I hear what you're saying, but I think that you've hit on both the difficulty presented by white privilege and the difficulty overcoming it.
This has been difficult for me to articulate, so I fear I didn't do it well enough in the post, but I think what I'm trying to say is this:
We as white people have the privilege of seeing a character as a character first, and a representation of a certain group second. This is because we have at least one character who represents us--and by 'us' I mean a white person--all the time. There's no hurt involved with seeing ourselves represented by a self-serving, brutish character like Jayne when we've got the wounded, noble Mal as well, or the sweet, moralistic Simon.
But when you're lucky to see even one main character who looks like you in almost any given media, what kind of character they are means as much as the colour of their skin. And constantly seeing those few characters so often portrayed as the sidekicks, the thugs, the straight men or the whores would hurt that much more.
So that seems to give me less leeway, but I'm willing to see what I can do anyway.
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25/3/09 03:28 (UTC)This has been difficult for me to articulate, so I fear I didn't do it well enough in the post, but I think what I'm trying to say is this:
We as white people have the privilege of seeing a character as a character first, and a representation of a certain group second. This is because we have at least one character who represents us--and by 'us' I mean a white person--all the time. There's no hurt involved with seeing ourselves represented by a self-serving, brutish character like Jayne when we've got the wounded, noble Mal as well, or the sweet, moralistic Simon.
But when you're lucky to see even one main character who looks like you in almost any given media, what kind of character they are means as much as the colour of their skin. And constantly seeing those few characters so often portrayed as the sidekicks, the thugs, the straight men or the whores would hurt that much more.
So that seems to give me less leeway, but I'm willing to see what I can do anyway.