tl:dr – i have no satisfactory answer for this.
a friend recently asked me to recommend a film where the male and female protagonists save one another regularly and equitably (other than “the force awakens”), i recommended “romancing the stone” – which is one of my favorites from the 80s.
my friend (who is also a POC) replied “i used to have that on the list, but doesn’t the blatant racism offend you?” i wrote back that “if blatant racism in films and tv offended me, i wouldn’t watch films and tv.”
i followed up by saying that “i can’t even watch a latino director win an oscar without hearing sean penn make a joke about his green card”.
as a latino, the cultural signifiers that the mainstream thinks there something disreputable, and vaguely below board and criminal, about my mere presence are pretty much everywhere (try explaining to a trump supporter that puerto ricans are actually born american citizens and watch their heads explode). even the shows that are supposedly doing good things as far as representation goes are chock full of tropes, characters, and scenes that – to me – keep my culture and my people in a stereotypical space of representation.
because i am also a heterosexual, cisgendered male, light-skinned/of european descent, and come from some measure of privilege, i have also heard – and understand – the suggestion that it is easier for me to affect a tough outer shell to all insults, real and perceived.
but the truth is that beyond the very grossly obvious infractions to which we can agree – like, say, ahem, episode 307 of “the 100″- everyone has a very different filter. one person’s microagression is another’s delightful turn of phrase – even when these two people occupy the same oppressed or marginalized cultural/ethnic/gender space.
for example – just today, i had an exchange of messages with a viewer who took offense at a joke that i had vetted by my go-to gay friends before putting in a script (my colleagues thought it was funny and not offensive, and understood the intent, but to this viewer, it served as a trigger, and i feel awful about that)… and that speaks to the issue of representation in a writers room, and in the culture as a whole: you can, and should hire diverse writers, but there is no guarantee that they will take offense at the same things that any other person in their ethnic/gender group, because these groups themselves are extraordinarily diverse.
it also raises the question “is it even fair to hire a person for their individual voice as a writer and then expect them to be the ‘UN security council’ of what people of their ethnicity/gender/sexual preference will or won’t find offensive?” i assure you, this issue is an ongoing source of vexation for me and every other “diverse” writer out there – and we vacillate between being excited to keep infractions against our ethnicity, both macro and micro, out of scripts, and being annoyed that people keep coming to us and asking “hey, you’re latino – can i get away with saying this?”
as i am already committed to giving no satisfactory answer on this, let me make a suggestion – when you wake up and step on the floor, you have committed a destructive act in that you have helped wear down that floor in some infinitesimal way. no matter what you do, the very act of existing creates change that some will understand as damaging. it is inevitable. once you know and accept that, the question becomes not “how can i go about the world doing no damage?” because therein lies madness, but rather “how can i do the least amount of damage?” – and the answer to that is through mindfulness to intention, and by trying to be as open to learning and understanding regardless of your mastery over whatever it is that you do.
so that’s my unsatisfactory and lengthy answer to your simple question – is it useful to keep your mind open to an understanding of what is, isn’t, or could be offensive? yes. is it necessary to keep an open mind so that you don’t just coarsely dismiss things brought to your attention as offensive? yes. is it useful to identify microaggressions – absolutely. is it a good thing to go about your life trying not to offend anyone you do not categorically and intentionally want to as part of the provocations of your art? of course.
will everyone agree about whether they are offensive, even when they are in the aggrieved ethnic/gender/sexual preference?
you tell me.
I think this is a really good articulation of some of the tough problems we’re facing as a culture/community right now.I really like the point that the goal is not to be working towards answering the question, “how can i go about the world doing no damage?” because that is an impossible question to answer.
But what we can do is figure out ways to conduct ourselves so that less conflicts arise and so that we can work through our past conflicts and better resolve any that do arise.
I think you’ve modeled some really excellent examples of how to move towards that way of relating to others over the past few weeks and I really admire that.
Do you think that it is important to identify and eliminate (racial/gender/sexist) micro-aggressions? I fear that far too many writers in charge of our televised “fables” often miss the finer points of undoing bigotry. Mostly because I have encountered far too many people who do not consider micro-aggressions to be a valid concern. But they are like little cuts that don’t hurt much at first, yet over time will amass into something incredibly painful and damaging. Do you happen to notice them? <3
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