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Monday, July 20, 2009

Grappling with, and Portraying, Discrimination

This post was inspired in part by a comment on the Analog forum about how difficult it is to portray discrimination if you've never been subjected to it. In fact, I think that it's difficult to portray well even if you have been subjected to it.

The other source of inspiration is an epiphany I had about portraying discrimination in a story that I've already written, but which I was never fully happy with.

I'll start by talking about the experience of discrimination. I'm from the US, which means that ideologically I'm not supposed to value discrimination on any basis. On the other hand, I do recognize that it exists all around me. For one thing, I'm female, and while I've never been told by my own parents that I can't do something because I'm a girl, I've been told it in other contexts. Believe it or not, when I was a kid I got really ticked about the way boys could go shirtless and girls couldn't.

My experience of discrimination changed and sharpened when I went to live in Japan. Wow, was that interesting. The variety of reactions I got was quite remarkable. Here's a sample:
  • There were the people who asked to touch my hair.
  • There were the hairdressers who told me they couldn't help me because I had fluffy hair like a cat's.
  • There were the people who wouldn't sit next to me on the train, even though it was packed.
  • There were the people who didn't recognize that I was speaking Japanese until I addressed them directly, because they just couldn't believe Japanese would be coming out of a face like mine.
  • There were other people (fewer, fortunately) who never did recognize that I was speaking Japanese.
  • There were people who would praise my Japanese up and down, making sure to remark on how difficult Japanese was for foreigners - at first I found this nice, and later I realized that many people would say this for anyone who could put together a basic sentence, so it really ended up belittling all my work.
  • There were also people who told me I spoke Japanese "too well" and that it made them uncomfortable - I suppose because they wanted to keep it for themselves and they felt invaded by my skills.
I also got gender discrimination in Japan - probably less than a Japanese woman would, but at one point I was told that because I was attending Ochanomizu Women's University (where the government had chosen to place me) that I must be smart for a girl. I nearly went apoplectic.

I once had a five-minute argument with a male professor over a point of English language grammar, because he decided to expound an analysis that was incorrect before he gave me a chance to answer the question he'd asked me. And this wasn't linguistics stuff, folks - he asked me the function of the word "but" in a complex sentence. It took me a while to realize he wouldn't back down, and I was in trouble because I don't believe in capitulating to something I think is incorrect, so I just said I couldn't agree with him and sat down. The girls in the class were open-mouthed at my audacity; the professor never spoke to me again. I am not proud of this, in fact, because it shows me that I'd missed some critical cues to the social situation.

I spent a lot of years learning to understand Japanese culture and social context, but I never learned to find it easy. As my husband says, "The good thing about being a foreigner in Japan is that you never get treated like you're Japanese. The bad thing is, you never get treated like you're Japanese."

The experience was an eye-opener, for sure. I've only started to scratch the surface with the things I've mentioned here.

For the purposes of writing fiction, I would begin by making the following observation: discrimination is complex. It is pervasive, and it has many different faces, all of which will show themselves in the relevant contexts. Even people's attempts to be nondiscriminatory in one way can show their bias indirectly in other ways. And even though I resent bias, I understand that I hold many biases myself, subconsciously.

If you want to show discrimination in your world, it's not enough to show people calling one another names. That's the obvious one - and you can do it, but you should also try to push beyond it into the overall picture of how a society marginalizes one group of people. Explore the limits of how your people define "self" and its value, and how they define "other." All the nuances of these definitions will make themselves felt in different social contexts.

I've dealt with this in more than one of my stories. Cold Words definitely deals with questions of superiority, inferiority, and the perception of discrimination between people. I also deal with this a lot in Varin, which has a complex caste structure with seven different levels.

My recent epiphany had to do with Varin, and in particular with my main character in one of the novels, a girl called Meetis. Meetis is a subversive (if not a revolutionary) because she chooses to look beyond the easy caste-based definitions of people and try to fathom their motives; she believes that people have common human characteristics in spite of caste. Here's the problem: this view of hers appears to be quite normal to many modern Americans. Thus, when I began the story with her, she appeared to be rather insipid and I was never able to get fully in touch with what her subversive character would be. Now, I'm thinking about it differently, and I won't be starting her part in the story until three or four chapters in.

