The Lost Airbender – Notes from New Sodom

Commenting mostly to subscribe to future comments; I’ll be interested to see where this discussion goes.

I also think the words “only” and “blatantly” in my original quote are pivotal, and they make it clear that this issue deals with such slippery factors as internal motivations and external appearances. Some things may be appropriative and not look it (perhaps the original A:TLA series fits into that category), and some things may appear appropriative despite the creator’s selfless motivations. You could say that Shayamalan, a South Asian, is reclaiming this Asian-influenced world from its white American creators–or even that he’s appropriating Americana, though that would be a difficult assertion to support. There are lots of grey areas here, and the whole issue is a dialogue between creator and consumer.

Thanks for writing this, Hal — I think it’s tremendously clarifying and may help important conversations gain some nuance. “Cultural appropriation” doesn’t seem to me a particularly useful phrase because, as noted here, it limits complex discussions to a discussion of property/ownership. Really, they should be discussions of the engines of representation, the mechanisms of power, and the effects of stereotyping. (And sometimes they are, despite the terminology.)

Since Delany comes up here, I thought I’d throw in a couple paragraphs from his 1990 essay “The Life of/and Writing”, recently reprinted in L. Timmel Duchamp’s anthology Narrative Power. The entire essay is appropriate to this conversation, since it’s partly about what cliches and stereotypes do in writing, but here’s a little bit: “It’s very important to remind people again and again and again and also to remind the best-intentioned people, because they forget this too — that what makes statements like ‘Blacks are lazy and shiftless,’ ‘Women are lousy drivers,’ or ‘Gays are emotionally unstable,’ racist, sexist, and homophobic is the vast statistical preponderance of these particular statements in the general range of utterances of most people most of the time. That statistical preponderance makes it almost impossible to say anything else about blacks, women, or gays. Again, it’s the silences in the discourse such statements enforce around themselves that give them their ideological contour. …

“Take the statement, ‘Blue-eyed people are irresponsibly morose.’ That’s not a racist statement because it’s not among the first three things you’ll hear about blue-eyed people in any bar or coffee klatch as soon as the topic of blue-eyed people comes up. It’s not a racist statement because it’s not part of the stabilization system for an economic matrix that assures blue-eye people will average incomes 30% lower than the rest of us. It’s not a racist statement because 80% of all the artistic representations of blue-eyed people, from folk operas to genre paintings to popular novels, do not automatically portray them as mooning away (irresponsibly) while catastrophes bloom around them; nor do the other 20 percent of the representations — the liberal ones — portray them as overcoming that moroseness with a mindless and wholly unbelievable vigor. It’s not a racist statement because it’s not part of a system that encourages three-quarters of the blue-eyed popular, whenever they feel even vaguely down, to search immediately for possible irresponsibility — who feel, if they don’t find it, that that itself is probably proof they’re irresponsible.”

Now, I might not myself agree entirely with some of the emphases here — I would emphasize part of the problem in the examples Delany cites is a desire to group lots of varied particulars into generalizations, to erase the differences within groups by asserting the meaningfulness of such groups, to insist that physical properties have meaningful and inherent correlations to psychological or behavioral qualities — but that’s a quibble when the primary force of the argument seems clear and powerful: cliched and stereotypical representations harm us all because they limit our ways of thinking and they have an effect on how the world works because they so deeply shape our expectations and assumptions.

When reading this essay, I thought of a debate that happened in the theatre world some time back — when the white British actor Jonathan Pryce was hired to play an Asian character in Miss Saigon. Some people defending the choice said that it was hypocritical of people who supported the notion of “colorblind casting” (that is, non-white people in traditionally or even explicitly white roles — those of Shakespeare, for instance, or a black actor cast as Willy Loman, or…) to criticize the casting of a white actor in an Asian role. That, though, is to miss a huge point of the idea of colorblind casting, which is about power, opportunity, and assumptions. In the U.S. and U.K., and particularly in expensive musicals, there are far more opportunities for white actors than non-white actors. It’s not even remotely an even playing field. In such an environment, casting a white actor in an Asian role has a whole different meaning (especially given the history of yellowface performing from casting a person of Asian heritage in the role.

Pryce and the producers of Miss Saigon were not appropriating a culture, they were participating in the ignorant propagation of stereotypes, the denial of opportunities to minority actors, and the strengthening of a system of privilege and erasure. (And this isn’t even to address the representations within the narrative itself!)

I could go on and on, but I won’t — I’m restraining myself from a long discussion of the idea of “Africa” in the non-African mind, and the representations that created and continue to support that idea.

The ideas in this column are useful and clarifying, and that’s really all I wanted to say.

I don’t think Michael Dante DiMartino’s and Bryan Konietzko’s original animated series was at all cultural appropriation simply because they obviously and whole-heartedly gave credit to the Asian cultures that inspired them. Some of the voice actors used for the cartoon were Asian Americans and the series itself was boon and great blessing for Asian Americans everywhere!

But definitely, this live-action debacle that came out in theaters is cultural appropriation since they refuse to cast peoples of Asian/Inuit descent as the main stars with exception of Dev Patel’s character who is the villain! They kept the names, attires, and cultures of the characters the same hired whites to portray them is senseless and ridiculous. As many people have pointed out this is the equivalent of someone making ‘The Lord of the Rings’ movie trilogy casting Asians as the main stars. It matters not if the producers and director of the movie were non-white. But to change the actual ‘race’ or phenotype of the characters is stupid. Seriously, it comes to show that so-called ‘liberal’ Hollywood is not as progressive as they want to think.

