We had a thread on this last week, and quickly became apparent that I was nubcake, tapping out on Dragonlance and Octavia Butler. Anyway here's an interesting piece of writing on the role of nonwhites in fantasy and sci-fi. I think I'll just follow the discussion below and take notes. It's interesting because, as a kid, I never gave this subject much thought. I remember my lecturing me and my brother Malik about the Drow. I also love that in WoW the "Drow" are the good guys, and the "high elves" are evil.
But I grew up in a house where the pantheon was Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Nat Turner. From that perspective, D&D, comics, sci-fi was almost a retreat, a vacation away from the real. Blackness was all around me, so I tended to cut some slack in the world of fantasy. I don't know. Maybe too much...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Dude, you must read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; it's all about this.
Zak, I am insulted. I read it when it came out!
As I said in the previous thread, the one thing I like about WoW is that there isn't really a clear line about who is good and who is evil (as far as playable races go). The Tauren are probably considered the most "good" while the hero of the game is an orc and the main villain is a human. Also, the humans are a bunch of racist, religious zealots who love to go to war against others over the slightest affront.
Each race has their good side and bad side, and none can proclaim total innocence, and that's what makes it such a departure from previous fantasy lore wherein orc/troll = bad while humans/elves = good.
It's your fantasy world. If you wanted to have a world where race was irrelevant, or where you were on the wrong side of history, more power to you. Judge yourself by how you deal with the real world, not by the number of orcs or elves you pretend to kill with your mighty no-specified-race Fist of Power.
"the pantheon was Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Nat Turner. From that perspective, D&D, comics, sci-fi was almost a retreat, a vacation away from the real"
X-Clan could have brought that to the sci-fi comics world, flying around in an invisible pink cadillac.
There really ought to be a distinction between how things are presented, and how the game is actually played. Order of the Stick has a great scene about that. One of the characters is asking another about a Drow that they're travelling with:
Haley: "Hey, wait a minute. Aren't dark elves evil?"
Nale: "Oh my, no. Not since they became a player race. Now the whole species consists of nothing but Chaotic Good rebels, yearning to throw off the reputation of their evil kin."
Haley: "Evil kin? Didn't you just say they were all chaotic good?"
Nale: "Details."
(http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0044.html)
How about Tananarive Due's African Immortal series, My Soul to Keep, The Living Blood, and Blood Colony?
Harlan Ellison has a pretty cool black lead character in the short story - Mefisto in Onyx. And Ray Bradbury has a couple of interesting short stories about Black folks suddenly deciding to recolonize to Mars without the permission of white folks.
I teach a course on African Americans in Science Fiction which is a bit tough sometimes due to the lack of materials to last an entire semester, but this thread has added a couple of new pieces.
You should check out Acacia, the new series by David Anthony Durham:
http://www.amazon.com/Acacia-Book-One-War-Mein/dp/0385506066
I deeply suspect that the vast majority of modern fantasy (I'll just say that modern is 1980ish and up) was originally written as an expansion of how a D&D campaign was supposed to have gone (rather than how it actually did).
Since it's based, loosely, on the campaign, the characters are based, loosely, on the folks who showed up. There's Bob who always plays the same barbarian character, Tom who lives out his weird women issues by playing a female ranger, so on and so forth and, wouldn't you know it, all of those folks are white.
It's not like the authors set out to make a Whiteworld for their story... it's that they based the story on the D&D campaign that went awry when Bob attacked the chief instead of giving him the proper respect and it all went downhill from there. The DM just looked around the table and all he saw were white faces. Then he wrote a book about it. (Or she, it's all good.)
If you know what I mean.
All right, another Acacia mention! (Talked about it briefly in the comments in the other thread.) Thing is, Durham's not a perfect writer, but he's often a very good one, so I am interested to see if his game's been further raised here.
Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road is worth a mention, now that I think of it.
It's interesting to me how people identify with different characters for different reasons.
