A moronic question

[Howard]

Sigh.
Pardon my French, but I hate this shit.
Nevertheless, I suppose I need to check <grumble>
OK, so, as we now live in the most entitled, ridiculous and yet wildly uninformed and uneducated period of human history, I have to ask: Is the word "Swarthy" a pejorative?

I say, quite emphatically, no. Its a perfectly good descriptive of darker skinned people who are not deeply pigmented enough to be called black. In fact, it seems to generally be used in a positive way, as in to describe a certain look about a man who is dusky and attractive.
But what do I know? I'm white. We know nothing, apparently.

Anyway: thoughts?

(Guess who woke up in a great mood this morning? lol)

 

[MaryA]

Well, I'm from a mixed-race background on my mother's side of the family, Howard, and 'swarthy' is a word I'd be wary about because it often comes up as a racial micro-aggression or as insensitive. White isn't the racial norm (would you describe someone as being whiter skinned but not lightly pigmented enough to be known as white?) and we don't need to resort to white/black as binaries. Mentioning skin colour as a descriptive term says nothing about the character of the person described but can tell you something about the person who finds it necessary to talk about skin colour as if it is either innocuous or significant in itself. And if you send off a manuscript to an agent or editor who's from a Middle Eastern or Muslim background and who has heard the word 'swarthy' used as a coded epithet, you'll leave the wrong impression.

Words that may have seemed innocent to British or American authors and readers a century or more ago are read differently today in a multicultural society or on a global forum.

I hope your day improves!

 

[Howard]

That white is nowhere near the racial norm is something I am very well aware of. I mean, its barely even in the running (And what the hell does "white" mean anyway? What background are we referring to? Belgae? Brigantes? Danes? Jutes? Angles? Saxons? What?! Drives me mad...)

I just resent the bastardization of words and the petty mindstates that people enforce upon themselves. At its core, Swarthy is categorically not a slur or pejorative of any kind, and is a word used to describe more than skin tone. But...someone somewhere uses it as a slur and suddenly it is. Baffles the hell out of me.

And yes, simply speaking to skin colour as a point of demarcation is not that useful and can in fact be harmful, but at times. it is necessary. In this instance it is because genetics actually play an important role in the story I am telling, and pointing out that the lead character'd looks are not average is kind of essential. But, as soon as you step out into this field, you realise it is in fact filled with landmines...

Anyway, bugger it. Its a good word, but I cannot be bothered with the ridiculous bun-fight that would ensue with its usage.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

There are several words that teeter on being politically incorrect because they're most commonly used to refer to skin colour. One such is swarthy, another is dusky. I recall a time, back in the 1960s, when immigration from the collapsing British Empire was on the increase, how people cast around for a descriptive word for newcomers from the Indian subcontinent that wasn't offensive. 'Tinted' was flirted with as a respectable alternative to the inflammatory wog and Pakkie, though it was really just a covert way of pointing out that someone's skin colour wasn't white, so fell into disuse as being too whimsical.

Etymologically, swarthy has respectable roots, as it's based on the word swarth which has two meanings—the outside surface of something, including the skin and rind, and more specifically, an area of grassland.

The odd thing about insulting words is that the group being insulted often take the term on to refer to one another. I worked with many races in Atlanta, constantly bemused by how they referred to one another as Nigga, Spic, Polack, Wetback and Beaner without malice. Gay people are happy to be affectionately called Queen and Fag when socialising in a group, but it would be derogatory for a straight person to label them in that way.

The thing is, with any word that's potentially insulting, is who is saying it? If it's you, as the narrator, then you're taking a stance that will be open to criticism. If it's your character who is foul-mouthed, bigotted and making sweeping prejudicial insults about minority groups then you've got artistic licence to create a flawed brute.
I've read several novels this year, in which no one like anyone very much, with insults openly hurled and seething resentment expressed through internal dialogue. Books like The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, All Involved by Ryan Gattis and The Force by Don Winslow contain enough hateful characters to make me worry about the sanity of the author.

