[SCA] interesting times -- more of them than there used to be

[cellio]

When I joined the SCA, it was a group dedicated to studying the middle ages and renaissance. Unofficially, the scope was described as "western Europe from the fall of Rome through the 16th century" -- which yeah, I know, is temporally broad. Geographically it wasn't broad enough; people in the SCA wanted to create personas from outside western Europe. The governing documents said something like "pre-17th-century western Europe and cultures that had contact with it". People used that last clause to easily argue for middle-eastern and Mongol personas, and less-easily to argue for Japanese, Chinese, and others. There's one person who does an Aztec persona and that raised some eyebrows. And notice that there's no beginning date there, which a few people have used to justify ancient-world personas. Personally I'm a live-and-let-live sort; I think a few of these are rather far from the clear intent of this organization dedicated to the middle ages and renaissance, but we each play the game differently so, eh, different strokes. (There's maybe a problem when people resort to rules-lawyering this stuff, but that's a tangent for another time.) Apparently in some places it hasn't been so benign, though; some people have gotten very hostile toward people doing these far-from-Europe personas.

The SCA board just put out a new mission statement. It now reads:

The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is an international non-profit volunteer educational organization. The SCA is devoted to the research and re-creation of pre-seventeenth century skills, arts, combat, culture, and employing knowledge of history to enrich the lives of participants through events, demonstrations, and other educational presentations and activities.

(Yeah, the board should really run these things past somebody fluent in written English. But I digress.)

By this new policy, there are no geographic restrictions. And, as before, no early temporal restrictions. Non-European personas are no longer "those other areas we tolerate" but are granted first-class status. The SCA is now a general-purpose historical organization (still pre-17th-century).

I'm of mixed feelings. On the one hand, people were already doing it and there's a lot of support and the world didn't end. It doesn't hurt me if other people's interests are in different locales. On the other hand, from the time I first saw people in armor fighting with swords and shields on the university lawn and said "I've gotta get me some of that", the SCA was at its core about the age of knights and kings and queens, of Vikings and Agincourt and the black death, of Chaucer and sonnets and eddas, of motets and balli and shawms. In the years since I joined my personal interests have broadened and changed; my persona is in Cordova under caliphate rule, not exactly knights and high middle ages either. Medieval, though.

I think, when talking with outsiders, I'm still going to describe the SCA as being for studying the middle ages and renaissance, which automatically implies Europe. (Everybody had a 12th century, but I don't think it makes sense to talk about "medieval Inuit" or "medieval Chinese" or the like.) That's still how I think about it, even if the reality is different.

Comments

[dsrtao]

The primary impetus for the change was that racists were claiming that Europe means white.

[hudebnik]

Oh, absolutely, and that's unsupportable by either medieval history or the history of the SCA (originating in counter-cultural Berkeley). Yes, the great majority of people in medieval Europe were what we would now call "white", but at the time they were considered very different races. (I read yesterday that, at one point in the last 200 years,, the U.S. Census form offered a racial choice among "White", "Negro", "Hebrew", and "Celt", among others.) And there was certainly contact with North Africans, Arabs, Turks, etc.

But this action strikes me as a case of "Something must be done. This is something, so..."

People have been arguing about the SCA's temporal and geographical scope since at least the days of the Rialto on Usenet, and have often used the analogy "You don't bring a football to a baseball game. Nothing wrong with football, but that's not the game we're playing here and now." With this change, it seems like we're playing football, baseball, cricket, croquet, ice hockey, lacrosse, polo, and tai chi all on the same field at the same time, terrified of excluding anyone. Or as my wife puts it, "The SCA is no longer a baseball league but just the Department of Parks and Recreation, offering only a physical plant where you can do whatever you want."

[cellio]

Wow, this was about that? Quite aside from the fact that it won't work -- since when do racists care about what a society's rules say? -- and that it's not true (see hudebnik's comment), it attacks the problem in the wrong place. Instead of putting super-broadening legislation in place so they can say "no, actually, it's not just for whites", they should deal with the people who profoundly misuse the society's platform. What action was taken against the crown of Caid? None that I've heard. It's good that they resigned, but that's just a reset to where most of us spend our entire lives -- not king/queen. What action was taken against the crown of Trimaris, who made a Christian mass central to their coronation? None; they still sit the throne (and used their position to stir up more controversy at Pennsic). If there've been more incidents then what corrective actions were taken, and if there haven't been, then why is the SCA fundamentally altering its scope on account of two misbehaving kings?

This was much more palatable when I thought the change was for a positive inclusion goal. Sigh...

(Not aimed at you; your comment just provided the launching point.)

