AND THAT'S WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHITEWASHING ARTEMIS CROCK
ETA 5/21/14: HI, JOSH. IS IT REALLY NECESSARY TO CHECK IN ON THIS POST FROM TIME TO TIME? BECAUSE YOU DO IT KIND OF A LOT. YOU DO YOU, I GUESS, BUT IT'S A LITTLE WEIRD TO KEEP COMING BACK AROUND TEN MONTHS AFTER I BLOCKED YOU. MAYBE LET IT GO.
jncera:
Just wants to let everyone know Cassandra Cain and Artemis Crock are half-Asian and half-Caucasian :) They’re allowed to have Caucasian features :)
Check your alleles, before you wreck your.. I’m bad at rhymes.
Thank god someone is sticking up for everyone's right to just default to viewing characters as white as long as it's convenient! It is PRETTY BULLSHIT that the whitewashing police rule the internet with an iron fist.
Look: I've spent a LONG time being argumentative and varying degrees of dickish to people on the internet, long enough that a) I'm looking forward to the not-that-far-off day where I can start to say "since before you were born" about it to uppity teens, and b) I've learned that it's incredibly important, especially when your audience expands beyond your immediate social circle, to think about what you're saying and be sure that what you're putting out there is something you can stand by.
In that spirit, this post has been crafted with a lot of thought and care, but IF I FUCKED SOMETHING UP, LET ME KNOW. Because Tumblr is a nightmare hellscape that refuses to implement any kind of system that lets you carry on a conversation, I've crossposted this to LiveJournal on the off chance that someone has something to say to me about this that would benefit from a back-and-forth, but asks and reblogs work too.
Why it's important to think about things, example 1:
This anon! If they'd actually bothered to look over murrmernator's work and thought about it, they probably could have put together that a) she consistently gives Artemis darker skin than Wally, b) the uncolored-vs-white distinction is pretty obvious, and c) Kaldur and M'gann actually do go uncolored in exactly the same situations as Artemis. [I cackled when she responded with those links, honestly.]
Example 2:
Taking the stance that Artemis is “allowed" to look white. That’s not something that would need to be defended even if it were something that should be defended, which…it’s not. True, if someone's gone to the trouble of faithfully depicting Artemis as half-white and half-Vietnamese in a way that's consistent with canon, it sucks if they have to deal with accusations of whitewashing.
But by going out on the limb of "she's half white, she's allowed to have white features, check your alleles," you're not defending murrmernator and Lisa Jenkins and Bryan Konietzko against accusations of whitewashing that they've already capably defended themselves from. You're defending half-assed fancasts that use Teresa Palmer and Dianna Agron for Artemis. You're defending Artemis erroneously showing up in the comics with light skin and blue eyes. You're defending people claiming that they're fancasting white actresses because of personality. You're defending a lot of shitty things, so I hope that's a stance you actually thought about.
We're not talking about mixing Paula's genes with Lawrence's and what kind of person might randomly result. That hypothetical person might not look Vietnamese in the slightest, or they might not look white in the slightest, or they might fall anywhere in between! Genetics can be NUTS! But we're not talking about that hypothetical third Nguyen-Crock sibling, whom you're free to depict HOWEVER YOU WANT. We're talking about Artemis Lian Crock, who has the same hair color as her father but otherwise resembles her mother and sister.
Look, the creative team behind YJ clearly felt strongly about representation. We know of 26 characters with B designations. Of those 26, we've seen 23. Of those 23, Kaldur, Raquel, Karen, Mal, and Virgil are black, Artemis is half-Vietnamese, and Jaime is Mexican-American. Then from the four Runaways who didn't join the team, you've got Eduardo, who's Argentinian, Asami, who's Japanese, and Tye, who's Native American.
On top of that, you've got characters who are discriminated against within their own fictional cultures: Kaldur and La'gaan are both considered "impure" by Atlantean racists, and M'gann is a white Martian.
The creative team also went out of their way to establish, for anyone who cared enough to put it together, that Marie Logan liked women, despite the fact that network restrictions prevented LGBT representation on the show.
Representation mattered to the creative team, and they clearly thought about what they were putting out into the world and the kind of work they were doing and what it meant. This kind of thing doesn't happen by default. It especially doesn't happen by default when you're drawing from the pool of "existing DC Comics characters."
You know what does happen by default? Ignoring what it means that Artemis has darker skin than her white teammates, that she speaks Vietnamese, that she's taking Vietnamese lit. Seeing "blonde hair" and thinking "white" instead of "biracial" even after seeing her Vietnamese mother and her biracial sister. (Incidentally, nobody's in any hurry to depict Jade as a white girl with black hair.) Deciding that if your fancast can't be blonde and Asian, it's more important that the hair look right.
I can't draw. Not even close. But I know how it feels to work hard on something and post it, how the anticipation of recognition and feedback feels - will this take off? Will people like it? Was it any good? It would suck, unbelievably and completely, to be criticized instead, especially if it was for doing something I'd actually done my best to avoid.
But honestly? Whitewashing is a bigger problem than being unfairly criticized for whitewashing, and being accurately criticized for whitewashing isn't a problem at all. We should all be making sure we're doing characters justice and being true to who they are. We should be pointing out when people are getting it wrong, not only because THEY ARE GETTING IT WRONG, but also because it makes people think twice about representation and where they might be getting it wrong.
The three examples I linked to above, those examples of artists who have had to defend themselves against whitewashing criticism: All of them were able to come back and say something along the lines of "actually, that's something I put thought and effort into depicting," and they backed that assertion up. It sucks that they had to address it, but isn't it GREAT that they could? Isn't it great that they think about these things while they're working? Wouldn't it be great if everyone did?
Or, you know, we could just keep on casting Teresa Palmer like assholes.
