Inadvertent Orcs

I am nearly finished with the Lars Brownworth podcast, 12 Byzantium Rulers. It’s the companion to his book, Lost to the West. I have reached the fall of Constantinople before the Ottoman Turks. It made me sniffle.

The final emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI, is the very model of a doomed last stand leader. The night before Mehmet’s final push, Constantine met with every soldier in the besieged city and thanked them, asking for forgiveness. He stayed in the Hagia Sophia half the night. He rode his horse on the battlements until dawn, offering encouragement to his men.

And when the wall crumbled, he threw aside his royal robes, shouted that the city may have fallen but the emperor lived, and jumped down into the fray, sword in hand.

Constantine’s body was never found.

I was listening to this podcast, sniffing at the doom of it all. The images in my head were those of the battle for Helm’s Deep. You know, from the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers.

But then I realized. This accidentally cast the Turks as the Orcs. And there’s all manner of problems with that.

In truth, I also thought of Helm’s Deep during the bit about the Crusader siege of Jerusalem. And also during the much earlier siege of Ravenna. Basically, if there’s a historical siege, my mind turns to either Helm’s Deep or The Alamos depending on size. But my culture, here, it betrays me.

I don’t have powerful fictional models of beleaguered people of color under siege by monstrous white folks.

I KNOW that these things have HAPPENED. History is what it is. But all the stories I know, the images that flash in my head when I listen to Constantine’s fall, are of nobly doomed white people falling before a dark-skinned horde.

I need some new images, folks. So, tell me. What are some accounts, in movies, television, or books, of a siege in which the defenders are people of color? Historical or fictional, either is fine.

(Note: I typed this on the WordPress app on my tablet, using my very aggressive auto-correct keyboard program. The format is odd, and I apologize for any strange word choice or grammar.)

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Art, my comics, and racism

I got a look at the cover art for Ixtab yesterday. It looks gorgeous, by the way. The artist had sent a draft of it for suggestions or approval. My partner, J, looked over my shoulder. “Her skin should be darker,” she said to me. I looked at the comic again. “Oh,” I said. “You’re right!” I failed to see the paleness of the skin tone. Because light skin is just “normal,” you know? And, in comics, Latino, Hispanic, and Native American characters are frequently shown to be such by their hair color, not their skin tones.

But that’s not my moment in racism.

My moment in racism came when, for a moment, I heard the voice in my head defending the light skin tones of a character who I wrote to be dark-skinned, who I wrote to look Mayan, Guatemalan. Who I wrote specifically and concretely to resemble my daughter, whose dark hair, eyes, and skin are rarely represented in the world of comics that I so love. For a brief moment I started to argue, in my head, that it didn’t matter that much, really. That was my moment in racism.

I asked the artist to change the skin tone, and she did.

Moments in Racism: Wiscon 33

I went to Wiscon this year hoping to not make an ass of myself regarding racial stereotypes, racial remarks, racism, or my own privilege. But I realized something, sitting here at home, thinking over the weekend. I have never gone to a panel at Wiscon discussing race. Or, worse still, I may have and I don’t remember it. I have the privilege as a white person to “know” that those panels aren’t talking to me, aren’t a part of my life, that they are for Other People’s Needs.

Someone at Wiscon this year asked me if the convention is graying, getting older, if no new (younger) folks are attending. I assured her that Wiscon was not graying, that there are plenty of younger people at the con. I walked away pondering the fact that the panels I go to have lots of younger people, I pondered the fact that one can apparently attend the con and only see select subsets of people and miss others.

Except you can’t. Everywhere you go at the con — except the People of Color Safe Space — there are white people. Every programming track is a white people track, every panel is a white people panel, every party is a white people party. And I hadn’t noticed that until this year.

[Note: Moments in Racism are part of an ongoing effort on my part to raise my personal awareness of my own racism, to unpack the backpack of white privilege. Comments welcome.]

Moments in Racism: Tropic Thunder

Tropic Thunder is, you may have heard, a recent comedy movie about a film crew trying to make a movie about soldiers in the Vietnam War. Robert Downey Jr. plays an actor, Kirk Lazarus. Kirk Lazarus is famous for his utter commitment to his roles. To prepare for his role in the filming of Tropic Thunder, Lazarus has artificially made his skin darker in order to look like the black sergeant he portrays. Robert Downey Jr., a white American actor, is playing Kirk Lazarus, a white Australian actor, playing Sergeant Lincoln Osirus — a black American soldier.

I found the movie funny. I found the exchanges between Lazarus and another actor, Alpa Chino, about race, to be funny. This was not the Moment in Racism I noticed. No, the Moment in Racism was when I felt worried that laughing at Tropic Thunder might be racist, and I tried to think of a person of color I could ask.

It’s that, the mentally placing all people of color into one sort of vague reference-book category for my purposes, that I noticed as my own racism. Because people of color are not all the same, not uniform in views and opinions and experiences, and are not in any way responsible for meeting my needs or answering my questions or representing all people of color everywhere.

Moments in Racism

This kicks off a new semi-regular feature in my blog, Moments in Racism. In this feature, I will attempt to mention those times I notice my previously unconscious racism. I’m engaging in the practice of trying to see it in myself.

To start off this feature:

A few nights ago while driving I saw a group of black men talking to each other in front of a store. One of them was holding a leash, walking a dog — a pit bull or bull terrier of some sort. I realized that I presume that any black men with dogs of those breeds are mistreating their dogs. Using them for fighting, or abusing the dogs into aggressiveness. This is today’s moment in racism.