tablesaw | Fear of a Black (Fantasy) Planet

Fear of a Black (Fantasy) Planet

No time for a list of things just yet.

The casting for the live-action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been announced. See if you can spot a problem:

It's not an isolated event.

Between the many movies about POC that feature a primary white protagonist (Dances with Wolves, Last Samurai, Last of the Mohicans, Forbidden Kingdom) [see also "Wiscon 31: What These People Need Is a Honky"—TS], to white washing (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Wizard of Earthsea, Prince of Persia), it's really more than simply "White people will only see movies with white people".

If that were the real reason, why even have stories set in POC cultures, or whitewash POC characters- why not just make all white stories to begin with or remake POC stories minus the cultural trappings(Resevoir Dogs, The Ring, etc.)?

The revelation caused some shock among the Ojousaw household because of, you know, the racism.

ojouchan was particularly upset yesterday. She's worried about our children, who will be brown, and who will look to the few characters who look like them, then wonder why they get changed to look like the people who don't. She's worried about her niece, who recently told her momma, "My favorite color is going to be brown, because that's what color my skin is, and nobody likes it." She's only four. I'm worried too, but it's still not as real for me yet.

But that's why I find it utterly heartwrenching that M. Night Shyamalan, who decided or at the very least signed off on the idea that all of these beautiful characters of color are better off being all-white, was initially drawn to the project because his Indian-American daughters loved the show so much they wanted to dress up as Katara.

There's been more outrage than wanky defensiveness, thankfully. I haven't heard the "I'm sure they're the best actors" argument yet, for example. There's also the argument that because the series is set in a fantasy world, there isn't actually any intersection between race and skin color as it exists in our world (ergo, somehow, everyone should be white), an argument also used in the Earthsea adaptations. But the one that's just hovering on the horizon (possibly forestalled because there are, as yet, no pictures of the actor playing Aang) is that some or all of the characters are white anyway. There've been a lot of discussion on this before too, like Naamenblog's essay "Anime/Manga Characters =/= White."

I had a huge disconnect recently when I heard someone on the street say to a friend that one of my favorite shows, Avatar: The Last Airbender, was great but why were all the characters white? My head jerked around so quick I almost got whiplash. I didn't understand how she could see those characters as white and before I could find a way to insert myself into their conversation and question her about this they were gone. It’s something I couldn't help but think about though.

His post was in response to a marvelous one by Yeloson (again) that is no longer available.

On the other hand, this essay just fell into my lap, "The Face of the Other" or "Do Manga Characters Look White?"

Interestingly, in a manga in which Chinese or European characters are the majority, such as a story set in China or Europe, majority characters are generally drawn exactly as Japanese characters would be drawn in a manga set in Japan, without any racial stereotyping at all. In the context of such a story, the Chinese or European characters are not Other, and markings of Otherness would be superfluous. The artist would make the foreign setting obvious through names, clothing, customs, architecture, and "props," rather than burdening every character with stereotyped racial features, which would limit her ability to distinguish characters from each other, and would also make it difficult for readers to identify with protagonists. Furthermore, if a Japanese character appears in such a story, she will usually be marked visually as Japanese, although usually only by black hair and eyes. (Readers are often expected to identify with such characters, and more exaggerated markings would interfere with that identification.)

Racial markings in manga, therefore, are generally relative. By contrast, an American comic book set in Japan or China would most likely portray every character with stereotyped racial signifiers (and probably with contrived accents, as well). It may be that Westerners, accustomed to non-relative, standardized racial markers, are baffled by the Japanese system of relative signification, in which a single artist may portray a Chinese character one way in one story (set in Japan), and very differently in another (set in China).

As a side note, "The Face of the Other" was linked in an article on Racialicious about videogames, specifically the Xbox release of Black College Football: The Xperience. I'm not really a fan of sports videogames. But:

BCFx will also come with support for the Rock Band drum set to tap into the popularity of drumlines at HBCU football games. The game will ship with 35 songs and 65 musical cadences.

Which is probably the most awesome videogame news I've heard recently.

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Yeah, I was one of those, "They don't look Asian" people. But then, I have never seen an episode of the show (though I have a rabid fan friend). So I didn't know that one of them was supposedly Inuit...?

Also, as I told Jo, the only manga I ever bother reading/watching are ones where they look like they are, say, Japanese. Looking at all those pictures posted on /film, all I saw was a bunch of white kids with blue eyes and tans. Maybe M. Night based all his casting on just those pictures and didn't bother reading anything about the story.

I don't mean anything offensive, just that it's what I see when I look at their choice of character shots.

