You'd be right and you're not being dumb.
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- Thread starter Jarrod
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You'd be right and you're not being dumb.
I certainly don't think you're dumb, but strictly technically speaking, the two aren't mutually exclusive...
Well, you've got to remember, ADF wrote that bit (the prologue of Log Ten) 40 years ago. He was not yet the experienced world traveler and student of world cultures he is today. And yet, that bit has always struck me as postulating a future in which none of us turn our backs on our cultural heritage (even if there are parts of it for which we feel profound shame, e.g., slavery, cultural suppression, genocide).
Yeah, sure, but my point is, it was (and sadly still is) a Western stereotype to assume that African cultural heritage automatically meant jungles and lion safaris. The Bantu-speaking peoples from whom Uhura is supposed to be descended were farmers and pastoralists, not hunter-gatherers, and they entered the Iron Age some 2500 years ago or more.
You could do something comically fun with this - due to the loss of records in ww3 someone with an entirely wrong idea of their cultural history.
Say a Scouser who wears a shellsuit and a curly wig to honour his ancestors because they have mistaken comedy stereotypes for reality.
I am of Norwegian ancestry. I'm also of German and English ancestry, and the other 25% is essentially a "Heinz 57" of Western Europe. President Barack Obama is of both Luo Kenyan and mixed European ancestry. I have family friends whose father was Armenian, while their mother was Danish. I'm not sure, but I am under the impression that Chelsea Chen, the young concert organist, is of mixed Asian and European ancestry.
Taking more than purely academic interest in "ethnic purity" is for racists. Who are we to say (or care) whether Lt. Uhura is of exclusively Bantu ancestry?
Also, I can't imagine anybody in his or her right mind attacking a lion as a source of food, unless there were no easier prey available. Members of a hunter-gatherer culture, if they had any common sense, would probably do their best to avoid lions, rather than attack them. I should think that hunting and killing a lion is exactly the sort of thing farmers and pastoralists would do, in defense of their livestock (or their friends and families).
Wasn't there some news story last year about a white American man who adopted a son he thought was Korean, ensured throughout the son's childhood that he was in touch with Korean culture, only for them to discover in adulthood that the son was in fact of Japanese ancestry?
That is totally not the point. It's not about Uhura's "actual" ancestry, because Uhura doesn't exist. It's about real-world authors who attempt to portray fictional characters of other cultures without an adequate education about what those cultures are really like. If you look at attempts in the '70s and '80s to portray cultural diversity, they were well-intentioned but often limited to stereotypes because their white creators didn't know enough about other cultures to offer anything more. So heroic Asians were always martial artists, heroic American Indians were always expert trackers attuned to nature, heroic Africans always came from thatched-hut villages in the savannah rather than major cities, etc. It's not about any single character -- it's about the fact that every character of a given ethnicity was automatically portrayed in the same way. Positive stereotypes are still stereotypes. (And the African stereotypes still persist to this day. That's why I'm so glad the Black Panther movie made the effort to portray African culture authentically, something that's still vanishingly rare in American media.)
You get no argument from me that we had a long way to go then, and we still have a long way to go now. My point is that, given that ADF was far from the mature and experienced world traveler he is today, he probably did better than anybody had any reason to expect.
And I know from ethnic stereotypes, even if I've never had the misfortune of being subject to them myself. Like Captain Kirk, I "was never a Boy Scout." I was, however, a "Y Indian Guide" for a brief time. Just long enough for me and my father to learn that (1) we had more to teach the YMCA about a healthy father-son relationship than they had to teach us, (2) at that particular place and time, it was mainly being run as a "good old boys' network" for the dads, and (3) I found the juxtaposition of YMCA-style Christianity with stereotype-laden notions of North American Native Culture more than a little bit disturbing.
And I know from ethnic stereotypes, even if I've never had the misfortune of being subject to them myself. Like Captain Kirk, I "was never a Boy Scout." I was, however, a "Y Indian Guide" for a brief time. Just long enough for me and my father to learn that (1) we had more to teach the YMCA about a healthy father-son relationship than they had to teach us, (2) at that particular place and time, it was mainly being run as a "good old boys' network" for the dads, and (3) I found the juxtaposition of YMCA-style Christianity with stereotype-laden notions of North American Native Culture more than a little bit disturbing.
Which doesn't mean we should be forbidden from pointing out his past mistakes and shortcomings. Acknowledging mistakes is the only way to overcome them. I'm not blaming him. He did the best he could for the time. But he was limited in what he could do, and looking back in retrospect, we can see those limitations.
Like I said already, even the most progressive portrayals of ethnic character types a few decades ago look badly dated and stereotyped today. Filmation's Asian and Native American characters were admirably progressive in a time when most animated shows had all-white characters or maybe the occasionaly token black guy, but in retrospect, we can see how stereotyped they were. There's always a learning curve to these things. It's important to recognize that progressive portrayals in the past were still backward in some ways, because that keeps us from getting too complacent about our own attitudes. I always try my very best to portray cultural and sexual diversity in a positive light, but I won't be surprised if people a generation or two from now look back on my work and find it naive or stereotyped in some way.
This reminds me of something that bugged me about my geography and history education in school, they focused on the US, and Europe, and maybe a tiny bit on on the big cities in Asia. They never came out and said, but they pretty much left you thinking that most of the world outside of the handful of major countires and cities, lived in thatched huts out in the middle of nowher. I honestly didn't even think there were actual real modern cities in places like Africa, Asia outside of Bejin and Tokyo, or the Middle East until I started watching foreign movies, travels shows, and documentaries as an adult .
Yes, it's shameful. That's largely why I went back to college as a history major and concentrated on non-Western and world history. I wanted to correct the gaps that my previous education had left. And it was a revelation. What typically gets taught about history in American schools is just a fraction of the whole picture, and a highly biased one.
Where I went to school in Canada it was the same thing, focused on Canada and Europe, with a little bit of American history.
In High school however world history was an optional course, which I did take. But I don't think we learned anything about Africa now that I think about it.
In High school however world history was an optional course, which I did take. But I don't think we learned anything about Africa now that I think about it.
And anything that wasn't that was "Here's some brief info about all the major empires that existed before the U.S. became the modern empire". Ancient Rome, Ancient Egypt, Semi-Recent England, etc.
On the one hand, I can kinda/sorta see how they got there when designing the curriculum. On the other hand, what the actual fuck!?
Which is not even close to all the empires -- just the ones Western civilization can claim as direct ancestors. There's no discussion of Chinese dynasties, no Maurya and Gupta Empires, no Mughal Empire, nothing about the Mongols except to the limited degree their history impinged upon Europe, no Mali and Songhay, no Bantu migrations, no Great Zimbabwe, little about the spread of Islam and even less of Hinduism and Buddhism. And let's not even get started on how Native American history is misrepresented. Other cultures are only talked about in the context of their interactions with the West, and even then their causal influence on Western history is ignored -- for instance, the fact that the Black Plague originated in and spread extensively through Asia for decades before it hit Constantinople and points further west. Or that the thinkers of the European Enlightenment were influenced by ideas from Confucianism, such as the idea that rulers would lose the mandate to rule if they failed in their obligation to ensure the well-being of those they ruled.
I did learn about most of those in AP World History. That course went through tons of things each at least in brief.
Naturally, of course, I learned more by reading in my own time.
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