Runcible Rape

So, if you're a person, you're probably aware of the latest spasm of insane nonsense in Republicans' ongoing battle against women who have bodies: Todd Akin's assertion that pregnancies resulting from rape were rare enough to be a non-issue in outlawing abortion, because the wombs of women who were victims of "legitimate rape" had a mechanism by which they would "shut that whole thing down."  This fantasy must be a great comfort for anyone who is genuinely troubled by the idea of a woman suffering through an additional humiliating, expensive, life-threatening ordeal after a traumatic assault, yet who must still demand that such a woman be prevented at all costs from accessing safe abortion services.  Akin was at first roundly decried by all sane people everywhere, then right-wingers demanded that we shut up about how terrifying it is that this idiot is allowed to make laws on health care and science and that we ought to only talk about how bad the economy is.  After that, a number of defenders of the sanctity of life until birth emerged from their Morlock caves, and now we have a media "debate" about "legitimate rape" just as we had a "debate" about going to war in Iraq, torture, global warming, et al, ad nauseum.

I am, by nature, an internet feminist, and so in this case I want to discuss issues of language.  When Akin laid his giant head on the sympathetic lap of Mike Huckabee the day after his moronic remarks, he explained that he had misspoken, and that by "legitimate rape" he had of course meant "forcible rape", rather than something that was worth the little ladies getting all het up over.  This term, "forcible rape", has a long history in the anti-abortion fight, most recently when Paul Ryan and Todd Akin forcibly inserted the phrase into a bill which would have denied any federal funding for impoverished women's abortions unless they were victims of rape.  "Rape" not being rapey enough, the co-sponsors made sure the bill read "forcible rape."

Now, "forcible rape" is a bit of a poser, as a phrase something like "close proximity" or "unexpected surprise" or "personal friend."  It modifies a noun by placing before it an adjective which is a central defining characteristic of that noun.  "Rape" means sex which is forced, coerced, produced through threat or violence.  Now, I'm not against differentiating between different circumstances of rape via categorical adjectives, if it helps break the idea of stranger-rape being the typical case, which arguably phrases like "date rape" or "acquaintance rape" do.  But the very use of the words "forcible" and "rape" in conjunction suggests that people who use it believe that there are other species of rape which are important to distinguish from this type.

Indeed, the one which anti-abortion campaigners suggest as an example of non-forcible rape is statutory rape.  Now, I haven't thought much about statutory rape since I stopped wanting to have sex with teenagers, at around age 19, but I think I have a pretty good handle on the right-wing objection to statutory rapes being included in the category of "rape" for the purposes of judging victims' merit.  The idea is that that slutty teens (abetted by the satan-worshipping lesbians at Planned Parenthood) will be so keen to get free abortions that they will (falsely, it is assumed) accuse venerable older men of consensually raping them, so the state had better at least ask the teens to display some vaginal bruising to back up their accounts.  Again, this is a fantasy of female evil created by anti-abortionists to escape from the knowledge that they are hurting children, rape victims, and women in general with their stance against modern fertility control methods.  Statutory rape is not a perfect legal construct, but it codifies the idea that extreme power imbalances, such as those that exist between children and adults, create a coercive atmosphere in which the child's consent is not legally meaningful when compared to the adult's coercion.

Anyway, all this is to suggest that, when you see the phrase "forcible rape" used as though it were a serious concept, you might well want to substitute "runcible rape," because "runcible" is a delightful nonsense word created by Edward Lear, and "forcible rape" IS A NONSENSE TERM CREATED BY POWERFUL SOCIOPATHS.

You're Doing Gender Wrong

I enjoy watching pop videos, I guess.  I'll certainly watch them for hours until I've had my fill.  Sometimes I even like the songs.  But mainly I enjoy watching brief linguistic and visual spectacles on the Semiotics Channel.  Take Mike Posner--if you listen to his lyrics, he just sounds like a classically-trained date rapist.  Classically-trained in date rape, I mean, not music.  But the videos for his odious songs are great!  "Cooler Than Me" has him stealing sunglasses off hipsters and looking into different film universes through them, and in "Please Don't Go" the emotional pain of a breakup causes the world to fragment and artifact around Posner like a badly-streamed video.  And every week produces a new guilded turd of similar caliber. 

