Your thought on accurate racial depiction?

scythe 2016-08-01 06:20:53 UTC #41

Sometimes I really wish that there was a way in English to differentiate between an individual and a population of people. For instance, there's a world of difference between a person who's white, and white people, but we can only say "white people". I really think a lot of miscommunication could be avoided if that existed. It's a huge time and energy waster to have to say "not all" after every discussion point.

apocryphagraphics 2016-08-01 06:37:23 UTC #42

We know for certain that isolation can lead to certain traits becoming more pronounced, but it's the scale your asserting that is frankly silly. All people of African lineage are apt to be better athletes? All Asians are apt to be smarter? You can't defend those assertions with the qualities of a people isolated in a tiny island environment. The smaller the population and the longer it is isolated the more pronounced the superficial differences will appear. but blacks are an ENORMOUSLY diverse group of a billion people. Asians are an ENORMOUSLY diverse group of 4 billion people. Your argument is they share these universal or largely universal traits? Really? The quantifiable differences tend to be very slight -- molecular-- and there is little evidence for large scale behavioral or physical traits associated with race. People with a certain ancestral historical association with certain regions of Africa tend to have a higher rate of sickle cell anemia. This is worlds different from proving that" black people blah blah blah. "

scythe 2016-08-01 06:49:26 UTC #43

To be fair, when I say black people, I'm referring to African American men (because we're talking about the NBA here), who for two hundred plus were essentially bred for musculature and endurance. And the Asian thing, I know it's not particularly comfortable to think about, but you can, and many many people have, aggregated and averaged out IQ test results by race, and East Asians consistently outscore everyone else except Ashkenazi Jews (who are avery tiny group so not really a fair comparison).

I'm not saying all differences are purely biological, I'm simply acknowledging the biological component to what makes each race different, again, on average. Of course each individual person's traits and tendencies would reflect an intractably complex web of personality, culture, upbringing and, yes, biological heredity.

scythe 2016-08-01 07:01:52 UTC #44

Also, I didn't catch this earlier, but given that this is a pretty touchy subject for some, I went to great lengths and took great care to make sure I wasn't misinterpreted to be saying all black people are better athletes, or that all asians are smart. I'm not required to defend assertions I never made. If I were to say Asians are the smartest, yet the dumbest person on the planet might be Asian, I would not be contradicting myself.

jennula 2016-08-01 07:02:19 UTC #45

For me, I'm always a bit scared of mis-representing since I'm a white person, born and raised in Sweden. I think I've been more into representing women, queerness and different body types rather than race and have probably worked more with that than skin color.

However, in SPEJS, one of the human protagonists has a darker skin tone, because it really didn't matter what her skin tone was to the story, so why not? And besides, it's set in a sci-fi-setting far away in the future, so I thought I didn't have to care that much about nationality (more than "they're human"). So yeah, here are the two human protagonists (there are two more protags too, but they're non-humans, and I guess not relevant to this discussion):

What I'm trying to do is to avoid any stereotypes. They're just two awesome women kicking butt, you know? And I guess I'm not trying to mix in too much earth culture in it since the humans fled from earth 500 years ago, so they've probably built a new culture, and also mixed their culture with the one that exist on the planet they now live on.

I'm not sure if this is a good approach, and I don't feel super comfortable telling on how to work with this (since I only see it from a white scandinavian perspective), but I just wanted to show how I work with it in my comic. I think representation is great, and stories get more fun if there are more variations among characters, like skin tone, body type, sexuality etc =)

kkitty 2016-08-01 07:10:15 UTC #46

I only choose the ethnicity after I design the color scheme and the outfit. To me it's nothing more than part of the design unless the character is strong in their culture. It's the easiest way to avoid stereotypes.

apocryphagraphics 2016-08-01 07:30:15 UTC #47

Jewish people win a lot of nobel prizes because their culture puts an extremely high value on western style education. A lot of Asian cultures now put an extremely high value on mathematical proficiency as a way to compete with the West and it's head start economically/ technologically. You're talking about education and culture, not race. The myth that African Americans are superior athletes due to selective breeding among slaves has been thoroughly debunked and falls apart upon the simplest understanding of genetics. For such a program to work during the actual time of slavery it would have to have been immense and well documented--involving the intentional transfer of large numbers of "breeders" and a large number of generations--as humans take up to 12-13 years to become fertile. Your assertion is that not only was this accomplished without any documentation or historical evidence but that the genetic changes to the slave population were so profound that they endure TO THIS DAY despite generations of African Americans abandoning the regime and reproducing at will without any consideration of a desired phenotypical outcome? Not likely. Really not even a little possible. African Americans are good at basketball because a lot of African American Families love basketball and start playing seriously at a very young age. None of this debate has even touched on the absurdity of defining what is "more intelligent?" What is "more athletic?" Michael Jordan has a very high vertical leap. Is he more athletic than a Scotsman who can throw a hammer halfway across football pitch? A group of Japanese grade school children might ace an algebra exam. Is this smarter than a group of Sub-Saharah African children who are practically independent from parental care and constant oversight by the age of 4? On what empirical grounds do you or anyone proclaim this group smarter or more athletic or more timid? There simply are no well defined standards that guarantee you have or even could established those claims to be facts. There's nothing wrong with having an African American character who lives in Brooklyn and loves rap music and the NBA. But those characteristics don't make that character any more believably "black" than an African American character that loves Spider-man and quantum physics. So I'll continue to write the person and not the stereotype. At any rate we are in danger of hi-jacking this thread.

scythe 2016-08-01 07:46:29 UTC #48

This I agree wholeheartedly with.

The rest. I think you think I'm saying genes are the only factor that goes into making one race or culture excel at certain things. I'm not. Like I said, it's likely a rich, complex web of a whole range of things, that I believe includes innate, inherited biology in the mix. And when it comes to that biology and the aptitudes it preferences, I'm willing to cut down with a very fine scalpel to the tenth degree if necessary. I'm not making any sweeping generalisations here.

Oh, and happy to leave it here if you think we're hijacking the thread. Such debates don't really go anywhere in forums like this anyway.

apocryphagraphics 2016-08-01 07:52:03 UTC #49

Yeah, it's a very interesting and important topic, but I think we are hi jacking it a bit. Time to let the rest of the community have their say.

isaacfriedman 2017-06-21 05:49:55 UTC #50

Do the people in this picture:

look like they are of a different nationality than the people in this picture?

Note: these were drawn almost exactly a year apart, so my style has developed quite a bit.

Also, is it racist to depict Japanese, Chinese, and Korean people with slightly narrower eyes and rounder faces than they actually have in order to contextually imply that they are east Asian? If it is I'm in trouble because that's kind of what I've been doing for the past year.

joannekwan 2017-06-22 20:56:14 UTC #51

I suppose there is a slight difference in the eyes, the old man on top clearly passing as asian. I think you were going for more rounded eyes for the guy on the bottom. I looked at random pages from your work on Tap and once I got a sense of your style it's easier to tell them apart.

As for your other question, I don't think it's too racist unless you're treading into offensive caricature stereotype territory. Yes many east asians have rounder faces, but I've seen plenty of round-faced people from other backgrounds as well. For eyes, I usually angle them slightly and make them more almond-shaped. But for me it's all about noses apparently. In my experience (I'm Chinese btw) most east asians will have soft sloping noses (of varying lengths). Here's a quick sampling of my east asian characters.