I'm kateorman. This is my side journal to learn and think about racism, using the TV series Doctor Who as a starting point. (I have a lot of "workbooks" like this - for me, it's a good way to learn stuff.)

THIS IS A NO SNARK ZONE. Disagreement and debate are welcome, but lecturing, bitching, and eye-rolling aren't. POC be warned: you may encounter frustrating White people here. Please consider them my problem, not yours. Erm, especially if they're me. :-)

Thought it might be useful to maintain a bibliography of books and stuff I've mentioned in this LJ. Possibly only useful to me, but there you are. :-)

( Bibliography )

Just a quick heads-up: there's a documentary on the Mutants DVD called Race Against Time about casting and representation in the original and revived Doctor Who. It's introductory but intelligent, and gives the UK context of the show's production, which isn't always obvious to viewers outside Britain.

Also, here's an interesting perspective: Cultural Exchange: Jonathan Kos-Read is 'the token white guy' in Chinese cinema.

ETA: Nearly forgot! Volume 3 of Time, Unincorporated, which includes my essay on race, racism, and Doctor Who, is at the printers now and should be available next month. (And may the gods have mercy on my soul. :)

As you may have seen, for health reasons, I'm decommitting from online activism. I guess that means this is the last posting for seeingred. I'm sure I've benefitted more from keeping this journal than anybody else has! But thank you for reading, and especially for your comments.

Anyway, I have a few leftover bookmarks: here they are, for your interest. (Caveat: I haven't read all of these thoroughly.)

Five Minutes With: Lenny Henry | The Big Interview:Lenny Henry | The Black and White Minstrel Show | Idris Elba interview (really interesting comparisons of US and UK TV) | Noel Clarke interview | No reason why Lenny Henry can't be Othello | Lenny Henry: 'Maybe one day we can have a black Doctor Who' |

"Racism and Science Fiction" by Samuel R. Delany | Ruminations on Cyber-Race | "Another way that racism harms white people is by denying them the ability to develop their critical thinking." | Where is the good popular fiction for black men? | Who has the right to speak about racism?

Racial Disparity News from Science Daily | "Aversive racism is the inherent contradiction that exists when the denial of personal prejudice co-exists with underlying unconscious negative feelings and beliefs."

Victoria police in racist email scandal: "One of the offending emails contained video footage showing the death of a man who was travelling on the roof of a crowded train in India. When the train stopped at a station the man stood up and touched an overhead power cable. Onlookers screamed as he was electrocuted. The email containing the shocking video began circulating in the Victoria Police computer system and racist comments were added, suggesting 'this might be a way to fix the Indian student problem'."

Racist police e-mail offensive, unacceptable: Australian envoy

Police emails cause diplomatic tensions

fwiw, my various scribbles in response to Elizabeth Moon's much-discussed posting can be found under the park51 tag over at kateorman. (A rationale for my approach appears here.) There are more thoughts to come later this week, once I've met my deadline. There's also relevant stuff under the islamophobia tag.

(For simplicity's sake, I think at the end of this year I'll probably stop posting in both kateorman and seeingred, and just use my main lj, dreamer_easy.)

An opinion piece from the SMH: Admitting our racism problem is first step to a solution. "... according to a 2009 VicHealth survey [...] nearly one in 10 of us do not believe that people of all races are equal or that inter-racial marriage should be supported. In the same survey, 37 per cent of respondents felt Australia was weakened by people of different ethnic origins 'sticking to their old ways'. Thirty-six per cent of respondents said some groups did not fit within Australian society, with Muslim, Middle Eastern and Asian people cited most commonly." (Footnote: I think it was 2007 rather than 2009.) This is in agreement with other surveys of Australian attitudes.

Analysis of the recent election: A disaster of Labor's own making: "[Swings against Labor were] worst in those suburbs which house the highest percentage of migrants - most notably those stacked with Asian voters who abandoned the party... [O]ne ALP veteran member [...] suggested the knifing of the Mandarin-speaking prime minister [Kevin Rudd, ousted shortly before the election] had cost the party dearly. Mr Rudd also articulated Labor's traditional support for migration - a position abandoned by Julia Gillard as she sought to appease voters worried about boat people and migration on the city's fringe. The Greens ate into the Labor vote in the inner city. The question is whether the migrants in the middle have had enough of being taken for granted."

Winding back a couple of decades, here's an irresistable tale of pwnage told by one of the creators of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon:

"Phil Mendez is a wildly-funny cartoonist who has designed — often without ample credit — a number of hit animation shows and features.

Phil is the guy — this story is legendary — who moved his desk into the restroom at Hanna-Barbera. While he was working there, he was promoted to some title that entitled him to a proper office, only they didn't give him one right away. They left him in one of their little cubicles with the portable room dividers. (At Hanna-Barbera, the walls often moved more than the cartoons.)

After several requests when unheeded, Phil simply added the letters "DEZ" to the sign on the men's room door and moved in his drafting table. H-B execs would walk in to use the facility, see Phil sitting there drawing, and make quick U-turns out to find another john.

Finally, they ordered him to vacate, whereupon Phil posed the question of how it would look to the industry if word got out that Hanna-Barbera's highest-ranked black employee had been working in the men's room... and had even been thrown out of there. He was assigned a real office within the hour."

A New Statesman blogger (columnist? how the world has changed) puts her finger squarely on the problems with the second episode of Sherlock, The Blind Banker, ie, that it was "an exhilarating romp through nearly every hackneyed orientalist cliché going". Where Laurie Penny is earnest, Anna Chen mightily takes the piss: "you should see my Terror of the Curling Tongs". (She also compares Sherlock to Withnail, which is brilliant.) We congratulate ourselves that things have moved on a bit from Talons of Weng-Chiang, but I'm not so sure.

I'm not sure how much longer this podcast will be available at the ABC Radio National site, so go listen now: the Good Spirit Festival was a remarkable meeting between Indigneous Australians and African immigrants held in Tasmania. As well as songs and dancing, the participants shared their experiences of dispossession. Shamefully, for some of the immigrants, it was their first real welcome to Australia.

... isn't a mosque and isn't at Ground Zero, for a start. The New Yorker demolishes the claims that it's some sort of "Islamist" "trophy". Letters to the New York Times discuss the matter civilly. One includes a damning claim: "The same people who came to our community board meeting in May saying they didn’t oppose the project - just the location - and would support it if it were anywhere else in New York were back again at our July meeting carrying signs that read: 'We won in Staten Island and we'll win at ground zero. No mosque.'"