Here are the slides to our presentation, with a few quick notes added. Check back in about three hours, and we will have the video of the session and the Q & A available (just as soon as it finishes loading.)

Some things to remember: We found ourselves with about four hours of material that needed to be shrunk into forty minutes – so a lot of things we wanted to discuss (the Jade Raymond situation, recruitment and outreach from the gaming industry, how different races/ethnicity are represented in games) hit the cutting room floor. In one of the segments, I refer to a fifty page paper I’m holding on to – that paper covers those topics more in depth, and I will publish it here after I revise it some more.

(Special thanks to Naomi and N’Gai for agreeing to be on the panel, everyone who showed up, those who weren’t there but tweeted and retweeted the findings, and Allison Bland for volunteering to tape this!)

Racialicious’ Note: Racebending is a site that was set up in response to the whitewashed casting of The Last Airbender. Racebending has since extended its reach to discuss the poor representation of people of colour in film and tv in general.

In case you missed the headline yesterday, Facebook has banned the Racebending.com group, implying we were “hateful, threatening, or obscene.”

The response from the community has been overwhelming and we are extremely grateful to all of you who spoke out in solidarity with the cause. Strong voices of dissent emerged, led by respected names in the Asian American community such as Asian Pop writer Jeff Yang, comic artist Tak Toyoshima, and Oiyan Poon of APAs for Progress.

We are still trying to contact Facebook for an explanation. In the meantime, we encourage our members to join our Facebook page or follow our Twitter for the latest.

Hopefully we’ll be able to open a dialogue with Facebook soon on this subject. It did get us wondering, however: what does it take to get your group banned? What – besides open discussion of racial issues in American media – does Facebook consider “hateful, threatening, or obscene”?

As it turns out, we beat out some stiff competition for the ban. A few minutes’ searching Facebook groups turned up quite a lot of material. We were very surprised that these groups satisfy Facebook’s “Terms of Service” and merit continued broadcasting on the social networking site. Given that these groups are thriving under Facebook’s policies, getting banned is almost an accomplishment.

Let’s take a look.

Facebook Asks Why Can’t Asians Drive?

First up, this group is a “Just for Fun” example of blatant racism, with slurs against the mentally handicapped thrown in for good measure. The ensemble is completed with the use of stereotypical “ching chong” font.

Facebook Accepts Rape Jokes

Apparently extracting humor from the victims of sexual assault is not sufficient for a group to be removed from Facebook. There are actually several groups based on this theme – easily thousands of members when added altogether.

Facebook Hosts “F*CK ISLAM”

This group is called “F*CK ISLAM.” The group explains its position:

There are many races to be found in islam. It’s your ideology we are revolted and annoyed by. I don’t care what colour you are. You are primitives. What’s worse is that you are primitives with access to modern weapons that your semi-evolved brains couldn’t ever have created on your own.”

It goes on for pages and pages, but this is the basic gist and tone of the group’s message.

Facebook Accepts the BNP

Last, we have the official Facebook group of the BNP (British National Party). For those unfamiliar with British politics, this Wikipedia entry may prove enlightening.

Their aim is to restore the pre-1948 demographics of the country by “firm incentives” for “immigrants and their descendants to return home.” Since 1982, they have fought hard to repeal British anti-discrimination laws. From their chairman:

Our fundamental determination to secure a future for white children is restated … We don’t hate anyone, especially the mixed race children who are the most tragic victims of enforced multi-racism, but that does not mean that we accept miscegenation as moral or normal. We do not and we never will.”
-Nick Griffin, Chairman of the BNP

Perhaps it’s not that these groups don’t violate the Facebook Terms of Service. Perhaps Racebending.com – a safe space for the open discussion of race in American media by consumers of American media – was simply deemed a high-priority for banning: something particularly “threatening” to users of Facebook, to casual readers. Perhaps the dialogue taking place among its six thousand members about where Americans of color fit into the national landscape was considered especially dangerous – especially incendiary, especially worthy of silence and censorship.

Unfortunately for them, the attempts at censorship have had the opposite effect: the community is speaking up. We’re louder than ever. And we’re not going away.

As the immigration reform debate heats up on Capitol Hill, right wing opponents are uping the ante with sensationalist and factually inaccurate claims. The latest? Immigration increases the country’s ecological footprint.

This latest claim came as part of a new report released by Progressives for Immigration Reform (PFIR), an alleged front group for uber conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR):

Mass immigration is increasing America’s Ecological Footprint (EF), pushing our country deeper into ecological deficit. Approaching 310 million, U.S. population currently exceeds the carrying capacity of our land and resource base. Nevertheless, high immigration levels exacerbate these trends by pushing our population to ever more precarious heights, preventing U.S. population stabilization, forcing annual growth rates to more than three million net new residents, and driving our numbers to a projected 440 million by 2050.

Read the rest.

They’re wrong, of course. As Walter Ewing points out, there’s no one-to-one relationship between population size and pollution. In fact, newly arrived immigrants are probably among the most ecologically friendly folks around. They’re more likely to use public transportation and less likely to waste food.

But consider this the latest round in green xenophobia.

Photo credit: Southern Poverty Law Center.

Me, N’Gai Croal, and Naomi Clark are all in full effect at SXSW – and we are so excited to present the panel on Social Justice and Video Games. If you are at SXSW, we’re on level 3, room 6AB, at 3:30 PM CT.

If you are NOT at SXSW, we are going to do our best to stream the coverage for you. Naomi’s laptop just crashed, so I am not sure what we will have. The hashtag for our session is #gamingjustice – you can follow the tweets. I also brought a video camera, and we will be posting the slides from the presentation soon.

It’s the first time that 1 in every 100 adult Americans is in prison, proof of an exploding prison system that our country can ill afford and a movement away from rehabilitation programs. Even more disturbing are the racial disparities within the prison system. More than 60% of people in prison are racial and ethnic minorities which means that 1 in every 36 Hispanic adults and 1 in every 15 black adults are in prison. How did this all happen? A change in laws and policies over the past decade have convicted more offenders, including non violent offenders, and put them away for increasingly lengthy sentences. For many, it is a system that is not providing the same returns in public safety in relation to this growth, and a rapid movement to change unfair laws has seen growing progress.

The 1980’s saw the “War on Drugs” launched in a big way. It was also the time for many federal policies that disadvantaged communities of color. One example: sentences for crack cocaine offenses (the kind found in poor Black communities) that were treated a 100 times more severely than powder cocaine offenses (the kind that dominates White communities). According to the Drug Policy Alliance Network,

Reform advocates say no other single federal policy is more responsible for gross racial disparities in the federal criminal justice system than the crack/powder sentencing disparity. Even though two-thirds of crack cocaine users are white, more than 80 percent of those convicted in federal court for crack cocaine offenses are African American.

The differences in sentencing were based on a myth that crack cocaine was more dangerous than powder cocaine and that it was instantly addictive and caused violent behavior, all of which has been disproved. What it’s actually led to is a costly system that focuses on low-level offenders and users instead of dealers and suppliers, imprisoning addicts that could benefit from rehabilitation programs. One analysis by Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat of Illinois, estimates that an increased focus on community programs and an end to the sentencing disparity could lead to a savings of half-a-billion dollars in prison costs.

