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It's recently come to my notice that the manner in which 'native races' are portrayed on Stargate is, if not racist, then certainly strongly jingoistic.
This is going to focus on the broader perception of races and how they get portrayed in the show - mostly Atlantis, although SG-1 will be in there, too.
Basically, it seems that the native races of Pegasus are either technologically inept (primitive) or 'the bad guys'.
We have societies like the Athosians, who are still in the 'hunter-gatherer' stage of civilisation, who are on the side of the Atlantis expedition but primitive; and at the other end of the scale, we have societies like the Gennii, who are close to the 'information revolution' stage of civilisation, but are at best wary allies, and at worst, frank enemies.
Then there are the Satedans, who must have had a pretty technologically advanced civilisation before the Wraith took them out - Ronon's weaponry speaks to that - but who don't even get a mention on the 'we could pick over their bones and see if they developed something we haven't' scale. Hell, I don't think anyone's mentioned even asking Ronon if they can take apart his weapons to see how they tick.
Granted, Ronon's likely to look at them and say flatly, 'No,' but the man came from a world that nearly fought back against the Wraith! Just because he doesn't speak much doesn't mean he's a savage. He's probably no more of a savage than any man who comes home from his work, sits down in his lounge chair and can't be prevailed on for more than a grunt or a dozen before dinner, let alone bed.
The episode that's supposed to deal with Ronon's background will be interesting: if only because it took them about 30 episodes to even revisit Teyla's background with the Athosians, and they were relegated to a side plot, a funeral, and some very lovely singing by Rachel Luttrell that had almost no relevance to the plot.
The race issue is another thing that's slowly been coming upon me.
SG1 - Teal'c is the 'native guide' - black, primitive people.
SGA - Teyla is the 'native guide' - mixed race, primitive people.
SGA - Aiden is the 'yes, man' - black
SGA - Ronon is the 'grunt and muscle' - with a polynesian background (? I think - but even if not, the point with Teal'c, Teyla and Aiden still stands)
You know, I'm waiting for the episode where they come across an Asiatic civilisation that's either run like the Japanese samurai or full of Asian crime gangs.
It's a bit worrying, not that there are characters who are relegated to the background and they're non-white(other characters are background, too: Janet, Carson, Zelenka, etc), but that the non-white characters seem to be inevitably relegated to the background in the Stargate universe.
To some degree, I'm sure it's symptomatic of TV shows: white people want to watch white people. Still, I find it disturbing that the nominated 'leaders' of the primitive peoples - and therefore their representatives - are almost always non-white. (Plus, the leaders of the 'white people with civilisation' are evil if their cultures aren't.)
Finally, I'm curious about the fact that the 'jumper driver seat is on the left. Not all civilisations drive on the right-hand side of the road. It's like the assumption that people in the Northern Hemisphere have that birds fly south for the winter, and that things get warmer the further south you go.
Atlantis does not necessarily have to be in the northern hemisphere of its planet. I mean, it very well may be - I haven't studied the shots of the planet all that well. But, coming from the other half of the planet (where Christmas is in summer and we build our houses facing north for the best sun) I think it would be cool to have all the people from up north completely turned around by the fact that the sun's path lies northwards and not south, while the people from the southern hemisphere are all "what are you guys going on about?" While secretly snickering behind their hands.
The idea of a culture that influenced Earth (instead of American-Earth influencing it) is intriguing: but it would have been nice to see some of the standards turned upside down - perceptions changed and rearranged - to make people think.
And if you can sandwich some perception adjustment in between entertainment, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing.
This is going to focus on the broader perception of races and how they get portrayed in the show - mostly Atlantis, although SG-1 will be in there, too.
Basically, it seems that the native races of Pegasus are either technologically inept (primitive) or 'the bad guys'.
We have societies like the Athosians, who are still in the 'hunter-gatherer' stage of civilisation, who are on the side of the Atlantis expedition but primitive; and at the other end of the scale, we have societies like the Gennii, who are close to the 'information revolution' stage of civilisation, but are at best wary allies, and at worst, frank enemies.
