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labingi"On Race in The Hour before Morning"
or
"My Attempt to Beat My Critics to the Punch"
Being totally unqualified to speak to RaceFail, I've been reading with interest and avoiding sticking in my oar. Here, however, is my very tangential contribution, a rumination on my own creative mazes.
I'm making a science fiction movie. I don't know if it will be good or bad, but I know this: if more than ten people ever see it, at least one of them will observe that it's got the black people oppressing the white people. The following is my explanation of how I arrived at this predicament, with some comments on what I'm striving to do about it.
Allow me to situate: I'm a white American from a predominantly white community who now lives in an even more white community. The best way I can assess the pervasive impact of white privilege on my daily thought processes is to compare my thoughts on race to my thoughts on gender. As a woman, I think about gender damn near all the time: in my reading, writing, cultural criticism, thoughts on my daily life. I think about race perhaps 1/100 as much. I belong to the "invisible race." When I pass a white person in the street, I don't notice their race. When I pass a black person, I do. When someone asks me to describe myself, I seldom think to mention my race. So I claim no cred for writing meaningfully about race. I can only do my best to try to think it through as best I can.
Some more situating: The universe in which my movie is set, the Continuation, is a universe I began creating when I was about eleven. At eleven, I can assure you, I was a completely well-indoctrinated little middle-class white girl of the 1980s. I believed that all people were equal because everyone had told me so. But in my literary upbringing, replete with Tolkien, Dickens, Masterpiece Theatre, and for that matter, Scooby Doo and Mr. Rogers, people of color were seldom part of the landscape. The nearest I got to progressive racial commentary in anything that touched me personally was probably Star Trek, and I mean the version that starred 5 white men, a black woman, and an Asian man.
Now, when you're a brunette little white girl from white middle-class America, judging people by appearance basically means hair color. Blondes, after all, do have more fun. So version 1.0 of the Continuation's racial scheme went like this: the good guys (the Kiris) had dark hair; the bad guys (the Samas) had blond hair; then, there were these other guys (the Leddies) who had red hair, and they were okay. That was my stab at correcting the bigotry of my elementary school experience.
When I was perhaps thirteen, it dawned on me that my universe was entirely white and this was probably a bad reflection on the racial diversity of humanity's future. So I created a black race, and conscious that I had to be extremely inoffensive to black people, I made them damn near perfect, arguably as good as the Kiris. These were the Ranlans. They were peripheral to the saga I had already constructed, and after sketching out their existence, I did approximately nothing with them.
At fifteen, I started writing Perdita (click link to see author's illustration of phenomenally Aryan protagonists). By this time, I had rejected the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys" and was writing comparative cultural analysis of better and worse ways of living sustainably and in harmony with nature. The Samas' "bad guy" status had been transformed into "ecologically unwise," which led to the devastation of their empire. The planet Perdita is a remnant of that empire, populated mostly by Samas, with a smattering of Kiris descended from an imprisoned population, and a few token black people who I wrote in to be racially progressive and explained by the theory that some Ranlans had migrated to the Sama Empire over the years. (I don't think this explanation ever reached the novel.)
Somewhere in my early teen years, I also invented another little culture: the Aeshtarians, who were basically a tribal, mercenary group. They were white to start, I think, but not very well defined in my mind racially.
When I was sixteen, I started writing Ghanior's story, which (poor thing) has yet to see the light of day in any remotely coherent form. But since Ghanior (a Perditan) ended up living with the descendents of the Aeshtarians (the Ashtorians), this story required me to flesh out Ashtorian society in great detail. Here, I decided, was an opportunity to do some interesting, culturally reasonable things with race. So I determined to make the Ashtorians the descendents of a group of Leddie and Ranlan emigrants. Thus, racially, they are mostly a mix of black and white with a preponderance of black and red (and mixed/brown) hair. They have quite diverse phenotypes, but if the stereotypical Irish person is red-haired and freckled, the stereotypically Ashtorian is mid-brown skinned and mid-brown haired.
So here comes The Hour before Morning, my present film, which I originally started writing when I was about 21 (about 12 years ago). It takes place in roughly the same historical time frame as Perdita: about 2000 years after the ecological devastation of the Sama Empire. The Samas have been trying to eke out a living ever since. Meanwhile, the Ashtorians have filled the vacuum and become a major power. They have colonized many of the Sama worlds and oppress the Sama people: QED -- dark people oppressing blond people.
But it gets even better--because in my town, we don't generally have a lot of people with mid-brown skin and mid-brown hair, or brown skin and red hair, etc. And on my budget, we don't have the makeup to alter people's skin color without going to some very dangerous places. Moreover, one of the main characters is a "black" Ashtorian in appearance. (I initially made him black in an attempt to write some sort of major, positive, important black character.) But as he is politically aligned with the Samas, his atypical appearance (for a Sama) is much at issue. Therefore, we have to show why people keep saying, "You look Ashtorian." Therefore, we have to point out that a certain proportion of Ashtorians are "black." So we need at least enough "black" oppressors to show a racial trend.
