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I was watching Shameless the other day, and it's a drama-comedy about a dysfunctional poor family in the Chicago South Side. The family is white, and most of th

I was watching Shameless the other day, and it's a drama-comedy about a dysfunctional poor family in the Chicago South Side. The family is white, and most of the main characters are white. This is really weird, if you've ever been to the South Side. But pretty much everyone quickly gets over that and ends up immersed in it. The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. It's just that they're badly written and badly acted shows. And, more perniciously, the show's media team likes to draw all attention to the criticisms based on race to make it seem like the main criticisms are all about race to deflect attention from actual, fundamental flaws.

hammock 4y ago
>The family is white, and most of the main characters are white. This is really weird, if you've ever been to the South Side Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white. The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe
CharlesW 4y ago
> The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-white-supremacists https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-middle-ages/2016/09/22/e56c4150-7f50-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...
- deleted 4y ago
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- scarmig 4y ago
  That centers race a bit much. There weren't black people in medieval Europe, but nor were there white people. We're projecting contemporary racial categories onto a past where they didn't exist. The question of whether there were black people in Europe is akin to asking what did people there think of the USSR. That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepots in the Mediterranean. If you proceed to e.g. Elizabethan England, most people wouldn't have been confused by the sight of a black person (cf Othello), though they'd likely be something of a curiousity (though still not considered black in the contemporary sense).
  - Maursault 4y ago
    > There weren't black people in medieval Europe But there definitely were.[1] Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors#Moors_of_Iberia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors#Moors_of_Iberia
    - LEDThereBeLight 4y ago
      You’re not understanding his argument. Medieval Europe didn’t have this internalized concept of race or skin color like we do - they categorized people more by religion (catholic, Protestant, Muslim) or origin.
      - Maursault 4y ago
        Fair enough, but that still sounds absurdly idyllic and very hard to believe. I would expect it to be the opposite, that there was extreme racism even between different families within the same culture, and mostly only in Europe and not so much in the Middle and Far East. Europeans invented racism, and I would have expected it to have occurred around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But this is all conjecture.
        scarmig 4y ago
        It wasn't idyllic. The Holy Roman Empire suffered millions of civilian deaths during the 30 years war (on the order of a third of its population). It's just the categories people used were things like region or (especially) religion. Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.

hammock 4y ago

>The family is white, and most of the main characters are white. This is really weird, if you've ever been to the South Side Not really, unless you consider (as most did in the first half of last century) Irish and Italians to be non-white. The south side is larger and more diverse than you seem to believe

CharlesW 4y ago

> The issue with the Rings of Power and similar things isn't the anachronistic racial composition of the cast. Note that it's a myth that everyone in pre-modern Europe was white. This is a white supremacist trope easily proven wrong by, say, digging into the representation of POC in medieval European art. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-white-supremacists https://www.npr.org/2021/05/06/994325620/going-medieval-on-w... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-middle-ages/2016/09/22/e56c4150-7f50-11e6-9070-5c4905bf40dc_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/5-myths-about-the-mi...

deleted 4y ago
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scarmig 4y ago
That centers race a bit much. There weren't black people in medieval Europe, but nor were there white people. We're projecting contemporary racial categories onto a past where they didn't exist. The question of whether there were black people in Europe is akin to asking what did people there think of the USSR. That said, yes, people we'd currently code as black existed in Europe, though disproportionately in entrepots in the Mediterranean. If you proceed to e.g. Elizabethan England, most people wouldn't have been confused by the sight of a black person (cf Othello), though they'd likely be something of a curiousity (though still not considered black in the contemporary sense).
- Maursault 4y ago
  > There weren't black people in medieval Europe But there definitely were.[1] Also, the idiots complaining about black elves are racist morons. There were, in fact, black elves in Tolkien's world. Though never depicted as such by artists, Eöl the Dark Elf (who was not Moriquendë, i.e. not a member of the Moriquendi or the Elves of Darkness) probably wasn't white. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien goes out of his way to describe Eöl's son as having white skin. There's no reason to do that unless his son was notably distinct in this way from his father. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors#Moors_of_Iberia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors#Moors_of_Iberia
  - LEDThereBeLight 4y ago
    You’re not understanding his argument. Medieval Europe didn’t have this internalized concept of race or skin color like we do - they categorized people more by religion (catholic, Protestant, Muslim) or origin.
    - Maursault 4y ago
      Fair enough, but that still sounds absurdly idyllic and very hard to believe. I would expect it to be the opposite, that there was extreme racism even between different families within the same culture, and mostly only in Europe and not so much in the Middle and Far East. Europeans invented racism, and I would have expected it to have occurred around the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But this is all conjecture.
      - scarmig 4y ago
        It wasn't idyllic. The Holy Roman Empire suffered millions of civilian deaths during the 30 years war (on the order of a third of its population). It's just the categories people used were things like region or (especially) religion. Race and racial ideology were developed in Europe, but it was in tandem with the modern era, not before it. Think 17th-19th centuries. It served a concrete purpose: to explain and justify how the leading European nations interacted with their colonial subjects. But there was no reason for race before colonialism, so it never developed because it would have served no purpose then.