With mounting pressure on Congress to do away with legislation that has devastated communities, we are at an opportune moment to instill justice back into the system. While The House Judiciary Committee has already passed a bill that ends the sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, the Senate Judiciary Committee will likely vote on a bill soon. Some Senators want to reduce the sentencing disparity instead of eliminating it but this watered-down compromise will do little to restore fairness. Let the Senators hear your voice.

Right now I’m owning the title/stereotype/image/whatever you conjure up in your mind about “angry Natives” because along with the usual colonial-type affronts to our people and communities, there are some notable racist extremities happening across Canada as of late. Initially I felt like there was just way too much going on to even write a single post about – but I thought to at least round up a few of the points of why I’m so flippin’, screaming, ANGRY that may shed light on what some of you may not be aware of yet. And we also need y’all to do something about this stuff in your communities too:

• The continuous denial of racism towards Aboriginal people in the education system. A new study from the Canadian Teacher’s Federation interviewed 59 Aboriginal teachers teaching in public schools throughout the country. The teachers reported a disregard for their qualifications and capabilities, a standard lowered expectation from Aboriginal students; and general disparage of the long-lasting effects of colonization.

• The “Free Native Extraction Service” placed on the http://www.usedwinnipeg.com/website (of course taken down now) advertising that it could “get rid of those pesky buggers with extraction services to relocate them to their habitat.” To top it off they actually illegally used a photo in their advertisement from the Native Lens Film “March Point” which I wrote about here some months back – which is, incidentally, a film about environmental justice and what Native youth are doing positively in our communities.

• Tuberculosis is 185 times higher in the Inuit population than in the rest of Canada. I repeat 185 times the national average – according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.  The recently released data from their Tuberculosis in Canada 2008 publication shows these appalling numbers contributing factors include “inadequate housing, as a result of both overcrowding and construction ill suited to the Arctic climate, and immune systems severely compromised by a general lack of healthy, affordable food’.”

• Harmonized Sales Tax or HST coming to the provinces of British Columbia and Ontario. Not that the government ignoring treaties is news by any stretch of the mind – however this is a big one to throw out the door of rights. The imposition of HST means that instead of seeing 8 per cent provincial Retail Sales Tax (RST or PST) and 5 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST), consumers will pay a combined 13 per cent HST. Yet for the first time since the introduction of the provincial sales tax, HST means status First Nations will be subject to the 8 per cent portion of the tax. This is a total and blatant violation of our treaty rights, not to mention the Canadian Constitution. This is a good article to find out more and you can go here to do something about it.

• Massive cuts to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, along with other insulting highlights from the Throne Speech, which is essentially an outline of the Canadian federal government’s budget. (Sign the online petition to reinstate funding here.) The Aboriginal Healing Foundation has provided support to residential school survivors and their families for a decade, in addition to funding major projects in communities across the country. My colleagues and friends at the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal and Inuvialuit Regional Corp in the Northwest Territories will have to axe some of their most necessary programs like health promotion and community wellness worker certification. In total it means 134 community projects across Canada will no longer provide culturally-based healing services to Aboriginal people. Oh sure Harper said he was “sorry” for residential schools in 2008, but just last year he said that Canada has no history of colonialism, so I guess this is right in line with the$199 million promised to address the legacy of residential schools not being committed to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. But don’t worry, in this same speech they said that Canada thinks the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women is a “pressing criminal justice priority.” Uh-huh.

• All of the racist garbage  and lateral violence people are spewing on the internet and in person about the proposed changes to Indian Status which would restore treaty rights to about 45 000 people. This decision is based mostly off of the Sharon McIvor court case, which addressed the specific gender discrimination of the Indian Act where even after the laws were changed in 1985 to restore status to Native women who lost it if they married a non-Native man, it didn’t extend past the children of those unions.  However the new changes would now extend to grandchildren. I definitely don’t think the government should be able to regulate who is and is not considered “status”, but I don’t anymore appreciate the internalized racism that we are doing to each other by adding extra jumps and hoops to go through within the community for who is really recognized as having rights on reserve and who is not.

These are just some of the latest oppressive occurrences against Indigenous people in Canada. On the regular I suppose I’ll also mention since it was International Women’s Day week last week, I didn’t find it any easier to get chastised by white women at the many events I spoke at when I brought up the mostly white academic industrial complex that mainstream feminism still lies in, and really doesn’t appear to care about the origins in Indigenous societies or the realities of Indigenous women for that matter – up until now (well, sort of) since we’re all of a sudden making the media with the thousands of us being murdered and going missing.

But it’s been going on for the last 500+ years, anyways.

Over at Femonomics Coca Colo asks why everyone on the Bachelor and the Bachelorette is white:

The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are two of the whitest shows on television.  Not only is the star always white, but so is the host, and so, by nature of our society’s continued discomfort with interracial dating, are almost all of the suitors.  The all-white star phenomenon then becomes a self-perpetuating cycle, because the newest star is usually picked from one of the nearly rejected contestants, who are all themselves white…

Now, simply choosing a black (or hispanic, or middle eastern, or asian, or south asian, or mixed race) star would certainly not remedy the problem.  In fact, it would likely only highlight it, since naturally ABC would never reverse the formula and stock this cast with all people the same race as the star (that would make The Bachelor a “niche” show, they would say).  Nonetheless, at least we would have taken a small, token step toward inclusiveness.  I know The Bachelor is ridiculous, that the formula of trying to find love in a couple months with 25 strangers is nonsense, and that we have bigger representation problems than television.  You can tell me all that, and yet it still enrages me how white this show is.  So ABC, you’re on notice.

I get Femonomics’ exasperation on this – as a race and pop culture blog, one of Racialicious’ biggest problems actually is poor representations of people of colour on TV.  But the Bachelor/Bachelorette’s myriad problems aside (like the heteronormativity and the bizarre power dynamics), the consequences of a bachelorette/bachelor of colour could equally be heartily positive, or completely negative.  Indulge me in some baseless what-if-ing – colouring the Bachelorette/Bachelor: what could go right (or wrong)?

Let’s imagine a bachelorette/bachelor of colour.  It would be just lovely to see people of colour pursuing love in their own way and taking charge of their sexuality, especially when you consider that people of colour are usually portrayed as asexual (Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop 1), comically hypersexual (Donna on Parks and Recreation or Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles), sexual vessels for someone else’s fantasy (any number of East Asian women playing bit roles in white vehicles), or the perpetual wingperson (any number of black women playing sassy black best friend roles in white vehicles).  It could be our (sexy) time to shine!

Then again, there are just as many things that could go wrong. Imagine if we had, say,  a Korean bachelorette.  I doubt we would make it through a single episode without references to said bachelorette’s exotic beauty and delicate hands.  Or what if we had a bachelor of colour pick a white suitor? We’d have another disastrous portrayal of white beauty being selected over nonwhite.

