unfortunately I have been having the same struggle wrt westerns (the few books I've found that touch well on the actual variance of culture and such have not clicked at all in strength of plot :/ ) but if you're really searching for the Vibe (and yes this is a real stretch) I do recommend what can be had of the lobbyists' in-progress musical 'golden mountain'. there are six songs from it out currently and I do think they get at what you're asking for, or at least they do for me.

The famous 1869 photograph of the Golden Spike ceremony — Andrew J. Russell’s “East and West Shaking Hands at Laying of Last Rail,” at Promontory Summit in Utah — focused sharply on white people as the builders of the railroad. You can’t discern any Chinese workers in the glassplate exposure.  But some 20,000 Chinese immigrants were key to the building of the rails, which essentially laid the foundation for a modern United States of America.

Ooh this does look promising! It gets into what I was talking about with stories from the Wild West that are actually based in its diverse reality and are super interesting. I'll go take a look at it, thanks!

Also I feel like if you were going to accuse me of anti-asian racism for writing sex work into avatar fic, the fact I made up an in-universe jazz band called Yoshiwara's Children or had Jin sarcastically joke that she's in the situation she's in because she ran away from the upper ring to escape the inevitability of becoming a royal concubine instead of the vagueness of "making earth kingdom characters sex workers" which i'll be honest, i'm still not entirely sure if they mean headcanons for Jet and Jin or my own goddamn oc's, and yet.

Also that anon failed to mention my au where Yue and Hahn survive and marry and become wife exchange partners with Sokka and Suki and Sokka and Yue have tender, intimate quality time while Hahn comes to terms with the fact he likes getting beaten and roped up and it amuses Suki to no end. Like no, it's not just the east asian coded characters i write as taking people to bed for social and material benefits, and the native-coded characters tend to get written in more explicit and steamy terms. The only reason you wouldn't see that is if you're only looking where you want to look.

im literally only being paid $15 an hour for this

In fact, far more Asian workers moved to the Americas in the 19th century to make sugar than to build the transcontinental railroad [...]. [T]housands of Chinese migrants were recruited to work [...] on Louisiana’s sugar plantations after the Civil War. [...] Recruited and reviled as "coolies," their presence in sugar production helped justify racial exclusion after the abolition of slavery.

In places where sugar cane is grown, such as Mauritius, Fiji, Hawaii, Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname, there is usually a sizable population of Asians who can trace their ancestry to India, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia and elsewhere. They are descendants of sugar plantation workers, whose migration and labor embodied the limitations and contradictions of chattel slavery’s slow death in the 19th century. [...]

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Mass consumption of sugar in industrializing Europe and North America rested on mass production of sugar by enslaved Africans in the colonies. The whip, the market, and the law institutionalized slavery across the Americas, including in the U.S. When the Haitian Revolution erupted in 1791 and Napoleon Bonaparte’s mission to reclaim Saint-Domingue, France’s most prized colony, failed, slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. British emancipation included a payment of £20 million to slave owners, an immense sum of money that British taxpayers made loan payments on until 2015.

Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system.

In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment with “Gladstone coolies,” as those workers came to be known, inaugurated [...] “a new system of [...] [indentured servitude],” which would endure for nearly a century. [...]

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Bonaparte [...] agreed to sell France's claims [...] to the U.S. [...] in 1803, in [...] the Louisiana Purchase. Plantation owners who escaped Saint-Domingue [Haiti] with their enslaved workers helped establish a booming sugar industry in southern Louisiana. On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. [...] On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at US$200 million. More than half of that figure represented the valuation of the ownership of human beings – Black people who did the backbreaking labor [...]. By the war’s end, approximately $193 million of the sugar industry’s prewar value had vanished.

Desperate to regain power and authority after the war, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. They, too, looked to Asian workers for their salvation, fantasizing that so-called “coolies” [...].

Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. Bound to multiyear contracts, they symbolized Louisiana planters’ racial hope [...].

To great fanfare, Louisiana’s wealthiest planters spent thousands of dollars to recruit gangs of Chinese workers. When 140 Chinese laborers arrived on Millaudon plantation near New Orleans on July 4, 1870, at a cost of about $10,000 in recruitment fees, the New Orleans Times reported that they were “young, athletic, intelligent, sober and cleanly” and superior to “the vast majority of our African population.” [...] But [...] [w]hen they heard that other workers earned more, they demanded the same. When planters refused, they ran away. The Chinese recruits, the Planters’ Banner observed in 1871, were “fond of changing about, run away worse than [Black people], and … leave as soon as anybody offers them higher wages.”