 

[Marc Joan]

For me, it is a perfectly legitimate word without particular racial connotations. It simply means having a dark complexion. It is neither positive nor negative (particular readers may associate it with positive or negative connotations, but that is outside the author's control). I always imagine it as being applied to Caucasians of a skin tone that is somewhat darker than the Caucasian norm, just as a 'peaches and cream' description might be applied to Caucasians who are somewhat lighter than the Caucasian norm. To propose that a perfectly adequate descriptor of appearance should be prohibited is simply absurd. And I'd have no problem with being described as swarthy.

Of course, there is enough gratuitous offence being given to all and sundry at present (reading posts on Facebook is like watching potty-mouthed rats fighting in a pigsty), and I wouldn't want to add to that, but trying to censor an innocuous adjective is not the answer, and will only breed resentment. What next? Is 'dark' out of bounds? How about 'pale'? Are we going to be unable to refer to skin colour at all? If that is to be banned, why not hair colour too? Why not height or shape? It's madness.

 

[Howard]

For me, it is a perfectly legitimate word without particular racial connotations. It simply means having a dark complexion. It is neither positive nor negative (particular readers may associate it with positive or negative connotations, but that is outside the author's control). I always imagine it as being applied to Caucasians of a skin tone that is somewhat darker than the Caucasian norm, just as a 'peaches and cream' complexion might be applied to Caucasians who are somewhat lighter than the Caucasian norm. To propose that a perfectly adequate descriptor of appearance should be prohibited is simply absurd. And I'd have no problem with being described as swarthy.

Of course, there is enough gratuitous offence being given to all and sundry at present (reading posts on Facebook is like watching potty-mouthed rats fighting in a pigsty), and I wouldn't want to deliberately add to that, but trying to censor an innocuous adjective is not the answer, and will only breed resentment. What next? Is 'dark' out of bounds? How about 'pale'? Are we going to be unable to refer to skin colour at all? If that is to be banned, why not hair colour too? Why not height or shape? It's madness.

This. Exactly this.
But then, I am already bowing to the pressure of lazy readers and paranoid publishers who will only cater for the most simple of markets, so what is one word compared to a book brought down to 11 word sentences and the removal of all description because "people don't like complexity" and have the attention span of Mayflies?

 

[Carol Rose]

Ask yourself this: is it completely necessary to the plot and/or characterization to mention what color the character's skin is? If not, why bother? I think that's part of the point @MaryA made. Instead, show characterization in other ways. If you must describe them, mention hair color and eye color. Write about their quirky habits. Show them doing whatever it is they do in the story. No matter what term you use to denote it, by singling out any one individual's skin color, you're saying without saying it that skin color is important. So if it's not important to the story, I wouldn't go there at all. It's not needed.

I don't describe my characters in terms of skin color. My readers are lucky if I remember to toss in their eye color and hair color. For me, it's all about showing who that person is inside. How they react to others. How they treat others. What they say and do. My readers can use their imagination to picture how the characters look.

And, I have to disagree this is the most uninformed, uneducated period in human history. We have all the known facts at our fingertips - quite literally - in the form of computers and smart phones. What we choose to do with that information is another matter entirely.

 

[Howard]

Ask yourself this: is it completely necessary to the plot and/or characterization to mention what color the character's skin is?

Yes, it is, thus me asking.

And, I have to disagree this is the most uninformed, uneducated period in human history. We have all the known facts at our fingertips - quite literally - in the form of computers and smart phones. What we choose to do with that information is another matter entirely.

Exactly my point. We aught to be at the most enlightened time in human history, and yet we are surrounded by Trump voters, Jihadists, Flat Earthers and a whole host of crazed religious types.
Opinion is the only thing that matters in this Twitter generation; facts are for the weak.

 

[Howard]

As an additional thought, to those saying that mentioning skin colour or creed is entirely unnecessary, I would put it to you that being afraid of detailing physical attributes is in itself a racist behaviour.
Things are what they are. Intent is what defines prejudice, not description.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Swarthy...don't hear that one much these days. Beloved of classics. Oooh arrr me hearties. Heathcliff was swarthy. Othello? There are brown eyed, olive-skinned white people. There are dark Picts; rather Mediterranean looking Irish; my father was one. I got his Roman nose. I don't see myself, what's the matter with it. I might, if it had ever been applied to me as a wilful term of abuse.

