Just pondering a thought that occured yesterday, when ruminating absently about a book I semi-reviewed a while ago (because thinking about thinking about thinking is clearly a valuable use of my time) - Jaqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart. A large part of the plot was made up by a character sketch so common it's bordering on cliche, if it isn't already. The unusually-intelligent would-be leader of savages wants his people to have the kind of life that the protagonist does. It doesn't really matter what kind of life it is (though it almost invariably involves capitalism, a supreme (rather than clan) leader and a greater industrial capacity, with better luxuries) just as it doesn't really matter what kind of society the savages have to begin with. The point is, the White Man  protagonist has it better.

When I got over my disappointment with discovering an irritating cliche in a book I otherwise enjoyed, I started musing - what brought this about, and why - when we are so clued in to the various White Man makes a better Native than the Natives Do stories - does it seem to slip under the radar? It's one of the more distasteful facts of the fiction industry, and the storytelling medium. Most of our audience come from privileged backgrounds, and many of our proto-stories - the myths that build stories into something that speak to us - are built on the various emotions we feel about being so privileged. There's the White Man Kicks Arse version (Avatar), White Man Tames A Savage (Robinson Crusoe),  White Man Has It Better (Kushiel's Dart) and a whole host of others.

And then there're the just-as-annoying inversions - Native Saves The White Man (Australian bush stories), Natives Have It Better (also Avatar), and probably an inversion of every other one as well.

But are they really about us? About the white man? Or have we just appropriated them from a more general mythic background, foregrounding them against our ancestor's guilt, and our shame for being so rich in the face of the world's poverty? Are they endemic to our society - the privileged, western world, or are they something deeper?

Thinking about fables, Aboriginal dreamtime stories, Celtic and Native American mythology, they all seem to have elements that echo that White Man story. Which makes sense - they exist to provide a cultural identity, and part of that identity is It's Better To Be Us Than Them. The hero that journeys to the otherlands usually saves not only himself, or that which he has quested for, but some part or aspect of the otherlands, too. The other world is changed for his presence, usually for the better, and he takes some kind of lesson or learning from them.

That's the basis of both the regular myth and its inversion, in one - it's just the split side of the Hero's Journey that echoes through all our myths.

So is it, perhaps, more indicative of our opinion of ourselves, that we take these stories on as something that reflects only the white man's guilt and greed and history, denying its resonance with other cultures? In some ways, that shows far more self-absorbtion than the myths themselves, I would argue. Everything always has to be about the White Man.

Personally, I'm rather sick of people reading things for 'race' and racial commentary - it's high time the world got over that idea altogether, stopped caring where people come from and look at what they do, and what they're capable of. But what would I know, really - I'm just a privileged western white girl.