When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.” That racial reasoning would justify a long series of anti-Asian laws and policies on immigration and naturalization for nearly a century.

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All text above by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022. [All bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

Oooooh… Cowgirl AU got me feeling things…

Clorinde as the sheriff who cuffs you and tosses you in a dark little cell in the town jail so she breed you in private…

Lynette and/or Arlecchino as wild bandits, bringing you back to their camp in the middle of the desert to fuck you by the campfire… the town thinks you’re an innocent maiden who’s been kidnapped just as she was due to be happily (unwillingly) wedded to a good (horrible) man, but you were actually seduced by their roguish charm…

Maybe Beidou is one of the Chinese workers the rail company imported as cheap labor to work on the new rail line coming though*, and she sneaks into your fancy house at night so she can fuck you nice and good before you shoo her out at dawn so your father doesn’t learn you’ve fallen in love with one of those ‘damn [insert slur typical of the 19th Century here]’…

*per the Smithsonian, 1/6 of Chinese immigrants in the 1860s ended up working on railroad construction, and the Guardian puts a more specific number of Chinese working on railroad construction at roughly 15,000.

Ohmygod this is all really cool! Sheriff Clorinde and Arlecchino + Lynette as bandits?? That’s so hot jaidjsjdn 💕

I will say though, despite how cool it is that you know so much about the historical accuracy of the cowboy times, I’m going to leave out any racial/discriminatory topics since it can be really sensitive/triggering for my readers.

If I choose to write an AU based on historic times (Ex. Empress AU, Pirate AU, Cowboy AU, etc.) there will be little to no mention of discrimination even if it’s historically accurate. This blog is safe space for all sapphics 💘

i keep seeing that picture of the Chinese railway employee (Han Junjia I believe, if the People's Dailt article I found is the same as the post I'm thinking of) posed in front of a steam locomotive in the 80s when he first started work on the railway side by side side a more modern picture of him in front of a high speed train. i don't think the post is that complicated- it like illustrates the development of china and the rapid transformation of the network and the country. from the 1980s to the current day -but the "before" picture - in the 1980s - is like. not the place where the Chinese state railways started and is worth discussing because it is an impressive development which I'd imagine a lot of the people who see it take for granted.

the locomotive is a JF class. the class of locomotive which would become the JF was originally designed and built in America and sent to Manchuria to work on the Japanese colonial railways and designated "Mika" or 'Mikako". After World War I, Japan assumed operation of the Sifang locomotive shops built by the Germans during their occupation of China, which was then used by Japan to produce Mikas of the same design as those orders from the United States. After China was liberated by the PLA the railways were recategorized and standardized and the Mika was renamed JF standing for - Jie Fang (Liberation). Spare parts leftover at the Sifang Locomotive Works from the Japanese Occupation at the Sifang Locomotive works were used to produce the first locomotive produced in the People's Republic and the first truly indigenous locomotive - JF no 2101 - which would enter service on railroads run for the benefit of the country and its people rather than colonial powers. The JF would be the backbone of the Chinese railway in the early years of the People's Republic as the railway network grew and the country rapidly industrialized. it was a reliable design examples of which lasted in service for at least 86 years. by 1980 the entire railway network had undergone a drasric transformation compared to just 40 years previously- from one with locomotives built by colonial powers to work on colonial railways to domestically produced locomotives to work on railways which were for the benefit of the country itself and not a colonial power.

even at the time the "before" picture in the aforementioned post had been taken, there had been people who had witnessed a massive and almost unimaginable transformation within the Chinese railway network. who started as employees in Japanese colonial railways or German colonial locomotive works who ended their careers building locomotives in not only a newly liberated country but a worker's state. and i think that's as impressive if not more impressive than the high speed rail construction.

Dingess Tunnel

Hidden deep within the coal filled Appalachian Mountains of Southern West Virginia rests a forgotten land that is older than time itself. Its valleys are deep, its waters polluted and its terrain is as rough as the rugged men and women who have occupied these centuries old plats for thousands of years.

The region is known as “Bloody Mingo” and for decades the area has been regarded as one of the most murderous areas in all of American history.

