A couple of days ago, Buzzfeed ran an article looking at several artists who have been using AI art generators to create fat, black, and sometimes queer sci-fi and fantasy characters.
As the article notes, black characters are a relative rarity in science fiction, and fat characters tend to be villains. So why not use today’s technology to envision a fairer and more inclusive future? “Fat, Black people deserve to be main characters capable of anything,” one of the artists told Buzzfeed. “We are just here like everyone else.”
Cue the outrage on the right. Right-wingers tend not to like to see fat people in art or culture and seem doubly upset by fat, black people, seeing any representation of them as “glorifying obesity.” And so it’s not surprising to see a writer on the right-wing blog American Thinker taking on Buzzfeed for celebrating “AI-generated, obese blacks.” Writer Andrea Widburg seems to think that one should only mention fat, black people as examples of how not to live a healthy life. “Given [the] dire health consequences” of obesity, she writes,
all of which are exacerbated by food choices and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, the logical thing for institutions that wish blacks well would be to cajole them into eating healthier foods and being more active. Interestingly, though, that’s not where leftists, the groups that claim to live to improve the quality of black life in America, are going.
No, instead of spending all their time berating fat black people for their fatness–a strategy that actually makes things worse for fat people, by the way–leftists would rather accept fat black people as people.
Now, AI has entered the fray to celebrate, rather than eradicate, black obesity. Leftists are touting black sci-fi and fantasy artists who rely on AI artwork to celebrate fat blacks. … AI is also useful for those who, along with their reverence for obesity, have abandoned sexual reality.
Apparently this is Widburg’s response to learning that some of these artists are queer as well as black. The horror!
So I guess it’s only appropriate to show fat, black people in the media if they are explicitly being “cajoled” into trying to become unfat. Treating fat, black people as if they deserve to be the “main characters” of anything, from science fiction stories to their own lives, is little more than an “obsession with [the] transgressive” that
too perfectly aligns with modern Democrat policies that (coincidentally, I’m sure) are just as devastatingly bad for blacks as old Democrat policies once were.
Most of the artists featured in the Buzzfeed articles are themselves fat and black; how dare they try to represent people like themselves in art!
One commenter on the American Thinker post thinks he’s got it all figured out.
The problem is that not enough black men marry black women. Besides, it’s a status symbol for a black guy to marry a white woman or a very light-skinned black woman. This leave black women no choice but to seek comfort in food. Moreover, being fat makes women–black or white–feel pregnant. Fantasy, of course, but when reality is different …
Wow. Thanks for sharing, dude.
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The right is now triggered by imaginary AI generated images. Last week they were screaming because Aunt Jemima was removed. It’s not acceptable unless it is a stereotype they want to see.
What bothers me is that AI art is derived from stolen art. It’s inaccurate to call the people who create AI art “artists”; they type words and the AI algorithm spews out an amalgam of manipulated, stolen art to order. The efforts of those creating a vision of fat, feminist, queer black women is undermined and cheapened by the methods used. Far better to have real artists create original images.
Dude….whut?
As a fat black woman:
Not black, but being fat doesn’t make me feel pregnant either. There’s a big difference between a fat stomach and a pregnant stomach, but I don’t suppose any of these guys have ever been allowed to touch either.
This has always been a lot less true in sci-fi literature than in visual media. Including cover art, which has been pissing me off all my life: when the book describes a protagonist having brown skin, there’s no excuse for the cover art being of a white person, but it usually is. (This has been less true the past decade or so, but it still happens way too much.)
@ dali
That crops up a lot with Heinlein. A lot of his characters are explicitly non white. Not that you’d know from the visual representations.
I can get Paul Verhoeven making Filipino Juan Rico a very Aryan looking nazi poster boy. He had a particular message he wanted to put across based on his own experiences.
But there wasn’t an accurate depiction of Rod from Tunnel in the Sky until the 2012 audiobook.
To be fair, Heinlein was incredibly racist. There’s no reason you’d expect he’d have minority main characters unless you already knew to look for them.
Uh… I’m not black, but being overweight does NOT make me ‘feel pregnant,’ nor would ‘feeling pregnant’ EVER be a “comfort” for me, jfc.
Does this dude realize some belly pudge is waaaaay different from having a human growing inside you? Why does he think feeling pregnant would comfort single women?
Seriously what fucking planet are these people from?
Hello, Samuel Delaney.
I admittedly avoir a few more dupois that I should but have you seen pictures of right wing militia groups? They could grease an entire tank division. And they object to fat cartoon characters?
