About the Word
So, because it’s my intention to invite everyone over to play, new people are bound to show up and see the word “coloured” plastered all over the walls. Some of you will be willing to accept it as a feature of the universe and some of you will react with horror: We don’t say that word! We don’t, and I was actually aiming for the horrified reaction more than the acceptance, but it’s gotten complicated.
People from the United States, and people from other places who are aware of our history, see “colored” (or “coloured,” I’m in Canada now!) and remember the facilities labelled “WHITES ONLY” that existed next to the coloured ones. They also remember a lot of people who suffered and died to make us stop doing that, and associated human rights violations. My initial intention was to contrast that with how accepted the word is in Tin Soldier, the word and its many associated human rights violations. Oh, yeah, there’s going to be a certain amount of those people getting beaten in public and nobody lifting a finger to help. Also, we’re not thrilled with them using the library.
I hoped you might notice how we like to change the language and then sweep all the behaviour under the rug. We don’t do that anymore! Except we do. The segregated library and movie theatre are gone, but that thing where those people get beaten — or even killed! — in public is still very much with us.
Maggie and Sanaam aren’t even considered coloured, but when they visit the fake US, they still have their own crummy toilets. Sanaam still sees people cross to the other side of the street to get away from a scary black man. The fake Disney company is in fake Africa, and they crank out films for worldwide distribution with anthropomorphic animal characters, even the princesses — because the world isn’t ready for a black Cinderella. A coloured one is similarly out of the question!
(As an aside, which is relevant to changing language and not behaviour, I do go back and forth on whether to use Black or black. Having gone through the summer of BLM, it kinda seems like we had a whole thing where we said, “please stop killing black people” and the media said, “would you like a capital B?” And, while that would be linguistically-consistent with terms like Latinx, that’s not what we asked for or needed. So I must ask a follow up, “will they be killed a bit less if we spell it with a capital B?” And the answer seems to be, “no.” I don’t much care for a capital B in this context, I’d rather have the other thing first. But I don’t want to be insulting out of context. In general, I’ll give you lowercase in-story and about story, and capital when speaking to a larger audience. ‘Kay?)
Marginalization persists through multiple vocabulary adjustments. Society is treating life like a round of Hungry Hungry Hippos, without enough marbles to feed all of them. Some people will be pushed out of the game no matter what we’re calling them. Lots of us are “coloured” in that way.
Changing the language is supposed to be an acknowledgement that the behaviour associated with the language was wrong. There is nothing inherently wrong with a collection of symbols and sounds, it’s the intent of the user and their unwillingness to change that’s the problem.
You see this IRL with non-black people demanding n-word privileges, as if we’re all done with the discrimination associated with the word and now it’s been removed of all malice for anyone who might use it. If we really had delivered that perfect discrimination-free society, then the n-word would lose all its sting, sure. But we haven’t delivered that society yet, and when you start acting like we have, that makes the rest of us think you have no intention of delivering. Or even trying to improve. You may have your dessert when you’ve eaten every last bit of your systemic racism, and not before.
It was never my intention to divorce “coloured” from its legacy. I chose it hoping to remind readers of its legacy, in a new context without the automatic defence that we don’t do these things anymore.
But I’ve run into a complication. In Tin Soldier, part of the point is that the word doesn’t have that legacy. They’re living an alternate history of prejudice and discrimination and at their point on the timeline “coloured” is normal. There is a lot of reprehensible behaviour existing around the word, but there are worse words that people use when they mean harm. (Words that happen to be completely innocuous for us — ’cos it’s not the word itself that’s the problem!) Nobody in-universe mirrors our reaction, and as we become more immersed in the setting, we also lose our reaction. Oh, crap, I didn’t think of that.
It goes to show you why even changing the language alone can be so hard for us, but it’s darn near impossible to make the point that these things become invisible and accepted when on all levels they are invisible and accepted. At least Erik and Mordecai are uncomfortable when the music store lady monitors them the whole time; they are totally fine with “coloured” and even use it themselves.
I’m not immune to this effect. After six years, when I talk about innate magic-users, that’s the word I use. Sometimes even in public, when I know people overhearing me have no context and they’re going to think I’m racist or a nut. But I don’t say “magician,” because that’s a mean word!
I can’t win. Even if I went back and did a find-and-replace over the whole story and picked some word that’s even worse for us, if offended people stuck around long enough the offence would wear off eventually. And then my readers and people who want to play here will end up talking about Tin Soldier in a Starbucks Tim Hortons (Canada!) and using the n-word unselfconsciously, and someone will get an iced latte dumped on their head.