Thanks for introducing me to the concept of abjection.

I’ve noticed in a number of different social contexts that one thing that bothers me is the demand by the dominant culture person that people who aren’t dominant culture should follow some cliched way of life that requires them to be non-technological or less technological to be “authentic.” I was on an Appalachian mailing list full of the usual left wing college educated agnostic Appalachian people. One of the posters, not from Appalachia, decided that one person was a fake Appalachian because “real” Appalachian people were humble, God-fearing, and conservative and respectful of authority. We pan-fried him.

The Cherokee were removed not because they were so uncivilized but because they were adapting quicker to some technologies than the average of whites around them (literacy in their own language being a big one).

I’m moving to Nicaragua and have been reading people from outside the country talk about the wonderful humble campesinos, who are the “real” Nicaragua. I suspect campesino life is more complex and the humbleness is more a shuck and jive than the people hanging out with them realize, but then I come from country people myself on my father’s side.

The “authentic” other culture seems to be static, unchanging, and by being unchanging, is very vulnerable to becoming esthetic objects for us, raw material for our imaginations. Lafcadio Hearn loved Japan the way it had been, not what it had to become to resist falling to another imperial power. Cherokee get asked if they’re really Cherokee because they’re not running around in deerskins and moccasins. Cherokee in a wonderful touch of irony have a summer job called Chiefing where various men put on Plains Indian garb and sell the right to photograph themselves with the tourist’s children, thus completely subverting the whole concept of “authentic.”

We see the same thing with the various people who love “authentic blacks” and talk about preserving their culture while not being black themselves.

I’ve resisted being labeled a Southern writer because that tends to be a box that requires me to live up to various stereotypes about the South more than listen to me as as someone as much influenced by the Lower East Side in the 70s as by rural Virginia in the 90s.

The people who want those people to live in an “authentic” static culture and be the emblems of what they think Western urban culture lost are not being as kind to the individual living people in those cultures as they imagine. I think the worst abuses of other people’s cultures is the treating of them as being only real, only genuine when they’re participating in an artistic arrangement of people to entertain the outsider.

I also have heard some good arguments that there is no such thing as Appalachian culture — that the whole concept was invented to be able to exploit the region, and that what’s thought of as Appalachian culture is simply American country life, just in the mountains, and that the region is as ethnically diverse or more than most of the rest of America and never really disconnected from the rest of America and not just one thing. But if people who live in exploitable landscape can be reduced to cliches, the outsider can dismiss as unauthentic the ones who really want to go to Harvard.

The Masai man who talked his way into Harvard is no less a Masai than the people with spears posing for tourists or the ones building brick ranch houses from money made renting land to agriculturalists.

Cultures adapt to other cultures. Living cultures change. If country people were spoiled by factory life, nothing is stopping the person protesting the loss of country butter from going off and becoming a sharecropper and making country butter herself.

The worst misuses of other people’s cultures come from people who just love the culture the way it (supposedly) was. Many countries encourage their tribal remnants to stay colorful for the tourists dollars. It also saves on education expenses.

Your further point about the blood libel of making only the villain brown-skinned is also excellent, but perhaps that’s the obvious problem and the less obvious problem is using other cultures as art objects, while claiming to just love the authenticity. I want to see Inuit fixing a snowmobile engine.

Culture is the means, not the end. Technological cultures put a tremendous pressure on other cultures. The answer isn’t becoming authentic entertainment for the dominant culture, I don’t think. I think reducing people in it to stereotypes of authenticity is the problem. Most expropriations of other people’s cultures tend to be along those lines, sort of like discussing life on Roatan without mentioning how fond people are there of the Statler Brothers, or deciding that Hispanic Hip Hop can’t be authentic, or being upset that a Catawba potter reads contemporary ceramic arts magazines and thinks of herself as a potter first, not a Catawba traditional potter. The worst abuses reduce complex humans to things that aren’t us, that can’t speak for themselves, and can’t have any dialogue with us on their own terms (like the man who believed that anyone who didn’t fit his cliches about Appalachian people was faking being from Appalachia rather than expanding his understanding of the region).

One writer once said that I didn’t need workshops because I was a natural story teller (cliche of Appalachia). He never knew or ignored the years at the St. Marks Poetry Project, the workshops in graduate school, the theory classes in graduate school, or any reading I’d done.

If the culture is more valuable than the people using it, something ain’t right.

Forced deculturalization is generally more physically horrible (I’ve heard about Cherokee kids being chained to beds in BIA boarding schools to keep them from running away). But a lot of subjugation was about keeping technologies out of “native hands.” Black slaves had the double whammy of being forced to give up Africa as it was and to not be allowed literacy (some of them were apparently literate in Arabic).

Most parts of the world which produce raw materials (mineral, agricultural products, timber) tend to be exploited by non-locals. The fetishization of other cultures is part of the tourist industry (academia anthropology being a very privileged tourism all too often), but the tourist industry, like all other raw material extraction, tends to fail to produce the economic advantages that adding value to raw materials gives. The locals sometimes lie to make the product more salable (Margaret Mead’s informants lied to her; the Cherokee do chiefing; non-locals with ego needs in the Philippines got modern villagers to pretend to be pre-agricultural stone aged tribes people).