Not black, but I am fat, and I explicitly chose to listen to fat people of colour.
As I understand it, and I’m probably preaching to the choir, but you never know we might have some lurkers looking for an education, concepts of fatness are linked to racist ideas of the ‘normal man’ from the nineteenth century and the ideological link between the ‘savage’ black person and the ‘uncontrolled’ or ‘indulgent’ fat person. The idea of a thin white-European man as the exemplar of humanity holds many facets – thin because he doesn’t indulge and is too high minded and lofty for bodily considerations and fat people were constructed as lazy, stupid and indulgent with the Prince Regent/George IV as a prime example of excess and greed; European because ‘Caucasoid’ humans are ‘more evolved’ than ‘mongoloid’ or ‘negroid’; and of course, a man, because everyone else is just a faulty man. Thanks to Social Darwinists and their eugenicist friends these patently ridiculous ideas and categories were given some sort of ‘scientific’ legitimacy at least until 1945, after which they slowly drained from science, like pus from a particularly large cist, but they still infect many cultures, for instance ‘Mongol’ was still used for people with Down’s Syndrome until 1980s in some places; Dr Down used the term, because he thought people with an extra chromosome were a ‘throw back’ to an earlier stage of evolution and showed that the parents were degenerate in some way – it’s all ‘sins of the fathers’ crap. Anyway, Sabrina Strings book ‘Fearing the Black Body’ and Simon Jarrett’s ‘Those they called Idiots’, when read together build a fuller picture.
Sorry for the infodumping, my ‘special interests’ in 2021 and 2022 were fat activism and neurodivergent history. Strangely enough, they still well alongside each other.
Right-winger: Here, my libertarian techbro pals created this neat tool so that you can disrupt the art world!
User: [Disrupts its normativity]
Right-winger: No, not like that! The “hiring human artists” part!
But were any of them playing flutes?
@Dali: Ursula le Guinn was quite vocal about trying to get the protagonist of her Earthsea novels to not be depicted as white.
@RJ Dragon: Thanks for that summary! I’ll have to look into it more.
@D.R. Never read Delany. Is there something specific I should start with?
When Carlos Ezquerra was given the task of designing Judge Dredd he portrayed Dredd as a black guy. That was continued by Mike McMahon when he took over the strip; and a number of other artists also did.
As Dredd always wears his helmet and the strips were in black and white the effect had to be subtle if not to descend into racist characture; but Dredd was intended to be black (the actual phrase used was “to put a mystery as to his racial background“; so as to break the mould of traditional English comic character.
Not all artists knew that though and some envisaged Dredd as white.
It wasn’t until 1987 though that Dredd officially became a white guy.
Trying to wrap my head around the notion that a good strategy for “cajoling” anyone into “being more active” includes “refusing to show them fictional characters that look like them”. Whatever else we may say about main characters in science fiction, it seems to me that most of them are pretty good role models when it comes to maintaining high levels of physical activity.
Oh, sorry, by “cajole” you actually meant “shame and mock”? Well, that explains it.
One commenter on the American Thinker post thinks he’s got it all figured out.
This shows the age of the person writing this. The 90’s are calling, they want their “please come back to us Black Man” segment on Oprah.
Some hashtags for that commenter to check out #ThePinkPill #DivestmentMovement #CrystelynKarazin #CynthiaG #Swirlers #KendallStCharles #BWE #BlackWomanEmpowerment
“ artists who have been using AI art generators”
Eh, are you really an artist if you just type what you want the generator to draw and it draws it? And don’t lots of these generators steal from real artists?
I could be wrong but that’s what I heard.
AI art has made me lose motivation to create digital art, & destroyed my sense of self, as I’m physically handicapped, & art is the only thing I’ve ever really been good at. I love drawing people with different levels of fat & melanin; darker skin is more reflective, so you see all these different colors from the background & lighting.
Explicitly black characters may be a relative rarity in written SF&F, but most such fiction that I’ve read doesn’t mention the albedos of the characters, so the reader is free to picture them however they want.
@RJ Dragon Thank you, now I have more to read! I completely agree.
@Moggie, Karl Drinkwater’s Lost Solace books have an explicitly black main character; he deals with the racism and classism of the society the she lives in, and the main character’s little sister is coded autistic (I asked, she’s autistic), and kidnapped by the state.
One of the novellas deals with a black woman who is sexualised by other characters purely because of where she’s from. I think he wanted to explore the sexualisation of racialised people, but he’s a white British man, so it wasn’t exactly own voices. He tried.
@BatteringLamb and @Do I have a name: I like sharing book recs.