The haunted mountains of this territory have been the stage of blood baths too numerous to number, including those of the famed Hatfield’s and McCoy’s, Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. Even the county’s sheriff was murdered this past spring, while eating lunch in his vehicle.

Tucked away in a dark corner of this remote area is an even greater anomaly – a town, whose primary entrance is a deserted one lane train tunnel nearly 4/5 of a mile long.

The story of this town’s unique entrance dates back nearly a century and a half ago, back to an era when coal mining in West Virginia was first becoming profitable.

For generations, the people of what is now Mingo County, West Virginia, had lived quiet and peaceable lives, enjoying the fruits of the land, living secluded within the tall and unforgiving mountains surrounding them.

All of this changed, however, with the industrial revolution, as the demand for coal soared to record highs.

Soon outside capital began flowing into “Bloody Mingo” and within a decade railroads had linked the previously isolated communities of southern West Virginia to the outside world.

The most notorious of these new railways was Norfolk & Western’s line between Lenore and Wayne County – a railroad that split through the hazardous and lawless region known as “Twelve Pole Creek.”

At the heart of Twelve Pole Creek, railroad workers forged a 3,300 foot long railroad tunnel just south of the community of Dingess.

As new mines began to open, destitute families poured into Mingo County in search of labor in the coal mines. Among the population of workers were large numbers of both African-Americans and Chinese emigrants.

Despising outsiders, and particularly the thought of dark skinned people moving into what had long been viewed as a region exclusively all their own, residents of Dingess, West Virginia, are said to have hid along the hillsides just outside of the tunnel’s entrance, shooting any dark skinned travelers riding aboard the train.

Though no official numbers were ever kept, it has been estimated that hundreds of black and Chinese workers were killed at the entrance and exits of this tunnel.

Norfolk & Western soon afterward abandonment the Twelve Pole line. Within months two forces of workmen began removing the tracks, ties, and accessory facilities.

Daguerreotype of an Asian man, possibly a Chinese railroad worker, America, c. 1850s

Since we collectively willed Claudie into existance I think our next target should be an Asian American girl during the 1880s with a story focusing on the railroad and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her father could be working to complete a railroad while her and her mother could live in the camp with them doing laundry or cooking for the workers. It would give us the first Asian American historical character (apart from Ivy who was put in a supporting character role), let us explore the midwest, combat racism, and trains are cool! Plus her story could have a special event where her mother makes her a bustle dress (so fashionable!)

Oooooooh her "saves the day" story could include a tornado even where she saves all the men at the railroad by warning them and the dress is for a special thank you dinner with the company owner..... (I lived in tornado alley as a wee one. First in Nebraska and then we were right next to Xenia, Ohio when it got decimated.)

Please signal boost!!

I am writing a book with a historic setting similar to the USAmerican west during the railroad expansion era. I would like to put significant focus on Chinese-American and Irish-American migrant workers, as well as various regional Native American cultures in this book. Although this book is a work of fiction, the country and setting is very much intended to be an analog for the real history of America. I want to shed more light on the stories of people who are largely forgotten in the modern accepted narrative of the time.

I’m doing a lot of research in order to represent these cultures as accurately and respectfully as possible. But I would really appreciate some help! I want to hear from people who have roots in the real story of the American west.

If you have Chinese lineage, Irish lineage, or Native American lineage (especially Monache, Paiute, Shoshone, Umpqua, Klamath, Piegan, Kainai, or Siksika) and would like to share your thoughts, input, stories (especially any family history!!) or just offer peer-review on relevant excerpts from the novel, I would be deeply thankful.

If this post doesn’t apply to you, please consider reblogging so it gets more traction and reach. Get in touch with me at [email protected] if you feel compelled! Thank you so much for reading. 💙☀️

This 1904 image of Chinese fishermen on a dock, having returned from Alaska to San Francisco, helps to illustrate Chinese workers’ huge role in the cannery business at the time. Chinese immigrants have a long history in Alaska; many Chinese immigrants built railroads, worked in mines, and played a large role in the cannery industry. Alaska’s wild salmon industry was turned into today’s international, multi-billion-dollar business by immigrants. Chinese immigrants were the first to take over salmon cannery work, and were followed by Japanese workers, who were then followed by Filipino workers, according to San Francisco Maritime’s Park Curator.

