So, does skin color matter or not?

 Well, there has been a constant uproar about gender and raceswaps in popular franchises -understandably so.

The response to this is always "diversity" and "representation" as if it was not the laziest, stupidest way to represent "people of color" -an easy way to pander and cause controversy which is supposed to drive interest in your product. (Aka "fan baiting").

The response is usually also: well, it is a fictional character, so what are you so upset about. (So we do not do it to historical ones? Sure about that?) Or: this was the perfect person for the role. Or: we need more representation.

(It is a long topic to discuss, but a short version - fans tend to like the stuff they like the way it is. They do not want their expectations subverted, and so on and so forth.)

The easiest response to this is obviously then, well, what about a white Black Panther? Or a white Spawn? So far I got not response to this. Usually the comeback is an accusation of racism. (For the record: I dislike the raceswaps in Ghost in a Shell, and other movies, where the characters were switched to white, but apparently that does not count.) Regardless the fall-back argument is that you should not be arguing about the skin color of a made-up character. So any non-historical character is free game to change -and only a racist would complain. OK, gotcha. (Talking about racism... there is plenty of that going around, but somehow it is normalized. Imagine a white guy saying he is not watching something because the main character is female or non-white... but I digress.)

Back to our topic: we can mention historical characters, too, who underwent raceswaps: Queen Charlotte, Anne Boylen, kinda Vikings, and now Queen Cleopatra. (And while we are at falsifying history, let's talk about the Woman King...)

So can we change those, too, or not? Can now we have finally Daniel Craig play Malcom X? 

Apparently the rule now is that any character can be switched to any race or gender, right?

Gotcha.

Enter Milo and Stitch. Read the linked article (and about the whole idiotic uproar). A bona fide Hawaiian actress is not brown enough for these people. I repeat: she is actually native to Hawaii. Her only sin is that she is too white. And NOW it is unacceptable to do a "raceswap". Which, I repeat, is NOT a raceswap. 

The mind boggles. I guess now we can come with the whole "relax, it is a fictional character, she could be a male and played by Dolph Lundgren, you are racist for making it an issue and so on and so forth".

The sheer idiocy and lack of self-awareness of these people is astonishing. 

Star Wars and the hierarchy of victimhood

 Well, identity politics is an insane ideology. On face value, if you do not think about it much, it may make a tiny bit of sense for "oppressed" groups, but if you really, really, really think about it it really quickly becomes clear how stupid and how dangerous the whole thing really is. And I do mean dangerous. Just because you are not an Aryan German in the '30s defining yourself and those dastardly Jews based on their group identity and not as individuals, it does not mean it is not the same idea. Only you approach it from the "victims' " side, not the perpetrators' - and you are free to define who the victim is. As long as you keep in mind who is not a victim: white males. Perhaps just white people in general, and sometimes it could be just males in general, even though that would include males who happen to belong to a victim group otherwise.

But it gets confusing really fast because it leads to a weird hierarchy of victimhood where you need to weight different victim groups against each other to determine who the victim is in any particular case where there are no white males to blame, which is made even more confusing considering the issue that a person can belong to several different victim groups at the same time. After all, how do you judge the group of black males against white females, for example? Does having black skin outweight having a vagina in this victimhood olympics? How about black bisexual males vs black transgender females? How about a disabled gay white male vs a lesbian Asian female? Do you count Jews as white or as a minority? What about Caribbean blacks and African blacks in the UK?

See: the sequel trilogies of Star Wars.

It has become clear very early that Disney approached the whole trilogy not from the side of telling a good Star Wars story, but from the perspective of social justice, more importantly, feminist social justice.

From the ridiculously Mary Sue female lead(s), the "The Force is female" stupidity, the disregard of extended lore, the emasculation and killing off important and beloved characters, the weak writing, to the vilification of the fanbase, it was very clear from the start that they were not interested in telling a good story or build the universe. They were interested in pushing an agenda even if it meant the destruction of the franchise. The agenda being some sort of warped version of feminism (4th wave now I believe).

So they pushed and pushed the unrelatable female characters -starting from Rey to that weird purple-haired admiral-, and forced everyone else to the background.

Which ranked some actors who were poised to play a much bigger role based on the first movie that came out. And who also had their victimhood agenda -in case not centered on their gonads, but on their skin color. Enter: John Boyega. 

The poor chap is really, really into how much he is suppressed, and how much he is fighting the good fight. The fact is that he is not the victim of racism. He simply lost the victimhood olympics. Apparently in this case his skin color was not enough to elevate him into a victim status - he merely became "just another male" in the trilogy, pushed aside to give way to the female heroes. And no, it is not because Disney is racist (they might be, who knows), it is because they were doing the feminist thing in identity politics, and kinda forgot about the race stuff. Sorry buddy, having a vagina trumps your skin color. Try again next time, will you?

