Often, that question gets asked in relation to works of art—can a work be racist or sexist if its creator doesn’t mean for it to be? And lots of people want to answer "no." When it was pointed out to Ted Rall a bit back that his drawing of Obama looked like a racist caricature, for example, he responded by saying, "Anyone familiar with me and my work knows I'm not racist," and insisted that he had not intended any kind of racial slur. Which no doubt was true. But just because he didn't intend a racist caricature, does that mean that the caricature was not racist?
The folks at South African game development studio QCF Design have a post which addresses this issue in some thought-provoking ways. QCF designed Desktop Dungeons, a role-playing video game. The game started out with more male characters than female, but as it developed through its Beta version, QCF decided to try to change that. They added female characters, but more than that they worked to make sure that "the women in DD’s universe [would] be adventurers first and runway models second." They go on to say that
This adjustment [that is, creating non-stereotypical female characters) turned out to be startlingly non-trivial—you’d think that a bunch of supposedly conscious, mindful individuals would instantly be able to nail a “good female look” (bonus points for having a woman on our crew, right?), but huge swathes of our artistic language tended to be informed by sexist and one-dimensional portrayals. We regularly surprised ourselves with how much we took for granted.
In other words, the designers intended to be non-sexist, but that intent in itself wasn't sufficient. They had to work at it. "Shorthands for the feminine kept crawling into our work when we weren’t paying attention—smooth skin, homogenised facial structures, evidence of makeup, you name it." In the end, "Portraits for some species went through several drafts just to deprogram our subconscious idea of what felt normal and right." Even at that, they admit, they didn't succeed entirely. The female goblins in the game still rely on eyelashes and lipstick for femininity—and, they add, "We also messed up pretty badly by whitewashing our cast (with the occasional blue-skinned Bloodmage, but that doesn’t really count)."
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For QCF, anti-sexism wasn't just a matter of saying, “Okay, we think women are equal.” Anti-sexism was work. The iconography of video game design and the tropes of the fantasy genre pushed them towards seeing women in stereotypical ways. To get around that, to avoid falling back on default sexism, they had to take the time and effort to think things through differently and imagine better.
In terms of imagination and representation, then, the default is often prejudice. That means that if you're not paying attention, you can end up drawing a racist caricature without meaning to. But it also means that, when creators and storytellers do try to confront prejudice—as, for example, in the casting of Michael B. Jordan as the Human Torch in the upcoming Fantastic Four film—many consumers see it as odd or strange or wrong.
I experienced this myself to some extent while reading Rick Riordan's novel The Lost Hero, part of his mega-popular Percy Jackson series focusing on the adventures of modern-day children of the Greek Gods. The book is for most intents and purposes a superhero adventure story, and it's unapologetic in serving up its fantasies of empowerment. It's also very up-front about making those empowerment fantasies relatable for a broad demographic. The care with which it provides the readers with one female Cherokee protagonist and one male Mexican-American protagonist (and in the next book, one female African-American and one male Chinese-American protagonist) seems almost ostentatious, and I initially found it a little off-putting.
Explanation:
