David Duke doesn’t just hold biggoted beliefs; he isn’t even just a bigot. He is a white supremacist.
That’s like saying that I can’t call my friend tall because that’s a term carrying connotations of Shaquille O’Neal or that a millionaire isn’t rich because that’s a term carrying connotations of Bill Gates.
You don’t have to be LITERALLY HITLER to hold racist beliefs. You can be a nice person, even a nice person who is aware of these issues and opposes racism overall.
I think it’s really valuable to recognize that prejudice and bigotry are things we all struggle with (or should, at least). It’s kind of like when you’re trying to reprimand a child; there’s a distinction between a person who’s done a bad thing and a person who is bad.
I learned this the hard way one time. I take part in a writing group–we share our writing with each other, critique it, etc. One of our participants was writing a novel, and only identified one of the main characters as being black about 10 chapters in. I made a note of that, and suggested that she ought to have established him as being black earlier. She pointed out, “I never said anything that suggested he wasn’t black. I never mentioned any race at all. You just automatically assumed that he was white.”
And of course, she was absolutely right. I had been treating white as the default character type. Learning opportunity for me.
Didn’t Heinlein do that once?
It seems like I’ve heard that. I’m not a great reader of Heinlein, so I can’t say for sure.
Wanna know what got me? Significantly worse than that.
I came across an essay by Ursula LeGuin, in which she objects to a screen adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea: objecting to it in significant part because, as she points out, Ged isn’t white. (I don’t think I’m finding quite the version I remember reading; but here’s one similar.)
And as I read that I realized – LeGuin straight out tells you in the book that he isn’t white. Very clearly; and more than once. And, despite having read that book multiple times – I had been imagining him as white anyway. My back-of-the-head assumption had been so strong that it overwhelmed the evidence of my eyes.
That was very much a whack upside the head. And I needed that whack.
I seem to recall something similar in The Hunger Games–people objecting to certain characters being cast with black actors, even though they were described in the books as having “dark skin.”
The default assumption isn’t that an unknown character is white, whether in fiction or in real life. The default assumption is that an unknown character is like oneself. This is how God came to be cast as a white dude sporting a long flowing beard.
It gets even more complicated with fantasy races. I made a fantasy world where the most privileged people are brown. There’s also a race that’s whitish, and then there’s a race that’s extremely white to the point of looking otherworldly, and whether that race is the oppressed or the oppressor depends largely on historical context. There’s a whole lot of intersectionality going on. And a lot of racism, truth be told.
So someone once called me out for describing one of my characters as brown when I introduced her. “Is that even relevant?”
Yes? Race matters in this society, it’s something that would be noticed. Would it be noticed by that specific guy at that time? Less sure. But her brownness would certainly be a nationality and cultural marker, placing her firmly as a member of the aristocracy.
It’s just really hard for me to imagine a world where you didn’t notice the color of other people’s skin, and have some kind of preconceived idea about them. That’s why I try to write characters who aren’t stereotypes in hopes of pushing back on the human need to compartmentalize everyone. (Because that particular aristocrat is actually in full-throated rebellion against her own country, and is using her privilege as a public platform for spreading revolutionary ideals.)
Maybe if the viewer/reader is white, cisgender, heterosexual, and some flavor of Christian. Otherwise, no, I don’t think people default to assuming that characters are the same as them.
This was demonstrated in an experiment that was used as evidence in Brown v Board of Education. Black children clearly expressed a belief that white dolls were better than black dolls, and even identified more strongly with the white dolls.
We’re strongly shaped by the society around us, and that includes what we come to view as a “default” state of being.
Personally, I’ve never once in my life assumed a character was Jewish absent explicit evidence. That would be a pretty silly thing to do and would alter or even ruin quite a lot of narratives.
That was then. Now is, or can be, different.
My wife’s daughter works as a full-time foster parent running a group home. She’s pasty white. Most but not all of her many many kids, both past and present, are black. All the vast supply of kids’ books she has are a mix of all black characters and a wide mix of characters such as white, black, Latin, east Asian, south Asian. It’s a real UN in those latter books. Even though everybody is depicted as an ordinary American growing up in ordinary America. Its just normal that every page has black, brown and sometimes a white face. The whites aren’t a majority or a default. They’re just one of a dozen equal choices.
We just had Christmas. All the kids of an age to receive a doll or an action figure got one whose general skin tone & features agreed with the kid it was given to. They were not hard to locate. This is mainstream stuff now.