I have been asked if I am Italian, Spanish, French, Indian or Pakistani. Nope! Anglo-Irish. I was once shouted at and called a stuck up white bitch in the street by a group of young Asian men, going along minding my own business, and thought, nice! Where did that come from? 1983. None of this behaviour is new, though it may be especially acute and egregious just now.

I don't know, Howard. We look like how we look, how could that in itself be construed as an insult? But a lot of description is allusive in writing these days. You get the picture fed in bit by bit, and join your own dots.

 

[Howard]

But a lot of description is allusive in writing these days.

I agree with you here, strongly. But it seems that a lot of YA books do make a point of painting their protagonists in fairly excruciating detail, though I have no idea why. Personally, I am taking a middle ground. I am giving her reason to muse upon her own looks, and why they are different from those around her. Allows me to drop in description, but in a fluid and logical way.

 

[Marc Joan]

I can completely appreciate & understand why people, mostly well-meaning, seek to police the use of words. Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of ignorant stereotypes. But to me -- and forgive me if I'm missing something -- describing somebody's skin tone is no different from describing the colour of their eyes, or hair, or what they are wearing. (The description can be constructed in an offensive way, of course, but that is a different issue). Now, I must admit that I can't recollect a single instance where I have found it necessary to refer to a character's skin colour per se in my stories ...but if I thought it was necessary, I would certainly do so, and I resent any efforts to tell me what vocabulary I can and cannot use. In any case, I maintain that word censorship is unnecessary and unreasonable; also, if people start to feel they are being muzzled, they will push back. Which may be why Facebook etc is so darn unpleasant. Trying to restrict the freedoms of other humans rarely ends well.

 

[Carol Rose]

I'm not here to talk politics. The world is what it is, and people have always been people. I choose to find the good in the world today, and in people.

I'm also not afraid of describing someone's skin color in a book. I simply don't find it necessary. Probably because I don't categorize people that way in real life. I'm more interested in who they are inside than on what they look like.

And I think that's all I have to say on both subjects.

 

[Marc Joan]

Well said! I will retreat into my shell now....

 

[Katie-Ellen]

I notice appearance, presentation and demeanour, I have to say, it's just part of the fascination of people watching and world watching. The outside is what I can't help seeing first in a physical world, and people send signals all the time, conscious and unconscious. But almost simultaneous is that emergent confluence of the inner and outer; what is deduced, inferred and sensed, rightly or wrongly according to our own perception and instincts, from movement, expression and response.

 

[James Marinero]

Ah well. there goes my sci-fi short story about the little green men from Mars. Colour, height and even gender specificity(?) rule it out.

 

[MaryA]

It wasn't a moronic question at all, but I suspect Howard knew it was a charged one!

Looking back at the history of the novel, writers have always had to work with constraints and taboo topics. Most of the basic facts of life weren’t even mentioned for a long time: belching, farting, urinating, defecating, menstruating, giving birth, copulating. Sexual violence wasn’t acknowledged: no rape, incest, child abuse. The village drunk was weak-willed and immoral because addiction wasn’t understood. Mental illness was romanticized or criminalized. Until fairly recently, you couldn’t write about religion in a critical or satirical way because of laws against blasphemy. You couldn’t write about gay or lesbian relationships because of laws against obscenity.

And all around the world, books still get banned or censored, writers thrown into prison.

We’re not talking about that here. Writers in the West can write about any topic or hot potato they want to write about. They can use tropes that don’t acknowledge diversity or the tensions around cultural appropriation. The problem is understanding that in a hard-pressed, diverse and sophisticated market, reader reception works against writers who don’t get it. If I pick up a sci fi novel and find a brilliant female flight engineer on Mars who has to be rescued by a male subordinate because she gets her silly heels caught in a grate and he then focuses on the size of her breasts while mansplaining what flight engineers actually do, I’ll think ‘Ho hum,’ and put the book down. I don’t think the author is necessarily sexist, I just can’t be bothered with those kinds of tropes. If a writer introduces a Chinese woman character by talking about her ‘slanting, almond eyes’ and ‘inscrutable Oriental expression’, I am looking at hackneyed cliché that fails to reveal character. Race and gender need to be treated in sensitive and creative ways to sidestep the long history of stereotypes.

