Diversity Representation in MU*ing

[GreenFlashlight]

Arousal darkened her skin to the warm rosy color of a well-smoked salmon patty. The sight of her made him ache with lust, as if to sprinkle her with salt and a twist of lime juice. He laid her on the sheets as gently as if he were laying her on a bed of rice. The lubricated marital aids lying beside her, waiting for their turns to be used, reminded him of spears of buttered asparagus. He looked down at her and lowered his mouth to her lips as he would to bite into a cheesy garlic biscuit. He missed the Red Lobster in town that had closed earlier this year.

[Kestrel]

@GreenFlashlight said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Arousal darkened her skin to the warm rosy color of a well-smoked salmon patty. The sight of her made him ache with lust, as if to sprinkle her with salt and a twist of lime juice. He laid her on the sheets as gently as if he were laying her on a bed of rice. The lubricated marital aids lying beside her, waiting for their turns to be used, reminded him of spears of buttered asparagus. He looked down at her and lowered his mouth to her lips as he would to bite into a cheesy garlic biscuit. He missed the Red Lobster in town that had closed earlier this year.

[SparklesTheClown]

I definitely can understand this person's points as far as describing skin color, and I'm not even inherently against following that, nor do I think they're wrong or that they're even making bad points. But I just personally see nothing wrong with doing the food thing, or some other comparative description. Like, are there implications if you dig really fucking deep and really deconstruct it? Sure. But like, I'm not gonna read someone with "mocha skin" and suddenly feel like it's a microaggression.

That said, I do think this person might be coming from a place of having read a lot of people who probably use those terms in very unfortunate ways. I can definitely imagine all kinds of ways that one could use those terms that might come off as a bit much or objectifying. It's really hard to give a good example, I know there are examples but in truth I'm about to eat so my brain isn't fully functional to articulate this.

Buuut I don't know, again, I'm not saying they're wrong, I'm just saying I just kind of don't have a big feeling about it, it's not something I see as a pressing issue or one that I particularly encounter in a context that I find offensive. But I'm only one person and I don't want you to take my indifference as absolute law. You'll have to use your own judgement if you want to consider if this is something you want to avoid or not. I'll try to think of negative examples later if someone else doesn't by the time I come back.

[silverfox]

If I don't feel strongly about it either way, then why not do it in a way that makes at least one person more happy? It doesn't hurt me, so I might as well go with it. Also, my descriptions suck, so having even more guidance is pretty nice.

[Meg]

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

divinity

uh. i didn't know you could eat that.

[Tinuviel]

@Meg

"Divinity is a nougat-like confection made with egg white, corn syrup, and sugar. Optional ingredients such as flavors, chopped dried fruit and chopped nuts are frequently added. Replacing the sugar with brown sugar results in a related confection called "sea foam"."

[Meg]

@Tinuviel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Optional ingredients such as flavor

tiny laugh.

[Roz]

@Meg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

divinity

uh. i didn't know you could eat that.

A lot of churchgoers partake every Sunday.

[Tinuviel]

@Roz said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@Meg said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@mietze said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

divinity

uh. i didn't know you could eat that.

A lot of churchgoers partake every Sunday.

[Derp]

Divinity = stale white marshmallow fluff, sometimes with nuts in it. Despite that it remains strangely tasty.

[Kanye Qwest]

divinity is fkin nasty.

but while I didn't read the links yet, yeah. I sometimes think of skintones in terms of foods but mostly when the names of colors are foods. It would stand out to me if I was reading something and ONLY poc were described that way, or only women, etc etc for sure. I can see how it could be gross.

[Ominous]

Bananas are white inside the peel, and they're delicious.

Also, I go away for a couple of days and this thread turns into a disaster area. I mean, I figured it was going to happen eventually, but it's sad that I missed it.

[JinShei]

@Kestrel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

Deleting my reply to this thread, having seen the split between the threads and not wanting to further derail.

[Narson]

@L-B-Heuschkel said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

@HelloProject said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:

There are very few truly racially homogeneous places on Earth, and this isn't like some modern thing. People really have this fascination with medieval Europe being 100% white and anything to the contrary is SJW propaganda. Fuck actual history and art I guess lmao.

Amen, amen, and amen again, said the historian. POCs were definitely a thing in medieval Europe, and the only people claiming otherwise are white supremacists pushing an ideal all-white European age of glory that never existed.