The kids generally don’t care what color their housemates are; everybody is a de facto brother or sister. That’s how you raise largely post-racial kids. They’re certainly aware there’s a difference. They just don’t think it matters.
Sadly they’re going to grow up into a world where their attitudes are ahead of the curve. But we can move that way as a society if we want to.
Despite my better (?) judgment, I want to give my $0.02 about @Beckdawrek , from the perspective of a proud member of her fan club.
Change can be hard. Change can be hard when we’re young and – in all ways – agile. Change can be hard when we live and breathe in a milieu of diversity.
I strongly empathize with Beck’s serious health challenges. In my own situation, virtually All Available Resources go to that. Period.
Low rung on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Some of those resources likely get recruited in adapting to change. What if they just ain’t there?
She also seems to have a rather big, rather close, slightly complicated family. Resource suck, Part Deux.
And my sense is that she’s lived in a relatively rural part of the South for a long time (forever)? Stereotypically, that’s a mighty narrow demographic.
Old habits die hard. Everybody we see on a daily basis is either a whole lot like ourselves, or … has to hide the differences.
But add me to the list of people who think Beck’s got a heart of gold and gets just a wee bit of the benefit of the doubt at most every turn.
Some truly great, and truly SD-esque discussion, here. I also want to h/t @DSeid . You’re crushing it 
Oh, and my dear friend – retired surgeon whose childhood was a lot like yours – gets his hackles up if I ever even imply that there was some privilege involved in his success. Kudos to you for recognizing yours – not at the expense of acknowledging your own damned hard work – and for having a strong sense of noblesse oblige – rather than toxic entitlement – come out of it.
Happy New Year to you/us/(they <grin>) all!
IIRC, we don’t find out that Johnny Rico is Filipino until almost the very end of Starship Troopers.
In Space Cadet, Sublieutenant Peters is introduced as part of the crew of the P.R.S. Aes Triplex, the ship on which the protagonist takes his cadet cruise. It’s some forty pages later (in my edition) when a character refers to him as “black as the ace of spades”.
That’s the most… jarring?.. example from Heinlein’s work for me, as I will readily admit that when I read it as a teenager, my mind’s eye saw a “generic white guy” in the Peters role until I hit that description.
The female main character (sorta it’s complicated) in I Will Fear No Evil was written by Heinlein who put up two pictures on the wall to visualize his heroine - one of a black woman, one of a white woman. I’ve never had the desire to go back and reread the book to see how his characterizations may have been influenced by this.
IIRC the eponymous heroine of the book Friday is dark-skinned; this is less a surprise from the text than it is from seeing the cover, which (at least in the early edition I have) depicts a quite pale young woman.
A few more classic examples include protagonists Rod Walker and Johnny Rico being black and Filipino, respectively.
Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s to being better than we once were.
In one of Heinlein’s juveniles, Tunnel in the Sky, a student who was amond those taking the survivial test was black. I think her name was Caroline
Space Cadet, mentioned already, is an example of religious diversity as well. When the cadet’s oath is taken they make their oaths affirming “This by the name I hold most sacred” and it’s mentioned the wide variety of languages and respnses used.
My point is that it’s not (always) a stylistic choice. In this case, I think your post being longer is why your statement comes off less accusatory than @EinsteinsHund did, despite being the same sort of thing.
One liner posts that are negative have a tendency to come off as more negative than the writer intended.
Oh, my, yes, same here. Comes of growing up white middle-class in white suburban New England at a time when the faces you saw on TV were almost all white and any minorities were in a subservient and subsidiary role, with men and women standardized to their expected roles. There’s been a helluva lot of revamping my brain has needed over the years.
One sci fi/fantasy author I enjoy has a recurring character in one of her series whose pronouns are they/them, with a name and appearance that are also not gender-specific, and everyone simply rolls with it as perfectly natural. First time I read that, I had to stop and ratchet up my mind to accept it. Now it’s no big deal, and they’re one of my favorite characters – but I had to make the effort to go with it.
The Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie is a great sci-fi series that’s also really challenging (in a good way) due to the way she approaches gender and identity.
The thing that’s hard for us to understand in the hefty number of white Americans for which that is still their everyday reality. You don’t have to get too far out of major cities before it’s still nearly all white. Except for that small section of the mid-sized town they don’t go to.