I think most of us can see the physical attacks on the other as obviously problematic, but the attempts to limit people for their own good tends to be harder to see as a form of bigotry rather than helping. We destroy them to save their cultures.

The very odd thing is that these sorts of people treat our ow culture as something other cultures shouldn’t appropriate. Education would spoil them. (A judge in NC called T.J. Reddy, a black poet with a MA, an “over-educated revolutionary”).

The Tasaday were one of the more fantastic inventions of the 20th Century.

I don’t think these impulses are particularly benevolent, but you’re right that they’re impressively paternalistic.

Dean: A water fountain on the street, or where you sit on the bus — these are pretty trivial too, until it becomes a matter of people of certain groups being excluded from the water fountains in the centre of town, excluded from the seats at the front of the bus. Then it becomes segregation.

So here the “seats on the bus” are character roles in an animated series on the tv and a movie in the multiplexes, dig? In one, the seats at the front of the bus — the roles of the heroes — were occupied by Asians, and this was absolutely fine, great in fact because it’s really fucking rare. In the other, suddenly those seats at the front were given over to white actors, and this is absolutely not-fine because it’s standard fucking practice. Hollywood functions on a chickenshit belief that casting Asians in those “front seat” roles makes movies unmarketable; as long as it does so, Hollywood is practicing segregation.

That it works like this is established fact, openly admitted by the studios that explicitly rejected “Falling for Grace” on that very basis. If you’re openly accepting that only white people get to sit in the seats in the front of the bus because otherwise white people might take their custom elsewhere, you’re openly accepting segregation.

Dude, if you see segregation in the media as trivial, I find it hard not to imagine you dismissing the Civil Rights struggles of the ’60s: “Pffft! What does it matter *where* you sit on the bus? You’re making a big deal out of nothing. No doubt, you’d never be satisfied with anything.”

What’s the difference, after all? If it’s only a character role in a movie, it’s only… a seat on a bus.

I mean, you can’t understand that people who deal with this sort of shit every day might care as much about being turfed out of the foreground action and sent to the background of the movie as about being turfed out of a front seat and sent to the back of the bus? Really?

I think that’s completely *on*-topic, N. It fits pretty neatly with the relegation of Asian characters to secondary status — male characters as sidekicks, female characters as sex objects, to paint it in the crudest terms. (There are other stock roles, of course, distinct from those associated with other ethnicities — shop-keepers and mystic mentors rather than angry police chiefs. Abjection takes different paths for different abjects, as I say. But you get my point about the exclusion from central character status, right?)

So, a kiss in a movie is generally a dramatically purposed key action, a moment that has meaning — usually as a resolution of sexual tension. Obviously if you’ve got a loving couple, you might see the odd “domestic kiss” — a peck on the cheek to say hello or goodbye — that’s not particularly important; but if we’re talking most mainstream Hollywood movies, rom-coms and action/adventures, a kiss is more likely to be a Significant Moment. And it’s the protagonists that get these Significant Moments.

Thing is, over-use of such a key action will lessen its impact, so if you’re going to have a big “dramatic kiss” in your movie — a liplocking smacker to express desire — you want to give it to the central characters of the A Story. It’s giving those sort of moments to those characters that *make* them central, *make* their story the A Story. Even if you have a sub-plot, a B Story, in which the hero’s Asian buddy has his own love interest, you’re not going to give them a big screen-kiss in case that dissipates the impact when the hero gets *his* girl. You might well signal that they’ve got together, but it’ll be backgrounded, because ultimately their romance is “not important to the [core] story,” to use the phrase so beloved of those who blithely accept segregation.

Of course, dramatically speaking, it’s perfectly justifiable to not squander screentime and distract from the core story by giving B characters a Significant Moment in which they eat each other’s faces. If you’re not aware of the underlying segregation by which male Asians are almost always B characters rather than A characters (with female Asians largely only getting A status as love interests,) all you see is a “good story,” one in which the writers have wisely focused on what really matters. But if you notice it, that rarity you point at is a palpable absence, a sign of abjection. In such a segregated media, every time a member of the abjected group notices that absence, it’s like a coded message: *you* are not worthy of protagonist status; *you* can never be a hero; *you* can never get the girl.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, isn’t remotely justifiable.

Thanks Hal, that’s a very insightful response. It’s absolutely refreshing to read an intelligent discussion as oppose to the “You’re being too sensitive!”, “Stop playing the race card” and the most common “Just shut the fuck up” response I seem to see whenever a similar topic is brought up.

Back to Airbender. I remember getting a bit caught up with argument in relation to M. Night Shyamalan’s casting of Patel and co. as the main characters in the fire nation. I called the act of the casting racist (not M. Night Shyamalan himself) and got some interesting responses.

While it might be significant to acknowledge that originally the role was given to Jesse McCarthy (or whoever he is), I still have a lot of problem with Patel playing Zuko – while it’s not “racebending”, it’s still “ethnic-bending”. In the original material, the fire nation is distinctively east-asian, with a lot of references to feudal Japan and China. In the movie (from the screenshots/previews I’ve seen), the armor, clothing, background etc. still holds strong reference to the eastern asia references.