The trick is to set up the context of discrimination first. To show the blatant abuse, to show the subtleties of labeling while visiting the POV of characters who are not at all like Americans. Once I can get that moving in all of its multidimensional horrible qualities, then when she shows up on the scene, her views will stand in contrast to what I've established as the norm. And now that I'm thinking about it in these terms, I'm starting to see how hard Meetis has had to work to maintain her views - the pressure she's been under to change, even within her own loving family, and the fierceness with which she must hold her beliefs because she knows precisely how dangerous they are.

Are any of you dealing with discrimination issues? I'd love to hear about it.

I will also note that on Wednesday night I'll be leaving for two and a half weeks in Australia. During that time I should have internet access, but I'm not sure how much blogging I'll be able to do. I'll be back here in California - and seriously jetlagged - on August 10th.

18 comments:

  1. Possibly the single most difficult task in fiction is to portray someone with beliefs you detest in a sympathetic way. The tendency is to assign All Bad Behavior to the Other-Who-Does-Not-Think-Like-Right/Good-People-Like-Us. So here's dude who sincerely believes, let's say, that women are intellectually inferior, talks down to them in a kindly, patronizing way -- and has no clue that he is being anything but kind and gracious. There is no need to portray him as bigoted against everyone else on the approved lists, a economical-political fascist, =and= he picks his nose. He might, other than his quirk of holding doors open for women, be a nice guy.

    I suppose a lot of boys back in high school also saw no reason why girls shouldn't go topless.

    Here's something, too: what if there is an operationally valid reason for the discrimination? Let's say the appaloosies have in the past generation and after many generations of struggle finally expelled the geezenstacks who had been occupying their country and treating them as second-class subjects in their own land. But there are also numerous geezenstack colonists who were left behind when the rulers were overthrown. One of their beliefs is that no geezenstack should live in a realm unruled by geezenstacks and so substantial numbers are in continual communication with the Grand Geezenstack-in-Exile, who rules just across the Straits. They yearn for His Return, pass on intelligence, and so on. The appaloosies therefore discriminate geezenstacks from among the general population. This will be Seriously Unfair to those few who don't believe in geezenstackihood, but anything else would be destabilizing for the new independent regime.

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  2. Very good points, Mike. In the arena of portraying people with beliefs you detest, in fact one of the people in my Varin story is undercaste and extremely resentful with ugly beliefs about those above him - he's been a serious challenge for me, because he is a protagonist and not an antagonist. All in all, he's a good guy. Mind you, I am working toward altering his belief system somewhat over three books, but where I'm going is not full acceptance - more like, the evaluation of individuals one by one on the basis of their personal circumstances. Still, it's very challenging.

    Another good point is that there are degrees of discrimination, and that it can show itself in subtle ways as well as in obvious ways - while the person can well be a great person in loads of other ways.

    History is always a huge factor in discrimination. Cold Words has a historical component, and so do my Varin stories (those have about 1000 years of history mapped out).

    BTW I can't wait to get my Analog and read your story.

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  3. When discrimination is approved by society, there is an extra layer of complexity when a character doesn't believe in the ideals of the society, but doesn't feel comfortable violating them in public.

    So, for instance, 2 members of two different castes fall in love under some strange circumstance. The woman (or man) of the higher caste is tender and affectionate in private, but whenever another person is watching, she will not even acknowledge his presence. This kind of prejudice could be particularly wounding, because the man (or woman) in the lower caste may have lowered his emotional walls.

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  4. And I never turn down an opportunity to discuss X-Men, which deals heavily with the subject of discrimination.

    In the first movie (as well as the comics), Senator Robert Kelly wants to create a Mutant Registration Act, which would require all mutants to publicly list their powers and identity for all to see. His argument is that this act would be akin to requiring registration for handguns, but it's a much different subject when the ability is inborn, as it would take away many freedoms, and open the mutants up for all sorts of discrimination and become targets for anti-mutant violence.

    The character of Magneto has always particularly interested me. As a Holocaust survivor, he's learned the harsh realities of the cruelty and hatred that can exist in the human mind. He shares Professor X's goals, but not his methods. His hatred and fear have twisted him to become exactly what he hates and fears.

