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#it would've been so fucking bad. like. shockingly bad. distressingly bad
bitegore · 3 years
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man the fandom racism post is not bad but it feels very incomplete, to me. and i mean by necessity it must be, but like- okay to use a personal example. i'm white and i grew up in a very white neighborhood, and like i know for a fact i've done things that were racist and probably still do without realizing sometimes. like i do my best but my best is not necessarily perfect or even good sometimes. okay? so that's the baseline we're working with if i use myself as an example.
the post said that your response to imperfect characters of color matters more than your response to perfect ones, and i do agree! except that I have always liked villains and mean characters. So, uh, let's use Supernatural, because the easiest Black bad guy character i can remember being SUPER obsessed with for a while was Gordon from SPN. Gordon's deal was that he wanted to kill all of the monsters because a monster had killed his sister, and Sam had to fight him to protect some vampires. They set the black guy up as a scary threat to a bunch of innocent white women. That is obviously bad. I'm sure someone else could talk more clearly about how fucked up this plotline was, because it's been ages and I can't remember it super clearly, but it was like... it was not good.
And like. I loved that guy. I thought he was so interesting. Like, obviously he was a dick, and his choices were bad, but oooohhhh how neat, how cool, etc etc. I wanted him to be Dean's evil new father figure and come back and I mean, obviously that didn't happen, but like- like I liked him. And at the time I was also without a fucking doubt, hands down, racist, because I was i think thirteen or fourteen and I was living with my racist parents and struggling to know how to act. I enjoyed fanworks with racist tropes in them. Honestly even the conception of the character was pretty racist and SPN continued to be astonishingly racist with its other black characters.
The post also used Katara as an example. I honest to god didn't know anyone disliked Katara, ever, because when I was a kid I was like. actively in love with her, I wanted her to be my friend, she was my favorite character outside Zuko. I thought she was the best. And I was racist! Like you have to understand, when I watched Avatar first I was like, ten. I was racist! At that point I hadn't even been aware that racism was still a thing because like. my neighborhood was very white and I was a sheltered kid, and my parents were racist.
so obviously 'liking imperfect characters of color' is not a solution. like, liking imperfect characters of color is better than holding all characters of color to higher standards than white characters, i agree, but you can't just stop there. you have to actually be aware of what tropes are racist, what concepts are bad, et cetera et cetera. and like I am not the person who should be saying this! I am pretty sure I'm still racist and just not sure where so I can learn how to stop! There are without a shadow of a doubt a million people better suited to talk about this stuff on this website alone! but I felt the need to say something anyway, I guess.
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