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Every time I see someone make the argument that representation in fiction isn’t a big issue, and that advocating for diversity is just a waste of time because audiences can identify with anyone, and anyway, trying to include a wide range of backgrounds is just tokenism, I have…
Just my opinion I wouldn’t really care if most stories were about “queer brown women” as you phrase it. Cause I do identify with anyone. I was taught to not look at race or sexuality. So those movies to me would just be about a person. Not a queer brown woman.
Congratulations! You have completely missed the point of my post. Let me tell you why:
Regardless of your intentions, saying “I don’t see race or sexuality” is functionally identical to saying “I don’t recognise racism or sexism”, for the pure and simple reason that your ability to perceive the latter is wholly dependent on acknowledging the former. If you can’t see race, you can’t see racism, because you’ve chosen to ignore the very thing that would help you resolve an otherwise disconnected series of abuses, microaggressions and elisions into a distinctive pattern of prejudicial behaviour against a specific group of people - a fact which has been proven by studies into colourblindness as an ideology.
Ask yourseIf this: if you don’t perceive the many differences between people, or think that such meaningful distinctions as race and gender are really unimportant, then how are you going to notice or understand when people are discriminated against on the basis of those differences? And no, you don’t get to claim you can see racism without seeing race, either, because if that’s what you’re doing, then you’re electing to look at racial differences in an exclusively negative light - behaving as though noticing race is something only racists can or should do. Acknowledging race is not, in and of itself, a racist act, but trying to erase race - to act as though equality is dependent on the pretense that everyone is homogenous and identical in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? That’s not just racist, it’s downright scary.
I’ll say it again: you don’t get to decide that someone’s else’s race, orientation and gender are irrelevant to their personhood. You don’t get to say “I don’t care about this character’s queerness, brownness or womanhood,” as though these details are somehow optional when it comes to understanding who they are. Identifying with someone doesn’t mean removing or ignoring everything that makes them different to you and focussing only on the remainder; it means embracing the fact that different people have different experiences, some of which you may not ever be able to identify with on a personal level, even if you can still connect with them through an awareness of shared humanity, because you’ll never know what it’s like to live as someone else.
I wrote my post to decry the sort of obliviously privileged logic that says straight white cisdudes are such a universal emblem of humanity that there’s no need for greater diversity in popular stories, because anyone can identify with them. You responded by saying that you wouldn’t care if stories were more diverse, because diversity is irrelevant: that it’s possible to identify with anyone, provided you ignore what makes them different. But here’s the thing: if you’re ignoring the race, gender and sexuality of characters who are different to you in order to identify with them? Then you’re not actually identifying with them at all - you’re disassembling them and discarding the parts that don’t interest you, that are different to you, so you don’t have to deal with the implications of thinking that race matters, gender matters, sexuality matters. You’re ignoring the very qualities that I’m saying are important, and yet you’ve somehow come away thinking that we’re in agreement on the topic.
If you can’t see race, you can’t see racism; and that includes your own.
(via twisted-reyes)
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