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  5. Being half chink, I was fortunate to be near white enough so that I missed the worst possible expressions of racial discrimination.
    Nevertheless, may I tender the following observations:

    1. As a woman, I'm sure you've experienced various forms of discrimination both here in the U.S. and overseas. As such, I'm equally sure that you have some emotional experience to draw on. Whether or not it's the *Right Stuff* to pour into your Meetis characters, however, is still unclear to me based on what you've written.

    Although I haven't studied linguistics, it seems to me that communications in general, and language in particular, are exercises in transplanting state information from one mind to another. English seems more than adequate at transferring fairly accurately non-emotional state information between two people. Like every other language that I am aware of, however, it is totally inadequate at accurately transferring emotional state between two people they happen to share some common experience that the language can reference. For example, as a woman, I'm sure that there is *IMPOSSIBLE* for you can ever tell me in any accurately way, what you felt when you gave birth to your children. OTOH, we *MIGHT* be able to accurately share how bad it was to lose someone close to us if we each when through such an experience.

    So far, you haven't mentioned anything to indicate you've gone through anything that's really all that close to your Meetis character is supposed to have gone through, and if you haven't, I doubt that you can ever give a realistic rendering of her that someone who has gone through gone through a similar experience won't detect isn't accurate.

    2. I'm sure that Mr. Flynn is correct about the difficultly of portraying someone you detest. As a non-writer I can offer no help/advice in doing so that you probably aren't aware of.

    However, it isn't necessary to concoct some hypothetical scenario to see a case where discrimination is done for what might reasonably be called *A Good Reason*. In this country, Women of child bearing age were excluded from a higher paying factory environment (a uranium processing plant, IIRC) because of the possibility of increased birth defects caused by that environment.

    3. No offense, Mr. Steffen, but you smell like a white man. I can't think of a single person who's experience any non-trivial (that's not the right way to say it ... but it'll have to do for now) amount of significant who thinks there's any complex about discrimination. The clothes may change, but what's in them doesn't.

    Regards,
    1sickpuppy

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  6. "Like every other language that I am aware of, however, it is totally inadequate at accurately transferring emotional state between two people [who] happen to share some common experience that the language can reference."

    Although I agree with the poster's statement, it is my understanding, despite only limited experience as a writer, that it is not a writer's goal to directly 'transfer emotional state', for the very reason that the above sentence states. Any attempts to do so would be ineffective.

    However, I do think that there is an attainable goal, even if it's only attainable by very skilled writers (and other artists), of causing the audience to re-create emotions in themselves similar to those the writer is trying to communicate -- albeit disconnected from reality.

    One simple method to do this, in this context, might be to relate events and facts similar to those the writer has experienced or at least observed in actual instances of discrimination. If the writer is good at his or her job, and is fortunate enough to have readers coming to his or her work without prejudice of what to expect, this should be sufficient. Those who have experienced discrimination this will recognize it immediately and empathize. Those who haven't experienced it may still recognize it, and understand what the writer is trying to portray. If the story fails, however, either at the author or the readers end of the communication chain, the reader may have a reaction similar to the poster's phrase "you smell like a white man".

    -- Irving Washington

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  7. Interesting comments. I'll start by addressing Dave's points. Yes, indeed, you can set up really interesting internal conflicts for characters by putting them in situations like the one you've described. I think these are more common than not – anyone who doesn't agree with a prevailing societal view will be under pressure to agree with that view (even if they're not being pressured directly by specific individuals). It would be very easy to develop a bipolar set of reactions – and this is in fact what Meetis does. She's very meek generally in order to protect herself, even as she tries to understand the motives of the upper castes to anticipate what they will want and what they'll do.

    X-men puts discrimination issues out in a very clean and obvious way. Conceivably it may even intend to set up a well-ordered playing field to demonstrate discrimination for those who don't understand it as well. I think the character of Magneto is intended to evoke a real instance of racism to make the parallel explicit. Magneto's character seeks revenge, but his issues are more complicated than just social ones. I've never really tried to delve deeply into his motives, but he's experienced discrimination and persecution on two separate elements of his identity, which adds a layer of complexity there.

