Shipping Characters of Color (or not, actually)

[allyndra]

So, I've been reading a lot of blogs about race, both in general and in fandom, and I'm trying to become aware of and confront my own skanky race issues. I remember discussion over the fact that people don't ship characters of color as much as white characters. And it drew me up short, because I don't. Chad/Ryan was my first inter-racial OTP, and that's pretty darn recent. All the approval-seeking by Ford never made me want to ship him with John, and even though Ronon is the hottest character ever to grace SGA, I take Rodney over him every time. I do like Gunn (and want him slashed with Xander), but I tend to overlook him. But I could, to some extent, brush this off. Everyone has favorite characters and pairings, and the fact that my pairings tended to exclude characters of color could just be a coincidence.

Then I watched Iron Man. I don't think I'm spoiling anything when I say that Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and James Rhodes (Terence Howard) had a close friendship. And lately, I watch everything through slash goggles. Still, despite Tony and Rhodes showing emotional connection, long-term friendship, and a willingness to express affection physically, I didn't have any urge to slash them. And that bothers me. If Rhodes had been played by an attractive white man instead of an attractive person of color, I would probably be frantically searching for the Iron Man slash.

The thing is, if I'm just dismissing interesting, attractive characters out of hand because of their color, how do I fix that? Awareness is usually considered the first step, but what is the second? Should I challenge myself to write more characters of color? Make an extra point of giving fic featuring those characters a chance? I'm going to try both of those, but if anyone has other suggestion, let me know.

Comments

[nextian.livejournal.com]

(Hi, wandered over from dancinbutterfly's journal.)

I had/have this exact same problem (because I am also a dumb white chick).
If we have this learned behavior (i. e. white boys are the slashy ones), the best thing I can think to do is forcibly unlearn it. What I did was track down canon sources that I already knew (a) were slashy and (b) had more than one major CoC. Reading deadbrowalking will give you a pretty good sense of places to look, although I wouldn't specifically comment to ask, because they are not an educational resource, just a support group. Psych, for example, is slashy as all crap (in a way that the writers possibly support), and although the main character is coded as white, his actor is Latino; his best friend is black. I had to find new canon to do this in -- I'll probably never ship John/Ronon, because I'm too used to watching for John/Rodney. I don't know if this applies to everyone, or just to me because I am a douche.

The other thing you have to get used to is a lack of fandom support -- Shawn/Gus, the pairing in question on Psych, has maybe five stories written about it, and as you point out, nobody writes Tony/Rhodes right now. Find someone you know doesn't have this problem, and squee your ears off with them instead of with the larger internet, because the larger internet will not be any help.

OKAY I'm sorry I left you a complete comment of spam! But this post is really kind of awesome to see, because any sort of awareness of the issue is, er, a little rare right now. /relurk