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certified-crystalclod · 3 years

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Why you should stop making characters “aracial”

We see aracial characters mainly in podcasts or tabletop games. Sometimes they can be seen in comics. Aracial characters are made so the fans can assign them their own race/ethnicity headcanons. They could also be seen as cop outs because the creator doesn’t have to put effort into putting representation into their media. It’s just an easy way to make everyone happy. This post will tell you why aracial characters actually doesn’t help create representation and actually lessens it.

(TL;DR: Aracial characters cause harm because the default headcanon is to make the character white. There’s no good representation with it and causes discourse and BIPOC fans to be attacked and leave the fandom. To portray a good BIPOC character, do enough research to where you feel comfortable writing them. To have some gender-ambiguity, set a region with no specifics. For example, say your character is South-East Asian but no specific country. Representation in media matters and doing a cop-out isn’t the way to do it.)

Before we begin, let’s start with some definitions.

Aracial: without race or race distinctions

Race: the idea that the human species is divided into distinct groups on the basis of inherited physical and behavioral differences

Ethnicity: the fact or state of belonging to a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition, common set of folklore, ancestry, language, history, society, culture, nation, religion, or social treatment within their residing area

Nationality: the state of being part of a nation whether by birth or naturalization or ties to a specific nation

BIPOC: Black, Indigenous, Person of Color. Used when referring to all 3. POC is not synonymous with Black or Indigenous.

Race coding: writing an aracial character to be a specific race/ethnicity without explicitly saying it in the story

Headcanon: to note a particular belief which has not been used in the universe of whatever program or story they follow, but seems to make sense to that particular individual, and as such is adopted as a sort of "personal canon"

Canon: A piece of work -usually in reference to literature- that was written by the original author

I may not use all these words but they are nice to know. Lets begin.

Why are aracial characters bad?

Aracial characters aren’t inherently bad. If you make your characters race-ambiguous you’re not some type of bad person who’s too lazy to do real representation. You’re just got the right idea, wrong action. Aracial characters are just... not the best. Sure this means you can make your favorite character whatever race/ethnicity you want, but this can also cause discomfort and discourse.

In the early stages of fandoms (2000-2010s) lots of headcanons for these characters were mainly white. There was hardly any representation so you had to make it yourself. When there was representation, it came off as back-handed and hardly had any effort put into it. The art would look great but they didn’t have the right hair or facial features. They just looked like a white character with a tan.

Then came race coding. Creators, purposefully or accidentally, would put in subtle hints at a characters race/ethnicity. This would be through the way they talked, the celebrations they had, their traditions, or their struggles. This mainly happened with alien or non-human characters. Examples of these would be the majority of the Homestuck trolls, Steven Universe gems, and various podcast characters. BIPOC and white fans would figure out their hints and announce them, saying it would be wrong to headcanon them as anything otherwise. This is true as doing so would erase their identity and representation. As this grew, racism within fandoms grew. People would say “they don’t have a race! We can depict them however they want!” and throw fits when told the damage they’re doing.

Aracial characters can allow the freedom to depict your fans to project onto your characters but it also allows racism and attacks on harmless headcanons. It seems they can work but most of the time they do more damage.

How can I play/create a BIPOC character without accidentally doing harmful stereotypes?

You should always do research. When you play a wizard, what do you do? Research the spells it can do, the languages it can learn, and other important factors. When you play/write a BIPOC character, do the exact same thing. Research experiences, languages, clothing, and traditions. Is your character poor, well-off, or rich? Do they have immigrant parents, are they an immigrant themself, or have they been a citizen all this time and not understand the struggles of undocumented people? Are they in touch with their culture or slowly losing it? All of these can affect the way your character acts, talks, and grows.

If you’re a white person or simply someone who is writing out of your culture, this can be scary. You don’t want to accidentally say something wrong or put a harmful stereotype onto your character. To avoid this, research the stereotypes. See how they are subtly put into media like movies and TV shows. You may have seen some and not noticed because you never knew. When you have these, you’ll know how to avoid them.

Don’t see your character as a political thing. If you think “this is groundbreaking. I’m playing/writing a character of a different culture and must do everything right! I will be the best!” then you’re doing it wrong. Portray your character as you would if they were the same race as you. Or if you had them as aracial. Do not see them as scary because you might fuck up or brave because you’re stepping out of your comfort zone. They are a human being just like you. Sort of.

How can I allow my audience to portray my characters how they want and also have proper representation?