The "industry" is incredibly biased. Okay, racist. There's very little accountability, they want to "sell" to whomever they perceive to be the "primary target audience" and this usually excludes everyone who is not white (it's stupid, considering that whites will, with luck, no longer be the majority in my state and in many other states in ten or twenty years, but...well, it sucks for the nonce and will continue to suck until we break down the racism in Hollywood.) imo. I am also a big Avatar fan, as is my sister, so this comes as a blow. But after they utterly destroyed LeGuin's Earthsea, I have no more faith in the system to adhere to a vision other than that resembling the worldview of a neo-nazi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatar_the_Last_Airbender

Loathe as I am to use wikipedia as a source for shit, check the map of the nation/world

Check the writing used on that map.

Or Zuko, one of the leads

Check out what he's wearing.

"Explicitly stated influences include Chinese art and history, Japanese anime, Hinduism (India), Taoism (China), Buddhism (India),[26] and Yoga (India).[27] The production staff employs a cultural consultant, Edwin Zane, to review scripts."

"Calligraphy

Traditional East Asian calligraphy styles are used for nearly all the writing in the show. For each instance of calligraphy, an appropriate style is used, ranging from seal script (more archaic) to clerical script.[28] The show employs calligrapher Siu-Leung Lee as a consultant and translator.[27]"

Let me throw an idea out there, not because I believe it necessarily but just to see if it floats.

Japanese animators aren't trying to make their characters look Japanese, any more than American animators are trying to make their characters look Caucasian. Japanese animators are trying to make their characters look neutral, which they (and their immediate audience) read as "Japanese". Therefore, an American looking at anime will see neutral-looking characters, characters intended to look neutral, and will therefore read them as "Caucasian", i.e. their own personal default. There's nothing per se wrong with that: in fact, to read the characters as "other/foreign" would be to add something to them that their creators didn't intend.

Now, there are flaws in this argument. I think the biggest is the acceptance of the assumption that Americans should see neutral as "Caucasian". And one might wonder why ~~Shama~~ ~~Shmal~~ ~~Shayma~~ M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian".

But if the argument holds, it makes some of the attitudes towards manga less racist. I mean, I've got to be honest: I look at the top pair of pictures and think, "Wow, that's not a bad resemblance." But if a resident of Tokyo thought the same thing about a pairing of Aquaman and Ken Watanabe, that would also be fairly sensible.

Some folks are trying to do something about it:

http://aang-aint-white.livejournal.com/646.html

In case it's of interest :)

To be fair, you should be a little clearer when you say "they" destroyed Earthsea, insofar as that wasn't Hollywood, that was the SciFi Channel. And because it bears repeating:

Somebody asked Whedon at a convention whether he had talked to the Sci-Fi network. This was just after Sci-Fi had cancelled the incomparable Farscape while retaining that show with the real-life “psychic” - not a fictional show about a psychic but an actual con artist playing his cruel hoax for a studio audience - and other, similarly un-sci-fi fare. Whedon responded that he had called the Sci-Fi Network about Firefly but they had told him it was too science-fictiony for them.

By no means am I saying that Hollywood, or "the system" isn't racist; just that SciFi utterly screwing up a science fiction vision isn't really evidence of it.

I think this is exactly right - as an anime/manga fan, I've learned some of the signifiers for "this is actually a Caucasian character" (blue eyes, larger eyes etc. - yellow or (in b&w manga) un-inked hair often just means bleached or brown hair).

That said, IIUC Avatar is an American production and, to me, these characters are definitely drawn to be non-WASPs.

Yeah, that casting is just . . . no.

Someone on my flist just posted about this, with a link to someone else's preferred cast (http://misora.livejournal.com/82141.html).

OK, so the fact that this is an American production company puts a twist on it that...um, I actually get lost in a Hofstadter-like strange-loop feedback. If they're drawn to be non-WASPs, but they're created by Americans and, perhaps even more relevantly, voiced by the likes of Tyler, Baker, Whitman, De Sena, Mark Hamill...

Again, I get dizzy. Also, I've never seen the show, so I'm not really in a position to judge.

IME as someone on the fringes of the manga publishing industry, manga artists draw non-Japanese people the same as Japanese people (except different hair colors) with one huge exception: black people. The black people I've seen in manga had exaggerated huge lips and generally looked different. I found it kind of shocking.

The Water Tribe kids (the ones in blue up there) also remain significantly and consistently darker than the rest of the cast (except for one Guru Patik, who was designed as a South Asian), one the show. You can't tell this from the pictures at all. They have blue eyes because of the whole water deal. (Earth-green eyes, Fire-gold eyes, etc.) And... they live in igloos.

Also, the animators took a great deal of care with character profiles -- nose and jaw shape, etc., especially in the second season.

