Jenn and I have had a disagreement.

[conuly]

I have postdated this so she doesn't see it but also so I don't have to FLock it.

So we were watching TV and there's this whole plotline around eeeeeeeeevil voodoo with eeeeeeeeevil voodoo zombies (not the undead kind, except maybe) with a character who is literally called Baron Samedi. He is evil.

I say that makes it more racist. Her argument is that it's less racist because he's an actual figure in the actual real-world religion. We both agree that the storyline itself is racist as hell, because nearly all instances of voodoo in fiction are.

But is our dear Baron Samedi a mitigating or an aggravating factor here?

I'm right, right?

Comments

Not my Religion, but...

[gwydion]

More racist. That's a real religion.

I still remember when they dressed up Legba as Baron Samedi and had him be evil on True Blood and how upset some of my New Orleans correspondents were because that was a particularly disgusting perversion of their religion.

I bet Christians would be losing their shot if people did stuff like that with their mythology, yet somehow it's supposed to be okay because most people who belong to the voodoun religion are black.

[alexseanchai]

a bunch of Christians lost their shit when the Miraculous Ladybug showrunner tweeted that Jesus, like the show's title characters, was a Miraculous wielder. which is to say, that Jesus was just an ordinary person with an ordinary life until he got hold of an extraordinary piece of jewelry. notice how much less egregious that is than this is.

notice how nobody much cared until Astruc pulled this on Christians. he said the same thing about Cernunnos, Herakles, and Sun Wukong on previous occasions, and the outcry has been distinctly muted.

also Christianity has the advantage of a vast number of positive pop culture depictions of any figure significant to Christian mythology that one might care to name. vodou, uh, doesn't.

[conuly]

That's hilarious on multiple levels.

[mama_kestrel]

Oh, but Voudoun is Superstition, while Christianity is Truth! (Goes off to extract tongue from cheek)

Seriously? This is about as racist as it is possible to be, and a few steps beyond.

[alexseanchai]

aggravating. the actual figure in the actual real-world religion—which is a closed tradition, I believe!—is, shall we say, Not Evil.

[baranduin]

Yes, you are right. Very disrespectful.

[pauamma]

I know nothing about the figure or the religion, so exercise appropriate skepticism, but a quick DDG search disgorged the following bit from the Haiti Wikipedia entry:

Duvalier sought to create a personality cult, identifying himself with Baron Samedi, one of the loa (or lwa), or spirits, of Haitian Vodou.

Given François Duvalier's well-known human rights abuses, I would wonder about guilt by association, perhaps. (That is, I would ask someone familiar with Haitian culture - preferably a Haitian - what they made of that attempted identification.)

[conuly]

I don't think these writers even went so far as wikipedia, let's not give them too much credit for research here.

[pauamma]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply they had. I was trying to describe how I got to ... well, probably not quite an opinion, but the germ of one.

[swingandswirl]

Aggravating, absolutely.

(I remember how incandescently furious I was with SPN for just this reason. These are living religions, FFS, with people who believe in the gods you just happily trashed for your bullshit story.)

[conuly]

It's one of the reasons I didn't watch The Frog Princess until the pandemic.

The kids always liked it because Black Disney Princess, which is fine, but I couldn't get past a. the fact that she spends almost the entire movie as a frog or b. the voodoo villain. WOW DISNEY WHY SO FUCKING RACIST.

[smokingboot]

Can't give much of sense without context, and I haven't seen the show.

Papa 'Doc' Duvalier used the persona of The Baron to augment his political standing; Maybe he truly believed he was an embodiment, maybe the Loa rode him in some ceremonies. It does seem that many among the Tontons Macoutes were leaders in Haitian Vodou; they used the symbolism of the religion to great effect, because everyone knew that Baron Samedi was to be feared (not just feared; he had his other aspects of course) and those who served him were to be feared too; many thousands 'disappeared' in Duvalier's time.
It can be no surprise that a story villain wore the persona of Baron Samedi after a very real and very terrifying villain did. After all, the Macoutes were named after a bogeyman and surprise, the bogeyman turns up on TV. A magical practitioner would not be surprised at this at all.

Does this vindicate the use of a sacred being in a story? I would argue that as villainy has been landed at the feet of many deities via story telling it is hard to avoid. We have seen cults, in fiction and truth, where messianic leaders turn out to be evil. Christ and Allah are blamed for overwhelming amounts of pain and horror, Jehovah is regularly reviled, Kali's motherhood is often forgotten in tales of Thuggees, even the Buddha's face has been spattered with blood. We are all someone's villain.

