So let’s talk about representation in the media.
Now, this is something I care a lot about and have tried to study over the course of my time as a Communication Arts major. I also feel like this is my sworn duty as a Star Trek fan, a television series that broke serious ground with media representation in the 1960’s.
You see, representation of race in the media means a lot more than just skin tone. Other things need to be taken into account, like social class, economic status, etc. An exception to this is science fiction, of course, but for now let’s talk other stuff.
A lot of us here are children of the 90’s, so I’m sure many of us remember “token black character” from the cartoons of that era. You know the one. He was cool, his family was rich, and they had all the cool stuff. Now I may be white as all hell, but something tells me a lot of young black kids watching those shows couldn’t really relate to that very well.
Now let’s look at Homestuck. When I first read the comic I couldn’t see the kids as anything but suburban white kids (save for Jade). Even Dave just reeked of “white rapper kid who tries to be cool”, which is part of why he was so amusing to me. I initially saw Jade as Asian for a variety of reasons, but once they started getting into the characters’ backstories I could only see them as two families of white kids. And that’s… really all they are in this comic: two families.
Now were this science fiction, at least, science fiction set in the distant future of some sort, the character’s races would be purely secondary traits. Let’s look at Uhura and Sulu from Star Trek: The Original series. While creating the show, Gene Roddenberry wanted to make the show diverse, essentially an analogy for “starship Earth”. Characters like Scotty and Chekov were, by and large, stereotypes. Uhura was a bit different, however, as when creating the character with her actress Nichelle Nichols they deliberately worked to not make her from the United States of America, but the United States of Africa. Her native language was not English, but Swahili. Uhura’s appearance on the show was done less to give viewers someone to relate to, but rather, to show someone like them acting in a position of authority.
Sulu was actually a different case, as he was created to be anational. When creating his character they didn’t want him to be from any specific part of Asia, due to a lot of nationalism in that region. As such, he was named after the Sulu Sea, which touches many different nations in Asia. Sulu was eventually given the Japanese given name of Hikaru, but the character’s anationality still remains.
In Deep Space Nine, Avery Brooks signed on for the role of Benjamin Sisko, he did so largely because he liked the idea of playing a black single father, and he saw it as a great opportunity. The character was created with no race in mind, and his race was only relevant in two episodes of the entire series. This is doing it right.
In Voyager, however, we have Chakotay. Chakotay was of American Indian descent, but instead of doing it tastefully like the previously mentioned characters, they did so by indulging nearly every American Indian stereotype in the book, resulting in a portrayal that results in facepalms across the board. This is doing it wrong.
So what am I getting at here?
Sometimes, a lack of representation can be better than bad representation.
As a transgender person, I’m no stranger to this. Transgender characters, namely, transgender women, are played largely as jokes in the media, usually indulging in age-old stereotypes that we’ve been trying extremely hard to break free from. Transgender characters are VERY rarely played by actual transgender people, which unfortunately feeds into this.
This is also why shit like The Cleveland Show pisses me off. I understand that FOX wanted a cartoon featuring black characters to reach that audience, but putting Seth McFarlane in charge of it was the exact opposite of what needed to be done. Instead of hiring some young black producer who could actually write accurately from that perspective, they hired the same guy who does all of their other cartoons, making essentially the same show as Family Guy, just with all the characters a different race. Instead of solving the problem, it just created a new one.
Keep in mind, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be upset that media doesn’t represent whatever group you’re a part of–far from it. What I am saying is there are some people who aren’t exactly qualified to write about groups they aren’t a part of.
