiding stereotypes drains color. Aren’t complex characters who don’t fit stereotypes and cliched tropes more interesting? You really don’t have to call someone “Shylock” for them to be colorful.
The limited sense in which I think you would have a point is if people are so concerned that they overcompensate and (say) a Black character cannot be a bad guy. But do we really see that? Now that we’re past the era when it was front page news to show a lesbian kiss on TV, I think most writers understand that it does more to normalize the presence of POC, LGBT, disabled characters if they are not always good and heroic.
Some dude named Richard Wright wrote this horribly racist book in which the main character lives up to every single racist expectation of black males, exhibiting not a single redeemable character trait or behavior along the way as he murders and betrays friends and lies and tries to cheat his way through life.
You can’t usually tell, given any single character, whether there’s bigotry or stereotypes going on. But very few works involve only a single character. If there are 23 different Good Guys in a work, or a set body of work, and they’re all white, and 14 different Bad Guys, and they’re all black, that’s almost certainly racist. Likewise if all of the Good Guys are black and all of the Bad Guys are white. But that’s not a particularly difficult extreme to avoid.
This seems rather ad hoc. Given the sample size in an opus, we can take a rigorous approach to work out if the probability of seeing the observed association between Blackness and badness by chance is less than 5%. If it is, you are significantly racist.
(I guess if the number of distinct marginalized groups in your work approaches 20 you’re probably getting cancelled.)
I don’t think it is logical or desirable to only have white people portray villain roles in film / tv etc, and I can think of several high quality black villains in just the last few years of film, and even more before that.
It would be a problem if a hilariously disproportionate number of movie / tv villains were black, almost like we were creating some sort of comprehensive idea that black=villain. While it’s a bit tongue in cheek there is a little tendency in film to cast someone with a typical upper-class English accent as a villain in film. If someone really wanted to seek offense you could argue this is a sort of mild stereotyping due to commonly overusing it, but I don’t have anything like comprehensive statistics on how common the practice is, if you watch a lot of movies it certainly is something that happens a good bit.
Oh, sure, I was just taking an extreme example for illustrative purposes, not trying to propose a single bright-line test.
Oh, and from the OP:
That would be bigotry, because there are a lot more people in the world than the Johns and Marys, and they all deserve representation. That, in fact, is one of the controversies involving current math textbooks: It used to be that word problems would say things like “Mary bought apples at $0.73 a pound and bananas at $0.49 a pound…”, and it would always be Anglo names. Now, the names are much more diverse: There are still Johns and Marys, but also Pedros and Mohammeds and LaShawndas and Xis.
I don’t mean this as an attack on the OP, who I don’t know. But I find many people are too eager to ask “what’s wrong with everyone else?” rather than ask “am I the one who’s wrong?”
If you find yourself saying things like “they won’t let you do it” or “you could never get away with that nowadays” or “it’s forbidden” stop and ask yourself who “they” are. There’s no actual authority out there who is censoring what people can say or write. You’re free to say or write anything you want.
But you have to accept the consequences. And the consequences may be that people take offense with what you said or wrote.
When people say this, you shouldn’t automatically assume they’re wrong and you’re right. And you shouldn’t assume they’re right and you’re wrong either. You should listen to what they’re saying and ask yourself if they’re making a good point. You should consider the possibility that maybe you should change.
If you’re writing a story and you made the evil banker character Jewish, you should stop and ask yourself why you made that choice. Was it a conscious choice or an unconscious one? In either case, what does that choice say about your beliefs about Jews? What are your beliefs and why do you have them? When you examine your beliefs, do you feel they’re correct?
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