Context is so important. If I’m writing about a young black man in the Deep South in the 1950s who has a doting white teacher who thinks of him as ‘dusky and handsome’, that might show her naivety and the kind of language used back then. I’d still expect the writer to find fresh and revealing ways to develop this character and to understand the nuances around descriptors to avoid demeaning, exoticising or fetishing the Other in 2017. This is why publishers now use ‘sensitivity’ readers. If someone decides to write about a transgender activist and has never read anything written by trans writers, has no trans family or friends and hasn’t done the research, the book is going to hurt and offend people and no publisher wants that. One epithet doesn't spoil a book and intentions might be sincere and good, but language is always going to be loaded with innuendos. That's why we work so hard to be understood, to convey accuracy, truthfulness and tone.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

I've read several crime novels this year, where the author rather mischievously didn't mention that one of the detectives in the investigating team was black. Ryan Gattis, Dennis Lehane and Don Winslow all implied the ethnicity of their characters by describing their clothing, prejudices against minority groups and offenders, their religion and education—which all seemed to be white attitudes—before dropping the bombshell that so-and-so was actually a third generation immigrant from Haiti. The authors all made a point that we're basically the same, though I felt hoodwinked.

The potentially dangerous and upsetting thing about being politically correct is that while having the morally correct attitude towards minorities might impart a rosy glow to your soul, there's nothing to say that the group you're treating fairly, and describing in acceptable terms, feel the same way about you! I've known militant lesbians who hated straight people, men and women, black power activists who wanted to destroy the entire white race and Jewish businessmen who wouldn't deal with gentiles.

There's also the jokey racism that exists between neighbouring countries, though much of that is done in a friendly and mocking way, rather than nastily aggressive.
Human beings are weird in the way that we look for differences to separate us. Imagine that a melting pot evolution took place overnight, and we all looked very similar in skin colour, height and weight. Even then, folk would differentiate between whether someone's hair was straight or curly and if their eyes were brown or blue.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Some wrongs in the world are so great no redress is truly possible, but humanity and justice demand they be acknowledged, looked full in the face. The Klansman...a truly horrible book, and the good guys go down. I couldn't bear to read it again. The young black woman, raped in a police station...later gunned down. When I read that I was a girl in my early 20's, and I related to her danger on that level.

Here in the 50's a young policeman once got his you know what out, locking my mother in a cell, offering her a guided tour when she went to ask if a lost bracelet had been handed in. She was fine. She laughed at the you know what till it shrank, and threatened to report him to his sergeant. In another world, another time and place, it could easily have become something altogether more horrific. And she of course, would not have dared walk in to ask about a lost bracelet. Now, I couldn't bear to re-read that novel because I'm the mother of two young women; I would be rereading that as a mother needing to protect that girl and being unable to. But the book was an exposition of evil, and how mundane it can be, so I wouldn't want to see that book banned, and it is highly offensive, all round. But it was clear where the writer's sympathies lay.

The Song Before It is Sung, and Masai Dreaming, by Justin Cartwright. Unbearable. Offensive in the extreme, read that way, to Jewish people, to the Masai, to all humanity, the things that happen, and which, far worse, really did happen. Novel writing, poetry is an shamanic act, about being other than ourselves, finding ourselves in the other and the other in us. I'm busily imagining I am a man. I have written in the first person narrative as a man, and what's more, he's got Irish and Trinidadian ancestry and has never in his life set foot in Ireland or Trinidad. Am I qualified? Will a sensitivity reader blast my effort as offensive? On what basis do I attempt it? This person feels real to me but to realize him through craft, I need to become invisible. A previous draft was written in the third person. A US publisher expressed disappointment, writing to me that they had wanted to walk in that character's shoes and look out from behind his eyes. They wanted to walk with him, and they felt third person POV didn't cut it.

When the rheumatoid thing got really bad, hobbling round Rouen on a walking stick, my brother once said, Jesus Christ, can't you go any faster than that, you f*cking cripple? And it was really, really physically painful, but this, coming from him, only made me laugh because of the place those words were coming from

The art of truths comes down to respect. Manners can be taught; respect cannot. Who is qualified to judge the essential human truths in writing? Everyone or no-one.

I'd put those books down too, @MaryA. Naff, puerile and shitty writing

 

[Howard]

When the rheumatoid thing got really bad, hobbling round Rouen on a walking stick, my brother once said, Jesus Christ, can't you go any faster than that, you f*cking cripple? And it was really, really physically painful, but this, coming from him, only made me laugh because of the place those words were coming from

This is perfect!