Before you accuse me of hating on interracial lovers and their offspring, let me just say that it is not individual interracial white/nonwhite couples that trouble me.   It is rather the constant movie/televisual representations of mixed race couples and their corollary that tires me out: which is that white folks are always portrayed as more loveable and desireable than people of colour.  Whatever the actual context of a mixed race white/POC bachelor(/ette) pairing, the mere optics would simply reinforce a demoralising message that people of colour are sick of hearing: we are never as dateable as white folks, or if we are dateable it is in a weird-ass creepy fetish way that we’d rather go without, thankyou.

Ok, so let’s imagine there are (more) suitors of colour on the casts of the Bachelor/Bachelorette.  That would be nice for representation figures alone, and breaking up the wall of whiteness Femonomics identified.  It would do wonders for the dating self-esteem of men and women of colour all over North America (even though vying for white folks’ approval ain’t that healthy). Yet what are the odds we’d just see our brethren getting rejected? I don’t know, but they might not be good, and that could be mighty demoralising.

More positives and negatives accompany a scenario whereby a white bachelor(ette) chooses a suitor of colour.  It could be portrayed as just your run-of-the-mill miracle of love thing.  Which would be good.  But it could also turn into something nauseatingly post-racial, with the couple getting back-pats for being so brave and courageous; missing the point that you should date someone just because you like them, and not out of some twisted desire to end racism by humping someone of another race.

A potential positive that has few potential negatives – at least from an anti-racist point of view? The casting changing on the Bachelorette/Bachelor to the point that we get to see a POC/POC couple on the Bachelor/Bachelorette.   But it may be a while before we see something like that.

What do you think? Would you like to see a bachelor/bachelorette of colour no matter who they choose? Would you be happy to see more suitors of colour, or does the risk of seeing yet another man/woman of colour get rejected on international television outweigh the positives of modifying the love demographic?

Or should we just continue whittling sailboats out of twigs and shooting marbles until there’s better POC programming on TV?

–

Thanks to Corinne for sending us the link!

From “The Tea Party is All About Race” by Bob Cesca

I was going to open this piece with an analogy about the tea party groups and why they’re treated seriously by the press and the Republicans. The analogy would go something like: “Imagine [insert left-wing activist group here] getting a serious profile in a mainstream newspaper, and imagine serious Democratic politicians appearing at their convention.”

The problem is, when I really evaluated what the various far-left activist groups are all about and compared them with the tea party movement, there really wasn’t any equivalency. At all.

Because when you strip away all of the rage, all of the nonsensical loud noises and all of the contradictions, all that’s left is race. The tea party is almost entirely about race, and there’s no comparative group on the left that’s similarly motivated by bigotry, ignorance and racial hatred.

I hasten to note that I’m talking about real racism, insofar as it’s impossible for the majority race — the 70 percent white majority — to be on the receiving end of racism. That is unless white males, for example, are suddenly an oppressed racial demographic. But judging by the racial composition of, say, the Senate or AM talk radio or the cast members playing the Obamas on SNL, I don’t think white people have anything to worry about.

…

From the outset, the tea party was based on a contradictory premise (the original tea party was a protest against a corporate tax cut). And when you throw out all of the nonsense and contradictions, there’s nothing left except race. There’s no other way to explain why these people were silent and compliant for so long, and only decided to collectively freak out when this “foreign” and “exotic” president came along and, right out of the chute, passed the largest middle class tax cut in American history — something they would otherwise support, for goodness sake, it was $288 billion in tax cuts! — we’re left to deduce no other motive but the ugly one that lurks just beneath the pale flesh, the tri-corner hats and the dangly tea bag ornamentation.

Irrespective of whether the president passed a huge tax cut or went out of his way to bring Republicans into the health care process, the seeds of racial animosity from the far-right were sown during the campaign. In those lines waiting for then-vice presidential candidate and current tea party heroine Sarah Palin, their loud noises spread the pre-scripted lies, lies that entirely hinged on the president’s African heritage. A white candidate would never be accused of being a secret Muslim. A white candidate would never be accused of being a foreign usurper. Only a black candidate with a foreign name would be accused of “palling around with domestic terrorists.”

In the final analysis, when you boil away all of the weirdness, it becomes clear that the teabaggers are pissed because there isn’t yet another doddering old white guy in the White House — like they’re used to. That’s what this is all about.

While Cesca’s point of view is certainly not new, he sure articulates it well.  Read the whole piece here.

Thanks to Elton Joe for the tip!

These are strange days indeed. We are firmly into the 21st century, and yet the 80s are haunting us. For African Americans it is yet again a decade of dream and deferral.

Back in the ‘80s, for the young Black and college educated, the doors of corporate America and other professions opened up and broadened the spectrum of the Black middle class like never before. But also, back in the ‘80s, crack cocaine and the aftermath of deindustrialization crippled areas of concentrated blackness in major urban centers.

Now in the 21st century, a new Black elite floods the popular imagination as Capitol Hill, the president and his administration become more and more colorful. But also now, in the 21st century, the recession hits Black communities hardest, and at the intersection of devastating rates of imprisonment, joblessness, and inadequate education lie a critical, hurting, mass of Black Americans.

Then came Precious.

The film, released in the Fall of 2009 elicited a flurry of responses. The debates over the film were complex, nuanced, impassioned. In fact, among the Black intelligentsia there seemed to be more discussion about Precious than there was about President Obama’s education agenda, the stimulus package, or rising unemployment and imprisonment. That was troubling. But then again, it is easier to fire off a blog post or provide a commentary about a movie than it is to write a concise response to a complicated web of policy, law, and economics. However, I believe the film elicited so much engaged response precisely because it highlighted the challenge of this moment when it comes to race in America.

The film tells an individual story, a poignant one, about an abused young woman in Harlem in the 1980s. If we attend to the individual story, fictional though it may be, our hearts go out to Precious. We see in her story personal resilience, possibility, healing. Those are good things.

The film tells a collective story. The story it tells is about the devastation that the 80s wrought on Black communities, and the failure of the public school system to provide a path out for “the underclass.”

In both the collective story and the individual story, there is truth. There is a real Precious out there. The story is fictional, but it is human. The problem is that fictional stories, especially ones on film, don’t just stand as individual stories, but they do “representative work.” They become part of the way we make sense of the world in which we live. The story of one novelist or filmmaker’s imagination becomes the story of entire groups of people or “types” of people. This is especially true when the kind of social location depicted in the story is remote from the experience of the majority of the viewers.

On the one hand, many of us who are familiar with the way the story of Black America in the 80s was told, and the way the story of the rise of imprisonment in contemporary Black America is being told, are frustrated with the spectacle of Black violence, deviance, and dysfunction that appears over and over again. We are tired of this story of pathology that we see yet again in Precious. Instead we want a story that reveals the laws and policies and economic conditions that produce concentrated poverty and its violence. We also yearn for the stories of those who sustain humanity and decency in the face of devastating poverty and marginalization. We would prefer for those stories to be told because they are, after all, far more representative of Black life than the wreck that is Precious’ life.

And so, we balk at a film like Precious, rhetorically asking: Doesn’t it just recycle those old images of Black pathology? And isn’t it reviving those stories just when we are beginning to suffer so much again, just when we don’t need a convenient explanation of “they are pathological” to facilitate the nation turning its back on the responsibility to provide conditions for all citizens to lead productive lives as participants in the democracy and economy?

