Venting A Bit - Tumblr Posts

1 year ago

oh man flashback to all the times people looked at me like i just grew two extra heads when i honestly answered their "what are you"/"what is your racial background" questions with "scots-jamaican seminole"

they just do not think that combination of ethnicities is possible for some reason

also a lot of people don't seem to realize racially mixed people exist (and that a person can be mixed with more than just two races)

Something that bugs me is when people say in comments on my work that they don't think real life, existing combinations of ethnicities and identities exist. To give you examples, someone got annoyed that I wrote a half Chinese, half Turkish reporter in one scene. This is a reference to leftist news reporter Cenk Uyghur, a real life Turkish man, who is married to a Taiwanese woman and has two children, so in fact Turkish-Chinese people do exist and I can name you two exactly. Someone was irritated that I wrote a bisexual Romani Jewish man. He's there as a stealth shoutout to bisexual Romani Jewish American investigative journalist Travis View, a real life human being. I got told it was silly to have an asexual white Muslim girl. I am all of those things.

I get that a lot of people in fandom live in small towns that do not experience much in the ways of diversity but there are eight billion people on Earth. Incredibly weird and specific combinations more niche than anything I have listed here happen. People with identities you have never even heard of or who have overlapping statistically unlikely identities are everywhere, especially these days, as global travel is easier than ever and mixed people are an increasingly large demographic in many countries.

Also... bro this is the MCU. We're cool with wizards, aliens, magic, multiple timelines, sentient AIs that try to destroy the world, superpowered suits of armor, but a white Muslim - and I remind you that's most of Bosnia, an entire country, as well as one third of USAmerican Muslims - is too much to imagine?

I know we're all stuck on the other discourse about racism in fandom and their protest movement but they don't mention this, and it's an ongoing annoying problem I see in fandom.

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I'd say suburbs more than small towns, but yeah. There's a very sheltered, clueless vibe to a lot of comments.


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