My choices are to give up and use some other word with no history for us, or keep using it in hopes that sometimes you’ll have a brief moment of recognition. I’m stubborn and I’ve decided to go with the latter — with a language update and its attendant problems occurring in Soldier On.
Hell, if you say “coloured people” in a Timmie’s (or wherever) and get an iced latte dumped on your head, I guess it’ll remind you. At least that word is a little less threatening than the other one, but you should still apologize and explain you forgot — that is your fault for using the language out of context.
Please do try to remember we don’t use that word in shared spaces and out of context. I know that is even harder now that we’re in a pandemic and our private spaces have become shared spaces via remote work and chat, but try. People doing grocery shopping in the 21st century didn’t sign up to hear, “blah, blah, blah, coloured people” in the pet food aisle, they just wanted to buy kibble for Mr. Boots. They also didn’t sign up to have some apparently-racist rando grab them and try to explain that they mean pretend coloured people, so it’s okay! It’s not okay.
As a compromise, please let me offer you the word immie, from Year 13 and beyond. In-universe, this is derived from a governmental classification system: I-MU, pronounced “‘eye-mew,” is the code for innate magic-user. (Learned magic-users are lemmies, or “el-mews,” and “mews” are magic-users in general). It’s got serious baggage in-universe and Mordecai hates it, but it’s got no context IRL! Safe for coffee shops and grocery stores — but do your best to behave appropriately for the evolving pandemic situation!
About the People
Why in the hell did I make a magical minority in the first place? Was The Green Mile not good enough for me?
In simplest terms: Because the X-Men make being marginalized cool. But let me unpack that for ya.
It is much easier to get everyone to put themselves into the shoes of a green wizard with cool powers than, say, a black lesbian woman. We need POV characters who reflect real marginalized people, too, and I’m giving you some, but innate magic-users are all-access (they give you a different POV no matter where you’re starting from) and they come with a coupon. Hey! Imagine yourself this way and you’d have cool magical powers and be able to call gods! Not many people are excited to pretend they’re nonbinary women, but creating a gemsona is fun!
I don’t think I’m quite at that level. I didn’t give them cool weapons and headgear like Touhou characters. (Maybe I should’ve, but it doesn’t quite fit in with the urban fantasy aspect.) But because I made them up, there’s no stigma or disrespect in trying them on as an identity. IRL, there are no barriers to painting yourself green, and there probably won’t ever be any. You’re not making fun of anyone. They didn’t used to do that in movies to fake being a race when they didn’t want to hire real people of that race. And if somebody snaps a photo, it won’t come back to haunt your political career. It’s a culture AND a costume! Try it on!
(The older I get, the more I believe everything is a costume, but some pieces are precious. They should be cared for like when Maggie borrows her mom’s hat, and never fenced-off, stolen — If the owner still has it, it has not been stolen! If it’s in a museum in some colonizers’ country, it has! — or paywalled.)
On the other hand, the exact opposite is true in-story, so I can make you revisit some of this stuff and see it through new eyes. Oh, shit. Oompa-Loompas are racist? (Oompa-Loompas are racist here, too, but they painted the movie ones orange trying to avoid the context. Pop-culture history is fun!)
It’s also way harder to throw up your hands and say, “I’m colourblind! I don’t see it at all! You’re the same as me!” when there are associated abilities and disabilities that need accommodation. “Let me straighten that out for you, colourblind person. I’m a bright orange human being and that means when I become overloaded with magic, literal coloured flames leap out of my body, and on certain days of the year I need to go to a special building so nature doesn’t try to kill me. Ya see it now?” That’s a lot more obvious than a history of redlining and what it’s done to your socioeconomic status.
(Honestly, I’d love it if I could burst into magical flames wherever anyone disputed my identity. Wouldn’t that be great?)
It’s a longshot, but if I turn up the volume and fiddle with the distortion, maybe I can get you to notice the Muzak that’s been playing in the background since before we were born. The original song is so old that even when we notice it our reactions are dulled. We shrug and accept it, or dismiss it as something that happened a long time ago. TS and SO’s coloured people are a remix, with a lot of sampling. If I spin this record just right, maybe I can get you to get up and dance, even if it’s self-conscious dancing.
Really, every race and culture in this story is a remix, even the ones that look familiar. It’s easy to forget. They’re our reflections, but that means they’re distorted. Their whole history is different; they had access to magic. With a little distance between their reality and ours, I hope some things will be easier to see.