It’s even more frustrating to see M. Night Shyamalan using this as his get-out-of-jail card. Just because South Asians and East Asians are labelled under the same term – “Asian” – in racial discussions, this doesn’t the two are interchangable. Their cultures/appearances are beautiful in their own different ways, but they are not the same thing. For me, it is quite ridiculous to see a South Asia playing a character named Zhao, especially one that’s wearing clothing/armor that is obviously chinese-inspired. (For the record, I will equally be pissed seeing a Korean/Chinese/Japanese actor playing a character called Tendulkar wearing traditional indian clothing)

It’s even more interesting to consider that M. Night Shyamalan is an Indian-American himself, so one would assume that he would be able to tell the cast differences between the two ethnics and not to treat them as just some sort of quota. (i.e. His argument that Indians are Asian-American too!)

Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see more South-Asian actors in the cinemas. And even though I do like John Cho, there is little doubt that Kal Penn is the star in the Harold and Kumar series. But I feel that because of the original material, these roles should be played by East-Asian actors, rather than South-Asian actors.

Reading your response earlier, I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t have used the word ‘racist’ to described the miscasting. However, I’m struggling to find a substitude word as M. Night Shyamalan seem to have a complete disregard in acknowledging the differences of two very different ethnics. Perhaps ‘bigot casting’ is a better term?

And for the record, our (at least my family and friends) definition of the word ‘racist’ seems to a bit different to the main-stream media understanding of the word. For example we are happy to label a chinese person as a ‘racist’ or havecommitted ‘racism’ when he starts to make derogatory comments against a Japanese person purely because of the past attrocities the Japanese Military had committed in the WWII. For us, any act of unfairness committed due to the ethnicity of person will be considered racism. In fact, it’s quite common for one to commit racism against their own ethnicity.

So as you (kind of) touched on earlier, maybe the reason that there is such a gap of opinions whenever the notion of ‘racism’ is brought up in a discussion is because people have a different definition of what ‘racism’ is?

Hal: “…the willful disregard of ethnicity plays out as a reduction of vision, an inability to see what is in the margins, a refusal to recognise that the margins are even there.”

But isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Wasn’t “race doesn’t matter” supposed to be the goal all along?

There seems to be this weird turning away from race-neutrality in the whole RaceFail debate; an insistence that, in the end, Being Non-White Really IS One Of The Important Things About You. I mean, if completely discounting race is itself an act of racism, then how can anyone act in a non-racist way?

We’re damned no matter what we do; if we depict Other characters as having identifiably Other traits then we’re accused of cultural appropriation, insensitivity, of using “actors in rubber masks”; if we depict Other characters as being the same as the rest of our characters only with different skin color then it’s “a refusal to accept that the margins are even there”; and if we avoid using Other characters entirely then it’s “looks like your story is a Whites Only club”. Small wonder that so many people get so mad about the debate, or withdraw from it altogether.

Much of the problem, to me, seems to be coming from the same place as the “homage/ripoff” debate. I liked this, so it’s an homage (or, perhaps, a very effective and respectful use of other cultural elements). I didn’t like that, so it’s a ripoff (or cultural appropriation). You say yourself (when you refer to Richard Morgan) that not everyone agrees on these topics; which, to me, means that it’s as much a matter of interpretation as anything else.

The fundamental issue is that we’ve all been trained since birth to see racism as The Worst Thing You Can Do, so when we see something that looks like racism it tweaks our conditioned Two Minutes Hate reflexes.

I mean, if completely discounting race is itself an act of racism, then how can anyone act in a non-racist way?

Thing is, it’s not about acting in a non-racist way. This is to assume that the system of moral dicta is actually consistent and complete, such that by following all the rules we can stay within that system, subsist in a state of Goodness. It’s to assume that there’s a way of acting that is essentially non-racist, one that can be codified in simple moral dicta, a system by which one can live one’s life in the certainty that by doing this and not doing that one will remain Good.

Or rather, to unpack it properly, to ask this rhetorical question is to protest the inconsistencies that trap us in a double-bind where we’ll inevitably put a foot wrong, lose our Goodness, and end up subject to moral outrage — but to do so with an implicit acceptance that the system is the only choice. But if I try to do Good Things, it says, I can only end up doing Bad Things. Taken as a literal question, it’s a request for a strategy of behaviour by which one can avoid perpetrating the crime of racism, in this situation where following one rule — “Thou shalt not pay attention to race” — inevitably brings us into conflict with another — “Thou shalt not disregard the margins.” Given the “But isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?” you’re kind of asking why we can’t just stick with a simple “Thou shalt not pay attention to race,” as a familiar and established axiom.

It’s a common response in the discourse, as you say. If you can’t/don’t question the system, seeing it as unworkable just leads to moral panic, a terror/horror of being shamed for the unintentional transgressions. Note that all the options you give in the “damned whatever we do” scenario — and “damned” is a significant term here — set up an action as automatically entailing a response of moral outrage, as infringements of this or that essential rule. Faced with the double-binds wired into the system, fearing (and often resenting) the inevitable condemnation for doing Bad Things, people throw their hands up in the air and walk away, saying, “everything I do is a Bad Thing, far as you’re concerned; nothing I can do will ever constitute a Good Thing for you.” If they stay in the debate, that response is usually reconfigured as an increasingly frustrated request for rules that aren’t inconsistent: “OK, so how do I need to act to not be racist? What Good Things do I need to do, and what Bad Things do I need to not do?”