刻骨銘心：to be engraved on one’s bones and heart

To remember with eternal gratitude

Today I made a chalk mural dedicated to the spirit of Denver’s Chinatown. I only just recently learned about the horrific history of Denver’s Chinese population, but I’ve felt it’s absence deeply throughout my life, especially my childhood. I wanted to connect to the spirits of those who once lived here, long forgotten by residents. It’s done in chalk, so the next time it rains it will wash away as did the history of the Denver Chinese. However, I’ve included a “plaque” to replace the since-removed, historically inaccurate plaque. I don’t plan to remove it, so it will remain until someone else removes it or it falls away.

Alt text for plaque: Hop Alley/Race Riot of 1880

During the 1860's, the first Chinese immigrants settled in Colorado, drawn here by the completion of the transcontinental railroad as well as by other demands for cheap immigrant labor. Most immigrants traveled to America to attempt to earn enough money to send to their friends and families before returning to China. Living amidst persecution, poverty and wretched living conditions, they worked mostly in laundries, as house servants and in the mines. The Chinese immigrants were able to distinguish themselves as clever and hard workers across the country. The Chinese occupied neighborhood was bounded roughly by Blake and Market, 19th and 22nd Streets, and contained about 500 people. Despite being full of rich culture and history as well as hard workers, Chinatown was only known for its opium dens where one could "hit the pipe" or "suck the bamboo". For this reason it was given the nickname "Hop Alley". Opium was weaponized by white colonizers in the early 1800's in order to cripple and subdue a thriving empire that threatened the dominance that the colonizers held over the surrounding areas. As anti-Chinese sentiments and general xenophobia rose, the Chinese struggled to maintain their peace. On October 31, 1880, in John Asmussen's Saloon, located on the 1600 block of Wazee, an argument broke out between two men playing pool and some intoxicated white people. When the Chinese men attempted to de-escalate and slip out the back door, they were attacked and beaten, beginning Denver's first recorded race riot. About 3,000 people congregated quickly in the area, shouting "Stamp out the yellow plague!" Absolute destruction of the Chinese neighborhood ensued. Though many Chinese people surely showed remarkable courage, only White saviorism was recorded from this event. Dozens of Chinese people were injured, and one man, Look Young, was murdered from being beaten to death and then dragged through the streets by his neck with a rope. Despite the murder and violence witnessed by thousands, the aggressors were never punished for their actions. It's reported that Chinese business owners suffered over $1,000,000 current dollars in losses. The Chinese government reached out in an attempt to recover these losses, a courtesy the Chinese had extended to American missionaries in similar situations in China. However, none of the Chinese business owners ever received compensation. To this day, the only reparations made by Denver were some gold medallions given to descendants of the Denver Chinese population. This story has vanished into near complete oblivion in Colorado memory which makes it all the more important that you are reading this. Thank you.

So I'm watching Princess Weekes' video about confederate vampires (watch it fr) and I wanna expand upon smth they mention about the explicitly White American Confederate storytelling in,

Drumroll please...

Firefly.

Now first: I LOVE Firefly. It's an incredible show and in fact I think it's a beautiful and inspirational piece of political art in many ways, and I'm gonna talk about that part a little bit at the end. But mainly, why did I hear the comparison and immediately start to have 50 puzzle pieces click? Well. This essay got long, and to be honest idk how much I might be repeating others cuz PW mentioned it due to others talking about it too, but I just kinda took a journey of my own off-the-dome observations based on things I've already read about/know. I hope it's an interesting journey for you too.

TW below the Readmore: discussion of colonial / military violence; discussion of Sexual Assault

We are looking at a world of cowboys in the stars, in which there was a recent Civil War. In fact, we're set in a "real life future," where the majority remaining galactic race stems from the great American Empire. We do get influences of Chinese culture with language and clothing, but remember that Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s - which themselves romanticized the values of independent, libertarian southerners (who massacred Indians and no-good loiterers - we'll talk about that later) - heavily utilized "Oriental" aesthetics and caricatures while dehumanizing the Asian people they were ostensibly in relationship with. After all, Asian Americans were a growing population in the landscape of the Western frontier, often working alongside your storybook railroad workers, gold seekers and, even further east than Pacific coastal industries, working & living alongside cowboys. However, the language of Western-genre films (because of the way it mirrors the language of Confederates) does not respect Asian culture as it is, but rather as a collection of "wisdoms" and aesthetics to pick apart and use the "good parts" of - for use by white people in their white expansion. This idea fits a bit uncomfortably well with Firefly's multiple white characters who are "orientalized" by the camera. Kaylee, Inara, and the Tam siblings fulfill various stereotypes and tropes of Chinese- and other Asian-American diaspora people groups. The show, in this way, offers the "diverse" presence of a Chinese influence... using actors of Italian, Irish, German, and possibly Latine background to fill the roles. This makes the Firefly universe look less of a pacifist future between Western and Asian cultures, and more like a colonized universe where the (white) Western colonialists maintain some practices of those forward-thinking Asians who came before them.