[PS, on top of everything: Artemis is half white, absolutely. You know where she got that half? HER DAD. HER SHITTY ABUSIVE DAD, WHOM SHE HATES AND HAS FIRMLY REJECTED IN EVERY WAY SHE KNOWS HOW.]
jncera:
Just wants to let everyone know Cassandra Cain and Artemis Crock are half-Asian and half-Caucasian :) They’re allowed to have Caucasian features :)
Check your alleles, before you wreck your.. I’m bad at rhymes.
Thank god someone is sticking up for everyone's right to just default to viewing characters as white as long as it's convenient! It is PRETTY BULLSHIT that the whitewashing police rule the internet with an iron fist.
Look: I've spent a LONG time being argumentative and varying degrees of dickish to people on the internet, long enough that a) I'm looking forward to the not-that-far-off day where I can start to say "since before you were born" about it to uppity teens, and b) I've learned that it's incredibly important, especially when your audience expands beyond your immediate social circle, to think about what you're saying and be sure that what you're putting out there is something you can stand by.
In that spirit, this post has been crafted with a lot of thought and care, but IF I FUCKED SOMETHING UP, LET ME KNOW. Because Tumblr is a nightmare hellscape that refuses to implement any kind of system that lets you carry on a conversation, I've crossposted this to LiveJournal on the off chance that someone has something to say to me about this that would benefit from a back-and-forth, but asks and reblogs work too.
Why it's important to think about things, example 1:
This anon! If they'd actually bothered to look over murrmernator's work and thought about it, they probably could have put together that a) she consistently gives Artemis darker skin than Wally, b) the uncolored-vs-white distinction is pretty obvious, and c) Kaldur and M'gann actually do go uncolored in exactly the same situations as Artemis. [I cackled when she responded with those links, honestly.]
Example 2:
Taking the stance that Artemis is “allowed" to look white. That’s not something that would need to be defended even if it were something that should be defended, which…it’s not. True, if someone's gone to the trouble of faithfully depicting Artemis as half-white and half-Vietnamese in a way that's consistent with canon, it sucks if they have to deal with accusations of whitewashing.
But by going out on the limb of "she's half white, she's allowed to have white features, check your alleles," you're not defending murrmernator and Lisa Jenkins and Bryan Konietzko against accusations of whitewashing that they've already capably defended themselves from. You're defending half-assed fancasts that use Teresa Palmer and Dianna Agron for Artemis. You're defending Artemis erroneously showing up in the comics with light skin and blue eyes. You're defending people claiming that they're fancasting white actresses because of personality. You're defending a lot of shitty things, so I hope that's a stance you actually thought about.
We're not talking about mixing Paula's genes with Lawrence's and what kind of person might randomly result. That hypothetical person might not look Vietnamese in the slightest, or they might not look white in the slightest, or they might fall anywhere in between! Genetics can be NUTS! But we're not talking about that hypothetical third Nguyen-Crock sibling, whom you're free to depict HOWEVER YOU WANT. We're talking about Artemis Lian Crock, who has the same hair color as her father but otherwise resembles her mother and sister.
Look, the creative team behind YJ clearly felt strongly about representation. We know of 26 characters with B designations. Of those 26, we've seen 23. Of those 23, Kaldur, Raquel, Karen, Mal, and Virgil are black, Artemis is half-Vietnamese, and Jaime is Mexican-American. Then from the four Runaways who didn't join the team, you've got Eduardo, who's Argentinian, Asami, who's Japanese, and Tye, who's Native American.
On top of that, you've got characters who are discriminated against within their own fictional cultures: Kaldur and La'gaan are both considered "impure" by Atlantean racists, and M'gann is a white Martian.
The creative team also went out of their way to establish, for anyone who cared enough to put it together, that Marie Logan liked women, despite the fact that network restrictions prevented LGBT representation on the show.
Representation mattered to the creative team, and they clearly thought about what they were putting out into the world and the kind of work they were doing and what it meant. This kind of thing doesn't happen by default. It especially doesn't happen by default when you're drawing from the pool of "existing DC Comics characters."
You know what does happen by default? Ignoring what it means that Artemis has darker skin than her white teammates, that she speaks Vietnamese, that she's taking Vietnamese lit. Seeing "blonde hair" and thinking "white" instead of "biracial" even after seeing her Vietnamese mother and her biracial sister. (Incidentally, nobody's in any hurry to depict Jade as a white girl with black hair.) Deciding that if your fancast can't be blonde and Asian, it's more important that the hair look right.
I can't draw. Not even close. But I know how it feels to work hard on something and post it, how the anticipation of recognition and feedback feels - will this take off? Will people like it? Was it any good? It would suck, unbelievably and completely, to be criticized instead, especially if it was for doing something I'd actually done my best to avoid.
But honestly? Whitewashing is a bigger problem than being unfairly criticized for whitewashing, and being accurately criticized for whitewashing isn't a problem at all. We should all be making sure we're doing characters justice and being true to who they are. We should be pointing out when people are getting it wrong, not only because THEY ARE GETTING IT WRONG, but also because it makes people think twice about representation and where they might be getting it wrong.
The three examples I linked to above, those examples of artists who have had to defend themselves against whitewashing criticism: All of them were able to come back and say something along the lines of "actually, that's something I put thought and effort into depicting," and they backed that assertion up. It sucks that they had to address it, but isn't it GREAT that they could? Isn't it great that they think about these things while they're working? Wouldn't it be great if everyone did?
Or, you know, we could just keep on casting Teresa Palmer like assholes.
[PS, on top of everything: Artemis is half white, absolutely. You know where she got that half? HER DAD. HER SHITTY ABUSIVE DAD, WHOM SHE HATES AND HAS FIRMLY REJECTED IN EVERY WAY SHE KNOWS HOW.]