dissatisfaction in monochrome

by @ssnnas

She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”

And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

If TV shows end, studios close, bands fall from the charts to prove that the vulnerable are not there to be used and discarded and not believed.

We were born into a world at war. Between the monsters that destroyed our cities and the monsters we created to stop them. We thought we had sacrificed enough. But the war we thought we finished is just beginning. And the only thing standing in front of the apocalypse is us.

https://www.youtube.com/user/billwurtzYeah, that’s the guy who made History of Japan, that really popular pit of memes. I’m probably not the only person that really wants him to make more shit, but that’s gonna be hard.

If you haven’t heard of this thing yet, it’s called patreon. See how he gets only 72 bucks a month for stuff from 26 people?

These are his views on the History of Japan video. Bill Wurtz deserves to have more support for the stuff that he is doing, and he should be able to make a decent living out of this entertainment. I would appreciate if you either reblogged or donated to his patreon: http://patreon.com/billwurtz

I don’t even know Bill Wurtz personally but he needs more support

EDIT!: If you can’t support Bill Wurtz financially through patreon, please please please check out his youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/billwurtz

EDIT!!:

We have officially reached 36 patrons, $100 per month, and over 1000 notes. This has been an amazing breakthrough, thank you tumblr, and keep spreading this around! (Still can’t even begin to believe this has only been less than one day)

EDIT!!!:

… you manage to be (or at least fake) calm and sensible about a lot of contentious issues that most people get angry about; how do you do that? I mean, *I* sometimes want to punch the people who reply to your posts, and I’m not even the one they’re talking to. But you reliably manage to treat people respectfully and as though they’re making legitimate points, even when as far as I can tell they’re actually yelling angrily at some alternate version of reality found only in their heads. How do you manage that (I assume the time-and-space distance of text helps), and do you think it’s always worth the effort?

This is something I’ve been struggling with a lot in the last week, so I’ve kept coming back to this question. 

I think that doing good is really really hard. I think it is demanding - that making the world better takes not just good intentions but active thoughtful effort, and I think that there are some really important moral questions like factory farming that basically everyone is getting catastrophically wrong all the time. And - it’s not like I am an exception and find morality easy, or always get it right. It’s hard for me and that’s part of how I know it’s hard for other people. 

And I know a lot of people who had such an unhealthy relationship with morality that where they are now is ‘fuck goodness and virtue and ethics and principles’ and this is much much better than where they were before, and almost everything I have seen of obligation has been people hurting because of it. 

So - if you find goodness vast and complex and demanding and hard, and you know everyone else is finding it that way, and there’s tons of work of screaming moral urgency all around that desperately needs doing, then what?

I don’t know, it just makes me want to give everyone a hug. No matter how angry they are, or how awful they are, or how much of the problem they are directly causing themselves. Because - wow, that’s a shitty hand to be dealt, and it is the hand that has been dealt to literally everyone, and most people are dealing with a lot of really bad stuff on top of that. 

(Internally there feels like a lot of difference between condescension - “well, it’s not like you could be expected to do better” - and compassion - “wow fuck this isn’t fair but here we are, what have we got with which to do better?”)

Imagine, I don’t know, you accidentally travel back in time eight hundred years. Everyone around you has terrible values - they probably don’t think slavery is especially objectionable, they probably think torturing people to death for theft is a reasonable thing to do, they probably think burning the neighbors to the ground for having the wrong interpretation of who is pope is really important. 

You could write them off as loathsome human beings. You could declare them innocent because how could they have known better anyway? Or you could say “they believe terrible things and they didn’t have a chance and how do I give them one?”

Sometimes it’s easier for me to extend compassion at that distance, to people whose evil opinions are uncontestedly evil and a vanished kind of evil and not an evil that is still hurting my friends or still defended as just. But I don’t want to only have compassion where it’s irrelevant. And I think the same reaction is all the more important when you don’t have the benefit of eight hundred years of hindsight from which to say “yep, in fact everyone will get over that prejudice and agree it is stupid”.

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories. 

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls. 

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left. 

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left. 

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left. 

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right. 

Until these are the bowls. 

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other. 

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl. 

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference. 

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss. 

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world. 

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat. 

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant. 

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.