Gentle reminder that my pronouns are THEY/THEM.
They're in my bio right above the ask button.
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@lagosbratzdoll
Gentle reminder that my pronouns are THEY/THEM.
They're in my bio right above the ask button.
Everyone's suddenly online enough to say “Of course Shabana is coming back” which isn't an argument anyone was making but no one is online enough to answer “why do you treat women of colour this way on the show”.
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rb and tag your favorite song that's not in english, japanese or korean
I'm not quite sure how to phrase this but I'm going to try anyway. I recognise that White Boss is going through a lot vis à vis his mental health. I know this and the show goes out of its way to beat us over the head with it.
What I really struggle with is finding an endless well of empathy for him. He's struggling and I recognise that. However the way he struggles matters.
White Boss can afford to take a months long sabbatical from his job. He can scream, berate and abuse his employees with virtually no push back. He can say absolutely repugnant things to and about patients.
And he can do all that and still be surrounded by endless wells of empathy from the other characters and a large majority of the audience. So why does he want mine?
Is it not enough that the audience goes out of its way to harass anyone who does not immediately extend empathy for Robby? Is it not enough that Robby will never have to reckon with the worst of his mistakes because the people he's most wronged are shunted off screen. Must I extend him empathy as well?
I'm also deeply confused by the insistence that empathy or understanding for white men in films, TV, books and real life is some kind of scarce resource that the rest of us must be coerced into grudgingly providing. Men especially white men have been the dominant face of fiction for literal centuries. Literature, films and TV are filled with complex portrayals of white men.
Like Robby or don't, I don't really care. But let's not pretend that complex male characters are scarce or under empathised with.
Daemon did not deserve her
i’m so gay
I find it endlessly amusing when non-Black fans whinge about fandom's refusal to discuss the flaws of Black characters. I can't help it. It cracks me up so much because the reality is that Black characters/fans/people never ever ever have the presumption of innocence. It's guilty until proven innocent. And sometimes not even then.
controversial but i actually don't really care that samira doesn't give a fuck about her coworkers. she's a good teacher and that's the most that's professionally expected of her. give us nothing girl, go home and forget they exist. you have enough going on. plus i think we should let women be antisocial and a little offputting sometimes
robby is fueled by a classic misogynistic hatred towards al hashimi that stems from his belief she is incapable of matching his work quality or even surpassing it.
he watches her pull off a risky crike procedure that she admits to never having performed before, saving a child’s life. he watches how his colleagues like and respect her as a leader and physician. he’s fine with tense back-and-forth until al hashimi dares to call him out on his behavior towards mohan. why is this the point of no return?
robby views mohan, and all of the ER, as his. in his mind, al hashimi is a threat to his power, authority and dominance. he has this disrespect towards all the women of colour in the pitt. he is absolutely domineering to the point of violence both physical (overriding garcia aside to cut into the septic patient’s leg) and verbal (demeaning santos and mohan in front of their peers). notice how he is NEVER that way to dana, mel, or mckay.
this is not just a character choice. it is reflective of the deep misogyny and racism held by the showrunners and writers, and it is poisoning the show.
TV shows are not naturally occurring, they're the product of many people's hard work. TV shows might strive for realism but that does not mean they are real. They're created by people. At its core, a TV show is a story. Stories don't write themselves. They're the brainchild of one or more people. Those people have biases and those biases show up on screen.
Stories are meant to be engaged with. Some stories have moral lessons, some are meant to teach us stuff but not all stories have a moral lesson at the end. You accept the premise of the story then engage with the elements of the story on the story's terms and come to your own conclusions of what the story is trying to say and if it says it well.
We're not meant to uncritically absorb what the author is trying to say or the story they think they're telling. Because as I said in the beginning, people have biases (conscious or not) that colour the way they view the world. Writers and readers (or watchers) are in conversation with one another.
The storyteller is not my teacher and and I do not expect them to be. What I expect is for the storyteller to treat me some measure of respect as I work through their story. I cannot remember who said that no two persons ever read the same book, but it's always relevant to remember.
If elements of a story must be erased for your analysis to work then frankly, your analysis is not worth the paper it's printed on. You cannot say, “Ignore that this character is a brown woman and that the man belittling her is her white boss. Ignore that he treats her white junior better than her.” because White Boss is suffering.
Somebody made a choice to make the character being belittled and berated a woman of colour and the character being coddled and indulged a white man. Somebody made the choice to have the resident he has a romantic relationship with Black. Somebody made the choice to have the Black resident he has a romantic relationship disappear. And those choices matter. If the storytellers (especially on TV) did not want us to engage with the race and genders of the characters, they could have cast the characters in such a way that these concerns would not be relevant.