But none of this excuses having the black people oppress the Aryan people any more than Willow's plotline excuses killing the lesbian. Writers, I firmly believe, have a responsibility to be aware of the stereotypes they play into. To mitigate the situation, I'm trying to stress the red hair as the Ashtorian marker. In a predominantly white community, this also helps with casting.
I would also really like to cast our only truly fleshed out fully culturally Ashtorian character, Ned'yem, with someone who is at least quite dark skinned. Boy, has this been an adventure. Even when I advertise for actors of color, at least 50% of the respondents are white. Most of the respondents who identify themselves as people of color live in Portland (about 2.5 hours away and pretty unfeasible for a microbudget project). Moreover, of those who identify as people of color, about 25% (from their photos) look white to me. (And appearance really is what counts in this particular issue.) And here's an interesting wrinkle: when I advertise for actors of color (and only then), about 50% of my respondents ask me if I'm filming a porno... despite the fact that I describe the film in the ad as a "sociological science fiction drama" and include a link to page that summarizes the story as three people in a prison cell philosophizing, complete with detailed character bios that make very little reference to sex at all. To date, I've managed to get one person of color to actually show up for an audition. (We ended up casting her in a different role, where I think she'll be a great asset.)
My point is sometimes it is not easy to move away from vast white overrepresentation. I'm sure my own racial tone deafness contributes to poor outreach efforts, but be that as it may, it's a bit depressing. Indeed, for the role of Jenchae (our major black character and a role that's even getting paid [not much]), I got a grand total of two actors to audition. Happily, one of them was a great cast. And so far, we have no black Ashtorian extras (and we really do need at least one to show that Jenchae's family is not the only black Ashtorian family). At the same time, I'm trying to fit some of our less Caucasian-looking actors into "Sama" roles to counteract the racist appearance of the whole thing but trying to do this without undermining the clear racial lines that realistically have to be present to show the cultural interaction of the Samas and Ashtorians. On the one hand, it's an interesting problem to work on. On the other hand, it's a mess.
To end on a happy note, I can say that my next feature (if I ever have time and money to make it) will feature mostly people of color (in positive roles). To end on a sad note, the thought of trying to cast them in this town makes my stomach go all squiggly.
or
"My Attempt to Beat My Critics to the Punch"
Being totally unqualified to speak to RaceFail, I've been reading with interest and avoiding sticking in my oar. Here, however, is my very tangential contribution, a rumination on my own creative mazes.
I'm making a science fiction movie. I don't know if it will be good or bad, but I know this: if more than ten people ever see it, at least one of them will observe that it's got the black people oppressing the white people. The following is my explanation of how I arrived at this predicament, with some comments on what I'm striving to do about it.
Allow me to situate: I'm a white American from a predominantly white community who now lives in an even more white community. The best way I can assess the pervasive impact of white privilege on my daily thought processes is to compare my thoughts on race to my thoughts on gender. As a woman, I think about gender damn near all the time: in my reading, writing, cultural criticism, thoughts on my daily life. I think about race perhaps 1/100 as much. I belong to the "invisible race." When I pass a white person in the street, I don't notice their race. When I pass a black person, I do. When someone asks me to describe myself, I seldom think to mention my race. So I claim no cred for writing meaningfully about race. I can only do my best to try to think it through as best I can.
Some more situating: The universe in which my movie is set, the Continuation, is a universe I began creating when I was about eleven. At eleven, I can assure you, I was a completely well-indoctrinated little middle-class white girl of the 1980s. I believed that all people were equal because everyone had told me so. But in my literary upbringing, replete with Tolkien, Dickens, Masterpiece Theatre, and for that matter, Scooby Doo and Mr. Rogers, people of color were seldom part of the landscape. The nearest I got to progressive racial commentary in anything that touched me personally was probably Star Trek, and I mean the version that starred 5 white men, a black woman, and an Asian man.
Now, when you're a brunette little white girl from white middle-class America, judging people by appearance basically means hair color. Blondes, after all, do have more fun. So version 1.0 of the Continuation's racial scheme went like this: the good guys (the Kiris) had dark hair; the bad guys (the Samas) had blond hair; then, there were these other guys (the Leddies) who had red hair, and they were okay. That was my stab at correcting the bigotry of my elementary school experience.
When I was perhaps thirteen, it dawned on me that my universe was entirely white and this was probably a bad reflection on the racial diversity of humanity's future. So I created a black race, and conscious that I had to be extremely inoffensive to black people, I made them damn near perfect, arguably as good as the Kiris. These were the Ranlans. They were peripheral to the saga I had already constructed, and after sketching out their existence, I did approximately nothing with them.