 

[Luciferette]

Your brother sounds like mine, @Katie-Ellen Hazeldine I have aggressive Dupuytren's diathesis (a genetic condition that causes severe contracture of the fingers). I had my first surgery this year -- highly unpleasant, painful, and it took ages to recover -- on my right hand. My writing hand! My brother has, very kindly, started doing "spaz hands" (his words, not mine) instead of "jazz hands" whenever he sees me.
Needless to say, he hasn't inherited the disease. The BASTARD. And that's me being deliberately offensive

 

[Katie-Ellen]

Owwww. So sorry, Luciferette.

The BASTARD!

 

[Geoff]

It does bring up another question, unless I have missed it above. What if, I love what ifs...., you are writing historical fiction? Say something set in 1850, for example. Would words considered redundant now, due to pc words modernism, be considered okay to be used in the historical context for accuracy? Obviously there are certain words would be regarded as extremely insulting and could not used, I assume.

 

[Paul Whybrow]

It does bring up another question, unless I have missed it above. What if, I love what ifs...., you are writing historical fiction? Say something set in 1850, for example. Would words considered redundant now, due to pc words modernism, be considered okay to be used in the historical context for accuracy? Obviously there are certain words would be regarded as extremely insulting and could not used, I assume.

Just recently, it's taken a North Korean dictator to revive an obsolete insult, with Kim Jong Un calling President Trump a 'dotard'. This might subtly indicate the age of English dictionaries in North Korea. More people would be familiar with the term from the phrase 'in my dotage' which tends to be applied to old age.

I'm rather fond of archaic insults, such as poltroon, rapscallion, curmudgeon, harridan, dastard and varlet. I once shut down a tedious argument that was on the way to being a violent row, by calling my opponent a slubberdegullion—he was so startled, that he asked for an explanation of the term, and, as he took a perverse pride in being the village drunk could only agree with me!

Incidentally, there's regularly fuss about the use of the word niggardly, which means stinginess and has nothing to do racial insults, coming from a different root form etymologically

 

[Howard]

It does bring up another question, unless I have missed it above. What if, I love what ifs...., you are writing historical fiction? Say something set in 1850, for example. Would words considered redundant now, due to pc words modernism, be considered okay to be used in the historical context for accuracy? Obviously there are certain words would be regarded as extremely insulting and could not used, I assume.

I think the job of the writer is to deliver believable characters, concerns about offence be damned.
Its not like, when Tarantino rocked up with his script for Django, a censor sat down, broke out their red pen and put a line through each racial epithet, is it? (Sidebar: I am appalled that I just used Tarantino to make a point. I loathe that idiot).

Same with my last (self published) book. One character was a young black guy, living in a dodgy part of New York, dealing drugs and guns. For me to write him as anything other than what he obviously was going to be would have been pretty ridiculous (and I doubtless would have been accused of the worlds newest and most loved phrase, "white washing" (Excuse me while I roll my eyes so hard I stroke out)).

 

[MaryA]

It does bring up another question, unless I have missed it above. What if, I love what ifs...., you are writing historical fiction? Say something set in 1850, for example. Would words considered redundant now, due to pc words modernism, be considered okay to be used in the historical context for accuracy? Obviously there are certain words would be regarded as extremely insulting and could not used, I assume.

We're talking about historiography though, aren't we? Versions of history, fictions constructed around carefully selected facts or interpretations.

My feeling is that we are creatures of our times. We write from a certain circumscribed understanding of then and now, and we write for readers who share or don't always share our sensibilities and prejudices. When I go back to reading what was produced in earlier eras, the histories are stranger and denser than I expect. Here you have a medieval Rabelais or Chaucer revelling in the obscene, here you have hagiographies of saints. Who gets to decide which version of history is more credible?

