Essays
This section consists of essays and opinion pieces written by various Flatlanders. Though they aim to persuade, they are not held to the same rigorous editorial standards as articles are, and should not be considered representative of all Flatlanders or of multiple groups in general.
Fidel once found an article on the whitewashing of Earthsea via Six Degrees of Blog Separation, and being the Unofficially Designated Racial Spokesman, started discussing the racial make-up of our frontrunners and the expectations of outsiders as to what that should be.
The Whitewashing of the Flatlanders
In 2006, if you looked at the ethnicities of only temps, and assume an Earth analogue for every non-Earth one, you have an Asian non-human, an Asian albino, a shapeshifter that tends to be Asian, a very plain and ordinary Asian human, an insect that sometimes is Nordic, another Asian, a Latino, an Asian-appearance/Nordic-culture snake, an ordinary "Caucasian mutt" human, another plain Asian human, an Asian dragon, another Causasian human, another Asian human, and a very proud Finn. That's 8.5 Asians, 4.5 Nordic/Caucasian, and one Latino, if you count Asian-appearance/Nordic-culture as having a foot in both worlds. Frontrunners had similar numbers—4 Asians, 3 Caucasians (counting Cira), and Mack as kind of unknown mystery race falling between the two.
Looking at all this, the Flatlanders would seem to be a great big mass of Asia, whether in ethnicity or appearance, with Europe running not far behind. This doesn't reflect the races of the City at all. Yes, the majority race among human citizens is Asian (if you mush all the nations of Asia together), but then, it looks fairly close to the population rates on this earth: a random human stranger is more likely to be Han Chinese than Sami (Lapp). Most people have naturally black or brown hair and some color in their skin. Pale, blond Caucasians are very, very rare.
The racial make-up of our frontrunners reflect the expectations of outsiders at the Front. Years ago, expectations were more biased towards Caucasian frontrunners before we ran into the online anime/game subculture, because the body is Caucasian, and there is a very strong bias in outsiders to expect members of a system to be the same race as the body they use to interact with them. The standards of videogames and Japanese animation—and their fans—suddenly made it "okay" for there to be more than a few token Asians around, because games and animation from Japan tend to feature (surprise!) Japanese characters in them. However, the remaining frontrunners were still expected to be mostly white—again, because of the body-matching prejudice. If you don't meet that expectation, the "inappropriate ethnicity" is treated as a racist metaphor, and the validity of your entire group can come into question, even by otherwise accepting people. The message to our group was very clear—"Thou shalt be white, and Asians are honorary whites."
Racial Shame and Self-Discrimination
That kind of racial prejudice burrows into you very deeply. It even influences how frontrunners interact with each other in our own matters. We keep forgetting that Ratok is about the same color as Fidel, and that Potega, color-wise, would stick out like a sore thumb everywhere in Maraeia but Guanshen, where he'd stick out anyway for not speaking Shenqi. Ratok seems to forget about it in an entirely different way—more that he doesn't remember to inform us if someone isn't white, when most of the time they aren't. It passes unnoticed, a supposed unspoken understanding, until he waves at a very pretty black girl and says to the rest of us, "Wow, she's almost the spitting image of Rhut", and we fall over from shock. His wife's skin color was never brought up in discussion, so the assumed default was white.
When writing "Defiance", the fictional character based on Ratok was designed as an albino, and the closest collage-character to his wife was a blonde bombshell with a Dutch name. Everyone who wasn't made an albino was made white. The Tuy clan was turned into the Toohey clan and forced to match a pseudo-Irish stereotype that doesn't even resemble real Irish people of the past or present. Ratok's clan were turned into Cromwellian English Puritans; the nearby port was turned into Salem, Massachussetts circa 1690.
