From Stormwind to Orgrimmar, you hear people saying that representation matters.
No, it does not.
As an Orc, I don’t watch movies or TV shows in hopes of seeing someone who looks like me. I don’t care for the actors’ race or skin color.
All I want is someone who acts really well and brings the character to life. I want a politician who can do the job he/she was elected to do. I believe EVERYTHING should be based on merit and merit alone. A person should not be looking to movies or politicians for validation of his/her own identity.
I hate hearing things like: first black woman to do X, first gay person to do Y, first spaghetti-shaped monster to do Z. Stop with the damn “firsts.”
Instead, we should celebrate great people doing things they are really good at.
We should be recognizing and celebrating people’s abilities and talents, and not their skin color/gender/orientation.
When minority groups are systemically, socially, and/or legally oppressed for multiple decades/centuries I find it perfectly acceptable to celebrate them breaking through that oppression and being the “first” in something that has for so long to them be unattainable.
You say this:
Yet fail to realize that’s not reality and wasn’t reality for most of our country’s existence. If it was we wouldn’t be having so many “firsts” right now, in the 21st century.
People who don’t face this type of systemic social adversity are always so quick to right it off as non-important.
But it does. When the bulk of your personality is derived from things not achieved or earned, narcissism and entitlement, yes. Representation does matter. Merit is dying and counter-cultures are now raging with the corporate machine. Welcome to the beginning of the dystopia. Balkanisation is the only answer in the US.
Yeah lmao at first I thought it was a troll post because he talked about “Orc representation” and then he started talking about black women and gay people and I was like… why are these real world topics being compared to a fictional fantasy race?
Most people that HAVE representation don’t see the value in it; this is nothing new.
Inciting the argument to be a choice between representation and merit implies two false ideas:
Those without representation are somehow without merit, and;
Those that are there on “merit” did not achieve that merit on the basis of the representation they already have and the lack of obstacles contained within.
We do not choose based on merit anywhere, at any point in human history. Merit is a false idea that entirely ignores context. It is a way for those who came from opportunity to sustain that opportunity into the future.
For a choice to be entirely merit-based, context must be either accounted for (through “forced” representation) or overcome (through equality of opportunity). The first is an imperfect answer; the second isn’t going to happen any time in any of our lifetimes.
If representation doesn’t matter to you then you have probably taken it for granted in your life.
Before Black Panther you can’t imagine how hard it was to find an action figure of color for my son to play with.
And “spaghetti shaped people” aren’t real. To lump in real people with nonsense like that is to discredit them and their very real historical and societal obstacles.
That will never, ever happen until people of all colours, orientations and genders have equal opportunities, and thus their “merit” can truly be compared in parallel.
Both people’s merit and networking are entirely informed by the opportunity they have had up until that point; including, but not limited to, where they grew up, what education they had, what circumstances they lived in, their socioeconomic status, the number of potential “networkers” they had that were the beneficieries of systemic imbalance, and much, much more.
To claim that their merit was the “only” thing considered is a logical fallacy; merit is not equal.
I don’t know you or anything about you; but perhaps if you had been born in a rich white family, you would have been the commander of the US Navy right now, or perhaps you would instead never have joined the armed forces and instead lived on your parents’ money claiming to be a self-made man; who knows?
Your merit is not equal to someone else’s merit in a system with systemic inequality. It is inherently impossible to compare.
That is not a bad ideal. The problem is, to accomplish that we need to be at a point in history where no one sees color/orientation/gender as a defining factor. We as a society are still far from that ideal.