If it is a case of 'see how primitive these people are,' or if Vodou is being used as a form of blaxploitation then that is clearly racist.

[sabotabby]

More racist.

[silveradept]

If the treatment was how Hollywood usually handles things, more racist, because they wouldn't have bothered to do any research other than to go "here's a convenient name" before beaming it to however many eyeballs they could. Which will influence the perception of voudou more in the direction they choose, I'm sure.

[ioplokon]

Yeah, it's fucked up. Imo, the premise is so bad that Baron Samedi doesn't really move the needle too much one way or the other, but like, probably it's worse? I think the Duvalier thing is a reaaaaaaaaach. Most Americans don't know or care to know jack shit about Haiti. (also uh, painting it as a spooky, violent, backwards, heathen place with no context for the broader history, culture, or American involvement in that history and culture is, like, bad?)

(Also I read this late last night and my brain parsed Baron Samedi as Bonhomme Sept Heures and I was like, well... it's an original choice, at least?)

[the_siobhan]

Definitely more racist. Disrespecting a religious figure is worse than just making something up to be shitty about.

[bitterlawngnome]

I've been around Caribbean Santería enough to know though that "voodoo" is generally shorthand for "primitive", "savages", or alternatively some sort of bullshit "close to the earth" nonsense, and all the African diasporic religions are lumped in together under it - colonial shorthand for well she was wearing the red dress so she was just _asking_ to be colonized.

But (tangent) this is making me think about how hard it must be to write characters meant to be evil (or good or anything in particular) without reference to some cultural prejudice. I know in visual language it's damn near impossible, and it become a question of which ones you choose and how you frame them. And someone with a different frame of reference is going to understand it differently so how do you accommodate that?

[flamingsword]

You have the villain of that race or type be a different kind of bad than the narratives about those people. Like, if an autistic character were a villain, you would have them be killing billionaires because it's not fair for someone to start out so ahead and then suck up so much of the worlds resources that no one can catch up. It's a believable motivation for anyone who knows autistic people, but it's not "I have bad social skills therefore I am an asshole". Y'know?

[bitterlawngnome]

I think I get it. How would you do it in this case? Have a voudoun-practising villain doing bad things for reasons that had nothing to do with voudoun? or ... ?

(frozen)

[mme_n_b]

Neither more nor less racist, but more offensive to a specific religion.

Consider a similar case - making the bad woman in a book Jewish without a specific plot-necessary reason is anti-Semitic. Calling her Mary of Nazareth mother of Joshua does not make it more anti-Semitic, but does make it offensive to Christians.

Similarly, calling the bad guy here Baron Samedi does not make the book more offensive to, say, Ethiopian Jews, and is therefore not racist.

(frozen)

[flamingsword]

But taking a religious figure out of Voudoun is cultural appropriation, which USians tend to only do from subjugated cultures, and IS therefore, more racist.

(frozen)

[mme_n_b]

I do not know the cultural make-up of the writers in question, and therefore cannot agree that this is necessarily cultural appropriation.

I also cannot agree that all or most most followers of Voudoun are currently or have historically been (despite a large minority of Voudoun followers that were enslaved in the USA) subjugated by the USA, and therefore cannot agree that this is necessarily cultural appropriation of a subjugated culture.

I have a hard time equating culture with race (hence my use of Ethiopian Jews above, as a group that afaik shares race, but not culture, with most followers of Voudoun), and therefore cannot agree that cultural appropriation is necessarily racist.

TLDR: This is nasty, but it's not the kind of nasty you're calling it

[al_zorra]

The varieties of Samedie (who has a day dedicated, and certainly in Haiti that day and night are one of tremendous celebration) nor Legba, Eleggua, Elegba, etc. are intrinsically evil, any more than are any other of the deities of the African and Afro-Caribbean syncretized, creole religions.

It's all racist as can be and just doing it at all is massive disrespect to these LIVING, practiced religions and spiritual practices.

Only a complete ignoramus idiot would think of writing a script like this.

As far as Haiti and Haitians being colonized by the US -- they have literally been a USA military occupation that lasted from 1915 - 1935, not to mention complete economic dominance. The whole purpose of Haiti for the US is to benchmark wage labor in the hemisphere.

[conuly]

Only a complete ignoramus idiot would think of writing a script like this.

Would it surprise you to hear that they also have eeeeeeeeeevil magical gypsies?

[pauamma]

Came back to this while cleaning old notification emails, and I'm curious. Was the religious figure named after the day (Saturday), or does that word mean something else in Haitian Creole than in French? *goes check* Google Translate says the day name is spelled Samdi (no e) in Haitian Creole, but I don't dare trust it.