Well, if they use rule 8 from the same list that rule 34 comes from (Rules of the Internet), then it should be “There are no real rules about posting”, which is immediately followed by “There are no real rules about moderation, either — Enjoy your ban”. Take from that what you will….
Why does that sound like a kid show parody? “Barely legal, barely legal, interracial teens! Interracial teens! Barely legal interracial teens!” Or something like that that cant actually be captured in text form.
What are you talking about? Mike is always smiling. I have never met a more cheerful person in my life. Heck, he will make your mom smile for a nickel.
I don’t know if Sal is giving him ‘guff’. No matter what I think she believes it (and honestly I think Sal is probably onto something here). She’s not just lashing out at him out of no where- she’s responding to a long ignored tension- one the Walky benefits from, but does not acknowledge.
yeah for real. this isn’t coming out of nowhere. walky ignoring this has got to be pretty hurtful for sal to take. and it sounds like she knows that this would be his reaction.
Right, like I’m sure Walky is reeling and feeling pretty defensive right now. it’s not an easy thing to hear, particularly if you have this concept in your head of having ‘earned’ the regard and affection you have. but it’s a lot easier for him than it is for Sal to grow up living it, and unable to ignore it.
in truth, their coloration is a storytelling device. in families that mixed, it’s not unknown to have one child come out pretty dark, one pretty close to white, and others in between. mendelian crapshoot, basically.
I know a family with a decidedly celtic mother and a technically mixed father (jamaican grandfather, some kind of european grandmother but I haven’t ever met/seen her) – who, all the same, is dark, curly haired and heavyset enough that he’s done a fine job of dressing up as Mr T for charity gigs before.
Their kids are basically Sal and Walky, even down to the hair, but with a more pronounced skin tone difference and less of the criminal intent (though the son is still a cloudcuckoolander)… They’re certainly more “mixed” than their dad, but far from homogenous at the same time.
So yeah, one half truth in cartooning, one half truth in commenting.
Yes, they are the same color both are RGB: (206, 168, 126) I checked on panel 3 where they are holding hands, similar lighting. She’s nuts.
That said, perceived racism is just as painful as actual racism. If I think someone treated me badly due to my race I feel light shit, regardless of what the rational actually was (I can’t read their mind and know it was due to something else).
Not to say she wasn’t treated differently. Two of my cousins (sisters) were always treated differently my their mother. The younger the obvious favorite. Played out a bit differently though… the older one got a PhD and the younger one partied through college. People are different.
I dunno, my sister acted like she was the eternal martyr of the family who was always being treated poorly and that was pure horseshit. She really seemed to believe it though.
Precisely. Sal *perceives* that Walky is the more popular one of the two, but the question here is, if she had dressed as herself and interacted with her parents in her normal manner, would they have acted any different?
Remember, the only interaction we have seen between the Walkerton parents and Sal is her putting on the mask of “Good Catholic Girl” and making excuses to not be around.
I can’t see how that would’ve made the interaction better. Obviously they sent her to Catholic boarding school to “straighten” her out. As it is, putting her best foot forward, she barely got acknowledged.
I’m kinda like Sal in that my mom wants me to be someone I’m not. If I pretended, like Sal, to be that person she soul be over the moon and all over me. The fact that Sal put in the effort to please them matters, ESPECIALLY considering it’s unlike how she usually is.
Her effort was fake, of course. But the fact is, she made that effort and they barely even glanced at her. They are *her parents*, and they didn’t even try to act like it.
Now, is Sal correct about the reason why? I’ve no idea. But it’s simply not deniable that her parents completely shirked their side of the relationship.
In other words, he’s at least partially angry about having to let go of his fool’s paradise, and deal with being caught in the middle of the reality of his family. Hair not being naturally ‘white’ enough being the issue or no (I think it’s gender, mainly), he’s just not enough like their snotty mother to have a clean conscience without at least considering Sal may be one to something.
or perhaps he’s upset because his sister literally just said “Mom only loved you more because you’re whiter”. That doesn’t have to be true to make someone uncomfortable or pissed. One doesn’t have to actually be privileged to take offense at that.
/though to be fair, maybe she is right, since I’ve only recently started reading the comic and fear archive binges.
Saying mom only likes you better ’cause your whiter is pretty cheap to hear when you’ve lived your life as an adjusted, if juvenile, person and your sister goes out and robs a store.
