The Racist of Earthsea
<p>In Slate magazine, SF author Ursula LeGuin complains that the<br />
producers of the new <cite>Earthsea</cite> miniseries have <a href='http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2111107'>butchered her<br />
work</a>.  One form of butchery that she zeroes in on is by casting<br />
characters who she intended to be red, brown, or black as white<br />
people.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings.  LeGuin has every right to be POed at how<br />
her intentions were ignored, but on the other hand my opinion of her<br />
has not been improved by learning that she intended the books as yet<br />
another wearisomely PC exercise in<br />
multiculturalism/multiracialism.</p>
<p>I liked those books when I read them as a teenager.  I didn&#8217;t<br />
notice any character&#8217;s skin color.  I would really prefer not to have<br />
had my experience of those characters retrospectively messed with by<br />
LeGuin&#8217;s insistance that the race thing is important.</p>
<p>Note: I am not claiming that all casting should be colorblind.  I<br />
remember once watching an otherwise excellent Kenneth Branagh<br />
production of <cite>Much Ado About Nothing</cite> that was somewhat marred for<br />
me by Branagh&#8217;s insistance on casting an American black man as a<br />
Renaissance Italian lord.  This was wrong in exactly the same way that<br />
casting a blue-eyed blond as Chaka Zulu or Genghis Khan would be<br />
&mdash; it&#8217;s so anti-historical that it interferes with the suspension<br />
of disbelief.  Fantasy like LeGuin&#8217;s, however, doesn&#8217;t have this kind<br />
of constraint.  Ged and Tenar don&#8217;t become either more or less plausible<br />
if their skin color changes.</p>
<p>But what really annoyed me was LeGuin&#8217;s claim that only whites have<br />
the &#8220;privilege&#8221; of being colorblind.  This is wrong and tendentious in<br />
several different ways.  Colorblindness is not a privilege of anyone,<br />
it&#8217;s a duty of everyone &mdash; to judge people not by the color of their<br />
skin but the content of their character, and to make race a non-issue<br />
by whatever act of will it takes.  (It doesn&#8217;t take any effort at all<br />
for me.)</p>
<p>If I had produced the Earthsea miniseries or been in charge of the<br />
art for her books, I would have both (a) respected LeGuin&#8217;s wishes<br />
about the skin color (she is the artist), and (b) regretted that she<br />
was so stuck on the issue.</p>
<p>To paraphrase one of my favorite Zen Comix punchlines &#8220;I left that<br />
issue at the riverside.  Are you still carrying it?&#8221;</p>