Then there are the Satedans, who must have had a pretty technologically advanced civilisation before the Wraith took them out - Ronon's weaponry speaks to that - but who don't even get a mention on the 'we could pick over their bones and see if they developed something we haven't' scale. Hell, I don't think anyone's mentioned even asking Ronon if they can take apart his weapons to see how they tick.
Granted, Ronon's likely to look at them and say flatly, 'No,' but the man came from a world that nearly fought back against the Wraith! Just because he doesn't speak much doesn't mean he's a savage. He's probably no more of a savage than any man who comes home from his work, sits down in his lounge chair and can't be prevailed on for more than a grunt or a dozen before dinner, let alone bed.
The episode that's supposed to deal with Ronon's background will be interesting: if only because it took them about 30 episodes to even revisit Teyla's background with the Athosians, and they were relegated to a side plot, a funeral, and some very lovely singing by Rachel Luttrell that had almost no relevance to the plot.
The race issue is another thing that's slowly been coming upon me.
SG1 - Teal'c is the 'native guide' - black, primitive people.
SGA - Teyla is the 'native guide' - mixed race, primitive people.
SGA - Aiden is the 'yes, man' - black
SGA - Ronon is the 'grunt and muscle' - with a polynesian background (? I think - but even if not, the point with Teal'c, Teyla and Aiden still stands)
You know, I'm waiting for the episode where they come across an Asiatic civilisation that's either run like the Japanese samurai or full of Asian crime gangs.
It's a bit worrying, not that there are characters who are relegated to the background and they're non-white(other characters are background, too: Janet, Carson, Zelenka, etc), but that the non-white characters seem to be inevitably relegated to the background in the Stargate universe.
To some degree, I'm sure it's symptomatic of TV shows: white people want to watch white people. Still, I find it disturbing that the nominated 'leaders' of the primitive peoples - and therefore their representatives - are almost always non-white. (Plus, the leaders of the 'white people with civilisation' are evil if their cultures aren't.)
Finally, I'm curious about the fact that the 'jumper driver seat is on the left. Not all civilisations drive on the right-hand side of the road. It's like the assumption that people in the Northern Hemisphere have that birds fly south for the winter, and that things get warmer the further south you go.
Atlantis does not necessarily have to be in the northern hemisphere of its planet. I mean, it very well may be - I haven't studied the shots of the planet all that well. But, coming from the other half of the planet (where Christmas is in summer and we build our houses facing north for the best sun) I think it would be cool to have all the people from up north completely turned around by the fact that the sun's path lies northwards and not south, while the people from the southern hemisphere are all "what are you guys going on about?" While secretly snickering behind their hands.
The idea of a culture that influenced Earth (instead of American-Earth influencing it) is intriguing: but it would have been nice to see some of the standards turned upside down - perceptions changed and rearranged - to make people think.
And if you can sandwich some perception adjustment in between entertainment, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing.
no subject
So, why was MS cast as Jackson and CJ cast as Teal'c? -- For the record, they were all cast together. MS, CJ, and Amanda Tapping.
See, one or two cases doesn't mean anything. Then it's "this individual was best for this individual role." When you have four cases or six cases or a dozen cases then it means something and that's what you have here. You have a dozen cases, or more. To say it doesn't mean anything is ignoring, well, everything.
- Andrea.
no subject
I'd guess because Chris Judge doesn't look an awful lot like James Spader... even if you did give him floppy hair and glasses.
And while MS is a fit guy, he doesn't have anything like CJ's sheer physical presence, he has the ability to play frightening, but I'm not sure I've seen him manage that quiet intimidation that's needed for a First Prime.