I kind of see this as Walky interpreting his sister’s outburst as just a pathetic “Not my fault” excuse since he never saw any favouritism growing up, although it is heavily implied. To him, it didn’t start until she broke the law. And as he’s stated, he’s naive enough to think a mixed race marriage eliminates racism.
But to blame race on it? That their mother favoured the child more of her skin type than the father’s? I think we need to see some flashbacks or something because we haven’t seen enough of the Walkertons to say whether Sal is just raging or actually has a point.
For Walky to react anything like constructive would require him to think and develop in ways that are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more stressful than he’ll ever-
Because Walkly’s experiences are no less legitimate? It’s entirely possible their parents played favorites. It’s entirely possible Walky was blind to it. But just making this as simple as “Sal-Right” “Walky-Wrong” is dismissive of his own experiences. Billie is right that being mixed-race isn’t a “get out of jail free card” for racism (it’s pretty darn possible for anyone to be culpible in that regard), but delegitimizing Walky’s connection to his identity as a means to then dismiss his own personal opinions and perspective on his childhood is pretty messed up. He has every right to be upset. (Not that Sal doesn’t as well).
Yes, sorry! Wasn’t trying to say you were either, more referring to Sal’s behavior and why Walky might validly be upset. I apologize if I implied otherwise though!
Their feelings are fine, but they’re not entitled to their own facts – the simple truth is that at least one of them is wrong, since their supposed experiences are in direct contradiction with each other.
Not necessarily.
They could both see the same experience differently.
Their parents *COULD* be treating them differently, and showing Walky favor. Walky might be too dense to SEE it that way, but it doesn’t mean Sal’s wrong. On the other foot, Sal’s reasoning as to WHY Walky is the favorite could be just as wrong too.
Everyone could be wrong!
and that’s the best kind of wrong.
Er, what you described would mean Walky’s wrong. Either they are showing favoritism, or they are not – it’s really that simple. They can both be wrong, but they can’t both be right.
I basically have no patience for the kind of “everyone’s ‘experiences’ are of equal value, even when they are an incorrect evaluation of what actually happened” thinking that Sgore was engaging in. If Walky is wrong, then his experience is less legitimate.
I suspect it’s the dad, since a) the dad is the one who married a white woman b) the dad is the one who commented that her hair looked better straight (ie, whiter, and seriously, that’s the first thing out of your mouth when you see your daughter?). That is to say, among some black people, internalized raicism, where you consciously or subconsciously favor whiteness or features associated with whiteness, is def. a thing.
*Full disclosure– Mixed race myself; find it easy to pass for white. Life has been _way_ less difficult for me than for my more obviously black brother and sister.
I dunno if stonewalling really counts as standing up. It’d take more spine to actually have a conversation about it and find out where she’s coming from, you know?
It doesn’t look to me like he’s stone-walling Sal, he’s storming out because of Billie. I don’t know if she is just making a devil’s-advocate “well, technically…” kind of comment or implying that she agrees with Sal’s assessment of the Walkerton’s (or at least their mixed race dad), but either way, if I were in his position, I would be pretty pissed off if she was interjecting in the middle of a really personal sibling confrontation like this
I’d also like to point out the way she said it she may have seen and heard things back when they were in town. Remember, she grew up with him. She knew about him and his family. It is very possible that she saw certain behaviors the supported Sal’s claims but never knew how to bring it up.
But she would know! And if she was just being contrarian, then she’d be a lot more aggressive about it! Instead, she’s speaking up and acting uncomfortable, which makes me think she means what she says but still doesn’t want to say it and really doesn’t want to be there.
Billie would certainly know. Let’s keep in mind that she has been a family friend of the Walkertons at least since grade school, and that she is close enough to Charles and Linda as to accidentally calling them “mom and dad”. (They got at least one daughter they like!)
I want to start a death metal band and write songs about fluffy kittens, adorable bunnies, and warm hugs that smell like cinnamon rolls and name it “ENDLESS SNUGGLES.” We will be a new branch of death metal, cuddlecore. Fuck yes. 😀
Walky seems to have had the right intention in the second panel but the wrong phrasing.
Either way i like him considerably more than Sal at the moment because that theory is just plain stupid.
