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4:21am August 19, 2014

madeofpatterns:

I headcanon Cassie as a condescending white person. I wonder if I’d see her differently if I consistently remembered that she’s black.

I wish that Animorphs had talked about racism and certain kinds of cultural differences more. It has its moments but….

Like Jewish!rachel in which Rachel being Jewish meant occasional sudden unexpected values clashes with the gentile kids.

Like, I don’t care how assimilated you are, a Jewish kid growing up in the 90s who suddenly has to fight a guerrilla war against invading aliens is going to be thinking about nazis a lot. And is going to have a lot more preexisting thinking about and emotional coping with the existence of evil than most non-Jewish kids.

Non-Jewish white kids don’t usually grow up having nightmares about racist murderers trying to kill them. Non-Jewish white kids don’t usually go through phases of being afraid that the shower will kill them, either. And non-Jewish white kids don’t usually grow up haunted by the knowledge that millions of their people died because no one with power to protect them cared, while much of the world ignored it.

So like - I know something about what it’s like for white Jewish kids. I don’t know what it’s like for non-Jewish black kids, but, I think it’s a kind of being under attack that would influence her understanding of being an animorph and the morality of violence.

It weirds me out that the first book mentions Cassie as black (which is how I picture her, because I paid a lot of attention to physical descriptions in the first book), but further books don’t really mention it or even enough physical description to make you realize it.  At least, I haven’t read that much far ahead, but so far only the first book has mentioned she’s black or even something like skin color that could be a clue.  (Although the thing someone said about how much they like her hair better when she keeps it super-short, made me really uncomfortable knowing she was black.)

Notes:
  1. schafpudel reblogged this from into-the-weeds
  2. geekwithsandwich reblogged this from aprilwitching and added:
    yyyeah…. op, that’s not a headcannon, that’s called “entrenched racism”. don’t get me wrong, I’m not condemning you,...
  3. mttheww reblogged this from aprilwitching
  4. catyuy reblogged this from into-the-weeds
  5. aprilwitching reblogged this from fourloves
  6. guestsemiconductor reblogged this from into-the-weeds
  7. thetigerisariver reblogged this from into-the-weeds
  8. jellyskies reblogged this from into-the-weeds and added:
    Also like. Cassie doesn’t have to act a certain way to be black. There is not a certain way black people act.
  9. into-the-weeds reblogged this from fourloves and added:
    I can see criticizing the books for not having the POC characters be more affected by racism or the Jewish characters be...
  10. fourloves reblogged this from madeofpatterns and added:
    Maybe I’m mistaken but I don’t think that’s what a headcanon is. My impression is headcanons are usually something that...
  11. madeofpatterns reblogged this from alliecat-person and added:
    Also, if there were no pictures or physical descriptions of Cassie, I don’t think I would know from anything that she or...
  12. alliecat-person reblogged this from madeofpatterns and added:
    Oh, I agree that it’s not realistic for Cassie to not reference human experiences of slavery when parsing out the...
  13. withasmoothroundstone reblogged this from madeofpatterns and added:
    Yeah I read him as either Latino or Italian, I wasn’t sure which.
  14. baskingsunflower reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    don’t worry; her race comes up again later