On the other hand, some of us want to embrace a film like Precious because it highlights a kind of suffering that our society fails to respond to. Children who are poor and of color, are inadequately protected in our society. They are more vulnerable to predators, more likely to be victimized on the street and in school, and less likely to have families that are able to marshal resources to deal with trauma, mental illness, and addiction. At the same time, poor, emotionally scarred parents who become abusers have virtually no resources to repair themselves. So when we see a movie like Precious, we applaud it for encouraging sympathy and investment in young women like Precious. We think “yes, the reality of her life deserves to be depicted, maybe it will inspire action.”

The film does both kinds of work on the audience at once. Strange indeed.

Earlier, I referred to how the film reveals the challenge of this moment. The challenge is this: When it comes to race: critically thinking members of this society have to consider the implications of symbolism (like the Black president, or the Oscar worthy dysfunctional sexual abusing welfare mother played by Mo’nique) at the same time as we consider the messy, complicated, content of our society, without assuming that these things have a clear or consistent relationship to each other.

Additionally, the film demands that we bring more to the table than just an analysis of its as a piece of art. If the film stands alone, it gets deployed and interpreted every which way. But if we use the film to open the door to conversations about society, ones that are filled with knowledge, data, and careful analysis, rather than mere anecdote and fiction, then it can do some useful work in our social and political lives. Perhaps it can inspire solutions to problems of representation and policy challenges.

President Obama is on our televisions, and a young Black man is selling drugs on a corner near my home in Philadelphia. Precious is on our movie screen, and my classes are filled with brilliant young Black women pursuing degrees at a world class university. These are realities. But what relationships do these individuals have to each other and to the society at large, and how do those relationships reveal the resilience of inequality or the promise of democracy?

Asking and answering these sorts of questions is key for understanding race in the 21st century United States.

Imani Perry is a professor at Princeton University and regular contributor to Afro-Netizen. She is an interdisciplinary scholar who studies race and African American culture using the tools provided by various disciplines including: law, literary and cultural studies, music, and the social sciences.

“Children of Invention” – by Tze Chun
Two young children living outside Boston are left to fend for themselves when their mother gets embroiled in a pyramid scheme and disappears.  ”Children of Invention” premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, screened at over 40 film festivals, and won 15 festival awards including: Grand Jury Prizes at the 2009 Newport International
Film Festival, Independent Film Festival Boston, Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, San Diego Asian Film Festival, and Ojai-Ventura Film Festival. Variety said the film is “Urgent, artful…austerely poetic,” and the Film Society of Lincoln Center said it is “As close to cinematic purity as one is likely to see this year.”

More info:

http://childrenofinvention.com
Buy tix (NYC): http://bit.ly/boBMIU
Buy tix (L.A.): http://bit.ly/b314K0

“White on Rice” – by Dave Boyle
40-year-old Jimmy is growing up, or at least he’s getting older. While mooching the upper bunk of his ten-year-old nephew’s bed, he enjoys the never-ending generosity of his sister Aiko, and dodges the wrath of his impatient brother-in-law Tak. He thinks that if only he could get married all his problems would be solved. But when he falls head over heels for Tak’s niece things only go from bad to worse. Featuring a standout cast including Japanese Academy Award winner Nae and Mio Takada, “White on Rice is a satisfying comedic feast” (Honolulu Advertiser) and “A Cinematic Milestone.”(San Francisco Chronicle).

More info:

http://whiteonricethemovie.com
Buy tix (NYC): http://bit.ly/boBMIU

——————-

Because so many women of color have such little wealth other than the value of a vehicle, the rest of the paper uses the definition of wealth that excludes vehicles in order to capture the economic vulnerability experienced by women of color.

Excluding vehicles, single black women have a median wealth of $100 and Hispanic women $120 respectively, while their same-race male counterparts have $7,900 and $9,730. The median wealth of single white women is $41,500. To put it another way, single black and Hispanic women have one penny of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by their male counterparts and a tiny fraction of a penny for every dollar of wealth owned by white women. With so little in reserve, half of all single black and Hispanic women could not afford to take an unpaid sick day or to even have a major appliance repaired without going into debt. The precarious financial situation of women of color is also evident when looking at those with zero or negative wealth, (negative wealth occurs when the value of one’s assets is lower than the value of their debts). Nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth (see Figure 2).

Pre-retirement wealth disparities for women of color affect them drastically in their retirement years. According to federal poverty standards, poverty rates for people age 65 and over are highest for women of color. In 2007 16.7% of white women living alone were poor, but 26% of Asian women living alone, 38.5% of black women living alone, and 41.1% of Hispanic women living alone were poor. 21

What does it mean when we talk about the difference between wealth and income?  These two terms are not to be conflated.  Someone can be a high earner, but still have no wealth at all – it is as simple as spending more than you earn.  It doesn’t matter what the money is spent on – it can go up your nose, on your feet, to your landlord or thrown in mass amounts on a stage.  However, if you manage to make a million dollars a year, and you spend $1.5 million, you are not wealthy.  Not even close.

This is why this median figure of $5 is so important to understand.  At various points in the course of the report, the data for women of color (again, defined as black and Latina, unless otherwise indicated) tends to fall around zero or five dollars, depending on the unit of measurement.

It is also important to understand the difference between a median number and an average number. I emailed report author Mariko Chang to clarify why the median number was generally used in the report:

In wealth research, it is conventional to use the median instead of the average for the following reason:  Because wealth is so unequally distributed, with a few people owning extremely large amounts of wealth and the rest owning much smaller amounts, the few very wealthy people pull the average higher.  The median, on the other hand is a better indicator of the wealth of the more “typical” case.  (If we rank people or households on a continuum from least wealth to most wealth, the median is the point at which half have more wealth and half have less.)  Because the median is a better indicator of the more typical case, people and organizations that study wealth report the median (although some report both).

Since today is Friday, we are going to ease up on the data and instead take a moment to reflect:  how did you learn your lessons about wealth, income, and money?

Monday: Differences in financial starting points and class mobility

(The whole thing is on YouTube, who knew?)

I don’t expect you to have ever heard of For Love of Ivy. I hadn’t heard of it until a couple of years ago, one night when I was hanging out with my dad and we were trolling On Demand for something to watch.

So, as we resurrect “Revisiting The Canon” here at PB, I realize this is an out-of-place choice. This movie isn’t actually in the black canon, like previous entries Boyz In The Hood, Eve’s Bayou, and Idlewild. But it is a black movie, in the sense that it features two black leads, and was cowritten by one of the greatest stars of the 60s, Sidney Poitier. Also, it’s old, and definitely worth revisiting.

Spoilers ahead.

Allow me to lay the scene. The story revolves around the Austin family that owns a department store and lives in a beautiful home out on Long Island. Father, mother, hippie son Tim, and popular daughter Gena. And their maid, the titular Ivy Moore, played by Abbey Lincoln.