At fifteen, I started writing Perdita (click link to see author's illustration of phenomenally Aryan protagonists). By this time, I had rejected the idea of "good guys" and "bad guys" and was writing comparative cultural analysis of better and worse ways of living sustainably and in harmony with nature. The Samas' "bad guy" status had been transformed into "ecologically unwise," which led to the devastation of their empire. The planet Perdita is a remnant of that empire, populated mostly by Samas, with a smattering of Kiris descended from an imprisoned population, and a few token black people who I wrote in to be racially progressive and explained by the theory that some Ranlans had migrated to the Sama Empire over the years. (I don't think this explanation ever reached the novel.)
Somewhere in my early teen years, I also invented another little culture: the Aeshtarians, who were basically a tribal, mercenary group. They were white to start, I think, but not very well defined in my mind racially.
When I was sixteen, I started writing Ghanior's story, which (poor thing) has yet to see the light of day in any remotely coherent form. But since Ghanior (a Perditan) ended up living with the descendents of the Aeshtarians (the Ashtorians), this story required me to flesh out Ashtorian society in great detail. Here, I decided, was an opportunity to do some interesting, culturally reasonable things with race. So I determined to make the Ashtorians the descendents of a group of Leddie and Ranlan emigrants. Thus, racially, they are mostly a mix of black and white with a preponderance of black and red (and mixed/brown) hair. They have quite diverse phenotypes, but if the stereotypical Irish person is red-haired and freckled, the stereotypically Ashtorian is mid-brown skinned and mid-brown haired.
So here comes The Hour before Morning, my present film, which I originally started writing when I was about 21 (about 12 years ago). It takes place in roughly the same historical time frame as Perdita: about 2000 years after the ecological devastation of the Sama Empire. The Samas have been trying to eke out a living ever since. Meanwhile, the Ashtorians have filled the vacuum and become a major power. They have colonized many of the Sama worlds and oppress the Sama people: QED -- dark people oppressing blond people.
But it gets even better--because in my town, we don't generally have a lot of people with mid-brown skin and mid-brown hair, or brown skin and red hair, etc. And on my budget, we don't have the makeup to alter people's skin color without going to some very dangerous places. Moreover, one of the main characters is a "black" Ashtorian in appearance. (I initially made him black in an attempt to write some sort of major, positive, important black character.) But as he is politically aligned with the Samas, his atypical appearance (for a Sama) is much at issue. Therefore, we have to show why people keep saying, "You look Ashtorian." Therefore, we have to point out that a certain proportion of Ashtorians are "black." So we need at least enough "black" oppressors to show a racial trend.
But none of this excuses having the black people oppress the Aryan people any more than Willow's plotline excuses killing the lesbian. Writers, I firmly believe, have a responsibility to be aware of the stereotypes they play into. To mitigate the situation, I'm trying to stress the red hair as the Ashtorian marker. In a predominantly white community, this also helps with casting.
I would also really like to cast our only truly fleshed out fully culturally Ashtorian character, Ned'yem, with someone who is at least quite dark skinned. Boy, has this been an adventure. Even when I advertise for actors of color, at least 50% of the respondents are white. Most of the respondents who identify themselves as people of color live in Portland (about 2.5 hours away and pretty unfeasible for a microbudget project). Moreover, of those who identify as people of color, about 25% (from their photos) look white to me. (And appearance really is what counts in this particular issue.) And here's an interesting wrinkle: when I advertise for actors of color (and only then), about 50% of my respondents ask me if I'm filming a porno... despite the fact that I describe the film in the ad as a "sociological science fiction drama" and include a link to page that summarizes the story as three people in a prison cell philosophizing, complete with detailed character bios that make very little reference to sex at all. To date, I've managed to get one person of color to actually show up for an audition. (We ended up casting her in a different role, where I think she'll be a great asset.)
My point is sometimes it is not easy to move away from vast white overrepresentation. I'm sure my own racial tone deafness contributes to poor outreach efforts, but be that as it may, it's a bit depressing. Indeed, for the role of Jenchae (our major black character and a role that's even getting paid [not much]), I got a grand total of two actors to audition. Happily, one of them was a great cast. And so far, we have no black Ashtorian extras (and we really do need at least one to show that Jenchae's family is not the only black Ashtorian family). At the same time, I'm trying to fit some of our less Caucasian-looking actors into "Sama" roles to counteract the racist appearance of the whole thing but trying to do this without undermining the clear racial lines that realistically have to be present to show the cultural interaction of the Samas and Ashtorians. On the one hand, it's an interesting problem to work on. On the other hand, it's a mess.
To end on a happy note, I can say that my next feature (if I ever have time and money to make it) will feature mostly people of color (in positive roles). To end on a sad note, the thought of trying to cast them in this town makes my stomach go all squiggly.
