About: Miscegenation
Jul. 30th, 2007 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jlhBy the way, I made another race post just before the book came out, which some of you might not have seen while you were trying to avoid spoilers. It concerned feeling uncomfortable or unqualified to talk about race, and whether talking about race spoils the fun of being in fandom.
I'm sure a lot of you have seen pieces of the whole![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
daily_deviant mess, but I'll try to lay out some things about it. The actual prompt is here, #4 under July 07. Now, I'm not going to get into the whole defining people as a kink; if you scroll up you'll see gay men and lesbians listed as kinks for other months. So that's just something daily_deviant does, and they're equal opportunity about it. That said, given that I'm biracial and all of the sex I've had (since I haven't had the chance to do the Lisa Bonet/Lenny Kravitz "OMG you're the exact same racial mixture I am? Let's have babies!) has been of the miscegenation variety, I share with my gay male and lesbian friends the odd feeling of being a kink through mere existence.
However, that's not the point. "Interracial" sex would have been a better term, because miscegenation does have a very specific historical meaning which I alluded to in my previous post about the Loving family and the legalization of interracial marriage in the US. The term miscegenation, as said in the wiki, is often used as a negative term for racial mixing, something to be feared. Miscegenation is the ultimate racial fear, actually, the one behind all the separation of schools and water fountains and seats on buses. Let that black man sit next to your daughter on the train, and you'll have little brown grandchildren and then where will the race be? You might remember how long it took for these laws to be stricken from the books—2000 in Alabama! So this IS a current issue, not something lost to time. By the way, other interracial marriage was also frowned upon for fear that the non-white folks would all meld and make some kind of SuperRace—odd, since the racial mixing was supposed to weaken the white race.
But let's set the specific US black-white context aside for the moment. Something thatdaily_deviant could have done, that would have been very interesting, would have been to keep the term but explore that original context as applied to the wizarding world, which is a mess of racial, or really magical species, hierarchies. Did Tonks and Lupin have trouble getting a wedding license? What if Parvati wanted to pursue Firenze? Rather than just using the term as a synonym for interracial sex (which it really isn't), the mods could have taken a look at something a little darker. Opportunity lost.
Now we're in the middle of yet another wank, because we can't seem to find the happy medium between "please, if you could, and if it's no bother, could you not use a word that refers to some unhappy moments?" which usually gets either a nonresponse or a good deal of defensiveness and a scolding, and "you are calling me an n-word," which always gets a response, even if it's the same old defensiveness. I don't know what the solution is to this; that might be the next post. In the meantime, a poll!
[Poll #1030673]
I'm sure a lot of you have seen pieces of the whole
daily_deviant mess, but I'll try to lay out some things about it. The actual prompt is here, #4 under July 07. Now, I'm not going to get into the whole defining people as a kink; if you scroll up you'll see gay men and lesbians listed as kinks for other months. So that's just something daily_deviant does, and they're equal opportunity about it. That said, given that I'm biracial and all of the sex I've had (since I haven't had the chance to do the Lisa Bonet/Lenny Kravitz "OMG you're the exact same racial mixture I am? Let's have babies!) has been of the miscegenation variety, I share with my gay male and lesbian friends the odd feeling of being a kink through mere existence. However, that's not the point. "Interracial" sex would have been a better term, because miscegenation does have a very specific historical meaning which I alluded to in my previous post about the Loving family and the legalization of interracial marriage in the US. The term miscegenation, as said in the wiki, is often used as a negative term for racial mixing, something to be feared. Miscegenation is the ultimate racial fear, actually, the one behind all the separation of schools and water fountains and seats on buses. Let that black man sit next to your daughter on the train, and you'll have little brown grandchildren and then where will the race be? You might remember how long it took for these laws to be stricken from the books—2000 in Alabama! So this IS a current issue, not something lost to time. By the way, other interracial marriage was also frowned upon for fear that the non-white folks would all meld and make some kind of SuperRace—odd, since the racial mixing was supposed to weaken the white race.
But let's set the specific US black-white context aside for the moment. Something that
daily_deviant could have done, that would have been very interesting, would have been to keep the term but explore that original context as applied to the wizarding world, which is a mess of racial, or really magical species, hierarchies. Did Tonks and Lupin have trouble getting a wedding license? What if Parvati wanted to pursue Firenze? Rather than just using the term as a synonym for interracial sex (which it really isn't), the mods could have taken a look at something a little darker. Opportunity lost.Now we're in the middle of yet another wank, because we can't seem to find the happy medium between "please, if you could, and if it's no bother, could you not use a word that refers to some unhappy moments?" which usually gets either a nonresponse or a good deal of defensiveness and a scolding, and "you are calling me an n-word," which always gets a response, even if it's the same old defensiveness. I don't know what the solution is to this; that might be the next post. In the meantime, a poll!
[Poll #1030673]