On the Value of Metaphor
Since I penned the first version of this explanation, Pixar’s Luca came out, and I got a clue-by-four about another pitfall. Before you get too mad about the level of representation you’re seeing (or not-seeing), give me a minute to plead my case for a metaphor’s flexibility.
Luca is literally about fish people trying to pass in human society. Literally. But social media blew up with LGBTQ+ people who saw themselves in the fish people. So much so that the mere fact that the fish people weren’t overtly queer was taken by a lot of people as a form of erasure and appropriation. And I’m sitting over here with my various intersections and thinking, “But the fish people were a metaphor for autism!” And the people in my autism support group felt that way too.
What really spoke to me in Luca was the part where Luca just casually mentions to Julia that they can “sleep under the fish” because to his experience shiny things in the firmament are fish, his best (and fellow fish) friend said they were, and he doesn’t know Julia’s world doesn’t work that way. She laughs it off, assuming he’s a normal human making a joke, and he doesn’t learn about stars until she explains them.
That is not a queer experience to me, that’s a neurodiverse character trying to learn masking and screwing it up, but they pass anyway by being “funny.” It’s happened to me so many times! If you confine that to a read of “oopsie, I said something about my LGBTQ+ identity in public and had to pass it off as a joke” I don’t get to see my autistic experience in that movie. It is possible to see queerness and neurodiversity in fish people, it is not possible to do so in literal queer characters. Queerness isn’t a metaphor, it’s a real thing that people are. Unlike being a fish.
Marginalized people of all kinds deserve to see themselves in media, including characters who have their identities explicitly defined. Yes, there should be children’s media with LGBTQ+ kids. But there is also value in failing to specify. A metaphor can speak to a lot more people.
So I’m ticking off as many marginalized identities as I can, but I can’t give you a main character for everyone — unless I use metaphors. Erik and Mordecai have an all-purpose difference they can’t hide, like race or certain disabilities. (Erik also happens to have a disability you can see, and both of ‘em have a few you can’t.) With their help, we can explore how that works in general, and sometimes you’ll see yourself, and sometimes someone else.
But Are They Jewish?
Lastly, now that I’m doing a plotline where immies are in trouble, with a European ambience, we have to talk about where they come from and what I’m doing with them. The fastest way to connect the dots is going to deliver you the least-nuanced picture and cause you to miss some important things, so let me check in and set you straight right here, where it’s most convenient.
In building my magical minority group, I asked myself, “What if the gods chose a people and never shut up about it?” I thought Judaism (with its focus on learning the rules and arguing with God), Catholicism (with its patron saints) and the displaced Afro-Indigenous soup that brought us Voudou, Santeria, Obeah and others (with their near-scientific taxonomy of divine beings and desires) collectively, had the most rational response to such a situation.
(Stop right there, my sensitive friends. Diverse as I am, I cannot generate an entire alternate universe using only the elements of my own heritage. Let me ask you, do all of these cultures still have their religious practices intact? Okay. And am I preventing them from doing their own thing by observing reality and constructing a narrative? Okay. Then the only damage I can do is to people’s feelings, and that’s subjective. Let me do my thing and you can make your own assessment.)
I sampled these various traditions and spat out a unique ethno-cultural identity — but I set my story in an alternate Europe. Brujas, Obeahmen, and even Catholics do not get as much blowback on that continent as the first group on my list. In this context, they sure as hell look Jewish.
Bearing that in mind, I’ve tried not to have them act too out-of-step with some kind of culturally-Jewish association. I keep an eye on Seth especially, since his family seem to be on good, if privileged, terms with their culture. Mordecai took off as a teenager and is highly critical of the whole deal, so he’s much more likely to eat a bacon sandwich out of spite, and Erik would just be clueless.
So your answer is yes, but that’s not all they are, and that’s not all they’re for.
Past this point, we are getting into the implications for the plot, and there will be spoilers.
In trying to be sensitive, I may have stapled myself to the obvious interpretation of their marginalization — irreparably. So I’m left begging you to zoom out and remember “genocide” is not this idea some guys in brown shirts had in the 1930s, and then we never had another one ever again. For starters, by the 30s, an occasional forced relocation, engineered famine or extermination was not out of the ordinary for European Jews, let alone many other groups across the globe. That is part of the reason more of them didn’t freak out and leave, it’s not like they weren’t paying attention, or they gave up because Hitler took their guns away or some shit.
