This week, I\u2019m torn between writing about Thomas of Ercildoune and the wet weather. Let me find a third topic, instead.<\/p>\n
In stories of all types, the general push of the tale help explain the impact of the words. Something that I encounter time after time in my research is that changing a single word to reflect contemporary understandings of hate speech does not by itself negate bias. It hides it a bit, that\u2019s all until the underlying story doesn\u2019t reflect that bias. If only the main character is given a place and a plot and everyone else is secondary to that character, then the story is about that character, for example.<\/p>\n
In some circumstances the change itself can work very nicely alongside the bias and reinforce it. My current example of this is the change of \u201cwhere no man\u201d to \u201cwhere no-one\u201d in some Star Trek TV. \u201cNo-one\u2019 opens the door to a wider sense of gendering, which is a good thing. The change, however, is in the TV prologue of Strange New Worlds, and Strange New Worlds is all abut discovery. The concept underlying the show reminds me every time someone says those words, that historically, European discoveries of new worlds (including the Americas and Australia) were mainly to exploit them (convert whole populations, make much money, populate with both the free and not-free\u2013 that kind of thing). Why does it remind me of that? All the non-human populations that experience First Contact in any Star Trek picture or TV show already know their own world. They are seldom watching out for strangers. How can they live in a place where no-one has gone before?<\/p>\n
Also, the brilliance of the crew makes for neat plots of the \u2018we can pull the wizard out of a hat \u2013 most people can only pull rabbits\u2019 kind. These amazing folks are designed to be celebrated. Their very existence validates the right to discover and to settle. The newer shows are more likely to have scenes where what the discovered actually want, but these are not universal. What is universal is the sense of destiny and of empire building. That \u2018no-one\u2019 becomes rather important in this context. The language shared is that some people (mostly human or very close to human in many of the key culminating scenes) have discovery rights that trump the ancient peoples who own a land.<\/p>\n
I will still watch Star Trek, but I will watch it and explain the bias to myself. There are other shows I wont watch at all. Reinforcing a bias isn\u2019t nearly as bad as helping people hate, you see. But that\u2019s a topic for another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This week, I\u2019m torn between writing about Thomas of Ercildoune and the wet weather. Let me find a third topic, instead. In stories of all types, the general push of the tale help explain the impact of the words. Something that I encounter time after time in my research is that changing a single word […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,17],"tags":[743],"class_list":["post-3163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-rants","tag-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3164,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions\/3164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}