Maybe you don’t want to have a set race/ethnicity in place because you’re afraid or uneasy. That’s alright. Some of us need baby steps. What you can do is give them a region or race but no specifics.

For example, you can have a Latine or Hispanic character without specifically saying “They’re Mexican!” or “They’re Chilean!” This allows this group of people to say “Hey! I’m Latine or Hispanic! I can portray them in my culture!” This allows your audience to have a variety of cultures to choose from.

Having free-range like this with your characters is fun. It allows people to choose what they think best fits the character while also having some representation. It’s not a constant battle of headcanons and constant white characters. Nothing wrong with them it’s just seems to be the default when it comes to headcanons.

Representation in media matters, especially in ones where there is free will to interpretation. BIPOC do not get to see ourselves in media everyday so when we can put it in ourself, we do exactly that. We make the characters live our lives through our traditions and music and style and just everything.

When the representation is poor and lazy, it shows how much a creator doesn’t care about their audience and how they only care about their image. This can be seen in aracial characters. It’s just a cop-out so creators don’t have to worry so much about it and leave the work to everybody else.

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rebeccaseattle · 5 years

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Stand and Deliver

I am, practically speaking a math teacher. Technically speaking, I am a mild/moderate special ed teacher, but I teach math, to special ed kids, mostly.

Growing up, one movie I saw over, and over, and over again in school was Stand and Deliver. It was played almost every day we had a sub or the teacher didn’t have a plan, etc, etc etc. Then, my senior year my school theater program (of which I was highly involved) decided to do the play version. I essentially memorized that film. If you don’t know the movie, is carefully based off a true story of the famous math teacher, Jaime Escalante, an immigrant from Bolivia, whose teaches/coaches/mentors a handful of underserved high school students from a gang-ridden Garfield High School in LA into taking and passing the AP Calculus exam. These students success is so impressive, that they naturally are accused of cheating and the students have to retake a harder version of the test to indeed prove they do know math that well.

Anyway, now that I am working math students, I asked myself, should I show the movie to my students? Somehow no one in my school seemed to know about the film. I’m sure things have changed in the 15 years since my own high school experience, and I’m in a different demographic. So I researched the movie carefully and how different educators felt about it.

I ended up reading a lot about Jaime Escalante and the true story the film was based on. It was actually pretty close, a lot closer than your usual Hollywood films, it’s inaccuracies were few and not to dramatic.

I found one fascinating blog post all about why teachers should not show this film to their students. One major point was, while Jaime Escalante was clearly an amazing educator who lead his kids to success, he was very controversial. Not only at Garfield high school as is portrayed in the film for pushing his kids so hard and setting high expectations for him, but also for later in life as he supported “English Only” movement in education. Many had the opinion that such an outlook is oppressive to students learning English as a second language. Most of the blog readers I read who said this, were like me, white, and native English speakers. I found this fascinating. I don’t necessarily agree with the English only movement, I don’t have an opinion and don’t think it’s my place to form one at this time. However, I think it’s possible to separate one person’s endeavor from another and appreciate one without the other. For example, I do in fact like Einstein’s general theory of relativity, however Albert was a huge jerk to his first wife, Meliva (whose name appears on one of the early drafts as its often said she helped with the math involved) and left her penniless with 3 children he refused to support for over a decade. Still Albert Einstein did do an amazing job of figuring out, testing, and working on this theory and that’s still amazing and inspiring. So I don’t think that was a valid reason to not watch it.

Another educator wrote that Stand and Deliver was in the same spirit of “Dangerous Minds” which is definitely a movie about white saviorism. That movie, whose title alone offends me, also based on a true story, is about a white lady who comes to a gang-ridden high school and teaches English to underserved populations and like reduces gang violence or something (it’s been a while). That of course is a theme I need to avoid at all costs, savorism is a horrifying myth I seen projected onto my job, more on that later. For more fun we can watch the SNL skit “Pretty White Lady.”

However, Stand and Deliver is not the same as Dangerous Minds. The teacher is not a white person, but an immigrant himself who is technically classified as Latino. Okay, yes Bolivia is a very different country than say Mexico, or the other countries my students, or his, may come from. And I’m sure they don’t speak the same type of Spanish is Bolivia then say other countries, but still he’s an immigrant literally speaking the same language as his students.

