Dreamer Easy

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! Check out ibarw for updates and links.

My plans to do a couple of longer postings this year have fallen through, so what I'd like to is to share with you some of the links I bookmarked when researching my essay for a forthcoming volume of Time, Unincorporated. I'll group them into broad subject areas. Here goes:

BBC

Britain's most popular television programmes 'too white', says Trevor Phillips Telegraph, 16 July 2008.

Too many black and Asian faces on TV, says BBC director Samir Shah. Guardian, 26 June 2008.

Comedian attacks TV chiefs over lack of ethnic diversity. Guardian, 8 February 2008.

TV's McGovern calls BBC 'racist' BBC News, 31 August 2007.


UK History

From the Beeb, the Race UK subsite

From the National Archives: Moving Here: 200 Years of Migration in England

The Anti-Slavery Society's page on Slavery in England

And via the British Library: The First Asians in Britain


US Culture

NAACP Report Finds TV Networks Lagging in Diversity, San Francisco Chronicle, 18 December 2008. (The report, Out of Focus - Out of Sync, is available online as a PDF.)

Black Women: Wise Best Friends To White Women Everywhere. Jezebel, 29 August 2007.

Bridal Magazines Seem To Think Black Women Don't Get Married. Racialicious, 14 December 2006.

I want you to want me, Salon, 30 July 2005 (and letters responding to the article).

Why Can't A Black Actress Play The Girlfriend?. Newsweek, 14 March 2005

Hollywood distorts black romance. USA Today, 34 March 2004.

Love in Black and White. New York Times, 26 January 2003.

Interracial Intimacy. The Atlantic, December 2002.

Trying to Get Beyond the Role of the Maid. New York Times, 17 May 2002.

There's also an interesting article on interracial screen romance at the Starpulse site, but every time I visit it, it sticks a Trojan on my computer! >:(

You can see all the blog entries submitted for International Blog Against Racism Week on www.delicious.com, here:
http://delicious.com/ibarw/ibarw3

Couple of quick recs:

rainbowjehan's drily humorous review of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano:
http://rainbowjehan.livejournal.com/836267.html

sanguinity's challenging thoughts on White privilege in the atheism movement:
http://sanguinity.livejournal.com/442559.html

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! For more info, visit ibarw.

UFO was a British TV series first screened in 1970, but set in the 1980s. A secret organisation, with one base hidden under a film studio and another on the moon, protects Earth from aliens who hatch all sorts of improbable schemes in their quest to harvest human organs. Jon, who'd watched the show as a kid, recently got the boxed set and we worked our way through the 26 episodes. It was lavishly made and surprisingly credible and adult, not to mention having the grooviest opening credits of any series ever.

UFO touches on race and racism now and again in a well-intentioned way. Rather than looking to laud or condemn the show - bit pointless nearly 40 years later, really - I'd like to just note some of these moments... although I do want to pimp to you the character of Lieutenant Nina Barry, sort of UFO's version of Uhura.

( Warning: lots of text, lots of images )

I do believe that International Blog Against Racism Week is coming up in August, so there's plenty of time for my mad plan: ask you all to read one book (or watch one movie) and then review it during the week.

I have dozens of relevant books around here, and there are plenty of movies and documentaries, all of which I'd love to review, but there's never enough hours in the day. But if a bunch of people read/watch one thing each and then give their thoughts on it, I reckon that'd be a great contribution - bringing books and films to peoples' attention, sparking discussion, etc.

Pretty much anything that seems relevant is fair game, fiction or non-fiction. Posts in past ibarw have covered a broad range of topics, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and Whiteness (I might do a posting about Watching the English amongst the other stuff :-)

Life's busy; I'm not going to ask you to sign up or anything. If you don't think you'll have time, you could leave a suggestion here for a book or movie which you enjoyed or found thought-provoking.

Yes, it's still International Blog Against Racism Week. :-) Check out ibarw for info and links.

"White" is, of course, a race too. It can be educational for White people like me to turn and look back at ourselves - to see our invisible Whiteness.

My ancestry is British and my language is English. Now, here in Australia, people sometimes incorrectly use "Australian" to mean "White"; but I call myself Anglo, which is short for Anglo-Celt-Franco-Norman-Frisian-Jute-Saxon. :-) My ethnic group, like my language, are fantastic mongrels, vigorous hybrids of genes and words.