But! You may say! Firefly isn't quite so white as that. What about the POC in the show!? Beyond its treatment of the de/re-Orientalization of a decidedly American/Western future, what about Firefly's real interracial representation, like Zoe Washburne and Shepherd Book? I would argue the inclusion of these unapologetic and kind black activist ideas is part of what begins to bring this show towards something more agreeable, but I also think they are at risk of becoming a bit of an obfuscation of a deeper anti-black racist remnant that remains entrenched in the show's Confederate story influences...

We need to talk about Reavers.

Joss Whedon admitted that Reavers were influenced by the role Native Americans played in traditional Westerns. "Every story needs a monster," he said in an interview. "In the stories of the old west it was the Apaches." It's pretty clear how the Reavers, who rape, murder, skin and cannibalize those of the "civilized world" are constructed from the specific racism against Black and Indigenous groups in America. Depictions of cannibals and savages in media have always been constructed to dehumanize those on the outskirts - whether it's the Apache threat Whedon mentions from the Wild West, or indigenous tribes of Africa or South America in any media, or the "terrifying" blackfaced "black" characters in Birth of a Nation, the horror trope of "uncivilized bands of roving lunatics who self-mutilate and can't communicate with their words" is pretty inseparable from its own racist origins. For centuries Europeans have been making "demons" out of pagans and indigenous people for their battle tactics or necropolitics, while simultaneously working hard to entrench our own atrocities in "necessities of the time." For one example, think of the fear associated with "headhunter" displays versus the still-controversial but more civilized-presenting "harsh peacekeeping" of public hangings. What is the difference between these practices besides a different eagernesses to contextualize the practice? I don't argue in favor of punitive violence for cultural purposes here, but it's important not to lose the contextualization of these tropes' origins in the social messaging of popular media. And in fact, the Reavers show an interesting way that the criminalization of Black and Indigenous Americans ties closely to the way we talk about the incarcerated and the mentally ill. I'm frankly not much more satisfied by the Reavers being an embodiment of "space madness" than I would be if they were straight up just Native Americans, or runaways from enslavement. American culture is great at coming up with "madnesses" which are really just the pushback to dehumanizing and unjust regimes. I'm not saying that the logic of the show would allow Reavers to receive constructive community-based mental health support involving free medicine and good therapy. But in a show that claims to be in favor of the marginalized and their voice for power, it's weird that this doesn't come up, right? Do the monsters in our media need to be irredeemable to work as narrative tropes? I would argue, once again, the inclusion of this Western and frankly genocidal trope (and if you think the Reavers are NOT a genocidal story trope, let me know what paths the narrative offers as a solution besides killing them immediately and indiscriminately when given the chance.) works to build a world-feel that's less "for the people" and more "for the justified, downtrodden warriors who know right from wrong," which is a very confederate line of thought.

Although Firefly highlights some literal black voices in their main cast, the plotline of the show is much the same as a confederate apologist story. Some people are more worthy of life than others in this tale - others who are too animistic and uncivilized; or who are simply left behind by the inevitable march of the white, righteous underdog ideologies. And these bold, brave rebels from the Civil War which recently happened are still around, just waiting to reassert their power and their independent desires from the empire. The Confederacy of the US was a white, ethno-nationalist and fascist state, admittedly so by their own politicians. It provided ideological groundwork for Nazi Germany and preceded much of the pseudoscience of phrenology. The Confederate position was based on white supremacy nearly entirely, and argued for the most racist version of a "globalist" idea possible. As evidence, here's some of the Cornerstone Address presented by Alexander Stephens, the "vice president" of the Confederacy: "Many governments have been founded upon the principle of subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature's laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system." But confederate stories and ideas have maintained a long-standing and unyielding influence, as after they lost the Civil War, the ideology of the Confederacy underwent a serious PR rebranding. Rather than "anti-American" racists, they became the noble fighters of a lost cause. They became the "defenders of heritage," and they became the mythologized ancestor of any white people who wanted to claim them. The Civil War "rebels" were painted as noble Southern men and women who, in a political landscape of the South becoming red states and the bible belt, were mythologized as Southern Belles and nobly humble plantation owners who loved Good Black people... just not the "mentally ill" ones who did things like run away or fight bondage.

