some thoughts to chew on

via aliettedb 

Fanboy by Alexander Chee

an article on being bi-cultural, especially of mixed-race, and then about comics as bearing significance to society.



I lived as a juvenile legal alien in a very foreign culture for long enough to know exactly what he's talking about with hearing both sides of a divide mock each other with the same kind of rhetoric. And I hear it everywhere.
Democrats, Republicans. Christians, Muslims. Westerners, Orientals.
Men, women.

I also know I cannot really wrap my mind around that experience, only sympathize with it.


I love him for making a point about a woman being suddenly not in a major role after marrying.
(The older married women I know are the most dangerous to their enemies, though in general they pick their battles and their weapons so it's not on the global radar. Which is why there are more mature women mentors in my fiction than old men, come to think of it. I grew up in churches, I know who the scary people are.)



I was thinking the other day about how heist-stories and bands-of-adventurers tend to have a multi-cultural make-up, traditionally. Wondered if that's partly because even we stop being able to differentiate too many white men from each other. Then realized even with white-only European narratives, having a Frenchman, two Celts, a Scot or a Pole was because there is a sense of those differing backgrounds bringing different perspectives to bear.



The idea that all historical periods in all countries previous to this were more in the dark about diversity than ours is also stupid, by the way.
It may be partly true, but so is everything else anyone else believes.
Not to say there haven't been good things coming out of a conscious effort to erase prejudices--which may indeed be mostly new.

Just sayin'.