There were also some Aztecs. It was lovely. :-)

This is why I loved "Cowboy Bebop" -- they made the blacks look normal. (Manga can also have some pretty unpleasant caricatures of Southeast Asians, at times. Not always.)

I remember being distressed about the SciFi Earthsea rendition, and reading LeGuin's take on it. Especially her quote:

"I think it is possible that some readers never even notice what color the people in the story are. Don't notice, don't care. Whites of course have the privilege of not caring, of being "colorblind." Nobody else does."

Unfortunately, then and now, I think this describes my initial take on the subject much of the time.

I hadn't seen that Joss Whedon quote, though-- thanks for repost.

The argument doesn't hold because by and large, it does not work reciprocally. "Neutral" usually translates to "white"; this is why casting sheets will specify "all races" for some characters and make no racialized distinction on others, because those are understood as the "default" of white. Whereas actors of colour, even when auditioning for parts that are *meant* to be ethnically diverse, are often dismissed as looking "too ethnic".

And one might wonder why Shama Shmal Shayma M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian".

Because he lives in the Western world, and the message that we get every day is that Indian is NOT the default. (Also, your thing with not knowing how to spell his name is really uncalled for and really kind of horribly ironic in a post about how neutral=/=white.)

Tangentially related -- I was just listening to commentary for an episode of the Simpsons where one of the writers casually said, "On this show, all of the Asians are white and all of the regular families are yellow." Which kind of sums it up for me, because yeah, the message is that if you're not white you're not "regular".

They did have an astounding number of Asian-American and black voice actors on the show, though. Mako, Dante Basco (and one of his brothers), Daniel Dae Kiim, Phil LaMarr, George Takei, Jennie Kwan, Serena Williams (!), Sab Shimono, Takayo Fischer, George Chung, Kevin Michael Richardson... some others...

They made all kinds of effort in the cartoon that I can't imagine they're doing in this film. (Not the least, the accurate representation of several martial art styles.)

There was an article that I read that I can't find right now, although I can probably try, but the gist was that what a Japanese animator sees as looking Japanese just might not look Japanese to Western eyes, anymore than the big burly redheaded caricatures of whites in 18th and 19th century Japanese art look truly "white" to us. The article specifically referred to how in cartoons, the signifiers are basically simple. This :-D looks like a face. So where a Westerner might be looking for what they see as the main signifier of "Asianness" (say, eyes with epicanthic folds), to an Asian eyes are just eyes, the simple signifier is enough, and other things become more important. But in the indication of Western eyes in Western cartoons is just as oversimplified and no more truly "accurate" than the indication of East Asian eyes in East Asian cartoons. (The article put this better than I'm doing now.)

And I'm totally talking your ear off, so I'll stop now. :-D

To clarify:

And one might wonder why ~~Shama Shmal Shayma~~ M. Night wouldn't see "neutral" as "Indian".

Because he lives in the Western world, and the message that we get every day is that Indian is NOT the default. (Also, your thing with not knowing how to spell his name is really uncalled for and really kind of horribly ironic in a post about how neutral=/=white.)

The question I asked alludes, in part, to Oujochan's post (http://ojouchan.livejournal.com/208561.html) in which she asked: "Dear M. Night Shyamalan: When you wake up in the morning do you hate yourself for being brown?"—another way, I think, of asking the same question as "Why doesn't he see 'neutral' as 'Indian'?" I didn't say that the question didn't have an obvious answer; merely that the argument I offered above raises that question. And it's a particularly relevant question here.

Also: with the name, I was being deliberately ironic. (Note, for instance, that the post a few comments above (http://tablesaw.livejournal.com/393819.html?thread=1088859#t1088859) calls him "M. Night". I should have gone ahead and mentioned that the SciFi channel also passed, for similar too-sci-fi-ish reasons, on "Polaris", the show from ~~Strachy~~ ~~Stryczin~~ ~~Stryzcy~~ JMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Michael_Straczynski).) Sorry if that didn't come through.

Beyond the "white is the default" problem in America, your argument forgets cases where the Japanese artists intend for the audience to read their characters as both neutral/non-othered and Japanese. Neither is more important than the other. (Also, Thorn is directly responding to a perspective that not only interprets manga/anime characters as Western and White, but believes that the Japanese artists are drawing characters with the intention of having them perceived as Western and White, often as a launching pad to psychologically evaluate Japanese artists or Japanese culture at large.)

This can sometimes be a problem for people from a different society with privilege. For example, no matter how much I consciously know that the most of the people Earthsea (and a vast majority of the characters in the story) are Not White, when I'm reading the stories, unless the text points it out, I keep slipping back into assuming that all of the characters are white. No matter how often I catch myself doing it, it still happens.