The plot is a simple twist on The Taming of the Shrew. Ivy, an uneducated woman in her late twenties, has been with the Austins for nearly 10 years. She wants to move into New York City to attend secretarial school, which would force them to hire another maid. The Austin patriarch, a pre-Archie Bunker Carroll O’Connor, couldn’t care less (“Hire another maid!”), but the mother, and two adult children are devastated, and try to convince her to stay.

The children, Tim (a very young Beau Bridges) and Gena, who seem to live at home and work in the department store, decide that what Ivy really needs is a man. Tim comes to this conclusion after figuring out what the biggest difference between Gena and Ivy is (“What’s color got to do with it?” Gena wonders): male suitors. Gena has several boyfriends, and Ivy none. The implication here, of course, is that a woman like Ivy doesn’t need any education if she gets some attention from a man. (As an aside: at one point, when the attractive Gena enters the stockroom of the store, all the men look up in admiration. Tim says to the room: “Alright guys, you’ve all seen Gena naked before.” This is never explained, and Gena’s sexuality is played in an odd, but nonjudgmental, way later in the film, as well.)

Tim blackmails Jack Parks (played by Poitier), a trucking business owner who has an account with the Austins, into taking Ivy out. Parks runs the day operation — shipping goods — while his partner runs the night operation, a casino truck for illegal gambling. But Parks doesn’t want the night operation exposed, so he very reluctantly agrees to meet Ivy. He’s educated and sophisticated, and looks down on Ivy as just another ignorant colored girl who wants to get married. Tim selected Jack precisely because he knows Parks will never propose and take Ivy away from the family.

When Jack, strongarmed, comes to dinner, there’s this nutty bit of dialogue that I just had to transcribe. It’s about 10 times more awkward than it reads:

Gena: Tell me, Mr. Parks, what do you think of the Black Power Movement?
Jack: I think about it…a lot.
Gena [awkward smile]: Ah. And do you approve of it?
Jack: I don’t…talk…about it.
Gena [awkward smile]: Ah.

[Tim enters with coffee.]

Jack: Thank you.
Gena: Ivy goes to a lot of civil rights meetings, don’t you, Ivy?
Ivy: Once in a while. It’s a place sometimes to meet people.
Tim: I was in an elevator once with Ralph Bunche. He stepped on my foot.
Jack [disdainfully]: That can be a problem when you don’t wear shoes.
Tim: No, he said “excuse me.”
Gena [proudly]: I’ve been on a lot of picket lines and things. In fact, I was even in jail once overnight, because I refused bail.

[Awkward silence.]

Gena: Ivy belongs to the NAACP, don’t you, Ivy?

At this point, Ivy excuses herself, and Gena follows her out. Saying what we’ve all been thinking, Ivy snaps at Gena, “Just because he’s colored, do you have to talk about colored things?” She adds: “Why did you make me sit in the living room like that? You know I never do that!”

But Ivy warms to Jack, and ends up going out with him, on the grounds that a date with him will be an ‘interesting’ experience for her to remember. By their second date, the magical properties of her vagina have led him to fall in love with her.

Abbey Lincoln, a truly underrated jazz singer, is compelling as Ivy, the maid who doesn’t want to die “ignorant and alone.” The privileged Tim and Gena are both amusing in their seeming goodwill, and frustrating in their selfishness. The parents fall a bit flat, but the story isn’t really about them.

But, of course, the real star in this film is Poitier. He gets to stalk the sets while being scored by Quincy Jones. He gets to be hostile and superior — something he does very well — and he gets to say things like “I got news for you, Charlie: slavery’s been abolished, maaaan” and “When you’re not thinking of me as the uppity spade with the trucks!” *finger snap*. And he gets to be the best-dressed man in the film. Also, I freely admit, this is the first Poitier film where I cocked my head to the side and said to myself: “yeah, now I get his, um, appeal.”

It’s clear that For Love of Ivy is trying to be progressive. And for its time, it mostly succeeds. The freedom for Gena to date whomever she wants is contrasted with the idea that loneliness is Ivy’s problem. Tim’s acknowledgment that he’s not good enough for Ivy himself gets played against the fact that he calls Jack Parks a “spade.” Ivy’s desire for independence is eventually solved by Jack’s marriage proposal, in which she leaves the Austin’s home for Jack’s.

I don’t know that this film could’ve been any better. In many ways, it’s a strange little piece of celluloid, and it speaks to its time in a way that’s very similar to Poitier’s great race film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner did. But it serves to remind me that little has changed in Hollywood in the last 40 years. And in fact, I’d argue that things have regressed a bit. For Love of Ivy is a romcom from 1968, when Poitier was one of the biggest drama stars in the world. Today, Will Smith is the arguably the biggest action/drama/romcom star in the world. But I doubt Smith would or could create anything so bizarre and forward-thinking as this.

I called up a fellow young black professional friend of mine and told her about the findings of the study.  “Is it messed up that I’m kind of glad in a way?” she asked, “I mean, all this time I’ve been wondering why I can’t get my shit together, but it turns out I’m normal.” We both laughed at her small attempt at gallows humor around a situation many of us know a little too intimately – when it comes to our white counterparts, women of color are light years behind in wealth.

The study is a new report from The Insight Center for Community Economic Development, titled “Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth, and America’s Future.”  The report is an in-depth look at the issues in wealth accumulation particular to black women, Latinas, Asian and Native American women.  However, even as this report is one of the most comprehensive I have seen on the subject, the limited data for Asian American and Native American women means that their statistics are limited from entire sections of the report, and discussed in a subsequent section about the need for better stats.  The report’s title is should be a familiar refrain to many black women, but the author of the report, Mariko Chang, kindly includes an explanation of the origin of the phrase:

More than a century ago, the National Association for Colored Women was founded by African American women leaders in response to a vicious attack on the character of African-American women. A few decades distant from the abolition of slavery, the intensification of poverty, discrimination, and segregation impelled these women to action in defense of their race. Their motto was “Lifting as We Climb,” signaling their understanding that no individual woman of color could rise, nor did they want to rise, without the improvement of the whole race. At the top of their agenda were job training, wage equity, and child care: issues that, if addressed, would lift all women, and all people of color.

The lift as we climb refrain was implanted into some of us from birth and a lot of my earliest lessons about black empowerment focused on financial empowerment.  Yet, these adages about saving money, investing in the community, and being a conscious consumer was like propping a footstool against a fifty foot high sheer rock wall.  Insight’s report focuses on the wealth gap, not the well documented income gap, for a good reason:

The current economic crisis has revealed why wealth is so important to the stability of households. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Without savings or wealth of some form, economic stability is built on a house of cards that quickly crumbles when income is cut or disrupted through job loss, reduced hours or pay, or if the family suffers an unexpected health emergency.

As the current crisis continues to unfold, it has become all too clear that it is not just “poor” people who are losing their homes to foreclosure in record numbers; even households with some wealth found that they did not have enough to ride out the still unfolding economic downturn. Wealth impacts not just current economic security, but retirement security as well. With concerns over the solvency of Social Security and the shrinking number of jobs that provide pensions, it is of increasing importance that people have the means to save for their own retirement. Wealth is also tied to the well-being of the next generation, as it provides parents with the ability to help pay for their children’s college education, and can also be passed down from generation to generation. In fact, the intergenerational transfer of wealth is one of the reasons why racial wealth gaps from policies long ago have become entrenched. [...]

