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