And now, as I edit in yet another update, there’s some folks committing a genocide and hiding behind the idea that the Holocaust was the only one, and they were the victims, so they’re just acting in self-defense — and even other Jewish people are being antisemetic if they object. Sweet baby hippos, I will give you all kinds of leeway for generational trauma, but I’m not gonna back off and let you inflict more of it because you’re hurt and scared. Fuck me, I never expected most of the world to invoke “Never Again” as a reason to support another genocide (and, because I started planning this years ago, the plot will reflect this blindspot of mine — so sorry, I can only fix so much), but I have a weird brain and people like me aren’t making these decisions.
As a species, we keep having this awful idea. Hilter modelled the Holocaust on what the US did to their Indigenous peoples in the Manifest Destiny years — and Canada did it too! We focus on the one time that thing happened in that foreign place where they speak that funny-sounding language, and shoo away the layers of bone and blood under our own feet. The Holocaust was a mechanized, modern genocide — one of very few with clear records and film of it — but Hitler did not die for your sins.
The laser-like focus on the uniforms, the symbols, the language and the past has allowed is allowing some really bad people to get away with some really bad shit. We say “Never Again,” but we mean, “We’re Never going to acknowledge this Again… and while we’re at it, Never Before too.”
I lived in Tucson during the forced separation of immigrant children from their families. I had actual concentration camps in my backyard, and the only thing I could do was protest and vote. (And, guess what? I helped get that Democrat we wanted into office, and the camps are still there! I’m just not there anymore, or supporting them with my taxes.)
I did not drag children out of those places and hide them in my attic like a cinematic resistance fighter because that would have meant they would never go home to their parents. Always, at the back of my mind, it seemed like they might go back to their parents, and that kept me from doing anything more violent than inconveniencing some politicians. (Ron Barber was still very put out that I was being so uncivil.)
And kids died. They were put into a situation where they were neglected and abused until some of them died. I don’t have an impressive statistic with a lot of zeroes to grab your attention, but that happened down the street from me and I could not stop it. I do not have a high horse from which to observe the circumstances of a genocide taking place in full public view, my horse is flatter than a fucking pancake.
To add insult to injury, I got to listen to lots of bloviating sacks of shit — including the folks running the Holocaust Museum! — explaining that a concentration camp is not a “concentration camp” unless it’s one of those death camps with obvious bodies piled up, like the black-and-white historical footage we’re familiar with. Bad leftist! Don’t tread on the Holocaust! We’re never having one of those again!
I am eighty-nine-percent sure that if a genocide should be considerate enough to occur in black-and-white, with everyone speaking German, and the bad guys in Hugo Boss uniforms with skulls (but not cool Punisher skulls!) and swastikas, we will notice it and stop it. Otherwise, we will dismiss (and, indeed, are dismissing!) it on the basis of any superficial differences and look the other way, because we do not want a World War with nuclear weapons. That’s why we talk about the Holocaust, not a genocide.
Since we are now at the point where we’re invoking the Holocaust to justify a genocide, this mindset needs to die yesterday.
In the late 1990’s, as a moody teenager, I visited the same Holocaust Museum that would later give its stamp of approval to Concentration Camps for Tots. My mother — who counted the Holocaust among her few special interests, who regularly watched the History Channel, and who avidly consumed the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners — was beside me, doing all the activities along with me. At the end, she declared with confidence that such a thing could never happen in America, because “the Germans are a sheeplike people.” I stared at her and said, “Then you have learned nothing.”
She didn’t like that. It didn’t go well. I don’t want to get into that here.
She died during the Obama administration. I sometimes wonder if she would’ve been horrified by what Trump brought us, or if she even would’ve seen it. Obama started putting kids in cages, after all, and we all dismissed it then.
Despite the fact that I am giving you a Jewish-like people in a dangerous situation in fake Europe, it is not my intention to give you The Fake Holocaust. It’s an attempted genocide, like the Holocaust, with no “The” at all. This is just another situation where the most convenient scapegoat is an insular, marginalized group, a few governments get together to beat the hell out of them, and the rest try to look the other way. Only this time, they’re your friends. It’s not superlative. It’s not special. It’s an awful idea we keep having, and sometimes it kills lots of people. It can happen here. It can happen anywhere. It is happening right now.
Ultimately, you will make your own decisions and interpretations. I am not here to do mind-control, I would like you to think for yourself. But I will do everything in my power to keep you from being blinded by the similarities and comforting yourself with the lie that there’s only one genocide out there to reference and it’s over now. If I am destined to lose that battle, this note is here to remind you of my intent.
In Conclusion…
I’m not perfect, but I tend to have reasons for the narrative decisions I make. If you give me enough rope (and pay attention) I’ll weave you a cat’s cradle.
And sometimes I will indeed hang myself, but I hope in an entertaining way!