My red hair must make me look uber-Anglo, because bus drivers, little old ladies, White supremacists, etc, apparently feel comfortable bitching to me about Asian immigrants or Will Smith being cast in the Wild Wild West movie. You have to have your snappy comeback(s) ready ahead of time, because the sheer gall of it always catches you off-balance. The simplest thing is probably to say: "What did you say?" And then move pointedly away.

I've been racking my brains to see if I could think of any times I've been the subject of someone else's racism. The only instance I could come up with which even would even vaguely count were the girls in junior high who would cry, "Tally ho!" at me in bizarre "English" accents. I doubt they could've found Australia on a map. Mind you, I do have a "cultivated" Australian accent. In fact I once wrote a Lemniskate column about that - I think I'll paste the text in here in case my old Yahoo! group ever vanishes. :-) ( Talking the Talk, October 2000 )

ETA: I just looked up the genetics behind freckles. Turns out they're linked to mutations in the "red hair gene" that makes the receptor for the "tanning hormone" MSH (see my earlier posting). Hence the association between red hair, sunburn, and freckles.

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! Visit ibarw for lots of links and resources.

rydra_wong suggests that, for IBARW, we grab a Character of Colour and pimp him or her. I think I'm going to broaden that out and pimp whole episodes of stuff. Just three this time, 'cos I'm knackered today. :-) In no particular order, here goes:

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Past Tense

In an unusual pair-up for DS9, Avery Brooks as Commander Benjamin Sisko and Siddig El Fadil (now Alexander Siddig) as Doctor Julian Bashir find themselves trapped in a crisis in history - our future, their past - as a riot breaks out in a ghetto for the unemployed. Brooks in particular is outstanding as Sisko, in one of the first really meaty, political stories of the show, and one of the first times we see Sisko emerge from his usual strong, silent act. Bashir is his usual goofy, earnest, highly ****able self.

2. New Doctor Who: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit

Someone described the supporting cast of this two-part SF thriller as the best looking supporting cast in the history of Who, and by gods, they weren't wrong. Amongst the many goodies to choose from are Shaun Parkes as Captain Zachary Cross Flane and Ronny Jhutti as Danny Bartok. ( SPOILERS )

3. Original Doctor Who: The Aztecs

First screened in 1964 as part of Doctor Who's very first season, this story still holds up today - there are no SF elements other than the time travel which brings our heroes to pre-conquest Tenochtitlan. They're quickly caught up in a power struggle with political and religious elements, which demonstrates both the highly civilised and the frighteningly bloodthirsty elements of Mexica culture - "beauty and horror", as Barbara says. There's a genuine effort to get the details right, even if it's not 100% successful.

Piccies nicked from time-and-space.co.uk, trekcore.com, and david_macgowan over in dw_pics.

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! Visit ibarw for lots of links and resources.

Here's some suggested viewing. In no particular order:

1. Kidulthood (2006)
London adolescents struggle to find meaning in a world of sex, drugs, violence, and exploitation by adults. Written by Noel Clarke, who played Mickey in Doctor Who - I bought the DVD on the strength of Clarke's Torchwood episode. (He plays one of the bullies, and is disturbingly sexy and threatening - the other standout performance, for me, was Cornell John as the terrifying Uncle Curtis.) Everything is kept hidden from the parents, everything, even when their intervention could be literally lifesaving. Though this movie's very modern in style, it reminded me a little of Rebel Without a Cause, which I saw much earlier this year.

( A ramble about adolesence prompted by the movie but not really relevant to IBARW )

2. The Seven Samurai (1954)
From awesome director Akiro Kurosawa comes an epic movie which pinches several terrific anecdotes from Zen and Bushido tradition and which influenced Hollywood hugely, even being remade as The Magnificent Seven. Kurosawa's style influenced Spielberg's, and you can sometimes see it, especially in the huge empty Zen canvasses of the landscape with little human figures in them. I guess this is the most famous Kurosawa film, but I've enjoyed all the ones I've seen, including Throne of Blood, which is a delicious retelling of Macbeth.

3. Smoke Signals (1998)
Another film full of funny anecdotes, the Native American road movie Smoke Signals is based on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie (Coeur d'Alene), one of the zillion books lurking in my to-read pile. Includes a staggering piece of music over the end credits sung by acapella trio Ulali, who can hit high notes I didn't even know existed.

