Ethnicity and Fandom (Capitulo Dos)
February 29th, 2008 by IllyI don’t mean to piggy-back on Brandon’s comment in class today about ethnicity issues surrounding the fandoms we’ve studied thus far…
But…
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Kathy had the last word in class today (Kathy, speak up if I misparaphrase you): Star Trek takes a stab at addressing the ethnic issue by giving Deep Space Nine a black captain, Benjamin Sisko, as an attempt to draw in black viewers.
However, a multicultural cast does not a multicultural show make: having a black character does not mean that the show will tackle issues pertinent to the black community. In a discussion we had on the way to lunch, Diana pointed out that Star Trek has attempted to break the racial divide since the very start with Uhura, a groundbreaking character because she was a black woman in a role of (debateable) power on television. We continued on to discuss how Uhura as a black character was, quite frankly, white-washed and placed in a form that would be easy for a majority white audience to swallow. The problem, we concluded, is that Star Trek, and many other shows, have not progressed from that early model.
Shows that attempt to target the minority community are aired either on cable or on basic broadcast channels that suffer from lack of viewers (the channel that comes to mind is UPN, now called My9, in New York—it’s known for showing black sitcoms and was nearly pulled from the air, sparking a huge debate in New York over the silencing of minority voices within various media mediums). That is not to say that the major broadcasting networks such as ABC or CBS, which have primarily white viewers, haven’t tried to target the minority market. The George Lopez Show was a fairly successful show on ABC for a number of years, but was eventually cancelled in favor of other (re: whiter) shows. I personally couldn’t stand the show because, as was said previously about Uhura, I felt that the show took the Latino family and made it palatable to a white audience and, in the process of doing so, sacrificed certain elements that would have made it more attractive, and identifiable, to the Latino community (sometimes it’s just not enough to see a Latino face on television–you have to believe it’s real, and The George Lopez Show just wasn’t real to me). The show (or the producers of the show?) chose instead to tailor their network line-up to appeal to their most reliable market which happens to be dominantly white.
When thinking about why it is that the fandoms we’ve been studying is mostly comprised of white middle class Americans, maybe we should consider what it is about the texts themselves that attract a certain ethnic following. Not to be cynical, but is there an avarice on the part of the producer to play towards the tastes of the ethnic majority? And what happens when a certain fandom becomes deeply associated with a certain group? For example, white fans of hip-hop are referred to by the pejorative “wigger”; on the flip side, growing up in a predominantly Hispanic and black neighborhood in the South Bronx, I was often accused of “acting white” because I liked Friends and listened to bubblegum pop music. This isn’t only limited to the question of ethnicity–these same questions can apply to the issue of gender within fandom…
I don’t know, I can’t think of a proper conclusion. I’d like to hear what you guys think.
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No, you didn’t misquote me.
In defense of Star Trek DS9: Several episodes dealt specifically with racism against blacks,namely Far Beyond the Stars and Badda Bing Badda Bang. So I think it was more than tokenism but less than what should be. There is a tendency for TV shows to have a token minority character and then say “look, we’re progressive.” I completely agree its a huge problem.
The main problem isn’t the self-serving companies that produce these texts, but the lack of response it produces. Fans do have some level of power, and they (and the rest of society) could use it do deal with the issue of race. But they don’t so the producers don’t feel a need to change.
I just wanted to add that the Wikipedia article on Star Trek talked a lot about the same issues with regard to portrayals of homosexuals on the show:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_in_Star_Trek
I had also been considering a critique of Star Trek as a mulitcultural show. It is interesting that it has become regarded as one in many summaries because of its use of alien cultures as “metaphors” for interracial conflict (especially in the original series and TNG), but I don’t think its portrayal of people (read: human beings) of color can qualify as being truly progressive. I don’t know if this is something that the producers are conscious of doing or if they are still stuck in a 90s model of colorblindness as evidence of progressivism.
I was intrigued by your mention of ethnic programming on the old UPN network and, questions of the appropriateness of minority portrayals in the media aside, if we could tie this back to fandom through the lens of genre. I had also noticed that many of the shows that are distinctly ethnically aware tend to be sitcoms. Whether this is a good thing may be another discussion in itself, but there do not seem to be many strong fan communities of the type that Jenkins describes surrounding sitcoms in general. While I am a fan of several sitcoms, I am unaware of a high level of vidding and fic-writing surrounding these formats. When it comes to fandom and race, I wonder if it is the racial divide within the high-profile fan community that is strongest, or a combination of genre and other factors like class which seem to overlap a good deal with ethnicity in media and media consumption.
Although I don’t think that fandom is as racially diverse as, you know, the actual world is, I think it seems to be less diverse than it actually is because most people don’t seem to identify their race online. They also don’t tend to identify age, location, class, and sometimes gender, although all of these things can sometimes be guessed at from context.
