Random Acts of Observation

I’ve been trying to catch up on some of the films that came out in the last few months of the year, as the internet elves make them available.

Recently watched BlackKKlansman, which was to my mind a truly extraordinary film. Well written, well directed, well acted. Spike Lee may have produced his best film yet with this. From the opening sequence, which was an assault of racist thoughts and images, to the final Black Power image, it was riveting. What I found fascinating was the way that he makes the ugliness and violence of the Klan so clear, and yet at the same time makes it impossible to see any of the Klansmen as positive characters - they are (with one important exception) shown as incompetent, full of insecurities, paranoid, and so on. It’s reminiscent of a similar choice made by Mel Brooks when making The Producers. The exception is, of course, David Duke. By making him appear not all that much worse than many of the other white men in the story, Lee reminds us that yes, the ridiculous pageantry and naked hatred can be disguised and made to seem electable.

While the undercover penetration of the Klan was the main plotline, the mere background was a strong story in itself, detailing the situation of Ron Stallworth as the first black man in an all-white, often openly racist environment. The choice to make Stallworth’s partner in going undercover a secular Jew - the actual identity of his partner remains unknown - is brilliant as it gives both men a reason to invest personally in the mission, although Zimmerman at first denies it.

The blending of past and present, ranging from images from Birth of a Nation and the harrowing eyewitness account if a lynching (in a powerful performance by Harry Belafonte) to shots of the Charlottesville march is profoundly chilling, reminding us that nothing we see is new, and nothing has been put behind us.

I’m still thinking about the film, days after seeing it. Powerful.


Another film I’ve seen recently is Bohemian Rhapsody. I wanted to see it, despite the discussions of its treatment if Mercury’s Sexuality, because I was a great fan of Queen and nothing can convince me that Freddie Mercury was not the greatest frontman in rock and roll history. I was prepared to be forgiving as long as Rami Malik’s performance lived up to its billing. Which it did. I was blown away by how well he inhabited Mercury’s persona. And while yes, there were some distinct problems with the way that Mercury’s sexuality was portrayed, It was very clear that Malik knew he was playing a queer man, and he played him that way. The text might have been less than accurate about the ways his bisexuality informed his life and his performances, but Malik puts it unmistakably into his chacterisation, and it is a thing of beauty. Whatever the problems were with the film, Malik made Freddie Mercury, the man, the artist, the musician, come alive in all his queer vitality.


So yeah, colour me happy with the movie. I’d have been happier with something more accurate, and less inclined to suggest that aspects of gay life that Freddie engaged in were due solely to his being lonely, lost, and misguided... but I’ll take Malik’s incandescent performance and ignore the things that could have been better.

I want to talk about something that troubles me greatly.

Why do so many white Western people keep insisting that all Muslims actively disavow the actions of a small number of religious fanatics who want to see the world in flames, when we don't ask the same thing of all Christians? Is it because we believe that Muslims are somehow different from us, that they are inherently more likely to choose and approve of violence? That they need to prove they are not bloodthirsty savages who delight in killing and creating chaos? Because that's what this demand looks like to me.

I have heard people say that Islam is a religion of misogyny and violence, but you know something? I've read both the Bible and the Qu'ran (admittedly, both in translation) and they really aren't much different on those counts. Both have passages that speak to love and peace and compassion, both have passages that seem to counsel violence and intolerance and revenge. Yes, in recent years we have seen much violence done in the name of Islam, but we are also living in a world in which much violence was, and continues to be, done in the name of Christianity.

I've heard people say that Muslims are barbaric and uncivilised, but I've studied history and I know that based on every measure of culture and enlightenment that I know of, by art and law and government and the creation of civil, caring societies, Muslim peoples have not been any less civilised, less cultured, less humane, than other groups of people.

Are we saying, then, that Muslims as a whole are not quite like the rest of us, that they do not feel empathy, compassion, horror and love they way we do? That they lack the breadth of emotions that we have? That they are not quite as human as we are, and hence we expect them not to feel as we do when a tragedy occurs?

What does it say about us, that it is so easy for us to think of others as not just different, but inferior? Perhaps it is we white Western people who lack empathy, compassion, breadth of feeling. We certainly have a long history of being unable to feel empathy toward those who are not white and Western. Maybe it's time for us to become more civilised, more humane, more human.

Or, why I finally decided to watch The Help and what I thought of it.

I had originally thought that I would not bother watching The Help. I'd read enough reviews to think that the whole thing was pretty problematic in terms of the framing of the generally unvoiced lives of black women within a story about a white woman finding her voice and getting a cool job.