I'm going to gently disagree in part - while I agree that actively promoting this is very much a far right white nationalist point, I actually think we have more ingrained and systemic problems with our history teaching that makes this a passive assumption that pervades our understanding of European history. The types of sources we use privilege white experience, often we don't teach racial aspects within survey courses/modules/components, but instead isolate 'Black History' or such to its own (often avoidable) sub component, and not seeing themselves within the history taught and for numerous other reasons we don't have a diverse engagement with history and related fields, and so history teachers and academics at all levels remain overwhelmingly white (and middle class)

[silverfox]

A BIG problem, from within teaching, is our resources, absolutely. A few reasons for this and almost all of them can be fixed with money spent.

1. outdated resources. My school is only 6 years old, yet the SS text we have is 10 years old by copyright date. What people were willing to accept 10 years ago is vastly different than now.
2. attempting to make it "acceptable". If a text is controversial districts don't buy it, and companies like Pearson or McGraw Hill don't make money unless they can widely spread their product. It should be usable in NYC and Appalachia.
3. age appropriate-ness. Verging on the far side of caution, horrible things, if they get mentioned at all, are described in the most general terms. This makes them feel like they weren't horrible.
4. standards. Teachers have to choose what to focus on within the framework of our standards. At the elementary level social studies often is the subject that gets compressed/combined with literacy. When time becomes and issue we will choose phonics and text structure over the social themes in books. Force me to fight for a particular state grade or my school is punished? Yeah. I'll do it.

[Tinuviel]

5 Parents. We're not replacement parents, and yet we are often expected to teach things that are in the wheelhouse of subjective experience, and cannot be taught by rote in a school.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@Narson said in Diversity Representation in MU*ing:
but instead isolate 'Black History'

That is an argument I am not qualified to have on the simple basis of not being American. I have no very little idea of how this subject is handled in the US. Black History Month is definitely not a thing here.

Awareness is increasing of the presence of POCs in Europe before, well, 1970. Their presence was never denied here, though, until fairly recently -- which is, to me, what makes it a white supremacist agenda. Fiction, art, poetry, historical accounts from just a few generations ago all treat POCs as -- well, just part of the scenery. Yes, they existed. Sometimes they were referenced in funny or strange ways, like 9th century accounts calling black people 'bluemen'. But they were definitely there, and pretending otherwise is a new, and highly questionable agenda.

[insomniac7809]

@L-B-Heuschkel I don't doubt there's a lot of white supremacist deliberate push there, but I think a part of it is just down to visual media (film, especially) casting costume drama and period pieces as entirely white.

Pop culture perception is influenced by pop culture presentation (even as we all absolutely deny that this is the case), so the assumption settles in that Europe didn't have diversity until the 70s. Challenges to this perception are assumed to be agenda-driven, which can even cause filmmakers to consciously cast white to meet audience expectations, further cementing the impression.

[L. B. Heuschkel]

@insomniac7809 I think you're absolutely right about that. You only need to take a look at any incarnation of say, the Arthurian legends in film. Rinso white in spite of the original 15th century work, Morte d'Arthur, naming numerous POC characters around the Round Table. Habits die hard.

[mietze]

My youngest child came home with a pilgrims and Indians themes project in kindergarten this year school year in WA state. Which was horrifying to me on many levels.

Public school instruction in the US is extremely fractured, not only state by state but district by district and school by school. (My older kids' elementary school would have NEVER done that, and also at the time was the main site for a native american students and families group for the district, and those parents very generously shared resources with the teachers, students, and other families about PacNW history and current culture!!)

My teenagers were not taught about the Japanese detention camps in school until /9th grade/. My kids knew about it because we are part Japanese by heritage and there's a lot of opportunities to learn about it outside of school here if you know where to look, and we also always took advantage of the Japanese american cultural events put on by the community. Including talks by survivors! None of their schools ever invited these people to come and speak, even though there is a very very local connection. In high school in the 90s this was never taught (I wasn't in WA state though) not even in AP history. I only learned about it because I've always been a compulsive overreader.

Growing up mostly in southern and midwestern schools, we did not have MLK day, we had Lee-Jefferson-King Day (in that order, I shit you not) and I never received any sort of education in the civil rights movement (including in AP history or the advances history classes that didnt teach to a for profit test), aside from my own personal interest. Even though there were historical resources right in those cities where I lived that could have been utilized by the schools.

I did get to tour a plantation house in the 8th grade though.

I hope things are less stupid elsewhere than they are here. For fucks sake, even just looking at the narrow band of colonization to modern focusing solely on things involving white people the US has so little history to do (as opposed to, say, England, for example) you would think we could at least do that competently, but I do not think we manage usually. It's gross.

So I'm not surprised that many Americans in particular are just ignorant and fall back on fictional media and what they "see".