In my experience, there isn’t a lot of talk about race in fandom. Part of that, I think, is because of what’s already been mentioned: as much as Star Trek claimed and perhaps tried to be progressive about race, it never really got there, and no other major fan texts that I know of have even made the effort. Note that the *only* actors in LotR that weren’t of European descent were dressed as orcs, for example — and I don’t really think that’s PJ’s fault nearly as much as it’s Tolkein’s, and he didn’t even try to claim that portraying elves and dwarves was analogous to portraying other races. I don’t think people see fandom as being ideally a utopia race-wise nearly as much as they see it as ideally a utopia gender-wise. So, because people see fandom as a place that *should* be more gender-equal than the rest of the world, they fight for that and talk about it, whereas equality of representation for ethnicity isn’t as much of an active fight (again, in my experience).
(To take a page from Lauren’s book, AND NOW SOME STUFF SO LONG NO ONE WILL READ IT hoorah, sorry guys (and Bob):)
Howwwwever, there have been a couple of really interesting controversies lately about race in fandom. One is that the girl who was cast to play Lavender Brown in the first 5 HP movies was black (general note: I really apologize if I accidentally offend anyone by using incorrect terminology), and she got recast when it came time for her character to be making out with Ron. Lavender’s race is never mentioned in the books, so many argued that there was no reason to replace her with a white actress:
In this thread, someone argues that “you can tell from the way the books are written that Jo has no prejudice what so ever” and there proceeds to be a general agreement that if the character is *supposed* to be white, she’ll be played by a white actress, and if not, she won’t get recast, on the optimistic assumption that J.K. Rowling has ultimate say over who’s cast in every single role.
There was a grassroots movement, as seen on Facebook, to “Keep Lavender Brown“, which ultimately failed.
This page has a nice summary of the rationale behind the movement.
It’s sort of interesting to note that the fanon I’d always seen about Lavender said that she was white and blond, despite there being no canonical support for either characteristic. Many fans I knew (and I) assumed she was blond because she acts like an idiot a lot and is placed at times in opposition to Hermione, a brunette, which says something about the way we see blonds (sigh).
A more serious problem came up in Doctor Who fandom that I mentioned a loooong time ago in passing. Frankly I don’t even feel comfortable summarizing the sides, so I’ll just give the background and then a whooole lot of links. On Doctor Who, the only constant character is the Doctor, who has been played by a series of white men. The Doctor is accompanied by a “companion” who changes every season or so. Although these companions have been men and women with equal enough frequency that no one’s complained of sexism, they’ve always been white until last season when a woman named Freema Agyeman was cast to be the Doctor’s new companion, Martha. Agyeman is of Iranian and Ghanian descent and natively English; Martha and her family are black. Her siblings and parents appear as minor characters on the show. Most of the third season was plotted before she was cast, and the producers weren’t specifically looking for an actress of color to play her, meaning that the major story elements were conceived of in a “race-neutral” manner.
While Agyeman was on the show, there were three pertinent story developments: 1) Martha, a med student, fell in love with the Doctor, who was blind to her affections and, she felt, many of her merits as a person, as he was still in love with Rose, his previous companion, who was white and blond and (no class commentary on my part meant whatsoever) a shopgirl. Rose, furthermore, had a bumbling best friend named Mickey, who was also black. 2) Due to a complicated series of events, the Doctor and Martha were in pre-WWI England for a while and the Doctor effectively lost his memory. Martha looked over him while posing as a maid. 3) Due to another complicated series of events, Martha’s mother and sister were also put into maid’s uniforms, this time due to coercion from the major villain of the season, while the Doctor was again…indisposed.
So. Racism?
neadods on Mickey, Martha, and the Message that Doesn’t Belong on Who
karnythia on Martha, Mammy, and yet more ‘isms’ in the Whoverse
hth-the-first offering a helpful hint for the colorblind: BE LESS BLIND
spiralsheep’s In Which our heroine explains to Doctor Who fans about “Mammy” in Britain
shehohashop arguing that ‘Blindness is not a moral positive. Blindness is an inability to perceive.’
And parrotfish’s The myth of colorblindness: more on race in Doctor Who.
As always, the comments are as interesting as the body of the posts themselves.
I guess my point with all of this is that as much as I agree that fandom seems to be dominated by middle-class white Americans, questions of race and ethnicity are there and are sometimes pretty hotly debated, bringing up the larger issue of fandom not being for race and ethnicity, like it’s not for gender, a wonderland of happiness and equality.
I don’t think the racial and ethnic specificity of media texts can be attributed to avarice on the part of producers. Commercial texts always have a targeted fan-base; the producers speculate about how to attract the largest number of viewers, and the best way to achieve this is often by catering to a specific group of people. The desire to maximize profits is pretty much typical of any capitalistic firm. Therefore I don’t think its appropriate to blame individual producers.
Most major networks seem to target majority as opposed to minority groups because as these terms imply, this is the way to attract the greatest number of viewers. But several stations that target minority groups have sprung up in recent years. They notice that people within these groups are unsatisfied with “white” broadcasting and thus recognize them as potential viewers. If these new stations broadcast “white” shows, they can’t compete with the major networks, but if they try to appeal to a minority fan-base, they can. But as with producers at the typically “white” networks, I don’t think it’s right dismiss them as “guilty” of avarice or racism. Rather, I think this practice illustrates the larger problem of racial division within society.