hey hey night vale fandom i feel like this is relevant
So let me see if I’ve got this straight, WTNV fandom.
Fandoms don’t exist in vacuums. People in fandoms usually participate in or are aware of multiple fandoms. What happens in one or more fandoms can and does affect what happens in other fandoms.
This, WTNV fans, is the world in which you are operating:
- The world where white nerds threw tantrums when the new Spiderman was revealed to be Hispanic.
- The world where white nerds threw tantrums when Idris Elba was cast in “Thor” to play a minor character who is also an alien.
- The world where white nerds excused racist casting-calls for “The Hobbit” which specifically called for Caucasian actors, and in which white actors played characters written as being dark-skinned in the original books.
- The world where white “Sherlock” fans threw giant tantrums over the casting of an Asian-American woman as Watson in “Elementary”.
- The world where white actors were primarily hired to play dark-skinned characters in “The Hunger Games” adaptations (Katniss herself being the most egregious example), and where white nerds STILL threw tantrums when black actors were hired to play characters written as having very dark skin/hair/eyes, because those white nerds didn’t picture those characters as being anything but white.
- The world where Johnny Depp plays a Native American the Lone Ranger and it’s okay because he’s physically attractive to many white people.
- The world where white nerds didn’t care when a white man was hired to play the Prince of Persia, to name but one of a multitude of examples which Googling could no doubt provide.
In short, this world we live in is one in which white nerds have both a history AND a currently-existing policy where every single character in every single bit of media they consume MUST be white until proven otherwise. But it’s more evil than that: these white nerds have an often-unarticulated-but-very-strong presumption that whiteness is inherent to personality. The only reason anybody could possibly object to Spiderman being Hispanic is if they’re operating from the belief that being white is somehow just as integral to Spiderman’s abilities and personality as being bitten by a radioactive spider. The only reason anybody could possibly object to Watson being played by a woman of Taiwanese descent is if they believe Watson can only be Watson if he is played by a white Englislh man (and in fact, many “Sherlock” fans argued EXACTLY THIS before “Elementary” even aired). Why object to an amazingly talented black actor being wasted on a pretty minor role where he’s an alien unless you think all the aliens must be white? Are you really unaware that there are quite a few people of color who live in various Scandinavian nations nowadays?
So, Night Vale fans, what does this have to do with you?
Well, I’ve been watching the fandom sort of at a distance since I became aware of the show. And I’ve got to admit that the main reason I conceded to listening was when Flea told me the fandom was using Evan Adams as a physical model for Cecil. I just read “Kindred” by Octavia Butler and that book has put me off consuming media with white protagonists, to be perfectly honest. I feel cheated that all my white nerdy friends have never heard of Butler and never would have recommended her books as a result, even though she was a badass and one hell of a writer. So palaceofposey’s fanart of Cecil as modeled on Evan Adams helped sell me on the damn podcast in the first place.
And I naturally evolved this headcanon where Night Vale is populated almost entirely by people of color, and they’re located in one of those Southwestern states run by Republican douchemongers who ignore Night Vale’s existence because it’s just a bunch of Not Whites anyway. And Desert Bluffs is like the white enclave community right next to The Poors Of Night Vale, where gruesome horrors are tolerated with a creepy smile and a can-do attitude and a woeful obliviousness to the suffering and death surrounding them (because they are willing participants). And the whole show became this metaphor in my head for race in the United States.
And then? Then a bunch of almost-always-white nerds pump out fanart of Cecil with light silky blond hair and pale skin unaffected by living in the fucking desert and big pretty light eyes (all three of them). Then those same nerds throw tantrums over how they’re TOTALLY not racist, and anybody who calls them out is being double-backflip-reverse-racist. Then those same fans’s view of Cecil as a white man starts becoming the standard view of almost-entirely-white fandom.
WTNV fandom: you do not, I repeat, exist in a vacuum. Am I supposed to pretend this isn’t depressingly familiar behavior? That there’s not a well-established pattern of (nearly always) white fans erecting a Whites Only sign outside their fandom, in many different and very prominent fandoms, and that this problem is not old and in fact continues operating to this very day?
This is what is meant by institutionalized racism. Sometimes people make choices and those choices are based on facts. The vast majority of the time, choices are made on instinct, emotional states, and previous programming (we use the euphemism “experience” for this). Whether we like it or not, people are deeply influenced by the world in which they live. If you emulate your parents, they have influenced you to do so. If you hate your parents and try to do the opposite of whatever they’d do, they influenced your behavior just the same. As a white person, I know that I was programmed to view people of color as suspicious and monstrous from an extremely young age, primarily by never socializing with, or seeing my parents socialize with, people of color.
Not all of the programming took, but I assume there’s unexamined land-mines of racism in the landscape of my mind. So does every white person in the United States. White people seem to deal with this by detonating the mine right out of their mouths, when it’s actually smarter, safer, and kinder to keep your fucking mouth shut and think about why you thought that. You will find that you remember an authority figure—parents, usually, but not always—who taught you by repetition to think that thought in the first place.
In the case of entertainment media, white people are trained by repetition to believe that all stories must have white-skinned protagonists unless they are explicitly told the protagonist is otherwise. If you want to overcome your programming, WTNV fandom, you need to stop acting like your fandom is magically untouched by the racism which taints every other fandom ever.
Go ahead and imagine Cecil as a blond white dude. But ask yourself why you must project whiteness onto a character who is never identified by race in the source material.
(Source: shoujocowboy)
i want to be the night vale twitter when i grow up