{"id":32248,"date":"2017-05-07T01:00:23","date_gmt":"2017-05-07T05:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32248"},"modified":"2018-09-18T14:05:21","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T18:05:21","slug":"qotd-the-privilege-of-colourblindness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/05\/07\/qotd-the-privilege-of-colourblindness\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The privilege of colourblindness"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Slate <\/em>magazine, SF author Ursula LeGuin complains that the producers of the new Earthsea <\/em>miniseries have butchered her work<\/a>. One form of butchery that she zeroes in on is by casting characters who she intended to be red, brown, or black as white people.<\/p>\n

I have mixed feelings. LeGuin has every right to be POed at how her intentions were ignored, but on the other hand my opinion of her has not been improved by learning that she intended the books as yet another wearisomely PC exercise in multiculturalism\/multiracialism.<\/p>\n

I liked those books when I read them as a teenager. I didn\u2019t notice any character\u2019s skin color. I would really prefer not to have had my experience of those characters retrospectively messed with by LeGuin\u2019s insistence that the race thing is important.<\/p>\n

Note: I am not claiming that all casting should be colorblind. I remember once watching an otherwise excellent Kenneth Branagh production of Much Ado About Nothing<\/em> that was somewhat marred for me by Branagh\u2019s insistence on casting an American black man as a Renaissance Italian lord. This was wrong in exactly the same way that casting a blue-eyed blond as Chaka Zulu or Genghis Khan would be \u2014 it\u2019s so anti-historical that it interferes with the suspension of disbelief. Fantasy like LeGuin\u2019s, however, doesn\u2019t have this kind of constraint. Ged and Tenar don\u2019t become either more or less plausible if their skin color changes.<\/p>\n

But what really annoyed me was LeGuin\u2019s claim that only whites have the \u201cprivilege\u201d of being colorblind. This is wrong and tendentious in several different ways. Colorblindness is not a privilege of anyone, it\u2019s a duty of everyone \u2014 to judge people not by the color of their skin but the content of their character, and to make race a non-issue by whatever act of will it takes. (It doesn\u2019t take any effort at all for me.)<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “The Racist of Earthsea”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2004-12-16.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Slate magazine, SF author Ursula LeGuin complains that the producers of the new Earthsea miniseries have butchered her work. One form of butchery that she zeroes in on is by casting characters who she intended to be red, brown, or black as white people. I have mixed feelings. LeGuin has every right to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,41],"tags":[1235,651,351,912,99,85,101],"class_list":["post-32248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-esr","tag-multiculturalism","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-privilege","tag-racism","tag-sf","tag-tv"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8o8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32248"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32248\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32249,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32248\/revisions\/32249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}