Generally these days UK pop videos are fashion shows whose central themes alternate between a kind of Babestation Lite and personal affirmations that you are, in fact, okay to just be yourself, even if maybe you don't look and/or fuck like the video people.  So basically music television has become women's magazines, with all the conflicting messages about women's roles that that implies.  I'm open to the idea that young women may be in need of someone to tell them that becoming the world's most lifelike Realdoll is only one of the many things they can aspire to, of course.  I'm just not sure that message is best delivered by a writhing professional dancer with no skirt or trousers.

One style of video I have come to find especially grating is the specific claim, made over and over again, that women are in fact just as good as men and can achieve anything they want.  This was a brave sentiment in 1961; the fact that it's still in heavy rotation in 2011 would seem to imply that it hasn't really soaked in, despite the very different material conditions of first-world women these days.  These songs--Jessie J's "Do It Like A Dude" is the one in current rotation, but previously we had Alexandra Burke's "Broken Heels", a couple entries in the genre from Beyonce, and basically Pink's entire oeuvre--they appear to stem from a sense of inadequacy at not being male, a kind of "penis envy", if I may coin a phrase.  And the answer in the videoverse is to do what men do, but sexier. 

This approach misses out one of the major conceptual gains of the feminist movement, aside from how it got pretty much everyone to agree that there was some historical point at which women were getting a raw deal (currently debates tend to rage about whether we should be locating this point in the past or the present).  The gain I'm referring to is the capacity to question the gender binary.  Rather than attempting to slavishly duplicate men's lives, only with killer heels and bouncing a baby on the hip, we could use feminist intellectual tools to stand back and ask whether the mass of men have it so good today that women ought to expend their energy on catching up. 

Also of note: I am apparently so straight these days, or Jessie J's hoodie-playsuit and wacky gurning antics are so terrible, that I didn't notice that the backing dancers for her number are largely delicious-looking Afro-Carribbean butches.  J, much like Lady Gaga or myself, identifies as bisexual, so I guess I'm meant to feel some kind of solidarity.  I don't.  Also they keep mentioning that she has a heart condition.  The phrase "save your breath" springs to mind.

My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

I got arms that long to hold you

Where I'm going I'm pretty sure I'll still need eyes to see, but--sadly? I don't know--I doubt I'll need a lot of the other body parts I collected over the years. A number of the more portable ones are already packed away, but those pictured here must remain in my room or, in the case of the torso, be stealthily abandoned in a distant public area after dark.

I decorated these when I was younger and worse and had fewer
Sharpies, so, you know, sorry you had to look at them.

Glass head appears courtesy of Pier 1.

Barbie leg at left for scale.

A keychain and...not sure why that has a safety pin. Punk rock!

Some human hair.

My closet.

Okay, so why do I have these? I'm more into skulls these days, but I think it had to do with wanting to seem dangerous, yet clever and sexy, like a serial killer. I never felt like other people regarded middle-class pacifists as sufficiently dangerous for my taste. But I also surmise that my motivations had something to do with the suggestion in Killing Us Softly that women are often depicted as disembodied parts rather than full people.

I saw Killing Us Softly 3: Son of Softly once in a college sociology class, and once in a college feminism class, and once before that in a context I don't remember.  It begins with Jean Kilbourne relating how she, a simple young woman working in the advertising department of a medical journal, happened to invent the idea of "taking ads seriously" in the 1970s when she started pinning sexist ads up on a big board in her home and then asking her friends to assist her in rendering a critical reading.  I can't really fault her for promoting a DIY approach to forming a personal philosophy, but I can't help but be irritated by anyone advancing the intuitive, anecdotal I-just-know approach to scholarship that is her stock and trade.  Anyway, she goes on to claim that violence against women is "widespread and increasing", which would have been quite a bold thing to say in 1999 since it would have so drastically contradicted so many reports and studies discussing the dropping crime rates at the time.  I imagine it's just a consequence of not updating your slideshow that often. 