Wealth and income are related, but they are not the same. Income refers to the amount of money received by an individual or household during a specific period of time, such as a month or year. It usually comes in the form of earnings or wages from a job, but can take other forms as well such as interest on savings or investment accounts, Social Security, transitional assistance (welfare payments), pension benefits, or child support. Wealth, or net worth, refers to the total value of one’s assets minus debts. Typical types of assets include money in checking accounts, stocks or bonds, real estate, and businesses owned. Typical types of debts include home mortgages, credit card debt, and student loans.

So how did we get to the five dollar figure? Page seven of the report explains “While white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61% of their white male counterparts), the median wealth for women of color is only $5.” A more complete answer is revealed in Insight’s wealth of charts discussing the gaps:

Since there is so much data (the full report is well worth a read, but clocks in at 28 pages) we will discuss small sections of the report and related issues over the next week.

The topics covered will include: the wealth gap (with and without vehicles); how marriage* impacts wealth building (and how stereotypes and fear mongering about single black women ignore the larger issues at play); parenthood and wealth building; differences in financial starting points and class mobility; a discussion of types of assets acquired by women of color; the rising levels of debt; Asian American and Native American women’s wealth, and barriers to understanding the full scope of the problem; issues of data collection and minority participation in the census; prior institutional factors contributing to the wealth gap for women of color; the “wealth escalator”; government assistance and its impact on wealth building; retirement; subprime home loans and the mortgage crisis, particularly as it relates to Latinas; citizenship and immigration status and how that impacts wealth building; cultural expectations of women; policy recommendations to end the wealth gap; and non governmental/community based solutions.

Tomorrow: Looking at The Wealth Gap

*There is no data included about queer POC. We will discuss this a bit more when we discuss the limitations of data, but the discussions of marriage and wealth building for POC provides an interesting element to the discussions surrounding same sex marriage rights.

Your run on Deathlok seemed to be full of allusions to the black experience. The lead character’s trapped in a cyborg construct and has his body stolen from him. His fear and shame at how his family would see his new form keeps him from them. He’s literally separated from his own humanity. And the dialogues between the cyborg’s computer AI and Michael Collins riffs on the twoness that W.E.B. DuBois spoke about. How much of this was explicitly in your and Greg Wright’s pitch and how much did you slip under the radar?

None of it was in the pitch, but all of it was intentional. Invisible Man was, and still is, my favorite novel. I’d just read The Souls of Black Folk and was explicitly thinking about Skip Gates’ The Signifying Monkey. Godel, Esher, Bach and Derrick Bell’s dialogues about race and law sort of crashed in my head. Deathlok was a way of sharing some of my thoughts about all of this.

Foremost, though, Deathlok was supposed to be a modern-day take on Marvel’s The Thing (a man alienated by his surface appearance), as well as my own commentary on the “grim and gritty” trend in comic book heroes. Contrary to the fashion at the time, I wanted to do a superhero who was more moral than I, not less. [...]

You’ve talked about how the character of Buck Wild came about as a commentary on the complicated love/hate relationship you had with Luke Cage. Do you still feel the need to address that relationship today? Did doing those issues with Buck help work that stuff out?

I’d worked those issues out even before I started Milestone. I just wanted to share those ideas with the comic book readership in an entertaining matter. Interestingly, those stories are about to be reprinted this summer as Icon: Mothership Connection. The excesses of Blaxploitation comics characters like Cage is the past, though. I’m much more interested in dealing with the stuff that’s going on now: more green characters with their own monthlies than black characters, a criminal lack of people of color in writing and editorial positions on mainstream books, et cetera… The last time I tried to write about that stuff in a mainstream book, my story was bounced (by the same people who asked me to write about it, mind you), and my editors wanted to replace it with clichés from twenty years ago, clichés that not coincidentally shielded mainstream readers and comicbook creators from any responsibility for the current state of affairs. I passed on that. I’ll write about those issues again when I have more control over the content.

—“Race, Sci-Fi, and Comics: A Talk with Dwayne McDuffie,” Interview by Evan Narcisse for the Atlantic

Canada is an officially multicultural country, but multiculturalism does not address racism.

The Continuum on Becoming an Anti-Racist Multicultural Institution shows six stages from being a monocultural institution to becoming an anti-racist multicultural institution. Canada appears to be at Stage Three:

3. Symbolic Change: A Multicultural Institution

• Makes official policy pronouncements regarding Multicultural diversity
• Sees itself as “non-racist” institution with open doors to People of Color
• Carries out intentional inclusiveness efforts, recruiting “someone of color” on committees or office staff
• Expanding view of diversity includes other socially oppressed groups

But…

• “Not those who make waves”
• Little or no contextual change in culture, policies, and decision making
• Is still relatively unaware of continuing patterns of privilege, paternalism and control

Stage Four is “Identity Change: An Anti-Racist Institution”. As Canada has never thought of itself as an anti-racist country, it remains at Stage 3 of this model.

In Canada, there is the mistaken belief that racism is caused by cultural differences, and that if multiculturalism is embraced, then there would be no racism. However, when Canadians face discrimination when we travel while black, go fishing while East Asian, protest while brown, or seek medical care while indigenous, the problem is not “cultural differences” to be solved with “cultural sensitivity”. This “cultural” problem formulation still insists that people of colour must have done something differently from white people to provoke discrimination. It ignores the possibility that people of colour might do the same things as white people and still be treated differently due to our race.

A clear example of people of colour being discriminated against because of race—not culture—is the fact that children of colour adopted by white (American) parents and raised as white still experience racial discrimination. In the past, white adoptive parents adopted Chinese children and raised them as if they were white biological children, cutting their ties to Chinese culture, under the same false belief that racial discrimination is caused by cultural differences:

Americans have adopted an estimated half-million children from overseas in the last four decades. During the early period of international adoptions, most parents believed their children’s lives would be easier if they shed their native culture, said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on improving adoption practices.

Parents believed that their children were a “blank slate” that should be filled in exactly the same as biological children, Pertman said. This sort of evenhanded treatment would be a buffer from any possible discrimination — or so parents believed.

Of course, this turned out to be false and harmful. People of colour raised as white people and raised in their white parents’ culture still experienced and experience racial discrimination.

It is not culture—or cultural intolerance—that causes racial discrimination. It is racism. Race and culture are two different things. Multiculturalism is not the same as anti-racism.

Multiculturalism does not stop White Canadians from assuming that I am a foreigner to Canada. In fact, the multicultural narrative tends to confuse racial diversity with cultural diversity, encouraging White Canadians to assume that Canadians of colour are culturally different and culturally other, based only on our racial appearance.

Canada’s problem mirrors the problem of white adoptive parents, who are now celebrating “Chinese” culture with their adopted Chinese children, falsely believing that multicultural celebration will protect against racial discrimination:

“They are trying their best,” she said, “but the truth is, no one likes to talk about race or acknowledge race.

–

Photo courtesy of Mollena, who sells actual race cards.

