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strange_aeons) wrote2008-05-12 11:31 pm
strange_aeons) wrote2008-05-12 11:31 pm
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I have a cold. Again. I've had something like half a million colds in the last year, where previously I've gotten them at a rate of about two per year. (This is probably a stress thing. That, and having a desk inches away from a woman I have dubbed Patient Zero.) I hoped I was done a couple of months ago when I caught the same plague that was laying waste to everyone on reality television at the time, and spent a week essentially dead. No such luck. God, my head.
Time to talk about race!
Posit a geopolitical entity of some sort with three primary ethnic populations. Population A is actually a bunch of weird alien monsters that constitute probably less than five percent of the population but hold most of the political power, effectively giving them majority status; they only make up half the government but they appoint all the positions they don't themselves hold. Populations B and C are humans. Let's say for the sake of argument that population B is predominantly very dark-skinned and curly-haired and population C is predominantly very light-skinned and straight-haired. I may decide it's the other way around. Populations B and C speak different languages at home (officially they speak whatever language population A mandates all the roadsigns be written in, either a creole or the language of some earlier population they exterminated or subjugated), practice different secret heretical versions of the state religion, and wear different styles of casual clothing. There is a long history of hostility between populations B and C, probably including wars when they still had their own countries (population A again), but not subjugation. Their numbers and political influence in geopolitical entity X are roughly equal. There are ghettoes, but the people who live in them mostly belong to populations D through M. Intermarriage is legal (because population A doesn't give a shit) but taboo and children of intermarriage are stigmatized.
My question is, does this ever happen on Earth (for values of population A that are not literally from space)? It seems like the kind of thing that probably goes down in parts of east and south Asia every day, but I don't know what's what in that region, ethnically, so I can't say; I just assume every possible interaction of the letters A through M is happening there all the time. I'm not that concerned about its plausibility, because real humans have never had to contend with anything like population A, but I do like having something to crib off of.
I am currently in a state of profound waffle about names and languages. The protagonist is arbitrarily named Simon Wakefield, but he belongs to population D; he's a refugee (population A again). He lost his family and was adopted by a member of either population B or C, and probably took her surname, which means that unless I change his name (and I am strongly resistant to changing characters' names, even when I literally chose said names at random), one of those populations has ethnically British surnames, and population D has Hebrew and/or Greek versions of Hebrew given names, possibly among other sorts of names. I'm thinking about giving the British names to population C, and giving population B French names, just to keep people on their toes. I have some concerns about coming up with an explanation for this that seems legitimate. I haven't made any decisions yet about whether this is one of those alternate Earths I'm so biased toward; I haven't made very many decisions yet about what even the area immediately outside geopolitical entity X is like. It occurred to me as I was writing this that the simplest route would be to make this planet a lost or condemned Earth colony, which it could very easily be, given the magnitude of the weird dangerous shit to be had there. Even if this is the case I might never touch on it at all in the text. This noodling is for my own use.
Whatever happens, population D definitely cannot have Hebrew or Hebrew-descended names exclusively. Maybe Simon is an adopted name also. A devastated, uninhabitable country formerly populated by a now-decimated people with Hebrew names is a can of worms I do not want to open. I didn't particularly want to deal with any interracial tension at all, and then some fell in my lap; there are places I'm not going to go.
Aside: I just saw that ad for the asthma controller that contains salmeterol and therefore 'may cause asthma-related death' again. There's a joke about the FDA and 'lethal quantities of irony' in there that I can't formulate. I blame the illness.
Time to talk about race!
Posit a geopolitical entity of some sort with three primary ethnic populations. Population A is actually a bunch of weird alien monsters that constitute probably less than five percent of the population but hold most of the political power, effectively giving them majority status; they only make up half the government but they appoint all the positions they don't themselves hold. Populations B and C are humans. Let's say for the sake of argument that population B is predominantly very dark-skinned and curly-haired and population C is predominantly very light-skinned and straight-haired. I may decide it's the other way around. Populations B and C speak different languages at home (officially they speak whatever language population A mandates all the roadsigns be written in, either a creole or the language of some earlier population they exterminated or subjugated), practice different secret heretical versions of the state religion, and wear different styles of casual clothing. There is a long history of hostility between populations B and C, probably including wars when they still had their own countries (population A again), but not subjugation. Their numbers and political influence in geopolitical entity X are roughly equal. There are ghettoes, but the people who live in them mostly belong to populations D through M. Intermarriage is legal (because population A doesn't give a shit) but taboo and children of intermarriage are stigmatized.
My question is, does this ever happen on Earth (for values of population A that are not literally from space)? It seems like the kind of thing that probably goes down in parts of east and south Asia every day, but I don't know what's what in that region, ethnically, so I can't say; I just assume every possible interaction of the letters A through M is happening there all the time. I'm not that concerned about its plausibility, because real humans have never had to contend with anything like population A, but I do like having something to crib off of.
I am currently in a state of profound waffle about names and languages. The protagonist is arbitrarily named Simon Wakefield, but he belongs to population D; he's a refugee (population A again). He lost his family and was adopted by a member of either population B or C, and probably took her surname, which means that unless I change his name (and I am strongly resistant to changing characters' names, even when I literally chose said names at random), one of those populations has ethnically British surnames, and population D has Hebrew and/or Greek versions of Hebrew given names, possibly among other sorts of names. I'm thinking about giving the British names to population C, and giving population B French names, just to keep people on their toes. I have some concerns about coming up with an explanation for this that seems legitimate. I haven't made any decisions yet about whether this is one of those alternate Earths I'm so biased toward; I haven't made very many decisions yet about what even the area immediately outside geopolitical entity X is like. It occurred to me as I was writing this that the simplest route would be to make this planet a lost or condemned Earth colony, which it could very easily be, given the magnitude of the weird dangerous shit to be had there. Even if this is the case I might never touch on it at all in the text. This noodling is for my own use.
Whatever happens, population D definitely cannot have Hebrew or Hebrew-descended names exclusively. Maybe Simon is an adopted name also. A devastated, uninhabitable country formerly populated by a now-decimated people with Hebrew names is a can of worms I do not want to open. I didn't particularly want to deal with any interracial tension at all, and then some fell in my lap; there are places I'm not going to go.
Aside: I just saw that ad for the asthma controller that contains salmeterol and therefore 'may cause asthma-related death' again. There's a joke about the FDA and 'lethal quantities of irony' in there that I can't formulate. I blame the illness.
Early Roman Britain
Of course, in that case, everyone wound up speaking Latin in the end and forgetting that they had ever been anything other than Romans.
-- Graydon