Thoughts: my racial favored class is blogger
There's been a bit of discussion of biracialism on mein dashboard lately, which has been very illuminating, not just on the notion of race and ethnicity and passing -- valuable for me because it's not a topic I have much firsthand experience with -- but also on the fact that a lot of folks seem to have really, really weird notions of what biracial people, like, actually are.
It reminds me of a, uh...let's be kind it call it a "discussion" I had on another forum about the movie Cloud Atlas. Cloud Atlas is a very beautifully, competently-done film with strong themes of love, equality, peace, humanity, and unity running throughout multiple eras and story arcs. It also, unfortunately, contains the very gross practice of casting three white men as the three sole Asian male characters in the film and putting them in hideous, Klingon-like yellowface.
(And before anyone points out that the film depicts multiple actors portraying different races and even genders throughout the film's multiple storylines, let me ask if anyone thinks if'd be okay if any of the black roles in the film -- several of whom are slaves on a plantation in the historical south -- were portrayed by white actors in blackface.) (Hint: not a single black role in the film was played by a white actor)
In any case, when I brought this fact up on that forum a while back, another poster mentioned that, hey, since this particular storyline of the film takes place in Seoul, Korea of the distant future, maybe these characters were mixed race white and Korean which is why they looked a little funny and not quite Asian!
That was actually one of the more benign responses I'd received, one that honest-to-Joss felt like he was actually trying to engage in the topic and come up with logical rationales for the situation, just tossing ideas at the wall and seeing what sticks. All the same, what a thing to insinuate, however unintentionally! Evidently, biracial people don't actually look like normal human persons; when white people and Asians have babies, evidently they'll look like some weird alien hybrid beings that aren't quite white and aren't quite Asian, a new subset of human that has yet to be seen on present-day Earth. Do they get racial bonus traits as well? +1 to armor class, ideally?
Correct me if I'm way off base here but, again, I feel like a lot of people these days may in fact just have a really bizarre concept of biracialism, like, holy shit what's gonna happen when we mix ethnicities?? WHO KNOWS! IT IS A SECRET TO EVERYBODY! But um well it's actually not a secret because here's the deal, guys: biracial people?...they look like Darren Criss. They look like Chuck Criss. They look like Naya Rivera. They look like Jacob Artist. They look like Halle Berry, and Alicia Keys, and Kristin Kreuk, and Vin Diesel, and Barack Obama. They look like normal probably hot people who you meet every day out in this world.
No makeup necessary to achieve that effect.