I fell in love with Ezra Jack Keats when I was a kid because one of his protagonists had the same first name as me.
The fact that Keats' character was a different race than I was seemed far less important to me than our shared name.
But I had the same reaction Le Guin did when I saw the first still from the Earthsea miniseries: "Why the hell is Ged WHITE?"
Ok, the work of fantasy/sci-fi that deals with race that's stuck with me most is the TV adaptation of Ursula LeGuin's "The Lathe of Heaven". In it, George goes to see Dr. Haber because he's having odd dreams. It turns out that George's dreams alter the world. So Haber sets out to improve the world, by implanting hypnotic suggestions to George that he will dream the world better in some way. We all know what happens when you are granted a wish in D&D. It just never goes right, does it. This happens to Haber, repeatedly.
One thing he wishes for is for George to "solve the race problem" (and gender too, I think). He wants George to dream a world where all the things that divide us are gone. And George wakes up to a world where everyone is gray. Martin Luther King never existed in this world, nor did one characters parents, who were racially mixed.
Patagonia,
Your basically right. On a deep level there is no good and evil in WoW. Still if I told you one side was called "The Alliance" and the other side was called "The Horde," what would you think? I think the rejection of good and evil is basically a ret-con. Go back to Warcraft I or even II. There is no doubt as to who's good and who's evil.
Dark elves are one of the most ridiculous damn fantasy cliches. They are evil, and live underground--ok, I can see that. Caves are scary and mysterious. You can't see anything. I can imagine lots of evil shit living in caves.
But live underground and have dark skin? Completely weird. Most animals that live in darkness lose their pigmentation and end up looking paper white when exposed to light.
There just isn't any real excuse for making them dark skinned. Not much of a stretch to say it has something to do with weird, subconscious race issues.
Professor Tracey: How could you possibly run out of Samuel Delaney and Octavia Butler books? Plus you've got your Sun Ra, and Deltron and... well really. How could you run out of Afrofuturism? Let alone that alongside mainstream sci-fi with black characters.
Addendum:
If you read a fantasy novel and you find yourself thinking "dang, they threw in one token black character and it's the friggin' mage again", I'd go back to the author's D&D game. Look around the table and you will see a bunch of white folk and one black guy.
And the black guy played a wizard.
@Professor Tracey:
If you're looking for material you should check out the novel Black Man (or, as titled in the US, Thirteen) by Richard Morgan (a UK author, white guy if it matters). Fantastic book. Might lend itself more to a discussion of prejudice generally, than specifically black people in sci-fi. But you're the professor, take a read and see.
Also Morgan has three other books (Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies)that through the major technology in the books ask some questions about identity and self (of which race is surely a part).
Hope it helps.
Certainly the pre-conceived ideas we have about those names would make us think one is good and one is evil. So too would the knowledge that the Alliance has humans, dwarves, and elves and the Horde has orcs, trolls, and undead. But I think that's what makes it interesting. Once you get past the initial biases, you can see it's much more complicated that that.
I don't know if I would consider it a ret-con. We do find out the the orc actions were not of their own doing and were instead under the influences of a more powerful force. Of course since we discover that later it may seem like one, but I think WC3 establishes quite early that the orcs, and particularly Thrall, are heroic and good people.
Duly chastened, I retract my "Dude."
I first read A Wizard Of Earthsea when I was a bit too young for the book. As a result, not only did I come in with the preconception that Ged looked like me (that is, southern European -- dark by European standards but still clearly white) -- but this misconception proved so durable that it survived not only the reveal in the book, but also my correct apprehension of Vetch's race from the first time it was mentioned. In fact, it even survived The Tombs of Atuan -- Tenar obviously belonged to a different racial group than Ged and was clearly European, but she was also obviously northern European. Earthsea, went my preteen logic, must be analogous to Europe and Africa -- fair-skinned Caucasians in the north, Africans in the south, and darker-skinned Caucasians where the two meet.