I'm not completely ignoring the possibility that there may be someracial influence inthere somewhere, but I think it's a harsh thing to be accusing people of when the same thing could have happened for non-racial reasons.
no subject
I really don't think it is. Because, first of all, I'm not accusing them of doing it INTENTIONALLY. What I am doing is accusing society -- specifically, the white US middleclass American society the majority of the writers come from -- of being racist. And you want to argue they aren't, well, bring it on. Though
Calling someone a racist, or a sexist, or a pigheaded entitled fuck has become loaded because people don't like being called on their bullshit. It's become "harsh" because people don't want to see what their society really looks like. And terms like "welfare queen" -- which has racist, sexist, AND classist implications -- have become a light-hearted joke seen on every television set across the U.s. in your nighttime comedy routines, and seen in your newspapers, and in your discussions, and in the more biased "news" programs. Accusing people of racism has become harsh, but reporting the majority of crimes with a black or Hispanic face -- even if there were two suspects/accused and one of them was white -- is standard issue.
I'll stop being harsh when people stop not questioning why they can't see "blondes" as exotic despite blondes being the rarest hair colour, and why with two men are equal phyisique there is one that has more physical presence and that man "happens to be" the black one.
I'll --
I'll apologize to
- Andrea.
no subject
Ray Winstone, Daniel Benzali, Lee Van Cleef, hell even Brian Moore. All people with far more physical presence that Chris Judge. He doesn't "happen to be" the black one at all.
Is it that hard to believe that there are people in this day and age can make decisions which aren't racially motivated? Because that's a very sad belief to have to live with.
And just for the record, they're not 'my' newspaper or 'my' discussions at all.
no subject
Which is sort of the point. It's not about you, or me, or any of us as individuals or individual cases. It's about patterns and if patterns are there and if patterns are not there. Patterns are there in SG1 and SGA. They're there in U.S.-produced science fiction in general.
I don't see what else you can attribute those patterns too. Either its racism of the shows or its racism of the system. If you have another plausible explanation I'd be happy to hear it, but I don't know what it could be.
- Andrea.
no subject
Patterns appear in all sorts of places, sometimes they're relevant, sometimes they're not and I think it's worth considering every individual case before you apply a pre-conceived pattern to it.
no subject
What I think is being said is that racism is not the only sterotype made, and therefore it is not neccessarily of such sinister intent as we might think. The sterotypes of ginger = nerdy; computer geek = ugly and cowardly; English = evil; glasses = clever are all incredibly common. The sterotype of fat=unattractive is far more widespread than anything we're discussing here to do with race, and fat people are vastly under-represented in TV and film.
All these things could be seen as unacceptable, and I would love to see a fat, ginger person in a lead role, but they're not always as a result of that stereotype. It might be that the English actor (or the actor capable of doing an english accent) is better at pulling off evil, it could be that the guy capable of playing a computer nerd is not conventionally attractive, it could be that the black actress is better at playing stick fighting leader than the next woman. There doesn't always have to be sinister intent, or even underlying unconcious bias. There may well be sometimes - particularly in relation to individual auidience reactions - but it's by no means guaranteed.
no subject
It's not about you, or me, or any of us as individuals or individual cases. It's about patterns and if patterns are there and if patterns are not there. Patterns are there in SG1 and SGA. They're there in U.S.-produced science fiction in general.
I don't see what else you can attribute those patterns to. Either its racism of the shows or its racism of the system. If you have another plausible explanation I'd be happy to hear it, but I don't know what it could be.
- Andrea.
no subject
All of the examples I've given above are examples of other stereotypes which influnce writing/casting and could easily dominate over race (put a fat white actress and a 'beautiful' black actress up for the role of political leader of the SGC and see which one gets the role )
There are also plenty of other non-stereotyped reasons for making a situation a certain way, as I've outlined above. It's dangerous to leap to conclusions just from the way something *looks* (and yes, we have to do that, because you can never know the exact motivations and thought processes going on). It's naive to assign one rationale for the way things are; usually there are seventeen hundred different variables all interacting to affect the finale outcome.
no subject
Luckily, I have googlemail, so all the comments are flowing in to there and doing the 'two new mails with lots of comments' thing. It's fine. :)
no subject
This isn't a US thing. I'm British, as is
no subject
But now I find it interesting both you and indian_skimmer are British and how that might influence yours -- and my -- perspective. I live in one of the most racially diverse places in the U.S. and I see these patterns every single day and it's the subtly of it that's really noticeable once you start looking. At least, here. So, because it is a huge, huge issue here, all the time, I think I'm more inclined to read that issue into a U.S. produced show, really. Even if most the actors are Canadian.