(By the way, Alexander Stephens had some things to say about mental illness too (same link again)- I'm tying this back to my point about "mentally ill Reavers" being less of a far-cry than you might think from Confederate thinking: "Our new government [the Confederacy] is founded upon [this] idea; its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ... Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. ... Those at the North, who still cling to these errors [of racial equality], with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate [call them] fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the antislavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. ... [I] told [a gentleman from one of the northern states in the House of Representatives] that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal." It's worth wondering what makes us, as viewers, accept that Reavers are inherently incurable of the mental illness which makes them monsters. Of course this trope could be used in a critical way - but we can see the real-language example here which should make us question what kind of reading to take from media which only addresses the single solution of wiping a True Evil demographic from existence.)

So I hope you see the influences now, how Firefly follows Confederate and White Supremacist storylines. It's of course worth talking about though, the ways it can be read as a radical story as well. The cast includes an empowered revolutionary black woman, a black spiritual elder who advocates for pacifism in resistence, a sex worker who consistently values and stands up for herself and her line of work explicitly, a working woman who struggles with misogyny, and a rich man disgracing himself from society to save his mentally ill younger sister who was facing violent abuse at the hands of the state. These are people who orient themselves for one reason or another in at least some form of opposition to the oppressive and violent power of the government, which once again, is an analogous state to the United States. Of course, the difficulty of the anti-governmental Confederate narrative is that anti-governmental sentiment can have incredibly valid origins. If you are facing discrimination you should indeed oppose the oppressive force that monitors and abuses all its citizens in one way or another. But for God's sake, that opposition should come from a perspective of eliminating discrimination for all. Not a perspective like Jayne Cobb's - the explicitly violent and self-serving voice which, through the show and movie, metaphorically pulls our disaffected protagonist, Malcolm Reynolds, toward the direction of his more cynical, militaristic and even fascist internalized values. Firefly wants to simultaneously make a diverse revolutionary text, but also misses the opportunities it presents itself to say something more meaningful through its own medium. We could've addressed the harm of Jayne's willingness to grant "humanity" ONLY to the people he deems as something like family - or who he feels have properly convinced him that they're worth saving. He is the perfect embodiment of the right-wing, misogynist, white-supremacist ideology at the center of Confederate thinking. He's a Nazi who has been pulled into collaborating with real marginalized people through his relationship with Mal. And there's some level of that which could be an interesting story about deradicalization. In fact in some ways I believe the show could be open to some kind of that interpretation, given the almost-betrayal that Jayne goes back against due to his dedication to Mal. But unfortunatly I'd also say that in the execution of the show I got a different perception, which is back to the whole Confederate thesis...

Instead of a fascist who we could watch be deradicalized by his fellow crew, Jayne ends up doing marginal good only ever out of respect for Mal. I would argue in this way, their relationship mirrors the romanticized mythology of the Civil War being a "war between brothers" due to split households in border states. This narrative clearly holds more respect for the Confederacy than continuing to rightfully call the ideology the abhorrent thing that it is, and it is clear that the same ideology rears its head deep into our legal systems through the treatment of oppressed groups to this day. In ways, the influence of pro-Confederate radicals AFTER the war worked to legitimize bigotry of all kinds in a truly unprecedented way in America. If we have to respect the opinions of the Confederates because they were our "brothers" and not our ideological enemies, then who will we feel more and more comfortable throwing by the wayside - them or the people we work together to shamefully dehumanize? Through this contextual lens, with a vision of Mal as a "decent cowboy" compared to Jayne's more blatantly intolerant cowboy persona, it seems glaring that Jayne's bigoted views are just more intense outward versions of similar prejudices to those Mal feels, but by comparing the two characters to one another Mal would of course begin to look more forgivable despite his relative centrism and lack of care for the marginalized beyond his immediate group. Neither Mal nor anyone, for the narrative's sake, ever really, constructively pulls Jayne aside to actually lay down meaningful expectations of respect. And our rebel storylines of outgroup justice in the future should not accept this lack of accountability! By doing so, we leave no room for the revolutionary need for the Paradox of Tolerance...

The one thing we must not tolerate is intolerance.