(It may be relevant that I came from a midwestern mill town with a lot of indifferently-assimilated white ethnics, most of whom came from southern and eastern Europe. Well into the 1970s, there were older Anglo-Saxons who weren't sure whether Italians and Greeks should be considered white.)
Allow me to dissent from the recommendation of Richard Morgan. His post-Altered Carbon novels have been marked by increasingly petulant and didactice exposition of opinions that Morgan persists in thinking both innovative and moving. And Thirteen/Black Man was predictable enough to call its near-future confederacy of the red states "Jesusland," just like the 2004 joke map. Morgan takes pride in pointing this lapse of imagination out in interviews.
A similar thing happened to me, cminus. I always pictured Ged as halfway between Greek and Native American. The cover image of my copy probably didn't help the situation either.
I really dislike dark elves, and never use them in my D&D games (I like troglodytes, kuo-toa and illithids for that role), but it's possible to explain their existence without resorting to racial explanations.
A major inspiration for the D&D Drow seem to have been the Svartalfar of Norse myth. Svartalfar translates as "dark elves" or "black elves", and many (though by no means all) descriptions of the Svartalfar stress their dark coloration. Wikipedia offers the following quote from the Prose Eddas, a source that Gary Gygax reportedly read for inspiration: "[T]he dark-elves dwell down in the earth, and they are unlike the light-elves in appearance, but much more so in deeds. The light-elves are fairer than the sun to look upon, but the dark-elves are blacker than pitch."
Incidentally, although the Svartalfar were usually depicted as being more unpleasant than the Ljosalfar (light elves), they were generally not seen as an evil versus good pairing, as the passage above indicates. The concept of the Drow as inherently malicious probably comes from the folklore of the Shetland Islands, which is where the name "Drow" comes from. The Shetland Drow were malevolent underground dwelling humanoids, often linked folklorically to the Svartalfar. However, the Shetland Drow were often described as looking less like a stereotypically modern elf than the Svartalfar; to give you an idea, Orkney mythology features a similar but less inevitably evil creature, the Trow, whose name is the root word for the English word "troll."
(I agree, it's nonsensical from a biological point of view for the sunlit creatures to be pale and the underground dwellers to be dark, but 13th century Vikings were surprisingly poor evolutionary biologists.)
Now that you mention it, Tel, the cover image on my copy of The Tombs of Atuan does make Ged look more Greek or Levantine, which probably didn't help.
There just isn't any real excuse for making them dark skinned. Not much of a stretch to say it has something to do with weird, subconscious race issues.
As I said on the previous fantasy thread, the drow appearance is very much inspired by that of photographic negatives of black and white film. See the pictures here:
http://www.entheosweb.com/fireworks/photo-negative_effect.asp
When it comes to Gygax, who clearly invented the D&D version of drow based numerous other sources such as the svartalfir mentioned above, one should assume an bad in joke or pun before all else. This is no different.
Am I the only one here who never saw the word "nubcake" before? Derived from "noob," would that be?
Isn't Native American LeGuin's stated color-chip for Ged's skin? I also seem to recall that "The Other Wind" says that King Lebannen is considerably darker.
@Flippanter:
Morgan's novels have definitely been angrier since Altered Carbon, I don't know that I'd describe them as petulant. Also, why do you say Morgan thinks the express opinions are innovative? What do you think of him as a writer, politics aside? Am curious.
I always thought of Ged as a sort of mahogany color, the red-brown color anyone of medium skin pigment gets if he or she lives outdoors on a boat. As for facial features, I always imagined him as having a sharp nose and high cheekbones. That could make him almost anything, from Mediterranean all the way across the middle of Asia to Native American. The main thing is weathered, though. Not the same kind of skin that ANY office worker would have. Scarred too, as I recall.
Of course since we discover that later it may seem like one, but I think WC3 establishes quite early that the orcs, and particularly Thrall, are heroic and good people.