4. Black Chicks Talking (2001)
A very watchable collection of interviews with Indigenous Australian women, from the famous to the "ordinary". I found a copy at the library, and there's also a book and a stage play based on it. It's funny as well as enlightening. One of the women - a former Miss Australia - only discovered her Aboriginal ancestry in her teens; the other women reassure her that she "counts" as Aboriginal, whatever her precise skin tone and her upbringing, especially as she's embraced that identity when it would have been easy to hide it. (A review of the book describes this further.)

5. Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979)
A friend suggested Richard Pryor's stand-up comedy as the best introduction to race relations in the US that you can get. Comedy can serve as a smokescreen for racism, but it can also address it in a way that gets past peoples' defensive reactions - when Pryor takes the piss out of White people and their nervous reaction to Black people, you can't help laughing at yourself; when he turns encounters with the police into hysterical anecdotes, he's giving you an idea of what it's like to be Black. What's more, I had no idea Pryor was so funny. Nor that the word "ass" could have so many meanings.

It's International Blog Against Racism Week! Visit ibarw for lots of links and resources.

Why having red hair is not like being Black :-)

As a ginger nut myself, I've been surprised to see people compare being a redhead to being a Person of Colour. So, to understand why well-meaning people might say that, let's do this backwards: let's first of all look at the ways in which being a redhead is like being Black.

First of all, red hair is genetic. The colour of human skin, hair, and eyes results from two pigments, the reddish phaeomelanin and the brownish eumelanin. At least six different genes control the production of these pigments, which is why humans come in so many different shades. Eumelanin helps protect us from UV damage from sunlight. The "tanning hormone", MSH, switches on the production of eumelanin. But in redheads, the receptor for MSH doesn't work properly - which is why redheads often tan so badly.

Secondly, redheads are sometimes targetted by bigots. I haven't been teased about my carrot-top since childhood, so I was really surprised to discover that in the UK, redheads are considered fair game for some quite serious harassment, and not just in the schoolyard. The stories are frightening: redheaded women taunted, in the tube or at work, about the colour of their pubic hair; a family moving house to escape harassment; even a stabbing.

And lastly, red hair is irrelevant. Or rather, it should be. Nobody should be judged on a stereotype of gingers as oversexed and temperamental. And yet, people still do it, just as we jump to conclusions about people because the colour of their skin. Nobody should feel free to bully redheads, and yet, some people still do it, just as some insult and harass people based on their race or ethnicity.

So much for the ways in which gingerism resembles racism. Now let's look at the ways in which they're different.

There's a lot more to racism than just pigmentation. For example, in the US, Irish immigrants were considered non-White (and lazy, ape-like, and generally inferior). Racism is inextricably mixed up with ethnicity. In Australia, racism against Middle Eastern immigrants tends to focus on language ("They won't learn English!") and religion ("omg terrorists! They don't respect Our Women! etc"), because it'd be hard to get away with more overt racism.

Redheads don't form a group that's like a race or an ethnicity. We don't have a common language or religion or culture. We don't have a history of being enslaved, segregated, locked in internment camps, or kicked off our land. We don't have a current experience of indefinite detention without charge or trial. We don't have a significantly higher infant mortality rate than blondes or brunettes, nor a lower average income, nor a shorter expected lifespan, nor a higher likelihood of growing up in poverty; nor do we make up a disproportionate percentage of prison inmates, or death row inmates. We're not crowded into neighbourhoods where other people won't live. To date, no-one has tried to "ethnically cleanse" us.

The longer that list goes on, the sadder it gets, and the more obvious that gingerism hasn't and isn't doing the kind of widespread damage that racism has, and is. Gingerism is unquestionably prejudice. It's just not in the same league as racism. And I pray to the red-headed goddesses of this world that it never will be.

Perhaps the most useful thing about comparing gingerism to racism is this: gingerism is patently ridiculous. If judging and mistreating people for their hair colour is obviously arbitrary, silly, and mean-spirited, then maybe our suspicions and assumptions about people from different backgrounds aren't as factual, logical, and natural as we think they are.

Your remarks are very welcome! (I'll add some links and footnotes in a comment.)