{"id":171,"date":"2004-12-16T18:55:03","date_gmt":"2004-12-16T23:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=171"},"modified":"2004-12-16T18:55:03","modified_gmt":"2004-12-16T23:55:03","slug":"the-racist-of-earthsea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=171","title":{"rendered":"The Racist of Earthsea"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In Slate magazine, SF author Ursula LeGuin complains that the<br \/>\nproducers of the new <cite>Earthsea<\/cite> miniseries have <a href='http:\/\/www.slate.com\/Default.aspx?id=2111107'>butchered her<br \/>\nwork<\/a>.  One form of butchery that she zeroes in on is by casting<br \/>\ncharacters who she intended to be red, brown, or black as white<br \/>\npeople.<\/p>\n<p>I have mixed feelings.  LeGuin has every right to be POed at how<br \/>\nher intentions were ignored, but on the other hand my opinion of her<br \/>\nhas not been improved by learning that she intended the books as yet<br \/>\nanother wearisomely PC exercise in<br \/>\nmulticulturalism\/multiracialism.<\/p>\n<p>I liked those books when I read them as a teenager.  I didn&#8217;t<br \/>\nnotice any character&#8217;s skin color.  I would really prefer not to have<br \/>\nhad my experience of those characters retrospectively messed with by<br \/>\nLeGuin&#8217;s insistance that the race thing is important.<\/p>\n<p>Note: I am not claiming that all casting should be colorblind.  I<br \/>\nremember once watching an otherwise excellent Kenneth Branagh<br \/>\nproduction of <cite>Much Ado About Nothing<\/cite> that was somewhat marred for<br \/>\nme by Branagh&#8217;s insistance on casting an American black man as a<br \/>\nRenaissance Italian lord.  This was wrong in exactly the same way that<br \/>\ncasting a blue-eyed blond as Chaka Zulu or Genghis Khan would be<br \/>\n&mdash; it&#8217;s so anti-historical that it interferes with the suspension<br \/>\nof disbelief.  Fantasy like LeGuin&#8217;s, however, doesn&#8217;t have this kind<br \/>\nof constraint.  Ged and Tenar don&#8217;t become either more or less plausible<br \/>\nif their skin color changes.<\/p>\n<p>But what really annoyed me was LeGuin&#8217;s claim that only whites have<br \/>\nthe &#8220;privilege&#8221; of being colorblind.  This is wrong and tendentious in<br \/>\nseveral different ways.  Colorblindness is not a privilege of anyone,<br \/>\nit&#8217;s a duty of everyone &mdash; to judge people not by the color of their<br \/>\nskin but the content of their character, and to make race a non-issue<br \/>\nby whatever act of will it takes.  (It doesn&#8217;t take any effort at all<br \/>\nfor me.)<\/p>\n<p>If I had produced the Earthsea miniseries or been in charge of the<br \/>\nart for her books, I would have both (a) respected LeGuin&#8217;s wishes<br \/>\nabout the skin color (she is the artist), and (b) regretted that she<br \/>\nwas so stuck on the issue.<\/p>\n<p>To paraphrase one of my favorite Zen Comix punchlines &#8220;I left that<br \/>\nissue at the riverside.  Are you still carrying it?&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=171\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Racist of Earthsea<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}