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Oh my God, every time I wincingly look back at the ongoing Cultural Appropriation bitchfight of doom, it gets worse. I'm not otherwise going to get involved, but here, I just couldn't help myself.
So, for those, like me, who hadn't seen or heard about Teresa Hayden's post wherein she expresses her anger over people badmouthing her husband (at least, that's what I assume she was doing from the descriptions - I haven't read any of the stuff involving him, either, but apparently he said things that offended people, refused to appologize when called on it, and then deleted his journal because people were yelling at him): Holy fuck, she calls fans of color and those who support them nithings.
In terms of offensiveness, as a former student of old English? Fuck, people, that's, well, not as horrible as the other n-word (which, please God, I hope no one's actually said), but it's pretty god-awful. Like, enough that I was reduced to staring at my computer screen in horror.
She has basically stated that all the people who disagree with her husband (including but not limited to, fans of color) are hateful, malicious, deformed, insane, sexually deviant, possibly cannablistic, sub-human or less-than human things. Because that's what that word means. It means monster. It means Not-a-Person. It means Grendal in Beowulf, the Ring-Wraiths in LotR, the in-bred, cannabalistic degenerate monsters in Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear."
That's what she's saying fans of color are. Maybe she doesn't really know what the word means and implies, but even if she just thinks it's an old spelling of "nothing" that would be offensive all on it's own.
And to think I used to respect her so much...
ETA: Apparently, there are differences between the Old Norse and Old English definitions, with the Norse one being a far worse insult and the Anglo-Saxon version being a little less on the digusting monster side and more on the outlaw side (see the discussion of several people with more expert knowledge than me in comments). Both versions are still insults, though.
So, for those, like me, who hadn't seen or heard about Teresa Hayden's post wherein she expresses her anger over people badmouthing her husband (at least, that's what I assume she was doing from the descriptions - I haven't read any of the stuff involving him, either, but apparently he said things that offended people, refused to appologize when called on it, and then deleted his journal because people were yelling at him): Holy fuck, she calls fans of color and those who support them nithings.
In terms of offensiveness, as a former student of old English? Fuck, people, that's, well, not as horrible as the other n-word (which, please God, I hope no one's actually said), but it's pretty god-awful. Like, enough that I was reduced to staring at my computer screen in horror.
She has basically stated that all the people who disagree with her husband (including but not limited to, fans of color) are hateful, malicious, deformed, insane, sexually deviant, possibly cannablistic, sub-human or less-than human things. Because that's what that word means. It means monster. It means Not-a-Person. It means Grendal in Beowulf, the Ring-Wraiths in LotR, the in-bred, cannabalistic degenerate monsters in Lovecraft's "The Lurking Fear."
That's what she's saying fans of color are. Maybe she doesn't really know what the word means and implies, but even if she just thinks it's an old spelling of "nothing" that would be offensive all on it's own.
And to think I used to respect her so much...
ETA: Apparently, there are differences between the Old Norse and Old English definitions, with the Norse one being a far worse insult and the Anglo-Saxon version being a little less on the digusting monster side and more on the outlaw side (see the discussion of several people with more expert knowledge than me in comments). Both versions are still insults, though.
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I generally get the distinct feeling that you (or at least, the poster's flist) are supposed to know exactly who the poster is angry at, but that they're being coy about it to avoid wank and/or give themselves plausible deniability if someone objects ("Of course, when I said, 'Someone out there on lj is stupid and mean. I won't say who, but you know who you are, stupid mean person!' I didn't mean you.").
My first encounter with it was a classmate in an undergraduate creative writing workshop who turned in a poem for group critique that criticized an unspecified fellow classmate or classmates for not taking the class seriously enough/offering bad critique/being a bitch. I distinctly remember thinking "If you have such a problem with this person, why don't you talk to them about it or mention your concerns to the professor? Instead of, you know, trying to guilt trip the entire class by announcing "I think one of you is so bad in workshop that you deserve to fail, but I won't say which."
the other hilariously horrifying antique insult that TNH called her critics was "draggle-tailed," which means an untidy slut. So she actually covered both the racist *and* the sexist axes, just like mac-stone with her "blog-whoring" and "orcing."
See, "draggle-tailed" just made me snicker (who talks like that outside of an 18th/19th century novel?) though, now that I think about it, in addition to sounding ridiculous, it also sounds dismissive and demeaning.
mac-stone is the origin of the "orcing" term? What is that word even supposed to mean? (I haven't read her original post - it was flocked or deleted or made inacessible somehow before I could). Is it like trolling, but in hordes, with the implication that everyone in said horde is dark-skinned like the Uruk-Hai?*
* which is actually something that bugged me during the LotR movies. Orcs are made from debased and twisted elves, so shouldn't they be pale the way elves are? The Mordor orcs are kind of blue-green, which works pretty well for me, but the Uruk-Hai combine blue-green orcs with men whom I'm assuming are also pale skinned, since everyone in the West is, so why aren't they blue-green? This may be a sign that I put far too much thought into those movies.
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*nods* Which is exactly what mac-stone is doing now, actually; she deleted the Cryptic Post and claimed that it was directed to anonymous trolls not Avalon Willow at all, even though in the comments (http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/889663.html) people basically chimed in immediately with "I know, right, AW is such a bitch!" and she responded like "Yeah, those mean ol' PoC make me so mad!" so... either the post was always about AW or she was happy to let people assume it was, which is pretty much the same thing.