It’s hard to say for certain what the reason is, though based on what we know we can’t dismiss the idea of subconscious racism. What we can say that Walky’s defense of them based on their being a mixed-race couple is pretty flawed. If I had a penny for every mixed-race couple based in fetishism (I’m looking at you, white dudes with Asian girlfriends), I’d be rich.
I have to agree with you- frankly the way this storyline has played has at least strongly implied some kind of subconscious racism is going on. Which is really complicated and not an easy thing to examine or remove.
Are you asking me? Usually white dudes into (East) Asian women have “yellow fever,” or what decent people like to call a dehumanizing fetish. When you chase after women (or men, though that takes out the misogyny) of a certain ethnicity you reduce their identity to solely their appearance and their cultural stereotype. The way these men talk about women makes me want to puke then stab them. They say super gross, racist, misogynistic, fetishist things like “Chinese women really know how to please a man. They’re princesses in public and whores in the bedroom. They haven’t been corrupted by western feminism and know a woman’s place is supporting her man.” They fail to see their Asian girlfriends as real people, just walking sexual fantasies. Obviously white men who are into (Asians/black women/Latinas/whatever) have varying degrees of fetishist mind sets and behaviours, but it still boils down to reducing a person down to the preconceived notions about her ethnicity.
I think your assessment is true when the attraction is based SOLELY on race. But it’s important to distinguish that it’s not (in and of itself) racist, objectifying, or reductive to find someone of a different race attractive or even to have a preference for the appearance of people from a different race. A man or woman may be into Asian/African/Indian/Hispanic partners, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean they only see them as fetish objects. It’s very possible that as far as sexual/romantic attraction they simply have a preference for the set of facial features, body types, and yes even cultural attitudes commonly found within that group. That’s no more INHERENTLY objectifying than finding redheads particularly attractive, preferring tall/short men/women, or finding glasses or a specific accent sexy.
For example, I was friends with a white woman in college who dated almost exclusively dark skinned black men. Over the four years we were in school, she had maybe three serious relationships, all of them with dark skinned black guys. She did not see them solely as sexual objects and she was not a racist. She simply found dark skin attractive and so the men she chose to date tended to possess that feature.
There is nothing wrong with finding other races attractive, yes. What I take issue with is people who “chase” or exclusively go after very specific ethnicities due to their fetishization of them. For example, people with “yellow fever” or “jungle fever.” As i described below though, I’m wary of people who say something like “I’m only into X race because they possess Y features” because individuals’ physical appearances differ greatly even within races, and to generalize is erasing the people who fall outside the stereotype.
I’m even more suspicious of people who claim to be in a group because of “cultural attitudes” UNLESS they belong to the same culture. Unless you’re part of that culture, as an outsider, you will never fully grasp it and to generalize that you’re into people of the culture based on your limited understanding of it is deeply problematic. I say this because I’ve heard, way too many times, that guys are into Asian women because they’re “submissive.” Fuck that.
That was a pretty egregious generalization there, honestly. I mean, if you’d been talking about dudes in general it would have been bad enough, but you specifically mentioned WHITE dudes into east asian women, as though there’s never been a black man or a hispanic man with a dehumanizing race fetish (or, read another way, no such thing as a man who’s capable of seeing his partner as a human being – but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here).
Look, I’m never going to sit here and talk about “discrimination against white men,” because I know what the difference is between personal prejudice and institutionalized discrimination, but you should probably examine the things you were saying a little more closely, okay?
I don’t see what’s wrong with what I said. I guess I could have said white dudes who are almost exclusively into Asian women instead of leaving out to “exclusively” part, but I stand by it.
I agree that all men, no matter their ethnicity, can racially fetishize. I specify white guys because a) it seems to be more prevalent with them, though obviously what I’m exposed to here in terms of diversity could be different from what you see; and b) because with white men you get the double whammy of racism and misogyny. With men of colour you still get the misogyny, but the power dynamics in terms of race are different because both parties are still minorities.
Keep in mind I’m not talking about guys who are into dating any race, as in they’ll find women attractive regardless of their race. I’m talking specifically about guys are more attracted to X race to other races, who go out of their way to date someone of X race, or who make broad fetishizing generalizations like “X are so hot because they are/do Y!”
X can be East Asians, South Asians, African-Americans, other people of African descent, Latinas, mixed-race people, etc.