Fidel's life was mushed together with bits of Erde to make a prequel, "Reliance", and it was notable for allowing two people (or characters based on us, anyway) to retain their original ethnicity: Fidel stayed obviously Latino, though Cuba was fictionalized as "Elat" and he had to be shoved into the machismo stereotype—which is MEXICAN—and one of Mack's friends from Erde, a proud and accomplished French Haitian cargo pilot named Ravenal Le Chatelier, stayed very, very black. In Fidel's case, he just couldn't "pass" as white; in Ravenal's case, Mack kicked up a storm whenever any attempt to change her ethnicity was made.
"Dude," she'd say, "Ravenal is black. She's as black as black is black, and is proud of it. She wouldn't want to be any other race. If you make a character like her, but not black, then it doesn't matter how close you are with anything else—you're leaving out something essential, something she really identifies with and thinks of as part of her identity. Take that away, and the character just isn't Ravenal. It's somebody else."
We stopped writing these stories a few years ago. We don't know if anyone would recognize them if we decided to start writing them again, with everyone's ethnicities as they should be. We might even be influenced in some other way by other expectations we don't know about.
You Are Not Your Body
Many say that when you write, you should "write what you know". One reason for that is so that you write the truth, something as it is, and not write to the expectations of others. Multiples are in such an uneasy position to start with that I'm not sure that a group could write about its members based on "what we know", because to write with that much truth is to risk a backlash from non-multiples and other multiple groups. Offline, it is very hard to find other multiple systems, because most are in hiding, and published material is still very biased towards negative stereotypes of trauma-split groups, or of delusional, attention-seeking histrionics. Online, it's easier to find a friendly voice, but many of the communities are filled with suspicion, accusations of fakery, and artificial standards for "real multiples", whether coming from a traditional DID perspective or from a naturally-occurring one.
One group we're friends with online are the Fenners. They are a very impressive collective of individuals, most of whom hail from England or Europe in their own histories. Not one of them is black, however, and since the physical body they reside in is black, they have the exact inverse in outside expectations from what's been expected of the Flatlanders. They've been asked, "Why aren't there any black people in your group?" When considering a name change for their legal identity, they've felt expected to choose "a black name" because of their body's skin color. "Wouldn't it be weird to have an Irish name if you're black?" Aside from the racism of expecting "black people" to match a certain image, it's the same message: "You are your body." To have a different race from the body is somehow assumed to be unnatural and wrong, even though not identifying as The Body is one of the most common traits that members of multiple groups have.
It's not denial, delusion, or self-hatred to have a different identity from the body you live in, whether you reside in it alone or with others. No one would call a woman insane for thinking of herself as a brunette when her body's hair grows in as blonde. In many places, both offline and online, it's acceptable to believe that one's "true self" is of a different race or even a different species from the body. A differing body image is only dangerous when attempting to make "the outside" match "the inside" is harmful to someone's health: a transgender person is welcome to transition from one physical sex to another under medical supervision, for instance, but an anorexic or bulimic is not welcome to bring him or herself to the brink of death in his or her effort to transform the body. Most systems we've talked to make no effort to match the body to any one image, or only seek to make it comfortable for everyone in-system. In short, their lack of identification with the body doesn't lead them to drastic measures. They simply accept it as an environmental factor.
Our group is actually very attached to the body, though it matches no one and "belongs" to no one in particular. It's the means by which we interact with the world, so maintaining its health and influencing its appearance are very important to us. Even so, we are not the body, and the body is not us. We have to draw the line at being expected to match the racial stereotypes that its skin prompts in others. These expectations are more revealing of the racism of others than of any racism among us. Instead of questioning of the motives of a system for having or lacking people of certain races, the question should be turned back on itself: why does it matter? Why is matching the body so expected? Why is having a different ethnicity from the body noteworthy? Why is it assumed that a different ethnicity "means" something? Isn't it racist to expect that a system in a black body must have black members, or to expect that a system in a white body must have white members? Isn't it racist to delineate what kinds of members are acceptable regardless of body?
These are the kinds of questions that need to be discussed—in systems, in the community, and among the professionals who still study the phenomenon.
