From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Fri Mar 01 2002 - 18:27:22 MST
At 06:38 AM 3/1/02 -0800, Brian D Williams wrote:
>>>They had to have a woman captain, a black vulcan, a Native
>>>American first officer, I mean come on!
>>What? Do you mean that demographically the crew really should all
>>have been Chinese or Indian or Pakistani or some such blend? Or
>>(as I somehow suspect) ((incorrectly)) that they all should have
>>been white American males
>Have fun leaping to wrong conclusions and erroneous judgements
>about people do you?
It's true that the way I framed that comment made it sound like an
accusation of bigotry against Brian, which I certainly don't regard as
justified. Apologies to those who took it that way.
>No I simply mean it was over done, it clearly wasn't a random
>distribution, but the hand-picked signature of the reverse
>discrimination protocol known as "affirmative action".
>Thus defined as "politically correct".
The trouble is, as we've all discussed previously, there are different ways
of reading that phrase. Most here seem to find it quite transparently
acceptable: a scornful way to characterize mealy-mouthed euphemism, masked
special interests, Nanny Statism, etc. I, like many non-Americans, read it
as a code for annoyance at any disruption of the privileges of the status
quo. In the extreme, it links up with terms like Feminazi ( = woman
determined to join with other women in defending herself against individual
and structural oppression) and others I won't even cite because some here
would be offended by their very appearance. So when the word is bandied
about, it can *look* like a moderately sophisticated version of a redneck
shouting hatefully at everyone he despises. Brian is surely not one of
those people; I wish, then, that he and others would avoid using terms that
carry this connotation to at least some of the people in the room.
And beyond that is the fact that fiction, even mass market debased fiction
like the Star Trek franchise, is *made up*, and not obliged to be
*demographically representative*. If you wish to have variety and vigor and
conflict in your mise en scene, what better way to do it than by choosing
characters in those positions who in our world might *not* just yet have
attained such status? [And so on; boring lecture mode truncated.]
Damien Broderick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:12:43 MST