Kilbourne argues, over clips of leggy women voguing as cameras follow them at a low angle, that "over and over again, just one part of the body is used to sell products, which is of course the most dehumanizing thing you can do to someone. Not only is she a thing, but just one part of that thing is focused on." Leaving aside a whole bunch of begging the question there, to what extent is this true, and to what extent does it matter? I guess after giving the whole thing around ten years' thought, I'll go with a) to some degree and b) somewhat. Close-up framing is basically an inevitability in image creation since, oh, ever, but at the very least since Birth of a Nation. And the way advertising works--the constant, increasingly sophisticated attempts to create, shape, and respond to consumer demands while always showing them something memorable--any part of the body that's fair game to show is going to be continually refigured and repurposed to make it new. That would probably be well and good if making a display of the perfected aspects of women's bodies weren't of such special interest to this society at the same historical moment when we seem to have reached the maximum tolerable level of equality and autonomy for the distaff and have started trying to shout back the tide.

But to what extent does this sort of compartmentalization and objectification affect women's self-conception, thereby insidiously undermining efforts at equality? When asking a question like this--essentially "is this a cultural construction or are women just like that?"--it's useful to be able to look to men. Sure enough, men are reported to experience great distress when the value of their bodies is abstracted to the dimensions of a single appendage. That level of distress, however, doesn't seem to have greatly affected their overall performance as a gender. It really seems to have more to do with, you know, choice and opportunity and all that, than whether they're humiliated in advertisements.  Because boy, are they ever.

The control of images and words is overly weighted as a tool for equality, I think, because words and pictures are fun to blether about. Controlling them seems quite easy compared to enacting policies to lessen the gulf between rich and poor, which would probably do the most good for everyone involved. But it isn't easy. Words and pictures are always going to break out of restrictions, because that's just the way people do. And I daresay, if political energy is indeed a finite resource (who knows, right? But I bet I wouldn't be so interested in the study of images if it weren't for Kilbourne) that it could be better spent studying to organize than studying to adbust. I understand, however, that my opinion may lose some of its authority when you see that I bought human hair.

Lain will be accompanying me to grad school if I can just
figure out a way to remove her head.

Instructive Failures

 I am something of an academic by nature, and it is to this I attribute my (apparently unusual) high tolerance for didactic cinema.  I'm not saying I could sit through Crash without yelling at the screen or anything, but I stuck with Studio 60 long after the show had dropped all pretense of being anything other than Aaron Sorkin's Chew On That Hour.  Sorkin is that entertainer who pulls a rabbit out of a hat in a novel and entertaining way, and then when the audience clamors "Amazing!  More tricks!" just pulls the same rabbit out of some slightly different hats over and over again until everyone has left.  It's not an uncommon mode for artists, and the first rabbit you see can be really something.

I never watched Sorkin's most beloved creation, The West Wing, but I feel like I understand the kind of catharsis it provided to progressives rendered catatonic by the actions of the Bush administration to have a shadow cabinet play out their Al Gore fantasies.  I'd seen Sports Night and enjoyed as much of it as I understood when it was first on, years before my partner told me he was really getting into Studio 60.   We watched almost all of the doomed first season together.  It's probably telling that I've seen the show up to the big nineleveny cliffhanger in which a main character's life hung in the balance, and have not yet felt a need to see whether she lives or dies.

What finally killed my willingness to indulge Studio 60's oratory, that I might learn something about how American topical sketch comedy shows are formed, was a dawning awareness of a certain tendency it had in common with a lot of modern screenwriting.  It was what instantly put me off Fringe and of course Heroes: a compulsive need to subvert audience expectations that turns pathological.  The fall of Heroes between its first and fourth season is...well, already this post is of extreme length, and I could go on essentially indefinitely about what went wrong there, breaking it down fractally, shot by shot.  But basically what killed Heroes was trying to surprise the fan community by refuting their expectations, especially when they expected a sensical, meaningful plot. 

For Fringe, the expectations it was subverting were those created by The X-Files, which in 1993 was itself subverting an audience expectation by creating a skeptical and science-minded female character (who was still always wrong) and an intuitive and credulous man who seemed to assemble his near-unfailingly correct interpretations of weird events by the same word-association method the Bat-Man uses to solve the Riddler's clues.  Fringe, then, seemed to be based on the assumption that audiences would find it daring to see a credulous and intuitive female investigator paired with a skeptical and science-minded man, and would not correctly identify their subverted subversion as a tired stereotype.

