race and reading

[marycatelli]

One thing I notice about the treatment of race in modern works of SF and fantasy is that it tends to assume that all current racial distinctions are the Laws of the Medes and Persians that altereth not.  It does not take much reading even in the early 20th century to have that belief knocked sideways and upside down.  Even just SF and fantasy reading, perhaps, though there is the issue of recognizing what you see.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance.  Different tribes of blacks would have their physical differences enumerated with care.  If you know your turn-of-the-century racial theories, it's not difficult to decipher this:

The Abyssinians themselves are a fine looking race of black men—tall, muscular, with fine teeth, and regular features, which incline distinctly toward Semitic mold—I refer to the full-blooded natives of Abyssinia. They are the patricians—the aristocracy. The army is officered almost exclusively by them. Among the soldiery a lower type of negro predominates, with thicker lips and broader, flatter noses.

even though he has them consider whites to be an inferior sort of being, many of them slaves, and living in the poor quarters when free.

Even writers not moved to use those distinctions as a kind of short-hand for character would nevertheless deploy them to describe.  In one Time Patrol story, Poul Anderson's characters know that history has changed, because in all the millennia they cover, New York City  never was occupied by a mix of brachycephalic whites and American Indians, using steam-powered cars.  He also used it to indicate new and different humans; "Time Lag" has a planet inhabited by a race of blue-eyed blonds -- with slanted eyes.

To be sure, reading the straight stuff gets some details that never make it into the fiction, where you can have unquestionably superior and inferior races and set up history accordingly.  It can be interesting to watch the attempts to depict one's race as superior in defiance of historical fact.  Italy would point to the grandeur that was Rome, but there was no denying it had gone down in the world since then.  Teutonicists had the opposite problem; much as they might claim that the patrician class in Rome was actually Germanic invaders -- as were the Greek aristocrats -- and those countries had declined when they stopped maintaining their racial purity, and well as Germany was doing in the modern world, there was no denying that the Germans in classical times had hardly been impressive.  English Teutonicists, wishing to give their own country priority, would claim that the pure Nordic breed was all but wiped out in the Thirty Years' War, leaving its superiority to England alone.  (American ones often claimed that there had been some remnants after the war, but they had all emigrated, to America.)

Robert E. Howard had his three races, of blonds, red-heads, and black-haired men, a distinction thought eminently important in the era.

And that, mind you, is in the 20th century.  Pushing the matter back farther brings even stranger things to the racial questions.  Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.

Comments

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.

I imagine that at least part of the reason is the feeling that this would be insensitive; and it couldl ead to accusations of racism and thus lost sales.

[marycatelli]

Any number of non-fiction works manage to bring it up without bringing charges of insensitivity.

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

Like which ones? I'm not trying to be obnoxious, I really do want to know. The sole ones I can think of were a few by Thomas Sowell.

[marycatelli]

Whiteness of a Different Color for one. Hmm. I shall have to track down the other one, about the working life of "whites."

But there are more than I haven't read. Like How the Irish Became White, obviously.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Fiction set in a different time needs to adopt the sensibilities of that time, not the sensibilities of our own time, to be great fiction.

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

And I agree, but the problem is when the writer uses real history as compared to the "everybody knows" version. I've been repeatedly and patronizingly told to my face that the research I did a few years back on the European witch hunts was "wrong" because there's no evidence whatsoever that it was some big conspiracy to destroy European goddess worship. And the rather considerable historical evidence to the contrary? Well, of course, the Establishment is just trying to discredit its critics!

Or that, say, medieval European women were not universally or even mostly treated as mere soulless chattel -- they owned businesses, ran abbeys where they commanded male clergy and laity, ruled nations sometimes, etc. But no, 'everyone knows better'.

Heck, go and read some of Zora Neale Hurston's essays on what she referred to as "Our White Northern Friends (and yes, you can hear them use the capital letters)" and their utter dismay at finding Southern blacks living in real houses on real streets with real cars parked in front of them. Show that in a modern story and you'd probably be accused of being an apologist for racism.

Yes, you're right, but how much real history do people actually know?

[marycatelli]

Those sorts will manufacture evidence because they are professional grievance-mongers and can not survive without their grievances. You might as well ignore them.

It's like being caught in the middle of the park, near no shelters, when the clouds opens. You will get wet no matter what you do, so there's no use trying to figure out what will stop your getting wet.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

A historical novellist of my acquaintance reckons that the way to handle this is with an extended afternote and lots of primary source references.

