March 20, 2007
300, Racism, and Ignorant Ethnography
Author and geek icon Neal Stephenson has an op-ed in Sunday's New York Times about the film 300, about which he is mostly favorable. In addressing the negative criticism the film is receiving, though, he says, Many reviews made the same points: ... All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained...)
Dude, get a clue! To the extent that "white" means anything at all, Persians were and Iranians are white. Hint #1: "white" is a synonym for "Caucasian"; the Caucasus is due north of modern Iran. Hint #2: "Iran" is linguistically cognate with "Aryan."
In modern American formulations of racism, of course, Iranians are "brown," not "white." Ask any Iranian about how they get treated by shop clerks, for example. But here's the twist: Greeks get the same treatment. Remember when Michael Dukakis ran for president in 1988, and some commentators were referring to him as "brown"?
I don't feel any more comfortable about adopting the role of the arbiter of who is (and implicitly, who is not) white, than I do about Stephenson adopting that role.
Nevertheless, he inhabitants of the sun-drenched Peloponnessus are neither more nor less white than the inhabitants of the sun-drenched Iranian plateau. Cinematically depicting one side of a war, the Good Guys, as pale-skinned and the other side, the Bad Guys, as dark-skinned when the original combatants looked much alike, is an expression of racism, pure and simple.
Posted by abostick at March 20, 2007 12:13 PMOne of the few things about race that I find amusing is that there are white people from India who are the color of the very best dark chocolate.
I found this on Wikipedia:
"Ancient Greece and Rome used white (lenkon in Greek; alba in Latin) as one description of skin color. Its light appearance was distinguished, for example, in a comparison of white-skinned Persian soldiers from the sun-tanned skin of Greek troops in Xenophon's Agesilaus."
Source: James H. Dee, "Black Odysseus, White Caesar: When Did 'White People' Become 'White,'?" The Classical Journal, Vol. 99, No. 2. (Dec., 2003 - Jan., 2004), p. 162.
The passage itself is:
So clearly there is no way to avoid the brown/white distinction in a film about Spartans versus Persians. Director Zach Snyder just got it backwards.
Posted by: Lynn at March 20, 2007 01:34 PM
