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[Doomblade187]

I only bring up the broad brush remark because people love conflating racist twitter mobs like this with people actively fighting for inclusion and equality. Once cannot control the twitter mobs, but one can disavow them when justified.

Edit: for the record my comment about white people not understanding other languages is based very much on my experience with my friends and family, as well as randos. So many people just can't comprehend that other cultures are different.

[ChairmanPoo]

I think that's probably a broad strokes generalization that doesnt really work or indeed leave in a good place other ethnicities. Knowing more than one language is in no small measure a matter of opportunity and need, which basically means migrant workers (to countries where another language is spoken obviously) and upper middle class people with the time and resources to receive extra education. I think neither situation is particularily uncommon with white people

[Reelya]

These are the same people who said that milk

I had to look up the context:

https://edairynews.com/en/milk-the-new-symbol-of-racism-in-donald-trumps-america-51608/

“The federal endorsement of milk in American diets contributes to the problem by uncritically pushing people to drink milk, despite the potential detriment it has on non-white people’s health,” Ms. Diaz wrote. “Our current federal dietary guidelines urge people to drink three cups of milk a day, according to the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The main health benefit of milk is to guard against osteoporosis, a disease that weakens your bones — hence the ‘stronger bones’ rhetoric. While this is a very practical health benefit, osteoporosis affects Africans at a significantly lower rate than it does most Americans.”

Uh ... that's the entire logic here. Promoting milk for health is racist because some groups are lactose intolerant.

EDIT: I just read closer and the person in the milk thing was an academic from California State University (CSU) and the neige one was at USC. Confusingly similar acronyms, but this was almost literally "the same people".

[Reelya]

These are the same people who said that milk and St. Patrick's Day are racist. These are the same people who complained about dark-skinned anime characters not having black VAs in the context of Usagiyama Rumi, then backpedaled to her VA not "sounding black enough" when someone with the ability to spend five seconds on google pointed out that her VA was in fact African-American (never mind the culturally self-centered notion that a character with dark skin in future Japan would sound anything like whatever horrid ebonics stereotype accent they were thinking of).

We need clearly labeled blacks who have sufficiently blacked up for our listening/viewing pleasure / virtue-signalling / diversity quotas.

Or that would be racist.

It is a logical conclusion of that cultural appropriation stuff though, isn't it? If it's wrong for a white person to speak like that because that's appropriating black culture, then it logically holds that you'd push those stereotypes on black characters and have people complaining they don't embody enough of the tropes. What's next? The gays aren't sufficiently mincing now? I kid, that's not "next" it's already happening, see complaints about Dumbledore in some recent Harry Potter spin off thing not being "openly" gay.

[Rolan7]

Twitter is perfect for fomenting snide "discourse" with lots of bad takes.
One should not criticize any movement based on tweets.

Blue-checkmarks are kinda valid, even if it brings out the worst in people.  There's a reason that public figures hire people to manage their social media.  Most public figures.

Edit4edit: And no, it is not a logical conclusion of the idea of cultural appropriation!  "My culture is not a costume" is fundamentally different than critiquing the "blackness" of voice performances.

[Doomblade187]

As I say, never trust the Disc Horse.

Besides, the complaint about Dumbledore not being openly gay had more to do with JKR basically retconning it in, with no indication. (Not too long before the "wizards pooped on the ground" incident)

[wierd]

I fail to see how "dumbledore was not openly gay" has any importance.

He was the headmaster of a school.  Sexual antics with staff or students would have been gross, so who exactly would he have been fraternizing with anyway?  Are they suggesting he should have been going to gay sex parties at hogsmede every saturday night?  People can be gay, and still be very professional in their candor.

Dumbledore strikes me as such a person, with such professional candor.  It wouldn't stop him developing crushes, but it would put a damper on his going out and bumping booties. 

gayness is about who you find attractive, not how you comport yourself.



Honestly.  I seriously wonder where the "You're only TRULY gay if you change sex partners like you do clothes, and revel in the experience" comes from.  That kind of thinking is akin to thinking that all straight people are either whores or womanizers.

[Rolan7]

I agree with all that.  There's a huge difference between being gay and being a campy gay stereotype.  Being openly gay is also different from being secretly gay, but Dumbledore's sexuality never came up.  like, reasonably.   So I never like, disagreed with Rowling for declaring that he was gay.

I did question her motivations for stating it.  Why point out *his* sexuality in particular?  It reads like an attempt to get woke points by retroactively declaring something which had no effect on the story.