The subversion I remember best from Studio 60 is when Evangelical funnywoman Harriet is misquoted in an interview in a way that suggests she believes that homosexuality is uniquely sinful, after which she is violently attacked by some large angry gays.  You may recall this particular story--in which god-fearing men and women innocently expressing a nuanced version of their beliefs are physically threatened by the same depraved sex perverts who control the media and twist around their words to suggest that not wanting gays to marry is somehow an expression of hate or fear--from the recent Supreme Court case on whether petition signatures from Washington state's Referendum 71 would remain public record or become secret, in the interest of protecting people who feared that their public expression of bigotry might cost them something.  (The court ruled 8-1 that the plaintiffs' wish to keep their terrible opinions between themselves and their legislature did not override well-established laws promoting civic transparency. The plaintiffs continued plainting after this, wishing the court to note how unfair it was that they had no chance of proving how fellow co-signers of this, their attempt to protect the solemn gravity of marriage by keeping it safe from people who really really want to get married while reserving it for people who have been cooling on the whole idea for 40 years, might be targeted with a similar level of harassment to two men who want to hold hands.)  So I found that to be a somewhat irresponsible bit of writing, in that, like most of Harriet's character on the show, it felt intended to pander to and soothe the ruffled feathers of a moderate Christian audience I'm pretty sure was never watching.

The second notable subversion attempt I wanted to talk about is one I misremembered, which came up during a discussion with my partner of blogospheric rumblings on whether Olivia Munn's disastrous Daily Show appearances were yet another manifestation of The Daily Show's "woman problem".  The female problem in question is one that should be familiar to students of television: shows, but especially comedies, have trouble attracting and keeping female writers even when they are actively seeking them out, let alone when they aren't.  My partner mentioned that Studio 60 had had a subplot involving a lawsuit by a former writer, Karen, alleging that the writers' room on the show-within-a-show was no more than a boys' club and that she had been fired for being insufficiently like the chick in the men's mags who just, you know, likes totally normal, pudgy guys and wants to wear push-up bras and Daisy Dukes and get beaten at video games.  I recalled that the episode contained a sequence in which Karen's lawyer asks around the show to find out why people believe she was fired, and to a man, they answer "Because she wasn't funny."

This did indeed happen, but it's worth noting that none of the characters expressing this opinion were actually contemporaries of the fired writress.  Also, when I went to look at more detailed summaries of the episode, I noticed that the final word on the matter came from one of the executive producers reading out the actual text of the complaint, which begins to make Karen look like she might not be talking completely out of her ass.  The content of the scene is based on a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against the producers of Friends by shitcanned stenographer Amaani Lyle, where besides discussion of David Schwimmer's orientation and Courtney Cox's fuckability, she alleges that the writers had collaboratively constructed a parallel Friends in which Joey was a serial rapist.  Regrettably, this is not the plot of Joey.  The complaint in Studio 60 relates an extensive public discussion of various ways the male writers would fain fuck Harriet--on an altar, with a crucifix, in Pat Robertson's mouth, etc.--which would itself constitute excellent grounds for a religious discrimination lawsuit.  The executive producer is of course deeply troubled by this, because Harriet is his woman.  So let's call Sorkin's opinion on the frivolity of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits--because I think it is pretty safe to say that the words coming out of his characters' mouths are intended primarily to advance his opinion--ambiguous.

It sounds like I'm saying I disliked the show for not toeing my particular party line, and maybe that's the case, though I wouldn't be watching much TV if I couldn't put my politics to one side in the interest of entertaining myself.  I think it's more that I don't really believe Sorkin thinks that scary gays will bash Christians or that bitches be trippin', but that he is condescending to the imagined prejudices of his audience in order to feel he has leeway to make his point.  I'm not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom here: all reviews I've read of Studio 60 involve some variation on calling it condescending.  But, you know, it's not awful to be condescended to if you're genuinely ignorant on a subject and are interested in getting a quick grounding.  What Sorkin managed by talking down to me on subjects I know something about, and by not seeming to mind if he was getting them all wrong, is just to make me doubt his credibility on anything I thought I might be learning from him.  The only times I've ever minded a lecture are when I know I have a hell of a lot better handle on something than the guy who's trying to explain it to me in very small words.

