Race + Fandom: When Defaulting To White Isn’t An Option
Lest anyone think that was a one-off occurrence, let’s once again look to fans of The Hunger Games–I know you’re not all bad, but ya’ll really need to send someone to get your cousins. Their racist stripes came out again, this time over the potential casting of Jesse Williams as Finnick Odair in Catching Fire. Williams is “not how [they] pictured” Finnick Odair to look, despite the character description: tan/golden skin, incredible sea-green eyes, bronze hair, and handsome.
Courtesy: myhungergames.com
Works for me.
But with the missing mocha (or any other word relating to some kind of warm and/or spicy drink) descriptor fandom defaulted because, even when considering a fictional dystopia, white privilege is alive and well. Any kind of representation is hard-earned, as if we’re not a viable fanbase to be won over. As if it wouldn’t be nice to have more than a handful of characters per fandom to dress as without receiving a side-eye. As if we wouldn’t like to be encouraged to reap the same benefits that active fandom participation encourages.
An article in the April issue of Wired Magazine confirmed and put into words a theory I’ve always secretly harbored: young people who engage in paracosmic play are developing creative skills that pay off later in “real life.” The examples are numerous (is the upcoming novel-turned-movie Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter anything but a historical AU fanfic?), though the article cites the Brontë Sisters (best known for Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre) as a prime example of those who began writing early through creating and building upon imaginary worlds as children.
It now appears that, like the Brontës, kids who engage in paracosmic play are more likely to be creative as adults. In 2002 researchers Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein conducted an elegant study. They polled recipients of MacArthur “genius grants”–which reward those who’ve been particularly creative in areas as diverse as law, chemistry, and architecture–to see if they’d created paracosms as children. Amazingly, the MacArthur fellows were twice as likely as “normal” nongeniuses to have done so. Some fields were particularly rife with worldplayers: Fully 46 percent of the recipients polled in the social sciences had created paracosms in their youth.
The full study can be read here.
Courtesy: sodahead.com
When I started in online fandom in 1999, mostly writing fanfiction, I was always looking for relatable figures to participate with. Often I had to create them out of thin air, or widely embellish the often slim back-stories that side minority characters were given in my favorite fandoms. I was willing to do the legwork that Joss Whedon wasn’t for characters like Kendra (and, fortunate enough to even have a personal computer to engage with the fanfic communities) and, thanks to years of not being recognised in Halloween costumes, I’ve grown used to having to explain that I’m dressing as non-white characters and why I’m doing it. But what happens to the kid who isn’t encouraged to participate because the white default removes the impetus from the start?
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