Simple answer: exercise your ethical judgement; stop assuming that some set of reductive moral dicta will allow you to subsist in a state of Goodness.

Unfortunately, in the discourse, these sort of pleas for clarity in the rules are usually going on amid the very moral outrage the angst is focused on, an outrage driven by entirely justified anger at abjection, but bound into a mechanism of social shaming that has all the sophistication of a sledgehammer. (There are arguments that such verbal bludgeoning is necessary to force denialists to see the problems; I see that point, but my own judgement is that they’re counter-productive.) With the moral outrage already rolling, that law-and-order mentality already in action, those sort of questions may well be taken as rhetorical challenges to the system, challenges that need to be met with a vigorous defense. The sledgehammer may be turned on you for undermining the integrity of a moral dictum that’s considered crucial in the struggle for equality, and for doing this when your key concern is with your own Goodness. Some will see this as placing the responsibility on the abject to do your ethical thinking for you, and they’ll respond with… varying degrees of consideration for your situation, shall we say? Maybe they’ll offer some broad principles, strategies for dealing with the minefield, but the specificity of such may allow them to be taken as yet more moral dicta to add to the complexity.

Me, I say those moral dicta are for children. Forget about “acting in a non-racist way,” and aim to understand the mechanisms of abjection so that you can recognise the subtler inequities and iniquities born of them, in any given context. Then apply empathy and integrity in order to counteract those mechanisms where possible.

Ultimately, the choice is not between depicting the Other as “having identifiably Other traits” or depicting the Other as “being the same as the rest of our characters only with different skin color.” The choice is between depicting the Other in accordance with received wisdom, not depicting the Other at all because the received wisdom is too hard to follow, and depicting the Other with an understanding of how depictions of the Other work, how they can employ such traits in various ways — some that actively reinforce a state of abjection by playing into a demonising semiotics, some that passively acquiesce to a state of abjection by overlooking the distinct treatment meted out to some on the basis that they have this particular trait. Where abjection persists, the first option is complacency and the second is complicity. The third is the practice by which one employs and thereby improves one’s ethical judgement. If, in doing so, someone slams you for having done a Bad Thing, you should be looking to augment your understanding of how abjection works by making sense of their reaction. You should not be angsting over whether or not this means you’ve fallen from a state of Goodness.

To Hal and DensityDuck:

In regards to DensityDuck’s interpretation of:
“…an outrage driven by entirely justified anger at abjection, but bound into a mechanism of social shaming that has all the sophistication of a sledgehammer.” which I think is a good example of quoting out of context and seeing things he/she only wanted to see.

From what I interpretated, Hal is questioning the methodology how a problem is solved, rather than questioning whether the problem exists or not.

The trouble is that being the minority, how do we get our voices heard in a more finesse way? How can we convince other people that the existing system is hurting us and will continue to hurt us in the near future unless something is done?

The sad truth is, for the majority of people anyway, ‘discrimination’ can only be seen when blood can be seen or when lives are lost. But ‘discrimination’ occurs at a much higher rate than that.

While there are many that are more sympathetic (such as Hal), they are sympathetic because they have the ability to empathize and wants to empathize in the first place. However, most people in the majority does not possess the ability to empathize or choose not to.

Unless we kick and scream, how do we get our messages across when the majority of people are covering their ears (or unknowingly have ear-plugs permanently placed in their ears)?

DensityDuck:

You’re ascribing a moralistic judgement to what N is saying that I don’t see at all. N isn’t talking in terms of Bad Things, far as I can see, people doing a “wrong thing on purpose for the wrong reasons.” N’s comment simply picks up on the point I made about certain styles of arguments being seen as necessary simply to get through to denialists. How does the abject make themself heard if abjection delegitimises their voice? How does the abject make the mechanisms of abjection apparent to the normative, if those mechanisms function partly by creating a state of disacknowledgement of abjection on the part of the normative? Those are the key questions N is asking, with no accusation of Badness.

And the questions are fair. If you understand the notion of abjection, this process of absenting is part of it. That which was once part of us, and still in reality is, on some level, is segregated out by markers of deviance, excluded as other, absented. The abject is, as the abject, standing outside the town hall, at a sign which reads “No abject allowed,” and the only way to get that sign removed is to raise a motion at the council meeting the abject can’t attend because of that sign. So for many the only option seems to be to stand at the doorway and shout. Angrily and aggressively. As I say, I don’t see a sledgehammer moral outrage approach as the only strategy — I see it as pragmatically flawed, in fact — but the questions N asks of how we get our voices heard are questions that need to be asked.

See, N’s assumption that obliviousness is a baseline state of the majority isn’t, I think, that unfair. Where N says that for most, discrimination is only recognised when it’s a matter of concrete physical harm — blood seen, lives lost — this is, I think, an accurate representation. At very least, it is a wholly understandable perception on the part of the abject. As a writer, and a queer one to boot, I’m attuned to subtexts that are basically blood libel, absences from narrative positions that constitute segregation; but the sheer popularity of works that are open to critique in that manner speaks of an audience that is overwhelmingly oblivious of those issues. This whole column addresses mechanisms of abjection in mainstream media that the majority of the mainstream audience simply don’t recognise. This does not mean all the individual members of that audience are doing Bad Things. It simply means that a state of abjection persists, and one effect of that state is this obliviousness.