But this is the issue with this whole exercise... you can't include all victim groups. You can never achieve inclusivity, and it means you will by definition exclude certain groups, meaning you are going to be the very evil you fight against if you believe in this nonsense. It is literally impossible to cram every single downtrodden identity groups into a 2 hour movie (it might be possible to do in a TV series, though -they are trying their utmost with Star Trek Discovery and Picard), and even if you try, it will be like trying to shovel sand in the desert: as you get more and more groups, they will fragment into further groups, and you will never be able to include them all. You included females? Great- now include black females you racist. Black females are included? How about Asian? South-East Asian? Non-able? Inuit? Aboriginal? Lesbian? Bisexual? Pansexual? And the list goes on. You can't include all female groups to begin with, let alone all groups you take to be victims. Which will make the members of those groups really angry at you, and you will be probably scratching your head like Katherine Kennedy is probably currently doing about what you did wrong. She made one mistake: she thought the only victim group is the female one, and forgot about the others. If you play this game you can only lose -even if you try your best to be the most socially justicest (I know it is not a word) warrior. Which makes it a delicious irony to see all the accusations they levelled at the "toxic fandom" come back at them.

Racism and identity politics

This video is an interesting take on the whole diversity issue.
Essentially Peterson argues that even though there are measurable, objective differences between different groups, the differences are realtively small. They are not significant next to the differences between individuals.
Therefore any argument for diversity based race or gender is basically a racist one, because it essentially states that the major differences between a white person and, let's say, and Asian person are determined by their race, and not by their persons. So an Asian person is more alike to all other Asians, a black person to all other blacks, and a man is to all the men in the world. This reduces a person essentially to his or her "group" being race, gender, sexual orientation, age or anything else.
This is obviously racist, and I do agree with his conclusion on this particular point -somewhat. Indeed the whole problem and paradox of identity politics is that it is fundamentally racist.

But then he further argues that the real basis of diversity is the individual. I am not certain I can accept this, however.

Those small differences he mentioned added up do amount to visible/detectable differences between individuals. Peterson makes the mistake of taking these differences on their own, and not looking at their cummulative effect. Taken as a whole, these differences do amount to an overall variation between groups, even though certain members of the groups may indeed be more similar to another person from a different group than to members of their own group.

So no. I do think it is still important to have as many types of people in groups as possible, although it is probably true that it does not necessarily mean that you have to focus on the "emphasised" grouping, like gender or race. While it may seem like a no-brainer that including a black guy in a group of lawyers may add an extra point of view, I would argue that if that token black guy is coming from the same Harvard environment as the rest of his pastry white co-workers, he will not  bring as much diversity of point of view into this group as a white kid for Idaho who attended to community college (or, god forbid, someone from an European country) would. If you include a black guy who is coming from a ghetto, you are getting there, however. But this is the point that Jordan is pressing: just by picking a random feature, and making it into the sole basis of "diversity", you are essentially a racist (if this feature is race), or, indeed sexist (if it is gender).

A narrowed defition of diversity exported to Europe

So apparently Europe has a diversity problem.
(Apologies for the CNN link; I hate these websites which start ad videos without asking. Deplorable.)

So anyhow, apparently we do.

What do you think it might be? The issue with the roma minority? The status of Hungarians in Romania? (Linked because it is NYT - some things have improved since then, some had not.) Is it the any other problems ethnic minorities face in European countries?

But of course not.

It can only be black people. No other minorities are of importance. In fact, there are no other minorities. This stupid, binary view (black/white) is imported from the US, along with its consequences, as we can see in the riots in the UK about the murder of a man in the US (let's not get into it). And yes, nobody claims black people are not disadvantaged in some countries. But the notion of singling out a population just because it is black, regadless how how few of them are actually living there, while leaving all the other minorities (who might be "only" brown, or god forbid, white - we can't have white minorities, after all) completely out, despite of the fact that by large they have been living in Europe since, well, millennia, and they do face problems of their own is simply preposterous.

In this view, a monolithic white Europe is oppressing blacks because this is what diversity means -and not the multitude of smaller and bigger ethnic groups that make up Europe itself. So when the American police murders a black person, let's smack a bobby in the face, shall we?

Sometimes it feels like the inmates are running the asylum. 

It is simple to explain, though. It is popular, it plays on the white guilt on certain people, and it aligns with the agency of certain people who are in a position to drive the public discourse, and can shout down anyone as a racist or alt-right if they object. In short it makes for a convenient way to deflect discussions about real issues, which would really open a big, freaking can of worm in the perfect European project. After all we can't have people going about tearing up this idea of idillic united Europe by pointing out that certain members may act towards their minorities in a way that is going against the fabled European Values we all heard so much about. So we turn a blind eye to real issues to focus on something that is makes for a good headline and makes the majority (e.g. all white people) into a scapegoat. And this way the proponents of the European Project (which is actually a really good one), and the out-of-control progressives (who worship identity politics) are actually digging the grave for both. The former I do deeply regret; the latter not so much.