The Victorians were a curious mix. I was talking with a friend this morning who is reading a new biography of Edward Lear and argues that many of Lear's wilder eccentric fantasies had to do with sublimating his repressed homosexuality. The Victorians were ghouls about death, especially the death of children. They liked spending time with corpses and images of the dead, loved mausoleums, they were vague about sickbeds and women giving birth but liked to detail cruelty towards animals. Tuberculosis was a romantic disease for young girls to pine away from in shadowy corners. Some popular authors thought epileptics and the mentally ill were fun to caricature. Spinsters and barren women and servants were good for a joke. The Victorians had their own stereotypes and were reluctant to give them up. The poor were criminalised in a great deal of fiction, or idealised and presented as martyrs. Colonialism was viewed as A Good Thing by some but not others. Right alongside Dickens, Trollope or Wilkie Collins, you had 'alternative' views presented by Anna Seward (Black Beauty) or George Eliot on socio-economic realities. You had Kipling's jingoism, the satires of Vanity Fair, and you had Charlotte Perkins Gilman on a woman being gaslighted by a cruel husband in The Yellow Wallpaper. You had Bram Stoker's gothic and the realism of Arnold Bennett.

There was and is no consensus on how to interpret or present the Victorian era, then or now. You could take Oscar Wilde or the upright Charles Kingsley. You could take the PreRaphaelites with their opium and alcohol, the Victorian bohemians. You could look at Henry James or Mark Twain. Not all of them were prolix or self-indulgent writers, even in a time when books didn't have to compete with TV or the Internet. Many writers ignored or glossed over slavery but others didn't (in the latest biography of the independent outspoken Lady Anne Barnard, the writer looks at how after her husband's death Lady Anne adopted a girl he had fathered by a slave and raised the child as her own). Women from middle-class backgrounds were often kept as virtual prisoners in their homes, but there are many exceptions. Blasphemy was a non-no but many late Victorians were reading Darwin and hinting at a godless future (Samuel Butler's Erewhon). Lesbianism might not have existed for Queen Victoria but Henry James knew all about 'Boston marriages' between women.

These days, I wouldn't attempt historical fiction with a Jewish miser or pimp as the villain. I wouldn't throw in asides about beaten carthorses or whipped mongrels. I wouldn't write about a lonely plain governess being saved, rescued and finally married by a troubled man with a dubious past and a wife locked in an attic. Some tropes no longer work for my generation. Such tropes or scenes might have been commonplace realities in the 1800s in Britain or they might have been less common than we suppose. They don't affect us the same way, we read differently now.

 

[Katie-Ellen]

There are eternals, there are tropes, and there's the zeitgeist. Anything that is none of those is out of time and not of NOW.

I've always thought Lewis Carroll was a tremendous bore and as I grew older...also a creep...and Edward Lear too. And Shakespeare....great lines, wonderful imagery and language, but character and plots? Meh. Sacred blooming cows. Ssshhh! Don't hate me for it, anyone. Actually, no problem; feel free.

@MaryA Women from middle-class backgrounds were often kept as virtual prisoners in their homes.

There's a terrifying novel on that subject Lovers All Untrue by Norah Lofts, based on a true murder trial.

 

[Howard]

We're talking about historiography though, aren't we? Versions of history, fictions constructed around carefully selected facts or interpretations.

Sure but I think its the same thing, its just that the example I used is contemporary.
As we look back at the 18th century and see how regular, white English people treated black slaves, so too will future generations look back in wonder at how the modern black community talks about itself.
One period's accepted terms are another's slurs.

I do agree with you, however, that trying to reach back in time and fully interpret how a given person in a given time might have spoken and been spoken to is a bad idea, but that is more because a modern audience would have no context on what I wrote.

 

[Howard]

There are eternals, there are tropes, and there's the zeitgeist. Anything that is none of those is out of time and not of NOW.

I've always thought Lewis Carroll was a tremendous bore and as I grew older...also a creep...and Edward Lear too. And Shakespeare....great lines, wonderful imagery and language, but character and plots? Meh. Sacred blooming cows. Ssshhh! Don't hate me for it, anyone. Actually, no problem; feel free.

@MaryA Women from middle-class backgrounds were often kept as virtual prisoners in their homes.

There's a terrifying novel on that subject Lovers All Untrue by Norah Lofts, based on a true murder trial.

Oh, god, yeah. Even reading much more contemporary stuff like Heinlein can make you uncomfortable. The blithe way he just dismisses anyone who is not a white male as utterly unimportant and unworthy of plot or characterisation is pretty cringe-worthy.