It's also interesting in the context of the Harry Potter fanfic scene, which often explored... non-straight couplings.  She was... not a fan.  So that's the context of her making a grand pronouncement that one *specific* character was gay.

There were plenty of other reasons to be leery of Rowling, one of which she helpfully made explicit.
So it's really just an unsurprising epilogue that the stories of young Dumbledore and his close male acquaintance don't touch on his sexuality whatsoever.

[TD1]

Being gay isn't indicated by going to gay parties and having sex in wild orgies of purely male composition. It's indicated by small things. Like heterosexuality isn't indicated by leaping on a fella and riding him to the ground.

For instance, McGonagall is fairly similar to Dumbledore in professional distance. But she still blushes girlishly when Hagrid kisses her.

Dumbledore... doesn't blush, blink, look, pause, anything. The man's a blank slate in terms of attractions. Which is what raises eyebrows when we're told that he's meant to be gay. Because the story makes a better case for asexual than anything else.

[Reelya]

I haven't read the books or even seen beyond the first movie when it was at the cinema, but the complaint would still only make sense if all other staff were "openly straight".

Effectively, there could be other staff with no hint towards their sexuality whatsoever. They're assumed to be straight, but that's not in the writer's words it's in the reader's imagination. If there's someone with no hints towards their sexuality at all then that's the reader's fault for ascribing "no hints" to mean "straight by default" and not something the writer did.

You can see parallels in the discussion of whether anime characters are "white" or not.

If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc.

The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed.

Americans apply this thinking to Japanese drawings. But to the Japanese the Default Human Being is Japanese! So they feel no need to make their characters “look Asian”. They just have to make them look like people and everyone in Japan will assume they are Japanese – no matter how improbable their physical appearance.

You see the same thing in America: After all, why do people think Marge Simpson is white? Look at her skin: it is yellow. Look at her hair: it is a blue Afro. But the Default Human Being thing is so strong that lacking other clear, stereotyped signs of being either black or Asian she defaults to white.

So if Dumbledore isn't explicitly labelled as gay, he's "assumed straight". But this is itself a problematic attitude, perhaps more so than JKR's thing "btw Dumbledore was gay". And that is in fact a valuable thing that she did it that way because it opens a debate about how gay people should be portrayed, and the cultural assumption that people are automatically straight unless we give them the "gay signs".

(In fact, in the anime thing, asians aren't drawn with "slanty eyes" because that's a western stereotype about asians, not a belief they hold about themselves. In anime, the "other" is the American, and they're marked with cliches Japanese hold about Americans, so that Japanese people will realize they're Americans: big noses, blue eyes, blonde hair, and they talk a specific funny way to make it more obvious. Similar to racial-labeling in The Simpsons, it needs to be all these tropes at once so that locals will realize it's an American and not just someone with a big nose, bleached hair, or funny-colored eyes).

[ChairmanPoo]

So if Dumbledore isn't explicitly labelled as gay, he's "assumed straight"

Why is this troublesome? There are more straight than gay people. Statistically it makes sense that he's straight.

[wierd]

Being gay isn't indicated by going to gay parties and having sex in wild orgies of purely male composition. It's indicated by small things. Like heterosexuality isn't indicated by leaping on a fella and riding him to the ground.

For instance, McGonagall is fairly similar to Dumbledore in professional distance. But she still blushes girlishly when Hagrid kisses her.

Dumbledore... doesn't blush, blink, look, pause, anything. The man's a blank slate in terms of attractions. Which is what raises eyebrows when we're told that he's meant to be gay. Because the story makes a better case for asexual than anything else.

Given Dumbledore's past, it is quite possible that the man has emotional wounds that prevent him from allowing himself to form romantic attractions (ever again.)

This would be a character development pathos, that helps define him as a unique character.  It would in no way convert him from being gay-- but it would make him a wounded and faulted being that all at once, understands both sides of love, and understands it very intensely-- He knows the deepest passion of love, and also the deepest bitterness of its loss, and the vulnerability it poses to one's heart.  (which is why he is a vastly different character from Voldermort, who is INCAPABLE of love, in any form.)

That's the way I understood him anyway, after the revelation that he was gay.  Prior to the revelation, his sexuality would have been a moot point; it would have had no impact whatsoever on his interactions with Harry, or the other students.  His sexuality only has any relevance in terms of the prequel stories, where he interacts with his boyhood crush.

[Kagus]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[wierd]

LOLOL

[Rolan7]

That's a workable depiction of the difference between gay people and gay stereotypes in culture.