Fantasy settings can be tricky because relative markers aren't as helpful in indicating race/color/ethnicity/whathaveyou. Because the text of Earthsea rarely gives me either visual markers or relative markers that I can associate with the real world, I resort to the unexamined default more often. When I see pictures of the miniseries, I am continually confronted with the visual markers (literally the bodies of the actors) that contradict what I know to be true about the characters. But in the text, with no such challenge, I slip. And while LeGuin clearly wanted her characters to be neutral, she also very deliberately wanted them to be non-white. ("My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start.")

On the Naamenblog post, Trigun is brought up as an example where things get confusing. It has a fantastic/speculative setting, neutral characters, and the relative markers of the world are taken from the mythology of the American West. Similarly, if great care has been taken to conceal the origin of the art, it's obviously much harder for a viewer to get any clue to the original artist's intention. These, I believe, are the types of case that you're thinking of.

What's interesting to me about Avatar is that, to use Thorn's terminology, it uses both light visual and heavy relative marking for its characters. This makes sense because it's being drawn designed by Western artists/storytellers for a Western audience, but uses anime/manga as its model. It has a heterogeneous population, so there are light visual markings to differentiate different groups, but it also uses extensive relative markings, particularly regarding things that are universal to all groups (see some of the stuff

sparkymonster posted above).

And when it comes to Western audiences interpreting the characters, there are people who see both the visual and the relative markings ("nobody is White/European"), people who see the visual markers ("Katara and Zuko aren't White/European . . . ) but not the relative markers (". . . but Aang is"), and people who see neither ("they're all White/European").

By no means am I saying that Hollywood, or "the system" isn't racist; just that SciFi utterly screwing up a science fiction vision isn't really evidence of it.

I honestly am unable to get a coherent understanding of what you're trying to say in this statement.

I'm saying that The Scifi Channel didn't screw up Earthsea for race issues; they screwed up Earthsea because they hate science fiction and will inevitably screw up anything they get their hands on. That's a fact about the Scifi Channel's approach to science fiction, not a fact about their approach to race, or anyone else's approach to race.

I'm still not getting what you're saying.

In my post, the pages linked, and these comments, there have been several examples that evidence the same pattern of turning non-White characters into White characters during an adaptation process. Why is Sci-Fi's Earthsea miniseries not a part of that argument? Why does Sci-Fi "hating science fiction" exempt it from this?

I'll give it one more shot, with the caveat that I may duck out of the thread soon, since I think in general I'm not making myself clear here.

Tanyahp said: "But after they utterly destroyed LeGuin's Earthsea, I have no more faith in the system to adhere to a vision other than that resembling the worldview of a neo-nazi."

If I may paraphrase, this means "Them destroying Earthsea is, perhaps on its own, evidence that The System cannot represent people of color." My argument is that:

(a) "Them" = "The Scifi Channel", and not "The System".

(b) The SFC destroying Earthsea is not evidence that other production companies(*) cannot represent people of color. I'm not necessarily ruling out using it as part of a pattern. But I am saying that losing all faith in the system because of what SciFi did to Earthsea is like losing all faith in the justice system because of what Bush did to habeas corpus: given that Bush hates the Constitution the same way that SciFi hates science fiction, it's only proof that someone with no interest in doing anything right will get this wrong, not proof that everyone will get this wrong.

(*)Caveat: yes, the "production company" of Earthsea was Hallmark. Insofar as the show was made for SFC, I'm willing to use a little metonymy here.

Yes, I see what he's wearing...and he himself looks like a white boy with shaggy brown hair. I haven't seen the wardrobe choices yet for the film, but if they suck, then I'll agree with outrage. :)

Asian people don't all look the same. There are variations of eye shape and skin colour; some of the people I know who are more Indian than I am also can pass for white people without a second glance. Amazing, but true.

Maybe I'm confused (its been a while since I've seen Cowboy Bebop) but I swear that was the anime with that one episode featuring black characters with afros and stealing watermelon trucks. When the anime club I go to watched that two years ago everyone did a double take going, "wtf--did you all just see that?"

I wouldn't know...I have no no familiarity with Asian people.

So you agree that he looks like a white boy, too, judging from your 'people I know' tale. He could be any race, but in that particular shot, he doesn't look much different than the guy they cast.

I agree they should have cast people based on how they fit the character description (and an ability to act...I saw someone suggest Devon Aoki for a role here...and having seen her in the otherwise awesome DOA, I don't think that's a wise choice, talentwise) rather than how they resembled the manga-stylized art, but unfortunately, the examples of the characters shown went for the latter.

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