- Andrea.
no subject
The European audience regularly outstrips the US audience in terms of audience watching figures.
I totally understand how the issues you see every day are what you bring to a debate, it's the same for me. That's why debate is so important about both trivial and serious issues, because actually there's probably not one right answer but a combination of several.
no subject
But, honestly, I still find that conclusion. Not that that is the only conclusion -- I don't think I ever said that but I may have given that impression, which was not what I intended -- but I think it's a primary factor in what's there.
I was aware that the European audience outstrips the U.S. one, by the way, but I've seen shows with great ratings oversees and semi-decent ones here be cancelled because the U.S. execs who made the decision couldn't see past their own country. So, yeah. Not only am I still bitter over that but I don't trust U.S. execs to make decisions about shows based on other countries anymore.
- Andrea.
no subject
Having said that, just because they're Canadian doesn't automatically take away the issues we've talked about. The type of problems we've both highlighted are Western attitudes not American ones. Canada, Britain, France ect.. all have severe problems with racism - sometimes they're framed in slightly different words, or debated more openly, but they still exist.
You're right about the US audience - every season we live or die by whether Sci fi want to reschedule and they have to have some audience to justify that.
no subject
I never meant to imply that it does take the issues away, but I did mean to imply that on an oversight level, where I think many of these problems exist, it leads a semi-distinctly U.S. and even more than that Southern Californian bias into these actions. Racism isn't the same everywhere -- there's regional, national, and ethnic variations, which, *laughs*, I'm certain you know -- and so racism (or any bias) cropping up in the executive decisions of a grouping form X country is going to be slightly different from a grouping from Y country. The more people you have from Y country as well as X country, the more likely things are likely to balance out because the biases aren't the same -- they come from different cultural scripts. Does that make sense?
That's why I think a lot of these patterns would be less likely to be actual indicators given that the production is so Canadian-dominated. Not because Canadians can't be or aren't racist but because X's racism -- MGM's -- if it exists is going to be different from Y's racism -- the production team's -- if it exists and the more variation there is the more likely it is, in a fluid group effort like a television show, to "cancel" each other out.
Having said that, I still think there's far too much of a pattern for racism, of whatever stripe, not to be a central issue here. Not the only contributing factor (so few things have one contributing factor), but a major contributing factor. Whether that's the racism of the people involved, the racism of tropes in the genre and shorthand, or the racism inherent in advertisers, executives, and decision makers believing that you can't sell a black John Sheppard to a "white" America, just for example.
(The same way you "can't" sell a black science fiction hero on the cover of a book or you "Can't" sell a female protagonist to a male audience, especially in a fantasy novel. Which is bollocks, but then maybe you really can't because no one bothers to try. Go Capitalism!)
- Andrea.
no subject
I've said in another thread here, that I think there's definitely a self fulfilling phrophecy in a lot of these assumptions and stereotypes. marketing execs assume you can't sell a black sci-fi hero, so they don;t try, so nobody sees it, so there's no audience the next time they ask the question. Having said that, unfortunately their usually is some basis in their assumptions. But a year ago no one would have thought you could market a gay cowboy movie - it takes some more effort, but you can do it.
I don't doubt that racism is there somewhere, I suppose I would question whether it is the dominant paradigm (and we're probably never going to agree on that!). For instance take the McKay issue I mentioned in my original post. Execs were demanding a very different character, pushing for an African American actor (I'm unsure whether that term is an acceptable one or not - it's not one used in UK - so I apologise if it's not) but the producers kept pushing for DH to play the role (and eventually forced their hands by having no one else ready to shoot).