But then I watched the Oscars - one of my little vices - and realised from her speech how proud Oscar winner Octavia Spencer was of her work in the film, and decided to honour her and the other black actors in the cast who had chosen to devote their talents to this less-than-ideal vehicle.

And I am glad that i did, because Spencer, and Oscar nominee Viola Davis did very good work in this film. And it is a film about women's lives and thus passed the Bechdel test with flying colours, always a good thing.

But I still would rather have watched these fine actors in a film about black women working as domestics in the southern US during the early days of the civil rights movement, and their relationships with the white women they worked for and the white children they cared for, without the framing story about a white woman's aspirations.

Not that we don't need more films about women of all races, situations and backgrounds following their dreams and succeeding, because we do. But to frame the story of black women with a story about a white woman who gives them voice, catalyses their actions... nah, we don't need any more of that.

In the comments on the Tor.com post in which Patricia Wrede's book, The Thirteenth Child, is being discussed, Tor user Alo, in comment 196, quotes from a rec.arts.sf.composition post by Ms Wrede, discussion her own (then) work-in-progress:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.

I repeat my subject line:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

It seems that, according to Ms. Wrede, at least on the occasion of the quote:

1. The best way to eliminate sterotypes of marginalised people in writing is to eliminate the marginalised people from one's writing?

2. Eliminating whole nations of people with thousands of years of history and rich, diverse cultures when writing alternative history isn't "widely divergent history"?

I know something about being erased from cultural representations of both history and modern society, and about people who are in certain ways like me being presented as often profoundly insulting and disturbing stereotypes when they do appear in cultural narratives - after all, I'm a woman, a queer person, a person with multiple disabilities, both visible and invisible.

And this just makes me sick at heart.

This isn't even a case of someone not thinking about the implications of making such a decision in developing her created world. No, she actually thought about ways in which the indigenous peoples of North America have been portrayed in settler literature, identified what she saw as problems, and deliberately decided to make the indigneous people vanish so she wouldn't have to apply herself to trying to do a better job of representing indigenous peoples that the problematic literature she identifies as the genre she's working in.

I say again:

She said WHAT?

::head explodes::

A platform-spanning discussion of Patricia Wrede's new book, Thirteenth Child, which originated at on tor.com with a review by Jo Walton, is taking place.

The discussion focuses on the ways in which the book, an alternate history fantasy in which First Nations people never arrived in the Americas, leaving the book's analogues for European peoples the luxury of settling in reality the Empty Continent that so much North American literature and popular culture seems to assume was there anyway (thus "vanishing" whole nations of indigenous - i.e., first arrival - peoples).

I have a suggestion for readers of fantasy who want to look at the other side of the Empty Continent trope. First Nations (Cherokee) author Daniel Heath Justice has written a trilogy of fantasy novels from the perspective of a people who have been colonised. It is heavily influenced by his own heritage. I've only read the first volume so far (the other two are sitting on my TBR shelf), but not only did I enjoy it, it made me think. My own review of the first volume can be found in my book journal, here.

OK, I have finally seen Iron Man, and while there was certainly lots of cool comic book geekery and a pretty, if superficial message about greedy corporate merchants of death, I'm tempted to suggest that the movie should be subtitled "A white American hero's adventures in the land of swarthy threatening people."

There are a lot of swarthy threatening people in this movie. They seem to be living in caves somewhere in Afghanistan, and have international connections that allow them to obtain weapons from the afore mentioned greedy corporate merchants of death (specifically, our wastrel hero's business partner at Stark Industries, the biggest and sexiest purveyor of weapons of almost mass destruction around). I guess that means that they are Taliban fighters, or maybe Al-Queda, even though they seem to be a gang who use ten rings as a symbol, and there's some throwaway lines about them being nasty swarthy people from all over the world, not just from Muslim countries. Hey, maybe they're some of the warlords, who were well known for terrorising the people... oops, no I forgot, the remaining warlords are good guys now that they're in Karzai's government.

Basically, the point I'm trying to make here is that the situation in Afghanistan, the real country, is very complex, and pretending it's as simple as frightened villagers, swarthy frightening terrorists and noble heroic American soldiers really does a massive disservice to a tragic situation.

Anyway, whoever they are, the villains kidnap our soon-to-be great white hero Tony Stark who is in Afghanistan showing off his latest weapon of not quite mass destruction to the American army, who he wants to sell it to. And here's where the movie really annoyed me.