I’ve been hooked on videogames since the days of the Atari 2600, though my family was too poor to have one.  When I was young, I am ashamed to say that any kid who had an Atari had a good chance of being my best friend, as long as I got to come over to play Atari during slumber parties or birthdays.  In grade school at Anderson, some of the ‘problem’ kids, if they were good, got to choose a friend to take 5 minutes and play Atari as a reward – I was always thrilled when I got that chance.

Through the years, if a system was able to play a video game, I’d play it.  I’d torture myself with text-based games on the Apple IIe, playing them over and over again even if I kept dying or failing in the same place.  I was obsessed with the Smurfs game on the Colecovision, got yelled at by my moms for playing too much Kid Icarus on the NES, and one of my proudest gaming moments was when a friend of mine brought over Zelda II: the Adventure of Link, telling me he just could not beat shadow link – and how he jumped into the air when I did it for him.  I lost my temper way too easily when I lost at Mortal Combat or Street Fighter 2 in the arcades. When Civilization came out, I mercilessly hung out at my friend’s apartment and played on his computer all night, like some shameless video game scrub.  When my dad needed quarters to take the bus to work, we’d go and use the change machines in Thompson’s Arcade, and my dad would give me exactly two quarters to play (it was also there where a white man once asked me my ethnicity, and when I told him I was Viet, he gave me a brochure translated into Vietnamese trying to convince me to convert to Christianity, and the irony is, I probably would have read more of that brochure if it was in English).  In college I saw a guy in my computer lab playing some 3-D game where he went around blasting demons, and he taught me how to type in the sentence on the computer that would allow me to play Doom.  After a strenuous test or big paper was due in college, I’d drive to Mall of America and blow $10 of quarters on this arcade game where you got to hold this big garish plastic machine gun and shoot things.  During my mid-20’s I was a terror to my roommates and their friends in Goldeneye.

You get the picture.  I’m still gaming today, just got my second red ring of death for my Xbox 360, and my partner has asked me to please stow my Master Chief helmet in a place where our guests can’t see it.  Not only do I game, but I’ve also written about racial representation, especially regarding Asians and Asian Americans, in video games, and also read a lot of online reviews and discussions regarding this hobby that I have grown up with.

Anyone who’s played games has heard of the Final Fantasy series of games.  I was a big fan of Final Fantasy on the SNES, particularly FF III, I think.  It gets a little confusing since Final Fantasy is a Japanese series, not all of which makes it overseas to American audiences, and thus get numbered differently.  So basically, Final Fantasy III in the U.S. might be Final Fantasy VI in Japan.

Recently, Final Fantasy XIII has come out, and following the previews, reviews, screenshots, and looking at the concept art, it reminds me of a question that is provocative but seems to be ignored – why do Japanese game companies create so many games where the protagonists all look European or white?  Sure, Final Fantasy XIII has one Black character, but then it makes it all the more compelling to ask, why aren’t there any Asian characters?

Final Fantasy fanboys, let me reiterate: THIS IS NOT A REVIEW. I’m sure that the in-game cinematics are fluid and gorgeous, the art design is innovative, and that the new battle system grows on you.  This is not a blog entry on game play.  If you want a review, there are dozens out there that don’t even bother to mention race – go take your pick.

In fact, that’s why I am using this space to ask this question, which I find slightly odd since there have been so many issues, from the mundane to the obscure, written about video games. I find it fascinating that Japanese companies, again and again, create games featuring predominantly white characters – or, to put it another way, games where there are no characters that look Asian.  This is particularly interesting considering the demographics of Japan, and also their reputation, earned or otherwise, for colonization and nationalism.  And as an American gamer who is Asian American, it’s also an issue since most American and European game makers also make games where the majority of the characters are white.

Sure, there are exceptions: the Yakuza series and Lost Planet, for example, or fighting games which tend to be more inclusive in their stereotypes of people the world over.  But those are, again, exceptions.  For the few that we can think of that have characters with Asian features, let’s create a list of games and characters that are white, and for the sake of argument, let’s limit it to ones created by the Japanese game industry: Link and the Zelda series, Mario, Snake from the Metal Gear series, almost all of the characters from the Resident Evil and Silent Hill series, as well as the vast majority of characters from the multitudes of Final Fantasy games.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  These are not niche characters or games: these are well-known, well-loved franchises, commercially and critically acclaimed.

This is not an attempt to attack Japan or Japanese people, I’m simply asking a question about something very provocative that no one seems to be asking, which is surprising given that other socio-political discussions on gaming have at least popped up here and there.  I’m not saying that those discussions are complete – I’m saying given that there has been at least some discussion about race, gender, and homophobia in gaming, no one has pointed out that, you know, it’s kinda weird that these games made by Japanese people, rarely have any characters that look Asian?

I’ll admit that my placement as an Asian American informs my curiosity, as there is a history of internalized self-hatred for many Asian Americans and a push for us to desire to aspire to whiteness, in appearance and in terms of culture (I used to dream I was, literally, a White Knight) – combined with the history of this country claiming the erasure of Asian and Asian American bodies is motivated by economics and not by racism (see the production of 21, and Avatar: The Last Airbender).  There’s this idea that Asian culture is more important than Asian people, and that actual Asian people can be swapped out by people of other races and that it doesn’t matter.

I already hear the arguments.   Again, I welcome informed and reasonable debate.  But it has become obvious that some people have come to this blog not to read, think, and discuss, but to attack and try to bully me into silence from behind the safe anonymity that the internet gives them.  I’ll offer anticipated arguments and my counter-arguments so that, when haters attack me, I can just refer them to the numbered bullet points.  So, in no particular order:

• Game sites don’t report on things like this because they’re not political. I beg to differ.  Many game sites publish stories on workers and developers getting overworked, underpaid, and exploited by corporations.  That is absolutely political.  And I’m glad that they do – these stories need to be heard.  My point is, there are different political stories and discussions happening on game sites all the time – but people still shy away from race issues.

• It’s fantasy, it’s not real. Exactly – fantasy is only limited by our imagination.  If we are free to create entire worlds and characters, why do we only create ones that look white?

• Gamers don’t want to think about politics. I hear all the time that gamers bemoan the stereotypes placed on them – that we’re all a bunch of straight male losers living in our parent’s basement, living off of junk food and deathly scared of having a conversation with a woman.  I hear that gamers and game developers want to be taken seriously, and that games should be respected as a form of legitimate entertainment.  Well, one thing that adults do is consider seriously these issues of race, gender, and sexuality.  If gamers and game developers have indeed grown up as we keep demanding we have, then we can’t dismiss or deride any discussions on race, gender, and homophobia the way that they have been.

• You’re making something out of nothing. This is actually a part of racism: white people think that they’re the ones that get to tell us whether something is racist or not.  People think they can dismiss racism, sexism, and homophobia by blaming people of color, women, and GLBTTs for being ‘overly sensitive.’  That’s like me coming over to your crib after you haven’t eaten for a week, listening to you say “damn, I’m hungry,” and insisting, “no, you’re not hungry,” then preventing you from eating.  Which leads to the argument that usually follows:

• My best friend/girlfiend/wife/boyfriend/game designer is Asian and says it’s not racist, so you’re wrong. So by this logic, if I polled my white friends and got them to say it IS racist, I would win?  I don’t hide behind my white friends, why should you get to hide behind your Asian ones? Don’t hide behind your friends: argue the points.