Blood & Salt

The things that managed to interest me about Salt (a largely unremarkable entry into what, to me, will henceforth always be the Jack Bauer genre) are, unsurprisingly, gender issues, courtesy of Angelina Jolie.  By the IMDB's account, Tom Cruise was originally attached to play the part of Evelyn Salt, but backed out when he discovered the film would portray him married to the Marxist from The Counterfeiters.  The part was subsequently rewritten for Angelina Jolie, which seems to have mainly involved changing the pronouns.  I approve!  Jolie is a fine actor and high in essential charisma, though I always wish she'd get back up to her Gia weight because right now the way her robust head is set on that tiny, ropey neck makes her look like a spoon.* 

But imagining each scene as it would play with a man of equal height also allowed me to imagine I might be observing something about the culture, something I could later use as a jumping off point for gassing about gender equality in a blog entry.  So: I believe that Tom Cruise's torture scene would have been longer, and I believe the discussion I had in the car driving home wouldn't have been about whether crashing a van into a police car would have snapped Cruise neatly in twain.  I believe, too, that I can back up my belief with comparisons to pretty much all the other 24-style action thrillers, which depict with loving detail the suffering of their leads.  To keep this fairly brief let's just take it as read. 

It would be usual to follow this line down a regular feminist argument: women are presented in media as weaker than men in their ability to withstand pain, when in fact blah blah childbirth, oorah.  I feel that, besides being the kind of bullshit that social conservatives use to argue that men and women may have their separate spheres, but each is of equal importance and equally fulfilling, this argument is just missing something.  I can't truly blame anyone for missing it, because, pardon me for getting all Morpheus here, we're soaking in it.   What we've become blind to by its constant naturalization in basically all media is violence against men, aka "violence". 

Men are constantly situated in media as the ideal subjects of violence.  I'm not saying there's not also an agenda running in some Hollywood films of punish-the-feminine; that would be a silly claim.  But we perceive depicted violence against women as particularly brutal against a backdrop of near-constant violence against men.  Salt, for example, kills somewhere between twenty and a hundred men in her film and I think kicks a lady cop in the chest, but the villain is unforgivably evil because he shoots a female attaché after shooting a dozen equally defenseless dudes. 

A conversation about how men have it kind of rough is uncommon in feminist circles, though I know so many women with interests in genders outside their own.  Primarily, if one brings up the fact that men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women and that this is normalized and celebrated in media, it is viewed as an attempt to undercut and equate violent victimization of men with dehumanization and control of women, drawing attention away from this important subject.  Fair enough, but who's going to stand against systematic, socially-approved gender-based violence if not feminists? 

Now, I enjoy very much the privilege of being considered unhittable.  I've only been punched once, in the fourth grade, and I doubt there are many men who can say the same.  But it seems to me that the protection I enjoy from being considered an appropriate target for violence isn't based on a recognition of my human dignity, but rather on a societal calculation of the value of protecting me as a resource.  Men's value is calculated differently, and so they are naturalized as the targets and perpetrators of violence.  While they are overrepresented as CEOs and politicians, so too are they overrepresented as the homeless, prisoners, and soldiers.  The Expendables, as opposed to Precious.

So one of the things we could do to increase gender equity in the affluent West is increase assaults, robberies, and carjackings against women, and of course by women.  We could get comfortable with the idea of more women being homeless and more women being exploded and shot fighting for us.  We could accept that whatever men are experiencing is the gold standard for what should be considered human, and strive always toward getting women to experience the same shit.  Or we could acknowledge that men are disproportionately the victims of violent crime, stop viewing and portraying that as perfectly reasonable, and try to, you know, decrease violence, particularly state-sponsored violence, against them, just like we campaign and rail against violence toward women.  That's the option I like. 

* It is wrong to focus on women's appearances in this manner.  Terribly, terribly wrong.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.