Because here is where we meet Yinsin, a character who apparently was East Asian in the comic books but who is portrayed as Central Asian and Muslim in the movie. In this relatively short sequence, we learn that Yinsin really has no plotline of his own. He is Tony Stark's fellow prisoner so that he can save Tony's life, help Tony communicate with his kidnappers, assist Tony in his escape (note to some extent it is Yinsin's method of preserving Tony's life that gives Tony the idea for the super-powered suit), and then nobly and courageously sacrifices his life for Tony, surviving just long enough to assuage Tony's fleeting moments of guilt by assuring Tony that he always knew the escape attempt would end in his death, and he was willing to do that, because Tony is a great man and all Yinsin wants to do is rejoin his family in Paradise.

Now I may be wrong, but doesn't Yinsin seem an awful lot like the Muslim cousin of the Magical Negro?

And I know that this movie has been praised for its stand against the arms trade, but I found myself thinking that for a movie that purports to be about how war is evil, it was very convenient for the conscience of the Western audience that it was only the nasty men hiding out in those caves who used weapons against helpless civilian villagers, and not, as has been the case far too often, the Western forces currently in Afghanistan.

So, yeah, the action sequences were cool and there's nothing like watching two CGI
Transformers fighting it out in the streets of LA, and the noble sacrifice of Yinsin made it possible for Robert Downey Jr. to skillfully portray Tony Stark's character development into a post-modern superhero with flaws and a suspect past as well as a conscience and a desire to do right (permit me, though, to express some doubts as to whether working with a shadowy organ of the American government that calls itself Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division is going to do the world as a whole all that much good).

But despite the frothy geeky goodness, it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I am getting so bloody sick of mainstream North American entertainment deciding that I, as a white person, am so empathy-challenged that I can't possibly identify with a person who is not white.

I assure you it's not true. I've watched dozens of movies (I'd watch more, but they're not all that easy to find) where the characters aren't white, and you know what - I've understood the characters' motivations, I've felt that I could identify with their struggles and their triumphs - in fact, I've enjoyed all those movies just as much as - and sometimes even more than - movies with all-white casts that are supposed to - what? reassure me? make me think "my people" run the universe? protect me from seeing difference?

And I bet you have, too. Even those of you who are also white like me.

So why do things like this keep happening? Who decides that if the source material, which is popular enough that you want to make a movie out of it in the first place, happens to have most or all of the characters be people of colour, that has to be changed for a North American audience?

When are we going to start having real-life casting? When will the people doing their thing in the movies and television shows I watch look like the streets of the city I live on, where there's more than just one black person, one Asian person, and maybe one Aboriginal person at a time?

I've got an idea.

Why don't we decide that for just one year, no movies or TV shows will be made that have white actors in them unless you can "justify" why the person playing the character is white. Let's have people of colour as the default, and only cast white people because it's a major plot point and there's no way to avoid it without making the piece meaningless, or because, well, you have to have one token white person. Who is, of course, either the sidekick or the mentor, and who of course sacrifices hirself heroically to save the non-white hero. Oh, maybe we'll allow two or three big-name white actors to make a movie, just to prove we aren't racist.

Let's see what our most popular forms of entertainment look like to those of us who are white, once we're the ones you hardly ever see. It might actually, you know, teach us something about being the person who's defined as the Other.

I've been watching a very interesting 4-part series on the American PBS channel for the last couple of weeks, called African-American Lives.

The set-up is that a group of about a dozen high-profile African-Americans, including Tina Turner, Don Cheadle, Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Maya Angelou and Jackie Joyner-Kersee (these being the people I was familiar with through the media) agreed to have their family histories searched, making use of every available methodology including genetic testing and comparisons with several different genetic databases.

As a Canadian, I didn't (and still don't) know much about the specific history of black people in the U.S., but watching this has taught me a lot more than I used to know. It'a also brought home to me once again how powerful is the emotional impact on a whole people who must, in order to examine where they came from, face the fact that their mothers and fathers were the property of others, and that for many there is no way to go through the loss of family connection to the past and to a place that has been an almost universal experience of the African diaspora.

Watching it has made me think again about a book I read a couple of years ago, Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (my original review is here).

Even though my ancestors were driven from their homes, forcibly loaded into boats for a voyage across the Atlantic during which many died from the poor conditions and brutal treatment, only to disembark in a country they had never heard of before, at least I can trace my family names back to specific places in the outer islands of Scotland, and my family, when they arrived in Canada, were poor, but they were not property. I can imagine, but I can't understand in my heart and in my gut, and probably no one else who can say what I can say, can understand either, what it means to have those two facts overshadowing anything and everything one knows about one's past, one's family, one's history, one's roots.