Casting characters of colour on a “realistic” TV show about a field so rife with racism that one can draw a straight line from multiple modern advancements to enslaved and tortured Black and brown people then pretending that their race and/or gender does not affect how they interact with that world is naïve at best.
The people behind the Pitt have spoken endlessly about how realism is their primary concern. It's hard not to notice that their realism only goes so far as acknowledging and (in my opinion) over explaining White Boss and his pain. The women, especially the women of colour, who he belittles, bullies, and abuses are of very little interest to the storytellers. Their pain is insignificant in the face of White Boss’s boulder. They (and their pain) only exist so far as they can give White Boss complexity.
And that too is a choice.
Toni Morrison once said, “the world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.”
And even if we decide to agree with the storytellers that White Boss’s sexism and racism does not come from a malicious place but a deeply held belief in the mostly women of colour's ability to be “rockstars”, we cannot pretend that the people who are writing this show do not have biases that show up in screen. They might not have intended to write a story about a white man grinding down his brown female subordinate until she leaves the field. But that is what they wrote. So we have to ask ourselves, does what the writers intended matter when that's not what we got in the end?
In my opinion, it does not.
Corteon Moore as Ellis Stevens — FROM, 4x05 "What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been"
robby sees himself in a white boy -> makes sure that dana's keeping an eye on him, tries to give him encouragement whenever he can, lets him teach the new med students
robby sees himself in a white baby -> swaddles her, holds her, tells her everything is going to be okay and she has her whole life ahead of her
robby sees himself in a brown woman -> calls her a mean nickname behind her back, tells her she might not belong in the ed, calls her a liability
media comprehension questions:
why does this inconsistency in robby's behavior exist? did the writers include it intentionally? how do they talk about robby's behavior outside of the show?
what systems of power are in place that might influence this discrepancy in the way robby treats other people?
who wrote this story? what systems of power exist that might influence the beliefs of the writers?
what message does the show convey regarding robby and samira's relationship?
is racism always intentional? does a lack of intent negate bigoted behavior and/or writing?
what does it mean to identify a person's behavior as "racist"?
another thing i'm noticing while combing through s1: this isn't rlly old news but robby really is like. uniquely cruel to samira. she is the only person who he repeatedly tells that she might not "have what it takes" to be an er doctor and has evidently complained about her so many times that when he DOES say something nice about her, dana's response is "never thought i'd see the day when you'd wish for more samiras" like that is insane
and the thing is that his criticism isn't even remotely justified. literally none of the other characters agree with any of the things he complains about. collins thinks that samira's thoughtfulness is one of her strengths and she tells robby that he's just breaking down her confidence. in s2 al-hashimi points out that he literally loses basic human empathy when he's speaking to her. there's part of the script floating around somewhere that didn't make it into s1, but it's during the morning handoffs and robby says something about samira and abbott responds, "she's smarter than all of us." which is like yeah mohabbot crumbs etc etc but also do you know how crazy your bullshit needs to be for another white man to call you out like robby is just insanely vile to her for no reason 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Being Black in fandom means you're stuck in a hell loop where you're constantly explaining racism and micro aggressions to full grown adults forever and ever until you kill yourself.
i think its telling that a lot of people see a "racist phase" as an unfortunate little character flaw like its not bizarre as fuck to have a phase where you hate Black people or downplay their suffering bc its funny to you.
like i firmly believe people can change and grow, but the way that nonblacks are so quick to go "its not a big deal" to every instance of someone having a history of racism is frustrating. especially because they'll see it as a single instance, just petty drama, and never stop to think about how tiring it is to find out over and over with different people that someone you thought was a decent person had a phase where they thought your oppression was hilarious, exaggerated, or even deserved.
(and as a side note, a lot of you need to realize that racism isn't solely saying "i hate Black people!!!" overtly- its much more pervasive and seemingly innocuous than yall seem to think and people point this out over and over but it seems to be a brand new idea every time this rolls up again.)
and like, people always get to grow out of these phases and laugh about them like its a piece of silly trivia, meanwhile the people affected by these phases then and now are told to be quiet about even just being disappointed. and a lot of the times nonblacks will exaggerate a mild expression of disappointment as a violent "cancelling" or dramastarting.
just stop treating racism like a accident to giggle at :/ people aren't perfect, but racism towards Black people more often than not is deliberate, and people are allowed to be disappointed by it