On Fantasy, Shakespeare, and the Decline of the Attention Span | Entry 4
Entry IV: On Race in Fantasy and Shakespeare’s Othello
In our last entry, we looked at race in Amazon’s Rings of Power. I made the argument that, given the enormous popularity of Tolkien’s Middle Earth and how diverse the audience for Tolkien-inspired stories has become, the makers of the show made a good call when they included people of color in the cast. I thought their choice to forgo any backstory or explanation of how characters with distinctly different complexions came to be living among elves, dwarves, and hobbits who mostly had fair skin was understandable, given that Tolkien’s lore did not allow for diversity within these races, and any attempt to account for it could only serve as a distraction from the world dynamics that Tolkien did put in place.
But what if the writers hadn’t been constrained by any kind of faithfulness to Tolkien whatsoever? What if they had been building an entirely new world from scratch?
Some newer fantasy stories incorporate diversity more thoughtfully, often by taking place in urban centers where people with distinct origins intermingle. Historically, the genre has been very white-centric, with any non-white races often coming off as distinctly one-dimensional, savage, or ‘other,’ so I am pleased to see the genre moving past those stereotypes and making room for more human representations of people of color. However, I am noticing a growing trend—across genres—whereby story after story presents oddly similar casts, wherein the leading character is usually white but some of the important characters around them are various other races, one of them identifies as LGBTQ, and these distinctions play little to no role in how the characters interact with or perceive one another.
Now, in a lot of genres, this kind of neo-prototypical casting makes sense. Today’s world is diverse. We can expect that almost any future world will also be diverse. Moreover, I think it’s a good impulse to want to make diverse stories for today’s audience. Everybody should be able to find characters they relate to and worlds they feel included in when it comes to the genre of fantasy.
At the same time, though, not every story can be for everyone. If you try to include characters representative of everyone in the same story, the plot will lose coherence and the characters will start to feel generic and boring. The key is to generate, as a society, a wide variety of stories with a wide variety of characters and types of worlds, so that everyone can see themselves in some stories. (And then maybe the most popular and racially homogenous stories can eventually get remade to include representation of a broader swath of the audience… but I digress.)
The publishing industry acknowledges this to some extent. Books like The Poppy War and This Woven Kingdom are set in Asian-inspired and Persian-inspired fantasy settings, respectively, in which there exist homogenous people groups that have tensions with other groups along racial and cultural lines (and only a small slice of today’s audience is represented). But it’s no coincidence that the authors were Asian American and Iranian American, respectively. There is a growing expectation in the publishing industry that if you are a white person writing fantasy (and this covers the majority of fantasy writers, at least in the US), real-world racial differences should be represented in the world you are building but must play little to no role in the story you tell (unless all the races in your story are completely made up).
Let’s contrast this with Othello. Othello was written by a white man a long time ago, before racism was codified and enacted in Europe or the United States. Back then, racial differences would have been noticed and perhaps hated, but they would have been just one kind of difference among many. (Religious, cultural, linguistic, or class distinctions may have carried as much or more weight, to give a few examples.) The play features a black man, Othello, who has recently married a white woman, Desdemona. Desdemona’s father is shocked and appalled by the match and accuses Othello of bewitching Desdemona with black magic because, according to him, there is no other way that she would have agreed to marry someone so ‘fearsome’ to look upon. Othello is a well-respected general in the play, and he is initially untroubled that this racist ‘othering’ kind of accusation is being wielded against him. He is confident in his own nobility of character and optimistic that it will eventually be recognized.
But Iago, the play’s villain, ruthlessly manipulates Othello over the course of the play, suggesting that Desdemona shares the racist attitude against him that others have and that she has secretly been unfaithful to him. Othello questions his belief in Desdemona and himself, and when he finds “evidence” neatly arranged by Iago to “prove” that Desdemona has cheated, he kills her in a blind, jealous rage—becoming the worst kind of monstrous stereotype that others have accused him of being. When he realizes Desdemona was innocent and he has been manipulated, he kills himself, too, and the play ends with the characters roundly denouncing Iago for his villainous deceit.
Typing ‘is Othello a racist play’ into Google generates 619,000 results, and a lot of the articles, videos, essays and conversation threads that are returned ask that very same question. Some say that because there are so many pointedly racist slurs leveled against Othello in the text (mostly by Iago) and because Othello eventually comes to embody the stereotypes wielded against him, the play is racist. Others say that because Iago is the villain of the play and gets recognized as much more to be blamed for the tragic deaths than Othello himself, the play is condemning both Iago and his racism rather than claiming there is anything inherently ‘other’ or monstrous about black people writ large.
I incline toward the latter argument myself, but one thing I (usually) love about Shakespeare’s plays is that they don’t offer straightforward or simplistic messaging about morality. His characters have genuinely clashing views about right and wrong and the way the world is or should be—and they all get to express themselves very articulately. You are left to guess and argue about which ones Shakespeare himself agrees with because Shakespeare’s own views are not the point. The point is the story.
Shakespeare’s story about Othello would never have been published today, and yet it has endured through centuries. Many regard it as problematic on the racial question, and though I’ve never seen an Othello production myself, I imagine it must be hard to watch. But it continues to be performed and to prompt conversations about race, racism, ego, manipulation, and isolation even today.
Despite my general appreciation for Shakespeare’s subtlety, I do hope readers will take a much clearer message against racism from any story I tell that touches on race. I expect most other authors writing today to feel the same. But I think it would be a shame if every fantasy author followed the maxim a literary agent once gave me, which was this: “Your world should look like our world” in terms of its racial diversity. If everyone wrote worlds that look the same way ours does today, then every fantasy world would look the same. And if everyone avoids making race any kind of motivating issue in any of those worlds, well, then we’ll have lost one of the tools that made Othello the kind of richly layered story that sticks with you and makes you think.