Which is part of what makes certain moments of this TV show so powerful: watching the faces of these people as they are shown the records of family members identified in the slave schedules, or listed in wills ot bills of sale, as they visit a piece of land owned by a free ancestor, or find a marked grave, as DNA evidence links them to a particular African people and gives them a past that stretches beyond the darkness of the middle Passage.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what would be appropriate for me to write about for International Blog Against Racism Week.

I thought about collecting links about Canadian racism – because there’s this comforting little bullshit mantra we white Canadians keep repeating to ourselves, that Canada isn’t nearly so much of a racist country as, say, the U.S. is, which is false, because it’s not better here, it’s just different – but due to some health issues, I haven’t had the time to search for all the links I’d want to include. So I’ve decided to save that for next year, and prepare it in advance, because it needs to be said.

Then I thought about doing some sort of autobiographical piece, on how I noticed that there were people of colour in my world and when I started figuring out that there were differences in treatment, and how being raised by a well-intentioned liberal mother to believe that all people are the same, no matter what their race, religion or ethnicity (the good old colourblind approach to racism) might have made my behaviour different from that of some other people (because, when I was growing up in the 50s and 60s, there wasn’t a lot of colourblindness going around, and I think, it may have been an essential step in the evolution of white recognition of racism and white privilege) but at the same time blinded me to the realisation of how important it is to recognise and respect difference, and to realise that saying “la-la-la, this is how I think it should be in a perfect world” does jackshit about how it is right now. But then I realised that this was that kind of shifting the focus of the issue away from racism and onto me, me, me, the well-meaning white person, that so many well-meaning white persons do so very well. So I’ll do that some other time in some other post when focusing on me is more appropriate.

Instead, I’m going to post an expanded version of some comments I made in response to an IBARW post about anger on oyceter’s journal.

On the Uses of Anger and the Resistance of the Privileged

I’ve been running into a lot of discussions of anger and how it is received when it is part of a protest against social injustice (such as acts or speech grounded in sexism, racism, ablism, heterosexism, transphobia, and other institutionalised systems of Othering, oppression, repression, prejudice, and privilege), especially when it is shown by someone who is a member of the Othered group.

It seems that it’s not nice for women to get angry about sexism, or for people of colour to get angry about racism, or people with disabilities to get angry about ablism, and so on. And when your inferiors aren’t nice to you, what do you do? Well, at first you ignore them, because as a superior person, you’re too nice to pay attention to their loss of proper subservience. Then you try to get rid of them – sometimes you even have to call in the servants to toss them out. You disparage them, talk to all your equally nice and superior friends about how horrible it is that all these inferior people are going around shouting and screaming and using foul language and sometimes even getting physical. You pass laws to keep them from acting up. You refuse to have them anywhere in your nice house, neighbourhood, workplace, playground, school, gentleman’s club, and so on.

It has been argued that this is why oppressed peoples should not allow themselves to be seen as angry, because then no one will listen to them, and nothing will change.

But then, one must ask, just how far does an oppressed group get by being quiet and polite and reasonable, and never, never angry? bellatrys has, I believe, covered this scenario very well. You don’t get far.

And yes, it’s very true that, if you then show your anger, you will encounter a great deal of resistance. But resistance is part of a process. If they are resisting, that means they have been engaged. They are no longer able to ignore, to pretend there is nothing happening. And that, I believe, is vitally important for change.

It is my belief that anger is important, that anger should not be set aside in the struggle for justice and for change. It is my belief that it should be harnessed, used to fire the spirit and support the body while you fight, even while it is controlled and channelled so that it feeds the message rather than rendering it incoherent. It seems to me that anger is how people respond when they are hurt, injured, mistreated, betrayed, belittled, excluded, done an injustice. It’s a healthy response. It means that you know something is wrong, and it has to be fixed. It gives you the energy to resist, to fight, to save yourself. Anger is not something to be denied. And using it effectively does not necessarily mean using it with violence, which is something that many people seem to think is true. Anger is energy – how it is externalised is up to you.

And yes, people who think of themselves as good people may – and probably will – get upset if you tell them by your righteous anger that they have at the very least benefited and been complicit in such injustices. In fact, they will probably go a lot farther than that. They’re going to resist. They’re going to call names, to excuse themselves, to say it happened a long time ago and it wasn’t their fault. They will argue that whatever is hurting you is hurting them too, to point out places and times where you, or your ancestors, or people like you, might have done something bad, or times when bad things happened to them, or their ancestors, or people like them (and all that might well be true, but some truths are not always relevant). And they’re going to be very, very hurt and dismayed at how angry you are, and how that’s just not like you, and they’ll try to persuade you that anger is not a valid approach, that you should be nice and calm and sensible and rational, just like them. They may even talk about how your anger is a sign that you’re not ready for, or perhaps not even capable of, being treated as equals.