Also, the other factor I had to point out, is the math in Stand and Deliver, is actually very real math. In college I learned an excellent short cut to integration by parts, that my professors learned from the movie. Today things are a lot better, but in that era, the math in movies, was actually quite fake, and bad. The math that is done in SD, is actually quite accurate. It’s real calculus, algebra, and trig. I figured if nothing else I could show it to my kids purely for them to try to recognize the math happening in the movie.

So I played the movie for my students and kept an open mind. I tried not to lecture or get to preachy toward them, I just wanted to be open to how they responded and then figure out if this was an advantageous movie for them to see. I did tell them to be aware of the various math tricks that happened in the movie.

Also it was my first time watching the movie since I learned calculus and was very excited to revisit these scenes and examine the math.

So here is the results:

1. My kids loved the movie. If for nothing else, they liked watching a movie in their math class. They would much rather watch movies then do math. It didn’t matter that the movie was nearly half a century old, still better than doing a worksheet or something.

2. One thing that I noticed is that a number of my kids liked that the movie was about latina/latino students. A number of my students have a lot of pride in their ethnicity. While there are a number of white people in the movie, they show up in minor supporting roles. Much like the reverse of what we see in Hollywood today. The movie really is about Latin Americans and they seemed to appreciate that they were in the foreground. The minute it started, one of my students who had never spoke to me before then, told me about one of his favorite old movies, that was casted completely by latino actors.

Furthermore, while Escalante is central, and he is portrayed as a hero, the real heroes of the movie are actually the high school students. It was very much a movie about kids in high school that delved into their family lives, dating issues, career decisions, conflicts with friends, etc. So it’s also a movie about high school kids.

3. In addition, despite the movie being around 40 years old, there were a couple of cultural elements my students seem to relate to. For example, the way my students greet each other and their particular hand shake (which I can’t do, but am learning, growth mindset) was done in the movie by adults. In the scene when Guadalupe was putting her brothers and sisters to bed, one of my students, who identifies as Mexican, called out, “That’s a Mexican household there. That’s my cousins” My students commented on what food was being cooked in scenes and compared it to their friends and families’ cooking. In the conflict scene where Escalante confronts the college board representatives about the accusations, they were super engaged, predicting, accurately what Escalante would say next and how they would have handled it. They pointed out to me we have the same desks as the students in the movie (facepalm here). They even explained to me, the subtext of the gang violence around Angel in the movie. This is something I didn’t see or understand when I was a kid. Of course this wasn’t the whole movie. A lot of the scenes culturally didn’t make sense to them, they were outdated, not relatable, or relevant.

4. They liked that the movie talked openly about racism. Going back to that scene where Escalante confronts the school board, they were super engaged. They got very excited when Escalante confronts the college board representatives, and the fact that they were sent out because of their distinct ethnic backgrounds. They liked that the racism was being called out rather than everyone turning a blind eye and closed mouth. Most of my students, regardless of ethnicity were engaged in that part.

Some of the kids though just spaced out, or were on their phones. I still have mixed feelings about the film, and would welcome other’s opinions about showing stand and deliver as a math teacher. It could be they were just grateful for a chill day.

For me, I noticed a few things.

1. The math is very accurate, and there are a couple of really cool math tricks happening in it. Namely integration by parts and the trick to multiply by nines using the fingers.

2. I liked that Escalante pointed out the Mayans understood the concept of zero long before europeans did. I personally also like pointing out white people did not invent algebra, middle easterners did. I think the history of math is important, but is often whitewashed to be just about the Greeks and Romans. Often in history, only white history is told and the accomplishments of groups is silenced.

3. The only math flaw I saw in the movie was when Escalante read ln(x-1) as the words L N. Any Calculus teacher worth their weight would of course read it as “The Natural Log of x minus 1.

4. There are all sorts of subtext I understand now as an adult, that I didn’t as a kid. The fact the Ana leaves the test early so others won’t be accused of cheating off of her, or that Guadalupe doesn’t have a place or time to study when she’s at home.

5. There is a honestly, the kids are clearly treated unfair by society and the movie points out this truth. The kids rise above by having to work extra hard to retake the test. I don’t know about the message of having the kids to work extra hard, I don’t want to get to preachy in my profession. But at least it acknowledges the unfair, racist elements the kids deal with, rather than be in denial or victim blaming I often see. It does have the message that the the kids are up to the challenge. They may have to work harder, but they are certainly underestimate by those in power over them. That makes an interesting point, but I’m not sure what it is yet.

Anyway, I showed the movie this year, and I would love other’s thoughts about it.

#stand and deliver #Jaime Escalante Math Class White privledge

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