• It’s not about race, it’s about money. This ignores the fact that some of these blockbuster Japanese franchises made tons of money in Japan, with Japanese audiences, before they were exported here.  And even if it were true, then can we have a discussion on how the exportation of culture, the massive wealth and power of U.S. western media makers, is gendered and racial as well as economic?

• It’s escapism – why do you want to play someone who looks like yourself? I don’t.  When I get the option to create someone, like in Mass Effect 2, I make someone who looks a hell of a lot better than I do.  In ME2, my character looks like what would happen if Daniel Dae Kim had a love child with Denizen Kane and was born with a lifetime gym membership.  Anyway, people who ask this question really show their privilege: white people don’t worry about this because they take for granted that the vast majority of games made out there gives them AT LEAST one option to play someone the same race, gender, and sexual orientation as them.  Put that into context: how many games out there, especially the ones with strong narratives and iconic characters, allow me to play an Asian male?  Or a Black, Native American, Latina, or Arab woman, if I so chose?

• Race is not important in video games . If this was true, then there would be a lot more diversity in terms of stories and characters.  Because if it doesn’t matter, then why not have more games where there’s an Asian protagonist?  Why wouldn’t games made by predominantly Asian men, feature at least one or two Asian men as characters? Look at the gaming climate today – maybe we should ask ourselves, why do game developers only seem to think that white characters make compelling characters?  Why are the vast majority of games being made ask us to relate to a white narrative and character?  And even if race or gender or sexual orientation doesn’t matter to you, can it matter to someone else?

• Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Age are based in European folklore and there were no people of color in Medieval Europe. Actually there were people of color in Medieval Europe.  You know what?  There were more actual people of color in Medieval Europe than there were REAL FIREBREATHING DRAGONS OR PEOPLE WHO COULD SUMMON MOTORCYCLES OUT OF THIN AIR WITH THEIR MAGIC POWERS.

• Japanese people shouldn’t be limited to making games that only have Japanese people in them. I agree completely!  As artists and creators, empathy and creativity, including stepping out of your own shoes and exploring the lives of others, is important.  I’m not saying that all Japanese games should be required to have Japanese characters – I’m asking why so few of them do.  And also, why is it that those of us who are people of color are continually asked to relate to someone who is not from our own race?  Why can’t people see that we have far fewer opportunities to see representation of people who are from our own race in pop culture and media?

• If you don’t like it, don’t buy it. The problem with this is, it’s not like a movie where you can rent it or look at a trailer.  You buy a game and you’ve invested $60 and a chunk of your time and energy to play it.  And you can’t rely on reviews because, well, game reviews generally don’t talk about issues like racial representation.  It’s not like if you read that Mass Effect 2 stripped away a bunch of its RPG elements and so you decide not to buy the game.  If you’re a person who cares about this stuff, you’re on your own.   I didn’t hear about Dr. Suchong before I bought and played Bioshock.   I didn’t know that Ada Wong was a Dragon Lady stereotype until after I had bought Resident Evil 2. It’s not like you can take a game you bought back to Gamestop or Best Buy because you found some representations in it to be problematic.  Can you?

• Some of these games feature American stories and characters, even if they’re made by the Japanese. This ignores the existence of people of color in America, including Asian Americans.  American does not equal white, though this mindset says a lot about the idea that Asians are perpetual foreigners.  Where are you from?  Asians get this a lot.  Plus, even if we went with this idea that America is majority white and that’s why the characters are, that hasn’t stopped white Western game developers from making a multitude of games set in Asia starring a white male protagonist.

• The characters could be racially mixed and biracial. Sure – but what, in the game or story, would have us believe that, or come to that conclusion?  Where does this desire come from – to see these characters, who have blond hair and blue eyes, which are markers of whiteness around the world, as mixed?  Does it add to the conversation and narrative, or is it an excuse to avoid these issues?

• Japanese people do make games with people who look Asian, like (fill in blank). Of course there are some exceptions.  But that’s just what they are: exceptions.  Try this: list all the iconic Japanese games and characters out there that feature characters that are white.  Now, create another list – with ones that are Asian.  See?

• They’re not supposed to be white or Japanese, the characters are in a fantasy world where they’re just human. If this is the case, then isn’t it a little odd that we equate human with light hair, pale skin, and blue eyes?

• Is race all you care about? If so, I would have stopped playing a long time ago.  I care about all the other things that gamers obsess and flame about on the boards: I think Gordon Freeman is a vanilla character but thrill at Half Life 2’s stellar level design and pacing (special shout-out to Portal).  I think Bethesda’s open worlds are breath-taking and mind-blowing, and yet I’m seriously irritated by their weight-based inventory system in their games.  I’m one of those crazy people who prefer Saints Row 2 to Grand Theft Auto IV, because even though SR2 is more juvenile, messier, and offensive, it’s also more fun to me.  And when I read about developers who get exploited by publishers, I get sad for them and their families and feel grateful for all the nerd sweat that went into making that snowmobile escape scene so exciting (and pretty) in Modern Warfare 2.  I love games, for all their frustrations and myriad flaws.  These issues of representation are just an added level of consideration for me.

You may have noticed that I don’t really provide any answers to my main query.  That’s because  I honestly don’t have all the answers.  I’m asking a question and I am curious as to what people think.  I also find it perplexing that people haven’t really asked this question before, especially as issues of race and gender and sexuality in gaming have been touched upon by various media.  The above rebuttals are to counter the knee-jerk reactions which I anticipate getting, as I am quite familiar with haters who don’t even bother to read my entire entries before putting up some abusive comment, or those who think snarky apathy is a cool substitute for honest debate and discussion.  I am also familiar with people who will complain that any of us even bring up these issues, which is perplexing since there are literally hundreds of other sources, professional or otherwise, that cover gaming which wouldn’t touch this issue – is it really that threatening that we talk about these things?

All of this adds up to people trying to bully those of us who would bring up questions of race into silence, or worse, make us blame ourselves for the flaming that goes on whenever we try to ask a difficult question.

And again, I don’t want it to appear that I’m unfairly picking on Final Fantasy XIII, as it’s far from the only Japanese cultural product that features predominantly white characters.  I also don’t want to pick on Japanese people. I’m not coming at this from some self-righteous place – anyone who read my nerd blog entry will remember that I have a lot of personal experience in imagining fictional worlds where everyone (including me) was white, and back then, if you told me there were racial aspects of my imagination and dreams, I would have gotten defensive and insisted that it was not racial and then I would have asked you to get out of my dreams.

I ask at this point in time because, for years, there have been a lot of blockbuster games from Japan featuring majority white characters, and yet very little has been spoken about it.  B  I’m not interested in policing how many people of color and Asians appear in a game, I’m honestly wondering where all of this comes from, and also why we can’t talk about it.

I am curious about these issues as both a consumer and a creator.  If we have the tools of creation, of story telling and world building and character at our disposal, what we create ultimately says something about us.

Thanks in advance for any constructive conversation and insight.