You could say that there was an inverse racism there - a desire to push a black actor regardless of the perception of the role (or their talent) - which to me seems more patronising. I'm not saying black actors are not able to stretch that far, or aren't believable in that role, but that DH is *perfect* for the role. There are very few actors who can pull off that type of thing, so it's not neccessarily caused by a limitation on race, rather a limitation on talent. Why isn't a woman in that role? Because DH is better at it. Why isn't a black person in that role? because DH is better at it. So is it not more plausible to think that they went with the best actor for the role, the actor they knew and trusted, rather than being influenced by racism (deliberate or indirect), at least in that case.
I think there might also be another issue here. Given the type of stories they've told in Atlantis, it might well have created much more of a kerfuffle if they had cast black actors in the roles of McKay(or his equivilent), Sheppard, and Elizabeth - because all three of them have done some morally dubious and non heroic things. I think people would have been up in arms if (black)Sheppard had shot a prisoner, and may have highlighted the race issue as part of their concerns("the black character is cast as less morally centered than the white character"). Of course that indicates that race is something people have to consider in casting, but not always in the way we think.
Okay, I really must do something else but have this debate today!
no subject
Honestly, the only people I've ever personally seen object to black persons having such roles? Were white. POC tend to perceive it as more dynamic and a good sign about what's available *for* POC. A black Sheppard would have been great because it would have been an indication that you could cast a POC in that role, which is a complex role with both moral highs and lows.
Re: DH. I'm not going to argue DH is a fantastic actor. I've been a fan of him since pre-Stargate (appearances on either Stargate). But it comes back to the fact that a) things do not exist in a vacuum and b) patterns exist.
I'm not arguing that individually there might have been reasonable justifications for every single one of these decisions. Individually. There might be justification for making the POC into the more primitive and/or warrior populations; there might be justification for the fact that consistently the more advanced a population is on Stargate the more likely they are to be white (SG-1 actually made point of themselves on this in a S4 episode. Also, a woman with curly hair? Is probably evil); there might be justification that Christopher Judge seemed better for Teal'c and David Hewlett seemed better for McKay (or, rather, that McKay seemed "better" for the show than the Dr. Ingram we know v. little about); there might be justification for... The list goes on.
And in that list going on, you develop a pattern which makes it more than a list of individual traits which could have justification. I think my problem is that you keep pointing to individual reasonings but what's the reasoning for it as a whole? What's the reasoning for the pattern? (You tried to answer this but, honestly, you pointed to "above comments" and all I saw when I looked at those was individual justifications.) I'm a big fan of Occam's Razor for a reason. The simpliest explanation, with the least corrolaries, probably makes the most sense.
- Andrea.
no subject
I think we really are going to have to agree to disagree. The simpliest explanation, with the least corrolaries, probably makes the most sense. That is the diametric opposite to my way of thinking.
To me there are any number of rationales, stereotypes, personal biases, quirks of circumstance which feed into a single decision and it is the combination of those which has an effect, not just one of those dominating and controlling for all the other variables. When you see that overall situations are a combination of those individual decisions, then the pattern of interaction is even more complex. Yes, that means race can be a contributing factor, but it is by no means the only or the most dominant one in operation. Just because there appears to be a pattern a) doesn't mean it is a significant pattern and b) most importantly, it doesn't automatically mean the pattern is caused by the most obvious variable.
no subject
- Andrea.
no subject
Oh, and put in a request anyway. I think I still owe you from the Genficathon due last September (you asked for Daniel in Atlantis S2 and Evil Ancients and I simply couldn't get the damn thing working right - I feel bad about letting you down).
Actually, I'm supposed to be writing the
I don't suppose I could get you to write me a Shep/Teyla fic
or a dozen? *g* I'm actually looking to see if I can persuade people who don't ship Shep/Teyla as a primary to write fic about them (even as friends) - you get some very interesting perspectives.no subject
*debates what I want to request* Though you don't owe me. *laughs* I liked what I got, which is more than I can say for, uh, some times.
- Andrea.
no subject
Cool. *adds as another person to pester for fic* ;)
The
*facepalms*