It won't help the people who bale out after chapter 1 because they prefer their vision of the world to yours, and people will probably quibble with the afternote - but at least that way you stand a fighting chance of it not being completely dismissed as fanciful.

I think some writers manage to make a version of history sound so real and compelling that it doesn't *matter* to many readers if it fits their mental model: they start to want it to have been that way. Easier to describe than to do, perhaps - and doesn't work for all readers. I was desolated to discover from Amazon that there are even people for whom Ursula Le Guin's world-building clearly doesn't work - to which my reaction was like this:
=:-OOOOO

[marycatelli]

There's a point at which you have to conclude that some people are not part of your target audience.

Though it does smart when they come to inflict their vincible ignorance on you. sigh The life of a writer, who needs to be like a snail -- very tender and sensitive on places, hard as a rock on others. The trick is mastering the art of pulling into the shell.

[eric-hinkle.livejournal.com]

A historical novellist of my acquaintance reckons that the way to handle this is with an extended afternote and lots of primary source references.

This does seem to work for Bernard Cornwell and Conn Iggulden

[marycatelli]

For ficitonal worlds, you have the problem of people who think world-building a world that really could have existed is no excuse. . . which is the point at which I say, "Grievance-monger!"

[marycatelli]

Yup -- to stretch horizons.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Yet the characters of a work of fiction seldom slice up the human race into divisions much different than modern day ones.

This leads to some serious historical misunderstandings. For instance, very few writers (Steve Stirling was a welcome exception) grasp that the ancient Egyptians considered themselves to be the ultimate race of humans, and looked down upon both what we would see as "whites" and "blacks" as inferior because they weren't the exact shade of brown-ness most common in the Two Kingdoms. It also leads to the assumption that human "races" will be very much the same centuries or millennia in the future, and occupying the same relative roles to boot.

What's weirdest is when these racial typlogies are applied to aliens -- for instance the assumption that the Vulcan T'pol is "white" and the Vulcan Tuvok "black" in the human sense of the word. This is parochialism with a vengeance!

[marycatelli]

I think the prize has to be the time that someone complained online that the Foundation trilogy was all of whites. Egregious enough that everyone did jump on the bandwagon to point out the obvious: with zero physical descriptions in the books, there is absolutely no telling what race they are.

[alivion.livejournal.com]

A while back I was thinking about all my writing in general, and I noticed that all my narrators but one were white men. Then I remembered that in no case do I give a physical description of my narrator, and only rarely is it clear that he is even male. The only reason I see my narrators as white men is because I'm filling in the undescribed gaps with myself. Another reader could do the same, and end up seeing a narrator of practically any description.

[marycatelli]

Orson Scott Card once wrote a book and never described the narrator. When two readers complained to him, he asked each one whether she didn't have an idea of what she looked like anyway, and they each agreed and described herself.

[marycatelli]

John Hemry in his JAG in Space series managed to never describe anyone. (He also didn't go much into physical details that would not have indicated race. I concluded that it was hard to make it convincing to depict characters falling in love when they are thus disembodied.)

As Jack Campbell, he does almost the same in The Lost Fleet. Diverges only once. That case, the character had green hair. Genetically engineered.

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

LOL! As if it's likely that, after something like 30 thousand years of interbreeding before emigration to, engineering for and adaptation to one planet after another, anything like the old human races of today would survive! Here and there you might see an odd group of isolated eccentrics maintain an ethnic identity from our own time (in one story, the characters encounter Jews on Trantor!), but this would very much be the exception to a repeatedly-blended and then re-separated rule.

[marycatelli]

Not to mention genetic engineering. . . I fool around with a notion of a universe in which dark skin indicates you come from a blue-giant star system or such like, and pale, a red dwarf.

The heroine comes from a blue-giant system where they instead opted for pale to show off that they control the sunlight that well, but that's a new thing on the galactic scene.

[marycatelli]

Oh, are you reading Michael Flynn's Spiral Arm series? There's one where it's clear that the genes have gotten into the blender with it set on High.

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Ursula LeGuin deliberates quite a lot about race as well as gender, and famously had trouble over the covers of her books and the filming of her Earthsea trilogy with a non-white protagonist.
Some publishers used to dodge the question of marketing when they had to do book covers of non-white lead characters by avoiding showing any face, which at least is slightly better than outright white-washing the characters.

[marycatelli]

John Hemry's always put the guy on as a blue-eyed blond despite all the lack of description in the story. (Though Lost Fleet adds to the silliness by giving him a large gun and standing him on a planet.)