But they can’t ignore the anger of the oppressed any longer. They have responded, and that is the beginning of dialogue.

(Time for a shift in POV and a narrowing of focus.)

Speaking as a white person in the face of anger expressed by people of colour, our reactions to anger are our problem. Not the problem of the people who are oppressed by the society we live in and benefit from, the people whom we indirectly and often directly oppress. We’re the ones who have to work though all the bullshit our privilege allows us to think and say and do. The anger of people of colour is what it is – the only honest response to what white colonialism, racism and imperialism has done to them. The fact that it is also a gift to us, if we chose to see it, is for us to understand and use.

Because people in power, people with white privilege - are, for the most part, not going to give up, or share, power and access, or let go of all the apparatus of lies and mystifications and covertly racist policies and all that shit that keeps us comfortable and unaware just because someone makes quiet, calm, logical, rational, nice arguments and appeals to reason. Because we can come up with just as many calm and logical arguments why it shouldn’t be done, why it doesn’t need to be done because the laws of god or history or the free market will do it in the right time and you’ll just have to wait for it, why it can't be done, at least right now, or why it wouldn't be right or fair or proper, or it would harm something important like the economy or national security or making whites feel good about ourselves, and all the other bullshit arguments. We have a million of them.

Most of us will not really be moved until we see and feel the anger of those we have oppressed, and understand it, and its consequences, in our gut. We are not going to change if we are asked nicely. Why should we? We have power, and privilege. It’s comfortable for us to stay that way. We might be poor, or women, or disabled, or queer, but at least we’re not people of colour – no matter how bad it gets for a white person, there’s always that little bit of privilege we can hold onto. (Of course, the intersectionality of oppressions means that many of you out there, regardless of your chromatic status, can say “at least I’m not a woman/disabled/queer/poor” – but this post is about racism, and we don’t need to fight about a hierarchy of oppressions, because there isn’t one.)

We’re not going to give this up without a struggle. We’re not even going to think about trying to give it up until we are forced to feel it. And we can’t feel a rational argument, or a polite observation. But we can feel your anger. And realise that this much anger has to come from something that hurts. That really, really hurts. And if we have any empathy left at all – and many of us do, it just that we don’t often engage it for people who we think aren’t like us – that’s going to eat inside of us, because we get angry when we’ve been hurt, and it will make us realise that you are like us, because you get angry when you’ve been hurt too. And then we, at least some of us, will start thinking about trying to give it up (in fact, some of us already have, and its because injustice makes us angry, pain makes us angry, and your anger made us understand that you are experiencing injustice and feeling pain).

Because it is about pain and empathy. This is why we make up myths about how certain kinds of people “don’t feel pain that way we do” or “don’t care about human life the way we do” or "hate our freedoms.” Because if we let ourselves realise that we're not the only ones who love life and freedom, and feel pain, that we're not special and refined and more evolved than all those other people we think are inferior, then we couldn’t sustain the illusion for ourselves any longer.

And that’s why anger will work, does work, has always worked. Constructive anger, anger that focuses the fire of justice on the pain that the unjust are trying to conceal, until even we can see how much pain you feel and how unjust we are.

I am totally boggle-minded. The paintings of an American artist, Clara Maria Goldstein, have been labeled controversial because they depict Jesus as a Jew.

Goldstein has created a series of paintings showing such "controversial" images as: Jesus as a baby, being lovingly prepared for circumcision by Mary; Jesus as a boy, reading from the Torah; Jesus dressed as and in poses associated with being a rabbi; Jesus wearing a yarmulke pictured next to a menorah. Now I know that the contemporary evidence (outside of Biblical texts themselves) on Jesus is rather slim, but all the sources I know of seem to agree that Jesus was a Jew. Apparently it's even in the Bible, what with the whole being descended from the House of David, and debating with the wise men in synagogue as a child, and calling the Temple "my Father's house" when he was doing that bit of housecleaning, and other such events.

However, these paintings are being denied display because "Gundersen Lutheran [the hospital] is trying to be more patient-friendly and it doesn't want anything controversial to potentially upset patients."

Let me get this right - portraying Jesus as what he actually was, a Jew, is controversial and might upset people?


The stupid. It burns.