You can see the "orcing" comment quoted in context here in coffeeandink's lj (http://coffeeandink.livejournal.com/880554.html?mode=reply) along with screencaps. Basically, yeah, it seems like her cutesy-geeky way of saying "trolling." And SOMEHOW she is either completely, totally unaware of the dodgy racial subtext of calling a black woman an "orc" (ie, yeah, part of the dark subhuman savage horde) or, she doesn't care. (It is also totally ironic that one of the original posts in this imbroglio, DeepaD's, specifically referenced dodgy racial subtext in Tolkien, so if she'd even done a *little* bit of reading she might have avoided saying something like that.)
which is actually something that bugged me during the LotR movies. Orcs are made from debased and twisted elves, so shouldn't they be pale the way elves are? .... This may be a sign that I put far too much thought into those movies.
No, the visual representation of orcs (and elves, even!) in the movies is SUPER SKETCHY. I mean, dreadlocks to indicate a savage sub-human race? Really? (It reminds me of all those conversations I had in SGA, where people would describe Ronon Dex's dreads in fic with adjectives like "bizarre" or "messy" or scary," and then not understand why that was an issue. Guys, you're talking about how a lot of people's hair just NORMALLY IS, so think about what you're saying: that a physical characteristic based on race makes someone automatically "scary" or "unkempt!" Just... no!)
Add to that the part where the movies made a lot of elves pale and blonde that weren't blonde in the books (like Legolas) and the whole visual metaphor that they have going on there gets kinda really sketchy. (It's kinda like how in the Narnia movies, all the Talking Animals and Beasts that went over to the White Queen were the ugly yucky-looking ones, and all the ones who stayed loyal to Aslan were the noble/cute-looking ones, whereas in the books the WHOLE POINT was that you can't tell who's a good or bad person just by looking at them. SIGH.)
(eta to fix link)
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Add to that the part where the movies made a lot of elves pale and blonde that weren't blonde in the books (like Legolas) and the whole visual metaphor that they have going on there gets kinda really sketchy.
I know *nods* Since elves are supposed to be a more enlightened species than humans, it probably says something that the only dark-haired elves are Elrond Half-elven and his daughter. Mostly it says that they wanted to cast Liv Tyler, I think, but you still get all the pure-blooded elves being blond while the half-human ones are darker. Legolas in particular I'd give a pass on because he's frequently been portrayed as blond ever since Greg & Tim Hildebrant got his hair color wrong in a 70s-era Tolkien calendar, but there are many, many spear-carrier elves in the films and like I said, they're *all* blond except for Arwen & Elrond. And then you have Grima Wormtongue as the only dark-haired Rohirrim (I mean, it makes perfect sense that they're all blond, since they're basically vikings with horses instead of longboats, but there's one dark-haired one and he's the evil guy?).
Personally, I was a little disappointed in the Gondor characters, too, because while I thought that Viggo Mortenson made a perfect Aragorn, and while I love Sean Bean to bits in, like, everything he's ever been in, I always imagined Gondor as a sort of Rome or Byzantium equivalent, with Minas Tirith as Alexandria and Rome and Constantinople and Troy all rolled into one, yet the men of Gondor were more Northern Europeans and not the dark-haired, dark-eyed people I'd been picturing.
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*G* Well, PoTC fandom had its own issues.
(Oh, man, don't even bring up the cats thing. That's another one of those things where, okay, the original story was just mentioned offhandedly, and then fen went nuts because OMG YOU'RE CALLING ME/HER/THEM/PEOPLE RACIST, and oof, now it's all anyone remembers, when there were MUCH crazier stories, like the "we're all doctors in a hospital" AU where Dr. Novak got demoted to a nurse because, I guess, men are doctors, ladies are nurses!)
Of course, that was a while ago, and I feel like fandom has at least moved up to, like, version 1.1.6 of this conversation as opposed to being stuck on level zero like we were for a while.
and then you have Grima Wormtongue as the only dark-haired Rohirrim
Huh, you know, I don't think I ever picked up on that, but yeah. Good thing we have some brown-haired hobbits or I might start feeling oppressed as a brunette! ;)
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When Beauty and the Beast came out and the heroine was brown-haired, brown-eyed, strong-willed, and a total nerd, I don't think I ever quite stopped being shocked.
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Belle was one of my favorites as a little girls, because she read books, something relatively few other heroines did.
(then, of course, there was the near-total lack of anybody with glasses who wasn't a comic-relief nerd, prior to Harry Potter. You had Arthur the aardvark and that one 1940s American girl, and that was it - I shudder to think what it must have been like for any child with a disability, if even near-sightedness was non-existant through not being normal enough).
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Only the High Elves tended to have dark hair and they were often described as the most lordly and wise.
They made Boromir fair haired and he betrayed the Fellowship. So, really, there isn't much of a case to be made for some kind of fair-hair conspiracy.
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Jackson muddled the pedigree for the Uruk-hai: is it Gandalf who says that Saruman has been breeding "Orcs and goblin-men"?
Actually the movies have generally muddied the waters when it comes to racist subtext with the Orcs. Not that Tolkien critics didn't try to identify Orcs with blacks prior to the movies (a vilified racially-identified Other) but for what it's worth, according to one of Tolkien's letters, Orcs are supposed to look like the "least lovely (to European eyes) of the Mongol types." So there you go, Orcs aren't black, they're...Mongolian?
(Actually, doing my Orc project it's been interesting to see how many different ethnicities/nationalities people have claimed Orcs represent. My favorite is Eskimos. Almost as "special," and quite ironic when included in the usual list of Africans, Asians, Arabs and so forth, is neo-Nazi Varg Vikernes' theory that the Orcs are vilified representations of his pre-Christian Norse forefathers.)
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Hmm... In the books, I always kind of got the impression that the Uruk-Hai looked basically like other orcs, except bigger.
Yeah, "orcs and goblin men," which confused me, because I was never clear on what the difference between orcs and goblins was, exactly, or if the orcs in the Trilogy and the goblins in the Hobbit were possibly the same thing (the Hobbit goblins I imagined as very pale, because they lived in caves).