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  8. "What I do know is that as a former software proctologist with an interest in the brain and the hard AI premise, I have seen the following in computers over and over again:"

    Computers/software do not think or communicate like humans and I doubt they ever will. That's why computers can be extraordinarily better at some things, like computing mathematical formulas with speed and accuraccy, but have trouble with vision. I mean, any human could look at a picture of a car, any model, any background, any lighting condition, and say "that's a car" with 100% accuracy. But to create something that did the same for a computer wouldn't be possible, at least at this point. Communications aren't done in the same way--an exact string of data is transferred, there's no "lost in translation".

    Connections in the human brain, are much much slower than a fast processor, but they're also massively parallel and associative, which is both a strength and a weakness. Also, there's much of the human brain that we still don't understand, while a processor is completely mapped, since humans design and manufacture it.

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  9. As my reference to "hard AI" (or as it's now called "strong AI") should have lead you to suspect, Mr. Steffen, I disagree with your assessment.

    The reason why computers are better at somethings and humans are better than others is because they "evolved" in dramatically different environments which has led to dramatic differences in architecture. That evolution favored a fast serial processor in computers versus a slower massively parallel array in humans. However, there's no strong evidence I've seen the indicates the two aren't Turing equivalent which means that they both can do the *EXACTLY* the same things, but not at the same rate of speed.

    It's interesting that you should talk about visual recognition because that's been an area of much research and computers can be made/taught to recognize a car (or anything else you choose) in a noisy environment with very good accuracy. Neural nets modeled on parts of the brain and blackboard systems have been doing that for quite some time. Again, what can be done with such systems serially, can be done in parallel and vice versa (i.e. they are Turing equivalent) ... it's just a matter of how long it takes for one to do the job of the other.

    As for what we know about the human brain, I think that one neural research put it quite well when he basically said, "The brain is not a thinking machine that just happens to feel ... it is a feeling machine that just happens to think." There's a lot of emotion related hardware in the brain for which there has been no particular need to simulate in a computer.

    Of particular interest as it I believe it relates to this thread is what are called "mirror neurons." These neurons fire both when an animal takes an action and another animal *SEES* that action taken, in effect, "mirroring" one another in the different animals. It is believed that this may have something to do with why we are sympathetic/empathetic, and interestingly, "mirror neurons" fire off not just when we see an action, but also when we read about it. You can call this "invoking an emotional response" if you like, but I call it transplanting emotional state.

    Regards,
    1sickpuppy

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  10. So if there's no need for the emotional hardware in an AI system how are they analogous? It's such differences as the emotinoal hardware that make them different, and make an AI not a good basis for comparison.

    Besides the emotional differences, human communication is much more noisy than computer communication on the semantic level. The same word or phrase doesn't mean exactly the same thing to two people. If they did, then discussions like this wouldn't exist. We would all just understand each other immediately.

    Show me a system that can reliably recognize a vague object like a car in a variety of backgrounds/lighting/car models. I haven't seen one. ANN's will do it for their training set, I'm sure, but I have yet to see them do such a general task reliably.

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  11. Thank you for your replies, Ms. Wade.

    I take it that we are at an impasse regarding the nature of communications and language and so shall not trouble you further on the subject.

    With regard to the ambiguity of words, from what you've said (and what Mr. Steffen has agreed with), I understood what he meant before. I am well aware of the fact that words can have multiple commonly accepted means and connotations, and that depending on the choice of the means and connotations a person selects, one can come up to a different understand of what a message (sentence or phrase) ... hence the "beauty" some find in poetry.

    However, to assert that without this ambiguity we would all understand each other perfectly was and is simply wrong. Here, I believe I'm echoing what your reading research reference in that it sounds like it is saying that the meaning of a message to a particular reader of the message is entirely up to that reader, which I entirely agree with. The extreme example that demonstrates this is what someone who is schizophrenic might make of a message or even a blank sheet of paper.