Put it this way: Where the abject can hardly help but be aware of every water fountain with a sign that says, “Normative Only,” the normative rarely notice those signs at all, because they’re not the ones who have to go to the ghetto to find a water fountain built for them. I watch 300, for example, and I see the boy-loving Spartans painted as red-blooded hetero heros who dismiss Athenians with a homophobic “nation of boy-lovers,” fighting nobly against Persians who are demonised and feminised in the crudest manner. Xerxes is pretty much a monstrous queer. Do the majority see the mechanisms of abjection in that movie? Do the majority taste the poison in the water of that water-fountain? Most of the criticism I’ve seen of that movie have been about the historical spuriousness and/or the puerile wankery of the power-fantasy.

So, I don’t think N is being unfair in positing obliviousness as the norm.

It may well be just me, but when I see someone make a judgemental statement such as “most people in the majority does not possess the ability to empathize or choose not to”, then I interpret that as the judger claiming moral or intellectual or empathetic superiority; after all, if you aren’t superior, then how can you judge well enough claim that someone else is in error?

I’m not arguing against the notion that someone might have a better ability to express empathy (or I’m not _trying_ to argue against it, at least.) I do think that many of these discussions involve unconscious assumptions of superiority. Indeed, it might be that the biggest problem in a lot of cases is that both sides of the discussion have issues developing empathy with their subject.

Heck, I think that what’s happening here is exactly what’s been going on in these conversations–just about a different thing. “You look like you’re claiming that you’re superior.” “Well, I didn’t mean to.” “Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t!”

******

“Again, it is founded on a rejection of the abject as a legitimate part of us, Othering them in order to define identity, the group Self, by negation; the abject is the opposite of simpatico.”

I certainly agree with you here. I think it’s no mistake that abjection often involves portrayals of the Other as inferior (and there’s that assumption of superiority again.)

However…

“Abjection is powered, at its heart, by revulsion, by disgust, by an antipathy that defies sympathy. It’s moralistic, defining the abject as an essential transgression of the Natural Order, as something that must be expunged accordingly; to enforce, propagate and defend abjection is a Good Thing in that system of mores; to abjure compassion is a practical requirement of Goodness.”

I don’t know if I’d go that far. Rousseau and the other primitivists didn’t think that precivilized cultures were inferior wastes that deserved to be exterminated. Abjection can occur even when someone’s motives are to exemplify and uphold an ideal.

In terms of Rousseau and the primitivists, see my response to Rebecca upthread, in terms of how infantilism redefines the abject. I’d say we’re talking about a base state of abjection characterisable in terms of disgust, antipathy, morality, transgression and ultimately extermination, but that you’ve got processes that complexify it all. Fetishising, infantilising & paternalistic modes of relating to the Other, modes that flip disgust into desire, seek to subjugate rather than exterminate, revere rather than revile. And so on. These are evolutions of the system, like the stock tropes developed out of the wholly negative stereotype by the redemption narrative.

Thing is, yes, you could say that these are types of abjection occurring “even when someone’s motives are to exemplify and uphold an ideal,” but I don’t think that’s incompatible with my characterisation of basic abjection. Indeed, I’d say that vicious abjection is all about exemplifying and upholding an ideal — an ideal Self defined in the exclusion of the abject.

@W

I’m confused at what you’re saying. BTW, my ethicity is actually Chinese and yes, I have read about the Rape of Nanjing and stuff and my blood does boil when some asshole Japanese Professor tries to deny it happened or those overly nationalist/supremist idiots (though that applies to every nation/ethnic I suppose)…

But you actually think it’s okay for a person of chinese ethnicity to be hostile to a person of Japanese ethnicity JUST because he’s Japanese based on what happened then?
I’m very confused.

I really don’t see that power is a necessary component to create racism. I have had bums or drunks telling me to “Go back to Fucking China” (Eventhough I’ve never set foot in China myself), so they obviously have no ‘power’ to ‘deport’ me (Back to LA I suppose?). So that’s not racism?

But I agree that if power is apply to racism (or any form of discrimination, really), it can cause a lot more damage.

* Hey DensityDuck, see, I’m not very good at empathy myself.

“So DensityDuck, another question to you: “Why can’t Aang be Asian and still save the world?” ”

Why do you think I’m okay with a non-Asian actor playing Aang in the movie?

I mean, I know that you’ve got this idea built up in your head of The Person Who Doesn’t Agree, and you’re arguing with *that* person instead of *me*, but seriously–you’re really reaching at this point.

And, again, you’re doing exactly what you say is bad. Instead of engaging with the person you’re talking to–instead of taking them at face value, without any preconceived notions–you’re letting emotional responses short-circuit intellect and substituting stereotype for introspection.

“… if you aren’t superior, then how can you judge well enough claim that someone else is in error?”
“Experience.”

So it’s just like porn and you know it when you see it, eh? I guess we’re done, then.

Is abjection in the eye of the beholder? Not in terms of blood libel and segregation.