[cellio]

Yeah, "Europe = white" was a non-starter to begin with. It's a pity they didn't say that instead of saying "oh wait, some people are misunderstanding, so rather than clarifying we'll just remove the bad word!". It's almost like they believe that it's possible to prevent problems 100%. But there will always be someone who misunderstands, innocently or willfully.

Thanks for reminding me of "you don't bring a football to a baseball game" from way back in the Rialto days. Your wife's assessment sounds right to me. In a way, Pennsic has been like that for years and we mostly all get along, but it's done through fragmentation. I suppose that'll happen more in the rest of the SCA now. How good or bad that is I can't say.

[dsrtao]

I don't take any of this personally.

I agree that the BoD is terribly lacking in common sense.

I also agree that this won't particularly solve the problem of racists.

I do, however, think that it is a generally positive change. The SCA has significantly increased the level of documentation necessary to be considered "good". Where that research exists for other places and earlier times, it will be brought forward and used. Everything was always fuzzy at the edges, anyway -- Europe was never out of contact with Asia and Africa, it made contact with the Americas during period. Extending period backwards to the beginning of documentation is just fine with me.

[cellio]

And that ties into what I *thought* this was about -- hey, we have people doing these other cultures too, so we're going to support that. Your point about higher expectations for documentation is a good one. We'll always have people who don't care and do undocumentable or made-up stuff, but we've always had that. Exhibit A: Tuchux.

If the BOD thinks they're doing something about bigotry and hate-mongering, they're wrong -- they've taken no actions against *actual cases of that*. By making this change they probably think they're "doing something" and therefore don't need to do anything else, which is wrong. I liked it better when I thought the BOD was doing something about "scope on the ground".

[hlinspjalda]

I've done a lot of research with images of census reports from the last 200 years, and I haven't seen anything (in the northeast or deep south, anyway) that reported race as anything other than white or black even when Irish and Jewish people were clearly present. I have often found "Hebrew" in the "Race or People" field for ship manifests, though.

[hlinspjalda]

A lot of people I know are under the impression that this change was for purposes of inclusion, more or less in response to the negative publicity generated by the Caid situation. Its timing vis-a-vis the Trimarian situation is supposedly incidental.

I am not sure the mission statement has yet reached its current final-for-now form, but that's just me not having much faith in the BoD most days. SSDD.

[hudebnik]

I don't have a precise citation; this was mentioned off-hand in a paragraph in the middle of https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/america-white-minority-majority.html

[luscious_purple]

I have a keen interest in the history of Lithuania -- biggest European country in the year 1400 CE! -- so I'm not entirely sorry to see the adjective "Western" dropped. I've been in the SCA for only 14 years or so, but I do think there is more interest in Eastern European cultures than there used to be, possibly because the Norse, Celt and English cultures seem to be so very thoroughly explored already.

Mundanely, the barony in which I live has an overall population of 55 to 60 percent African American, with a sizeable Latinx minority. So anything the SCA can do to appeal to people who don't see themselves in portraits of "dead white Europeans" is OK with me.

[siderea]

Is that true? Or was it because European-only history groups are magnets for white supremacists?

(I do not think this is a good solution to the latter, but it at least makes more sense.)

Or that racists already in the Society were using the European definition as an excuse to be racists towards people doing non European personas (regardless of their actual race) and they decided to take their club (heh) away?

[dsrtao]

That racists already in are using it as a club and also to attract more racists, I think.

[hlinspjalda]

Thanks for the ref! Looks like the Times was quoting an email from Robert Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute. The full quote's a little more waffly.

Historically, this has played out in the practices of the Census Bureau and the Citizenship and Immigration Services that “recorded race and ethnicity categories over time, e.g., ‘Celt’ and ‘Hebrew’ once appeared outside of the ‘Caucasian’ category.”

I have no doubt they used categories and practices that excluded the Jews and the Irish from being white at some point; but he doesn't claim -- and they don't, to the best of my knowledge, ever seem -- to have put that on the actual US census form per se .

I know, this is an OT quibble. :-) It caught my eye because I've been doing a lot of genealogical research these last couple years.

[hudebnik]

Yes, I seem to have read more into the quote than was actually there. Thanks for the clarification!

[cellio]

I always considered eastern Europe to be in, by the way -- even if they said western, they also said "with contact" and for me that internalized as "all Europe is surely in".

I wonder why there's a perception that dark-haired Mediterranean-complexion Vikings are ok (I was one for a long time), but black Saxons aren't? The black Elizabethan I know of (a laurel in the East) seems to do fine. I can totally understand "that history isn't *interesting* to me because it's too far from mine", but I hope blacks, Latinx, and others aren't routinely being told they can't be whatever personas they want.