Well, that some of them are, anyway.
Actually, I think the Warcraft universe in general is pretty good at demonstrating that all races (even demons, in a sense) contain good people and bad people, smart people and stupid people - without beating the player over the head with anvilicious exposition to that effect. Look at the four main night elf characters of WC3, for example: Tyrande, Furion, Illidan, Maiev. Quite different from each other, wouldn't you say?
With one exception: I haven't found the good blood elves yet. In a game where even the undead are sometimes sympathetic, I found this a little disappointing. What does it say about the Horde that they associate with the blood elves?
I'd be quite happy if the horde kicked them out.
@AMT
To start with what I think of him as a writer, I quite like Morgan's style of conveying action in his novels, at least the Takeshi Kovacs novels: fluid, but abrupt, and conveying the sensations of fighting and fleeing. I don't particularly like the standard-issue I-am-such-a-badass exposition in those books, but it isn't too oppressive.
This interview captures the self-congratulatory flavor of Morgan's political sensibilities pretty well.
Lastly, "petulant" because since the third Kovacs novel, Morgan's books have been full of -- I would say animated by, because those passages are so common and seem to be the ones that Morgan finds more satisfying than anything else -- scenes of his protagonists, however hard-bitten, experienced, cynical, noir and ex-special forces they may be -- throwing tantrums like 13-year-olds, "you're just a racist, Dad" posturing and all.
@Flippanter:
Thanks for the link. Not sure I agree, but I see what you're saying.
There are some sympathetic blood elves (there's one I recall hanging out at the tauren village out on the plateaus in Thousand Needles, trying to find a cure for their magic addiction). And they are finally redeemed at the end of the Burning Crusade content when they realize what their illustrious "leader" is actually up to. Their paladins are now drawing their holy power from the Naaru willingly rather than "stealing" it.
That essay is definitely an interesting read. When I was a child, I never really felt interested in projecting myself into the characters themselves (I don't with any kind of fiction, actually) unless I made him myself, and even if I did, I wouldn't feel the same difference, being white. Being gay, though, it was something I thought about, but given that the representations of romance in fantasy/sci-fi tended to be very, very poorly done, I didn't feel like I lost anything. I actually didn't want gay characters on the Star Trek shows because I figure they'd do a terrible job with it.
"I actually didn't want gay characters on the Star Trek shows because I figure they'd do a terrible job with it."
You can't tell me LaForge wasn't the closeted guy on the Enterprise D's bridge. The desperate attempts to hook up with Ashley Judd, etc., rang completely false.
Who knows? If the show had lasted another season, maybe he'd have finally come out.
One of my first introductions to written SF--perhaps not the best one, but there it is--was the Isaac Asimov-edited anthology "Before the Golden Age", which was a collection of 1930s pulp stories he read as a kid (a Russian Jewish immigrant kid working at the family candy store in Brooklyn). Many of these stories were alarmingly racist (and sexist, but that almost goes without saying); they didn't just take place in a world of white people, they took place in a world where good white guys rescued beautiful white women from evil black and brown men and the occasional Fu Manchu stereotype, regardless of the exotic setting.
Asimov's take on this in the introduction was interesting. He says that he honestly didn't detect the racism in the stories when he originally read them; but coming back to them as an adult, it horrified him--he found it hard to believe that the text he was seeing was the same text he had read earlier, and he was actually tempted to edit the stories to take the racism out, and return the experience of reading them to something more like he remembered. He finally decided that that wasn't the right approach, and opted to provide commentary and a sort of apology instead.
I never read much of the stuff before the 1940s. Still there was some stereotyping even after. Although in many of the ones I recall, like "Stars My Destination", the stereotypes of blacks I think were not intentionally negative. Not being black though I might be seeing them wrong. I did notice a good deal of Asian stereotypes in 50s-60s SF. Asian characters were either devious or possessed some kind of arcane wisdom.