With blood libel I’m talking about semiotic associations that are right there in the text, to be pointed to. Dark skin = villain. Hook nose = greed. It’s the stuff of agitprop — and of advertising, actually — so I don’t see that as a matter of “I know it when I see it.” If a text is abjecting in this way, it’s using the mechanisms of language to do so, demonstrably so. It’s as objective as saying that when you photograph a hot chick with a semi-automatic draped over a T-Bird, and turn that into an advert for the weapon in Guns & Ammo, you’re exploiting the way we think in symbols — using semiotics — to sell the gun by coding a message that guns are sexy. Similarly, if you used a photograph of a white guy heroically using that weapon to defend that hot chick from a horde of marauding black guys, again you’d be exploiting semiotics, with a message that guns are empowering — and rightly so, because you need that power to defend hot chicks from the unbridled lust of marauding black guys. This isn’t “I know it when I see it.” You can detail the exact semiotic processes at play here.

Segregation is even more objectively verifiable. It’s mostly physical, a matter of who is allowed to do what, and when and where they’re not allowed to. You could measure segregation back during the 50s and 60s just by counting the water-fountains, the schools, etc. Now, when it comes to segregation in the media, you can point at the movies. And the segregation there is not simply a disparity that can be rationalised as happenstance. You can point at whitewashing in things like The Last Airbender, and some will still argue happenstance. But you can point at movies like Falling For Grace, where studios have explicitly articulated their segregationist policy as a segregationist policy. The public, they say, will not accept an Asian-American lead in a mainstream Romantic Comedy; we must abide by their wishes and exclude this movie from mainstream RomCom status, put it where it “belongs.” The absence of the abject I’m talking about above — straightironing in 300 or Troy or Alexander — is just one particular facet of segregation. Again, there’s no “I know it when I see it” here. It’s as objective as saying that a night-club has a no-jeans door policy on the basis that its bouncers turn away people in jeans… and freely admit that they do so because they’re wearing jeans.

Whether people tend to see blood libel and segregation as legitimate problems is also objectively verifiable. It’s just a matter of raising the subject with people, explaining what you mean if their first response is “what the fuck?” and listening to how they respond. Repeat until you have enough data to discern the proportion of those who see these as real issues versus the proportion who don’t. Compare with the findings of others. Make your case in a public space, where you have a decent cross-section of people, and if you can get a sizeable sample, that’s more grist for the mill. We asked a hundred people, “Do you think blood libel and segregation in the media are legitimate problems?” You said, “No.” Our survey said — ding — sixty seven! Sixty seven people said, “No.”

Yes, experience attunes me to seeing abjection in something like 300, where others might not. But my argument is that this is no more a matter of subjective opinion than if someone allergic to nuts is more attuned to the presence of nuts in processed foods than the majority who are not. The actuality of whether or not nuts are present is still objectively verifiable. They’re there or they’re not, in high quantities or low quantities, this type of nut or that type of nut. It’s not a matter of “I know it when I taste it” — or rather, “when my tongue swells up and chokes me to death.” It’s not a situation where someone else can taste the food, not discern a nutty flavour and declare that their “no nuts here” judgement is equally valid as any other subjective opinion. I have an allergy to the abjection of queers in fiction, and not because it hurts my sensitive feelings, but because it’s agitprop, blood libel, and blood libel shapes opinions which drive people to kick the shit out of faggots. Its an actual health risk.

And the experience of unempathic obliviousness on the part of someone you’re trying to explain it to? That’s just a gnarlier judgement to verify given that the process here is basically asking that hundred people, “Do you think blood libel and segregation in the media are legitimate problems?” then explaining to the sixty-seven who say “No,” why you think it is, how it affects the abject. And you ask them again, and if they still don’t see it, you keep trying to get through to them, keep trying to make them care, keep trying to spark up an empathic response. That makes it a gnarlier question, because you might just not be explaining it well enough. But ultimately, you can boil it down to another question. We asked a hundred people, “If you don’t think blood libel and segregation are legitimate problems, and someone else does, is that their fuckin problem?” You said, “Yes.” Our survey said — ding — fifty three! Fifty three people said, “Yes.”

That’s selective empathy, I’d say, and it’s objectively verifiable as far as I’m concerned.

The air benders were white (except one monk who was black…ish), the water benders were white, the fire benders were Indian (I’m sure Shamalan’s Indian heritage had nothing to do with this), and the earth benders were Asian. The bending looked like dancing, and the names were pronounced “correctly” to people who only came to see the movie because they watched the cartoon.
However, all this is irrelevant because the movie was so bad it had everyone laughing during the movie at inappropriate times, and cursing after it was over because we had all just spent $9 on a shitty movie.

No, that’s three big walls o’ text saying that the problems we’re talking about — blood libel, segregation in the media, and selective empathy — are objectively verifiable… versus a glib paraphrase that disacknowledges that precise (and fairly belaboured) point. And an equally glib comment about the legal recognition of a “reasonable person” that actually backs up my case. But hey, I’m nothing if not persistent, so let’s give it another go. Because that “I know it when I see it” philosophy doesn’t come into play at all, no more than if we were talking about anti-black agitprop, segregation in the 1960s, and actual hate-crime-level prejudice.

