Black Ariel, The Classroom, and the Expansion of the Ordinary

The current wave of freakouts over non-white fantasy fiction characters has broader lessons for all of us, if we're only willing to learn them. Yikes-- Black elves in Middle Earth! Oh nos! A Black Ariel in live action Little Mermaid! 

There was a great post on LinkedIN from Bonnie Dilber, an HR professional. She writes, in part, regarding the overlap between those freaking out over Black fantasy characters and those who do the hiring at companies:

If someone has been so strongly influenced by a movie made in the 1980s that they can't support a Black woman playing a mermaid, than how are they looking past seeing white people as directors, VPs, and Chiefs day in and day out to envision a Black person in the role?

Part of working towards equity is recognizing the archetypes we've developed for what a "leader" or "doctor" or "politician" or "fancy singing fish" look like so we can check those biases and make sure that we don't miss out on people who check every single box except "looks like what I pictured when I thought of this title."

In the language of those objecting to everything from Black elves to a same-sex couple on Peppa Pig--particularly ordinary folks on social media or in my supermarket--there's the idea that these characters represent a change. They're angry that somebody deliberately chose to create these characters, which just brushes up against an important truth--

Every character design represents a series of deliberate choices, but for some folks, that deliberate choice is about editing or altering, because every character in a story should be set the automatic default of white and straight. 

In other words, in some folks' thinking, a white straight character does not represent any sort of deliberate choice, but every non-white non-straight character results from a deliberate choice to alter, edit, even replace that straight white default. 

This same thinking is reflected in laws like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, that include an injunction against teaching anything about gender roles. Folks feel strongly about this. Here's Dave Rubin on Youtube telling us that if he found out a teacher talked to his six-year-old about gender or sexuality, "I might kill that person."

Except, of course, everyone talks to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality all the time. Every kids' book (and I have read roughly sixty gazillion of them with the Board of Directors) that shows a Dad coming home from work and a Mom who cooks and cleans at handles the nurturing of the children. Every children's book that shows a male Dad and a female Mom. Heck, every adult who thinks it's cute to talk about a six-year-old's boyfriend or girlfriend. All of that is talking to six-year-olds about gender and sexuality. Just not, you know, anything other than the default. The ordinary. The regular.

The right is cranky not exactly because there are Black elves and Black mermaids and lesbian polar bears, but because these all push aside some ideas about what is normal, natural, regular, default, ordinary. These all challenge the idea that white and straight (and male) are not a choice, but an effortless way of being that just is. That while every other choice about a character or a person's way of being has to make a case for itself, being white and straight (and male) isn't supposed to need to. 

There's a lot of complaint about the notion that woke folks are being driven by superficial skin-deep distinctions, itself a telling image, as if all this other non-white non-straight stuff is a skin slapped over the proper ordinary default. "I don't see color" ends up meaning "I see everyone as sharing the same ordinary normal default identity as mine." And as Adam Serwer notes in his Atlantic piece

It’s worth noting how rapidly right-wing language about colorblind meritocracy melts away when it does not produce the desired results. Perhaps the actors cast were simply the most qualified?

In the classroom, some of this argument should be familiar, going all the way back to when folks first starting picking apart the canon on the theory that maybe there were things worth teaching that weren't the product of dead white guys from England and America (who, if they were not straight, at least didn't say so but pretended to the normal ordinary regular default identity). 

Choosing what to teach and choosing how to envision futures for our students are all exercises that bump up against this new challenge.

Checking our assumptions shouldn't be an unexpected challenge in teaching. It's part of the teacher's journey in one form or another. Forty years ago I had to realize that no, it's not okay to assume that students and parents share the same last name. You can't default to the assumption that all your female students like boys. And no, you can't make assumptions about students' most likely future based on what you see when you look at them. We can't, as Dilber says, disqualify someone because they check every box except "looks like what I imagine when I think of that role."

So yes-- the idea that elves and Jedi Knights are made up characters, but they aren't realistic if the elves are Black or the knights are female is kind of nuts. The notion that LGBTQ people are not an ordinary part of the world is--well, that takes us right into Flat Earther territory. But before we use all our energy making fun of these people, best we use some of it to examine whatever assumptions about "ordinary" we're carrying around.

This is not a bad thing. We sometimes frame history by the edges, the people who expand what is possible. But we can also frame it as the less edgy business of expanding what is ordinary. There will always be struggle there, people who fight like hell to hold onto the notion that only they are ordinary. But expanding the ordinary is how we widen the boundaries of the tribe and extend our embrace of what it means to be fully human in the world.