A part of this, or maybe what just encourages a cycle, is that there aren't really that many black authors of science fiction. Not precisely related, but most of the ones I'm aware of are women. Steven Barnes was once described as the "only" black man still active in the genre, which is an exaggeration but maybe not too much of one. Mystery writer Walter Moseley has also done some SF. I think some white writers are concerned that doing a black-oriented science fiction might come off wrong or be seen as a kind of cultural misappropriation.
In the case of Fantasy I think a potentially important part is that the modern Fantasy genre largely originated with people reimagining/riffing on specifically European mythologies. Mostly the Celts, English, Nordics, Romans, and Greeks. (Not much uses Basque or Hungarian mythos) In recent times Japanese and American Indian mythologies have become fairly trendy, but on the whole I think African mythologies are still not of much interest. Well excepting Egyptian mythology.
Lastly there's jazz musician Sun Ra. He's pretty out there, but some of what he did could be considered a kind of science fiction.
Asimov's take on this in the introduction was interesting. He says that he honestly didn't detect the racism in the stories when he originally read them; but coming back to them as an adult, it horrified him--he found it hard to believe that the text he was seeing was the same text he had read earlier, and he was actually tempted to edit the stories to take the racism out, and return the experience of reading them to something more like he remembered. He finally decided that that wasn't the right approach, and opted to provide commentary and a sort of apology instead.
Asimov's experience mirrors my own, though I was lucky enough to be younger and have Ged alongside the embarrassing stuff. It's amazing what flies by you when you're a kid, and what seems obvious and sometimes horrifying when you're older and politically more aware. I've never gone back to the Napoleon Bonaparte series by Arthur Upfield-- which I loved as s child-- because I know far too well how much they would disappoint me now.
I had that experience with Lovecraft. Read him somewhat as an early adult, then read him a lot more last year and was quite a bit put off about the representations of blacks as evil mystics. It was hard for me to finish "Medusa's Coil," and the last line will fill you with contempt.
Though, reading him more closely, his white "heroes" are really anything but. They're arrogant, insufferable jerks who are frequently driven mad when they discover the world (and the universe) isn't as ordered as they think it is. You generally don't feel sorry for them when whatever inevitable horror ultimately falls upon them. I'm not sure you're supposed to.
pardon the cut-n-paste, but this seems like a relevant sentiment here --
Mark Dery: Have you ever felt, as one of the few blacks writing SF, the pressure to write science fiction deeply inscribed with the politics of black nationalism?
Samuel R. Delany: The answer there depends on what your question means. If you mean: Do I feel that, deep within my work, I’ve situated material that encourages the reader’s engagement with some of the political questions that the disenfranchised people in this country, victimized by oppression and an oppressive discourse based on the evil and valorized notion of nationhood and its hideous white — no other color — underbelly, imperialism, must face but cannot overcome without internalizing some of the power concepts and relationships inescapably entailed in the notion of “nation” itself? Well if that’s what you mean, my answer is: Damned right I have! Certainly from my 1974 novel Dhalgren on, that’s been a major plank, reason, and justification in, of, and for my project.
If, on the other hand, you mean: Do I feel that the surface of my work must blatantly display signs of solidarity with those who, through the real despairs imposed on the by oppression, have momentarily abandoned any critique of the presuppositions of nationhood and its internal contradictions, and that, through such signs in my work, I endeavor to speak back to those people in a voice indistinguishable from theirs, confirming what in them cannot question, what in them does not have the luxury of being able to critique the grounds on whcih they stand — a confirmation which, while I acknowledge that its project is an endlessly practical and necessary one, and one which I can usually support art some level of abstraction? Well, if that’s what you mean, then, alas, the answer is: No. That’s not part of my project — even though I often approve of it in others. Still, it’s just not what I do best.
– “Black to the Future,” Flame Wars (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1994), 188-9