I just saw an article in The Root about remarks made by Michael Caine and Charlotte Rampling, about the Oscars, about the lack of anything close to parity of recognition given to non-white actors. Neither Caine nor Rampling were championing the desire of non-white actors to be recognized, however. While Caine's remarks seem, to me, fairly benign and naive (I think his stance pays no attention to race and he's just relaying his own experience of how long he had to wait for an Oscar. His wife an children are brown.) ... Rampling's comments are ... well ... read them for yourself.
If Disintegration were to be made into a TV show or film, the majority of the cast--if cast faithfully (read: not whitewashed)--would be non-white. It takes place in the far future, where I imagine that humans will have interbred to the point of practically eliminating "race." There are different shades of people in my book (as there are now, admittedly), but "whiteness" and "blackness" as we know it exists only on the extreme fringes of the skin tone spectrum, and the vast majority of humans exist throughout the vast middle of that spectrum (as they do, now, in point of fact, but political and social power in Disintegration is no longer held by the white minority (which has become much, much smaller), unlike today.
I created this reality because it seems like a reasonable extrapolation of where things are headed, for humanity. If you haven't seen my picture or watched my video: I'm white. This probably affords me the privilege of not really caring about my whiteness. I'm the color that I am simply because my parents were the color that they are (honestly, it's not that simple because you can consider the social influence that encourages people to couple in a manner that maintains a racially divisive status quo, but let's not go down that rabbit hole). Just like I had no say in being born, I had no say in how much melanin I was going to receive. I'd like to live in a world where that is the sole truth of anyone's skin color: that the amount of melanin we have is irrelevant to anything aside from whether some of us are going to burn more easily in the sunlight.
In other social-justice news, I saw that a syndicate has been created promoting works with strong female characters and I think this is a great idea. I can't afford a monthly membership to anything, at the moment, but I believe in what they're doing, and I am fairly certain that Disintegration passes not only the Bechdel Test, but the latter three tests listed at the Wikipedia entry for the Bechdel Test (the Russo Test (there's a lot of sexual fluidity in Disintegration. The B in LGBT is heavily represented), The Sexy Lamp Test, and the Sphinx Test (because I don't want my "strong women" to just be the typical patriarchal male character in a female body.))
On the latter parenthetical, Captain Carina Duvais appears to be the typical action heroine stand-in, a "man" (in quotes because I think that a man can be more than just patriarchy's masculine ideal, but that is the benchmark I am citing, in this case) with breasts and a vagina ... but the character has much more depth than that. If I were lazier, Carina could pass the sexy lamp test because she is sexy (in the prosaic way that we've been inundated by media to perceive as truly sexy) and I've depicted her this way, but it isn't just to be salacious. It's purposeful because it makes her an object of desire to many of the men she encounters, whom she ideologically despises, and she has to navigate that unwanted attention.
Second Lieutenant Ada Bennett, the counselor, is almost diametrically opposite Carina because Ada engages, mostly, in heterosexual intercourse and she is empathic (figuratively and literally; she has telepathic abilities that allow her to sense only feelings, like Counselor Troi from Star Trek: TNG). She is warm, generous, non-violent, etc., etc. But Ada is no shrinking violet (her penchant for submission in a sexual context does not make her a clothed pushover) and her receptiveness to sex isn't depicted, narratively, in a pejorative manner (characters react to her proclivities in a negative way, but it's indicative of the character's problems with female agency, and the pervasiveness of the Puritan Ideal).
Lieutenant Commander Angela Hastings is another of Disintegration's female leads and she isn't very analogous to Carina nor Ada except that they share a common biology and gender. She also the least sexualized of the three characters, in the narrative, mainly because of her involvement in a monogamous commitment with A'arilon Ray (my ostensible protagonist, but this is an ensemble story, so no one is the sole protagonist nor antagonist), and her high rank insulates her from overt expressions of desire by other soldiers.
So, there are some things that have been on my mind. It was fun to write them out, and provide a little character backstory. Thus ends this socially conscious entry into the reader update log. If anyone wants to chime in on any of these points, I relish the opportunity for discourse!
