IBARW: also, I wish I could find a good song for Henry

[butterfly]

It's International Blog Against Racism Week.

I couldn't really think of anything to write about for it, so I hadn't done anything. I find racism, like other forms of bigotry, constantly startling. It's so obviously wrong to judge a person as worth less because of their skin color, but society does it constantly. It pushes it into us through media and through culture and trains us to believe it, too. I try question myself about it. I try to always listen when other people say that something is racist.

It's not something that I know from the inside. I'm a woman and I'm queer, but I'm white. I don't sit around and think of myself as being 'white', but that's part of the privilege of it.

I was arrested for shoplifting as a teen and got, basically, a slap on the hand for it (I had to write a letter of apology). If I weren't a white girl, would my sentence have been so lenient?

As a vidder, I'm aware that the characters that I've vidded that are white definitely outnumber the characters of color that I've made vids about. I've only made two character study vids that feature CoC (Tosh from Torchwood; Gunn from Angel). I have a few others in various states of progress (Teyla from Stargate: Atlantis; Martha from Doctor Who/Torchwood; Mickey from Doctor Who; Mimi from Rent; Boomer from Battlestar Galactica) but there's no telling when any of those will get finished. The CS vids that I've made that feature white characters vastly outnumber these. That's something that I do want to continue to work on.

The best that I think I can do is try, see where I may be failing to measure up, and then try some more.

Comments

[thunderemerald.livejournal.com]

Interesting comments about the vidding. On a similar note, I'm attempting to write a novel (you know, just like everyone else in the world), and while I don't actually physically describe most of my characters, in my head they're white. And the ones I do describe? Various shades of white.

Food for thought, this. If my book is about prejudices (in a fantasy setting, so it's mostly spellcasters and werewolves versus "normal" people) and skin color isn't really brought up much at all... is that just a different form of prejudice?

Hmm.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

On a similar note, I'm attempting to write a novel (you know, just like everyone else in the world), and while I don't actually physically describe most of my characters, in my head they're white. And the ones I do describe? Various shades of white.

I actually noticed that when I was writing an OC for a fanfic, that I automatically made her white. In that specific case, I just changed her description so that she wasn't, but if a character is already firmly inside your head, it can be hard to change what they 'look' like.

If my book is about prejudices (in a fantasy setting, so it's mostly spellcasters and werewolves versus "normal" people) and skin color isn't really brought up much at all... is that just a different form of prejudice?

That's the question. It's a mark of our society that white is the default assumption and it is work to actively change that, even just thinking about it.