Direct question #1, DD: Do you accept that a) a movie presenting black men as sub-human rape-monkeys can function as agitprop, b) denying people of colour the right to ride at the front of the bus is unjust, c) hate-crime-level prejudice is a reality that can be legitimately established in a court of law?

If you don’t accept those… well, enough said. If you do…

Direct question #2: Do you accept that those who deny these are objectively wrong, or do you think that their opinion is equally valid, in an “it’s all a matter of interpretation” way, that maybe a) a movie presenting black men as sub-human rape-monkeys can’t function as agitprop, b) denying people of colour the right to ride at the front of the bus isn’t unjust, c) hate-crime-level prejudice isn’t a reality that can be legitimately established in a court of law?

That’s a simple yes/no. And note that I’m not asking if you actively believe the denials, but rather whether you accept the dubiety. The point is, these are all, as far as I’m concerned, established facts: that blood libel both works and exists; that 1960s segregation was unjust; that the law can and has successfully and legitimately prosecuted hate-crimes. If you want to disagree, go for it. That would probably make you look like a complete wingnut, I have to say, but I don’t doubt some would argue such a position. Many did, back in the day. Some still do.

Let me just encapsulate that so you don’t have to paraphrase me into a position that’s not mine: blood libel, segregation and hate-crimes are unconscionable realities; to deny them is to deny historical fact.

That “reasonable person” is an established principle of common law only makes it more important that the majority recognise these realities. If they don’t, the consensus judgement translates to legislation which reflects the morality of that “reasonable person” in which blood libel, segregation and hate-crimes are A-OK. This is proven by history.

Some people, back in the day, would have denied that The Birth of a Nation could possibly be harmful, that segregation was unjust, and that lynching a black guy for having sex with a white woman was, like, the opposite of human decency. Those people would, in many areas, have been in the majority. Their viewpoint would have been the consensus. They were wrong, I say. See direct question #1 and direct question #2 again. Are you with me that those people were wrong?

Direct question #4: Do you agree that, in that sort of situation, the fact that such views are considered reasonable is pretty much the root of the problem?

Similarly, many today would deny that 300 could possibly be harmful, that segregation in the media is unjust, and that scorning some faggot/nigger/whatever when they get “uppity” is, like, the opposite of human decency. Similarly, those people are, in many areas, in the majority. Similarly, their viewpoints are the consensus. Similarly, they are wrong, I say. See direct question #3 again. Are you with me that these people are wrong?

Direct question #5: Do you get why, in this sort of situation, the fact that such views are considered reasonable is seen as a problem by uppity faggots like me, and if not, what exactly doesn’t make sense?

I mean, maybe you’re not with me on that last stretch — again, I make no assumptions — but whatever your position, the point is, we’re dealing with claims of hard realities. Who’s more likely or less likely to notice those hard realities doesn’t matter a jot. All that matters is, if you choose to deny them, whether you’re open to sound arguments based on semiotics, statistics and sociology. Again, I’m happy to debate the soundness of specific arguments vis-a-vis 300, Falling for Grace and kin selection. I’m happy to debate the actuality of blood libel, segregation in the media, and selective empathy. But after challenging N for not engaging, your own responses to me have made no attempt to engage whatsoever. Both simply put a gloss on my position that misreads it completely.

So again, I can make it crystal clear, so there’s no need for you guess at a proper paraphrase: 300 is blood libel; Falling for Grace is segregation; the majority of people exercise selective empathy; these are actualities, demonstrably so; to deny them is to deny the historical facts as they’re playing out in front of us.

Direct question #6: When you represent this claim that we’re dealing with genuine inequities — demonstrable by the simple application of basic semiotics, statistics and sociology to reality — as an “I know it when I see it” philosophy, does this constitute a dismissal for you? Where you attempt to characterise my position as based wholly on perception, are we to infer that you see these problems as simply artifacts of misperception?

Again, that’s a simple yes/no question. I’m not assuming either way, but if that is your basic stance… as I say, I’m happy to expand on the actual arguments.

(And, yes, that’s three more walls o’ text. I tend to think that in discussions like this, superficial comments of a flippant sentence or two only lead to the sort of shitstorms your earlier post was bemoaning. And isn’t that what LiveJournal is for?)

An epistemic assertion does not constitute a deontic imperative. What you quote is a claim of factuality, not a demand that you accept such a claim. On the contrary, I explicitly tell you that no such agreement is required:

… if you want to dispute the basic thesis of the column and/or the notion of abjection-as-selective-empathy, by all means do so. That’s what I’m defending, and I’m quite ready to do so on the basis of semiotics, statistics and sociology. Seriously, feel free to argue that a) 300 does not lionise homophobic heroes and vilify villains as depraved queers, or does so but with no negative effect, b) Falling for Grace is not hard evidence of segregation, c) kinship selection does not have its inverse, in which “non-kin” are refused recognition as legitimate recipients of empathy.

So you don’t have to accept the assumptions. I’m explicitly inviting you to argue with them, in fact. What you quote is simply a statement of my position, offered for you to dispute should you wish to do so. As an attempt to have that discussion I’m asking you directly — via those six questions — whether you accept each stage in my argument, from the most basic premises (question #1) to the end position (question #6); if not, at what stage do you cease to agree?

Feel free to articulate where and why you disagree with my argument. Answering those questions would be a good start.