I’m going to talk about one of my least favorite things in fandoms and probably on all of tumblr, just I hate it so much and I’ve been seeing it going around again. The tumblr ideal of what makes a PoC, it’s probably one of the most ignorant and detrimental issues masquerading as a positive movement that I’ve ever seen.
PoCs are People of Color and this is often Black people who are the darkest in skin color, yes. However, that does not exclude fairer-skinned PoC and I mean that on a scale of Asian PoCs to Hispanic PoCs to Biracial PoCs. PoCs come in different skin colors and yes they are other than white.
The thing I hate about tumblr is there is actually a scale, like the one above. Where there is a specific point tumblr has or rather a very specific color tumblr has before a PoC can be considered a PoC. Which leads to fairer, dark-skinned PoCs being drawn as the darkest blacks rather than their tanner complexions. Examples are Kaidan Alenko from Mass Effect, Fenris from Dragon Age 2, Zevran from Dragon Age Origins, and Josephine from Dragon Age Inquisition. These are all PoC characters who have lighter (not white) skin colors and yet a lot time there are art pieces giving them darker, Black complexions. Which it’s less the art and more the arguments or sentiments behind the art that care so harmful to tumblr’s thinking.
Because people start to believe that if a person isn’t this dark, well then they aren’t PoCs or not the right kind of PoCs. What more people often go into these arguments of what makes a PoC’s skin colored as it is, there is a lot of arguments over lighting versus PoC skin. I cannot count how many times I’ve seen someone call out something because the skin of the PoC was lighter in a bright light than it was in the dark, I’ve seen this the most with Josephine, Dorian, and Fenris who are often presented in dark settings as arguments. Please, if you are going to defend PoCs being washed out by a light, go do research on how light washes out dark skin. Go check out the Blackout selfies or a PoCs selfie tag, light affects dark skin in a lot of ways and for lighter characters like Josephine and Fenris it will wash out some of their features to a lighter color in certain environments. A good test on whether it is lighting or whitewashing, is if the light areas are brighter, but the skin around the light will quickly get dark the further away from light it goes and other part/features of the PoC are as dark as you’d expect for that PoC.
Just please, please realize there is not just a black and white scale on how dark a PoC needs to be, to be a PoC and that plenty of dark-skinned PoCs have tanner complexions versus the “acceptable” dark complexions. Duncan is a lighter PoC, Fenris is a lighter PoC, Josephine is a lighter PoC, they are all PoCs and that’s not at all what I’m arguing against. They just come in other colors than “black” and that doesn’t whitewash them in any way.