    That this can happen in a non-schizophrenic case was made especially clear to me by the "For Nothing" by Amanda McBroom (who's most famous song is "The Rose"). This song begins:

    White shadow on a blackened wall
    Picture of a young boy standing tall
    Pointing skyward where ashes fall
    On Nothing

    Are we gone without a trace?
    A burning ball in empty space?
    Even God turns away His face
    From Nothing

    Ms. McBroom goes on to try to try describe the nothingness which I suspect she wants the listener to fear or at least sense as *Bad* in some sense:

    No more courage
    No more fears
    No more passion
    No more tears
    All that loves just disappears
    In Nothing

    The memories of what we dared
    The way we hoped
    The way we cared
    And all the noble dreams we shared
    Are Nothing

    While I always understand the words the same way each time I hear them, and at times understand the nothingness is something to be avoided, at others, it something to be longed for with almost every fiber of my being.

    Another example is the message left behind by a mother who killed herself:

    And then the day came when the pain it took to hang on
    Was far greater than the pain it took to let go

    With all due respect to your abilities as a linguist and your experience as a mother, you won't understand either of these examples in the same way that I and some others do, and that's not because of the ambiguity in the words or their connotations ... it has to do with the emotional state (mood) of the reader.

    As for your Meetis character and "us" versus "Them," thank you for your encouraging comment. Once again, to do my bit to prove the old adage about no good deed going unpunished, let me note one thing further: The criteria used in the categorization is not orthogonal as we computer weenies like to say. Using my previous examples, one can be both black and a woman. Hopefully, then you will not neglect in your story the discrimination that can take place within a caste.

    As for other readers of your blog feeling welcome and non-threatened to make contributions, I certainly hope that anyone who wants to will make a contribution. However, as Happy Rhodes said in her song, "Words are made for cowards, There's no room to hide behind ...." To me, if someone writes something that is questionable or writes that they feel that something I wrote is questionable, I think it reasonable to question or defend as appropriate. Obviously, since this is your blog, if you'd prefer that I don't, I will respect your wishes and bow out.

    Regards,
    1sickpuppy

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  12. "This is not the case with computer to computer communications where data is data is data. The data transferred is the data received."

    Incorrect on both count.

    In the case of the former, bits have not intrinsic meaning to a (binary) computer except with the context of their usage. A particular bit sequence may be used to represent some type of number in one instance, a string of symbols in another, or some form of instruction in yet different instance. And it is not at all uncommon these days for entities called "objects" to retain hidden which alters the meaning ascribed to a bit sequence (e.g. output stream processing).

    As for data being transferred being data received, I suggest that you look into "Error Correction Codes" work at sometime.

    Regards,
    1sickpuppy

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  13. No problem Juliette. It's the absolute least I can do.

    Btw, hope you're having a good time in Australia!

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  14. Hi Juliette. Sorry I've been away so long. The time hasn't been entirely wasted, though. Marooner's Haven, the title I finally settled on for my Nova Britannia story, is coming along nicely. Still several million light years from being finished, you understand, but coming along.

    So, you're having a good time down under?

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  15. Quite a lively debate here!

    My story is an exploration of descrimination and prejudice and the effect that has on groups and individuals.

    In this world, homosexuality is punished by death, and this has been a hard sell for a lot of people. As a lesbian who has had a gun pulled on her more than once for being so, that part wasn't such a stretch for me.

    To my surprise, I actually love exploring my antagonist's POV. My antogonist believes he is doing the right thing to try to cure my protagonist of her deviancy. I'd hate him in real life, but I'm fascinated by his story.

    -K.

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  16. Thanks for your comment, K.
    I agree that plumbing the motivations of an antagonist can be a fascinating process.

    I'm really glad we've had so many different kinds of discrimination brought up in this discussion. This is something so pervasive in the human condition that it's no wonder it's such a rich source of inspiration for conflict in fiction.

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  17. K, if homosexuality is punishable by death, then your antagonist probably thinks he is saving her life.

    Not to mention the satisfaction some people get from saving others from deviancy and sin (real or imagined).

    People you would hate in real life are often the most interesting characters.

    The Chinese curse "May you live in interseting times" comes to mind.

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  18. Thanks, everyone, and sorry I've been incommunicado for a few days. I think there are a lot of ways to deal with this topic fruitfully, from whatever perspective you happen to be closest to. David Marshall, you're right on that K has some great potential issues to work with in her story. I'm looking forward to seeing it, K!

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