Oh and P.S., one last thing: Upon an internet search about the paradox of tolerance I learned that Bill Maher has a famous quote about it, and idk the specifics but seeing that dang centrist asshole liberal made me want to clarify that the argument itself could tie very well into stuff like Islamophobic talking points, since the US defends a lot of its military landgrabs as "defending liberal ideals" due to conflating all Muslims with extremist groups. So I just felt the need to add that being "intolerant of intolerance" is NOT equivalent to dehumanizing groups based on stereotypes of them being "more prone to violence" or other dogwhistles like that. I would imagine that comes through, but it's also just worth making explicit. Even me, in this essay, seeing a character who falls into many of the plot points of a Confederate heroism storyline and is a white man - I'm not intolerant OF those things. In the episodes where Mal successfully subverts those ideologies he's mirroring on screen, by interacting with the world differently because he has learned to humanize an increasingly large group of people, I cheer for him! However, I remain intolerant of the intolerance Mal continues to show by virtue of his failure to hold others and himself accountable to the paradox of tolerance, and lets abuse goes unchecked for longer than he, as a man with power and a growing communal mindset, COULD put to rest.

They’ve built a “Great Wheel” on the Seattle waterfront [...].

The small timber village became a military outpost in the Puget Sound War [...], [and] soon evolved into a trade gateway, with timber tailings and other industrial trash from Henry Yesler’s mill used to fill in the marshlands [...], atop which migrant laborers raised tents and shanties [...] now working to feed raw materials into the furnaces of the Second Industrial Revolution burning in the East. [...] The first nationwide strike ripped across the country’s railways in 1877, but in Seattle the unrest took on a grim character, as thousands of unemployed white workers rioted against their Chinese counterparts [...]. Meanwhile, [...] local elites rebuilt [...] downtown [...] from scratch, hosting the tallest building on the West Coast alongside other new constructs [fueled] with money gleaned from the supply chains linking eastern capital to Alaskan gold. [...] Today the city - again rebuilt [...] - is seen as one of the primary beneficiaries of the “Fifth” Industrial Revolution in information technology, outshone only by California’s Silicon Valley. [...] The digital was increasingly thought of as somehow "immaterial," sustained by intellectual labor more than physical toil [...].

Silicon Valley myths of [...] "immaterial" labor disguise a more gruesome dynamic in which growing segments of the global labor force are being deprived even of the basic brutality of the wage, instead forced out into growing rings of slums, prisons, and global wastelands. [...]

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Perched alongside a downtown business corridor [...], Seattle's Great Wheel seems to peer out over [...] [the] prophesied “cooperative commons,” an infotech metropolis abutting the beauty of an evergreen arcadia. But travel below Seattle’s cluster of infotech industries and the image appears much the same as that of a hundred years prior - a trade gateway, squeezing value from supply chains by selling transport and logistical support. The southern stretch of the metropolis bears little resemblance to the revitalized urban core of the city proper. Instead of the “cognitive labor” of Microsoft, it is defined instead by the cold calculation of companies like UPS, founded in Seattle when the city was one link in a colonial supply chain built first for timber, then Alaskan gold, then World War. [...]

In south Seattle, this logistics empire takes the form of faceless warehouses, food processing facilities, container trucks, rail yards, and industrial parks concentrated between two seaports, an international airport, three major interstates, and railroads traveling in all directions. Meanwhile, the poor have been priced out of the old inner city, moving southward [...]. [T]hey can be found staffing the airport and the rail yards, hauling cargo in and out of two the major seaports, loading boxes in warehouses [...]. And, beyond them, the shadow stretches out to Washington’s rural hinterlands where migrant laborers staff a new boom in agriculture and raw materials [...] - and further still into America’s long-depressed interior, where the Great Wheel meets its opposite: Memphis, the FedEx logistics city, watched over by a great black pyramid [the infamous Bass Pro Shop pyramid]. [...]

Every Seattle is capable of creating an eco-friendly, “cooperative commonwealth” tended by apps and algorithms only insofar as there is a Memphis that can provide human workers to sort the packages, a Shanghai to build the containers that carry them, and a Shenzhen to solder together the circuits of the machines that govern it all.

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All text above by: Phil A. Neel. "The Great Wheel". Brooklyn Rail. April 2015. Published online at: brooklynrail.org/2015/04/field-notes/the-great-wheel. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, personal use, criticism purposes.]