What if we discriminate using culture or nation instead of race? I heard people loves to discriminate based on nations, even a few wars has been about that…
Or hell, we can still talk of race, as I’m not a “Caucasian white”.
I’m Spanish, and I’ve been watching Hollywood movies all my life about North-american people. Some of them very about American leitmotifs. And I don’t care if the characters aren’t Spanish, a movie is a story, who cares about their nation or race.
Hell I’m a geek, I read a lot of scifi and fantasy, where sometimes people are blue or they have tentacles instead of hands, and I still don’t discriminate. A good story is a good story. If you need something/someone to “identify with”, maybe you have a few biases.
And still, as a kid, I remember having thought a pair of times: “How cool would be if this badass character [usually a villain :P] is from Spain like me? It would rock!”
I now analyze my thought process and yeah, I just wanted to have my ego pleased in a very silly way.
So, the most funny thing about people complaining about diversity [in fictional works, not stuff like jobs] is that isn’t really a great social cause as they seem to believe. It’s very superficial, if you think about it. They just want artists to stroke their ego putting fictional people of the same genre/race/culture so they can point out at their screens and see “cool someone like me in a movie!”. It’s a fight against discrimination, yeah, but discrimination of… having or not something akin to ‘fanservice’, wanting to being pat in the head as the white people has been pat in the head all this decades in films.
Do you know what artists I know that are experts in putting characters that are to be totally identified by the consumer?
Manga artists that make crappy shojos or shonen where the main character happens to be a “very average” high school kid, just like their target market segment (totally coincidence!), but somehow that totally average high school kid happens to attract hot babes/dudes or be a special child or whatever. Pure fanwank that works, because people are that shallow. But it isn’t something to strive for.
Is there some cultural blindness by part of the creators? Let’s say it: yes. It isn’t coincidence that a Eastern European white guy has written a fantasy of white people where the black people are pretty far away in a distant land. People are formed by their environment, it’s how it works. Let’s be nice and suppose the average American would have mixed a bit more the races, following the same logic, if he has lived all his life in a city of more intermingled races. It would be natural for him.
But why that fictional setting has to imitate real life region B instead of real life region A? There is too some cultural blindness in the second group in thinking that the “right” choice is automatically to be like the region where they lived all their life, just because there are more representation of other racs. Pure American-centrism. Are they going tot complain if a Chinese movie is full of Chinese people or if a African game is full of black people? Well, poles are 97% of the total population of Poland, diversity is also accept country full of white people and their white works, same they would have to accept an African work full of black people.