Oh, I think I just understood your wording, my bad. Asian women chasing after white men is very, very different in terms of historical context and oppression. While whey men chasing Asian women reeks of racism (orientalism) and sexism, you cannot be racist or sexist against white men, especially given the context of colonialism and the fact that white men in Asia have a long history of raping and trafficking local women (and making bad romanticized plays about it). If anything I think a lot of women of colour who exclusively go after white men probably harbour internalized racism.
So any White Male who likes east-asian features is a racist misogynist ?
“Thanks” for the insult.
What you’re saying is that every white person dating out of his ethnicity is just having a slavery fetish and that every other person dating a white one is just a submissive self victim. That’s bullshit. Liking a certain type of physical traits is not the same as dehumanizing.
Racists and sexits must be fighted, but you are making broad generalizations here.
Also, usually “liking certain physical traits” is just an excuse because Asian people do not all look the same. Just like black people do not all look the same. Han Chinese (and I bring up Chinese people as examples more because that’s what I am, and feel more comfortable talking about us) are as diverse looking as, say, white British people. Saying, for example, of but I just like the way their X looks is assuming they all have X and that people of other ethnicities do not have X. Or saying, “but all Asians are so cute!” is reinforcing the idea of Asian people being submissive and nonthreatening.
That’s debatable. Asia is a bigass continent with many ethnicities. If you’re talking about East Asian specifically, may I point out that some northern Native American, like Inuits, look “Asian?” And so Aboriginal Russians? And so do interesting mixes of people – some latin@ mixed people look “Asian,” for instance.
There is a huge difference between preferring blonds to preferring Asians.
But they’re not East Asians. So when people say, I like East Asians because they look like X, and only East Asians, they don’t actually mean they like X feature.
there isn’t really, it’s a personal preference. Limiting it to a smaller demographic doesn’t make it any better or worse.
I love how you keep saying “White guys” constantly too. Because black guys, white girls, black girls or other races/gender combos are never guilty of having “expletive” fever. Nope.
I’m pretty sure I explained why I keep using “white guys” earlier, but in a nutshell, I see this kind of thing more with white guys, and the issues of racism are enhanced with white guys than guys of other races. And with girls of any race you don’t have the misogyny.
Limiting it to a smaller demographic that share the same alleged features means it’s not about the features, it is about the ethnicity and all the stereotypes and baggage that comes with that.
People like you are the reason why I disliked the jughead comic Willis posted.
“You cannot be racist or sexist against white men” really? Really?
At what level of genetic mix is one considered “Immune” to racism?
Not meaningfully you can’t. Context, both institutional and historical, is important.
I’d say it’s hilarious the lengths to which reactions in the comments to this and the previous strip have tried to minimalize the internalized racism of a fictional character, and (either by extension or in parallel) avoid having to examine that maybe, just MAYBE, their own worldview comes from a position of privilege that ought to be more closely examined (which is the lesson Walky is SUPPOSED to take from this)…but it’s much more depressing than hilarious.
At the very least, it proves 100% that Walky’s anger is over being called out on the racism he’s taken for granted. OR, in other words, it’s okay when Joyce is depicted rejecting information that doesn’t fit her worldview (because ha ha, we’re not like HER, amirite??? Oh those wacky fundamentalists!) but nog forbid we should stop and consider whether we’re doing the exact same thing. Uncomfortable truths and rigid ideology are things that happen to OTHER people, didn’t you know?
To add on to what Dave said, I think it’s surprising and maybe ironic(?) to find comments like yours on this webcomic considering that it’s clear Willis is trying to shake up minds, touch on “controversial”/”social justice” issues and get people who may not of their own accord interact with those topics to think about them. Race is just one of them – also what it means to religiously conservative in a world that’s rapidly becoming more “progressive,” what it means to be gay in a world that may try to define someone by their sexual orientation, what it means to be held to different standards because you’re a woman instead of a man. But also race – how white people, and people who are perceived as white, inherently have more power (“privilege”) than people who are coded as PoC or more obviously mixed.
Really what I’m saying is, a huge part of my enjoyment of DoA ties into to Willis’s social commentary. And if you either don’t agree with it or are not willing to open your mind and consider what he’s trying to convey in his stories, what’s the point of reading it?
You can certainly be racist against white folks and sexist against dudes. But there’s a huge difference between some black guy being racist against me and me being racist against a black guy. If a black guy’s racist against me, oh no, that is one person who doesn’t like me. It’s unpleasant, but I can move on. It’s racism, sure, but it’s a curiosity more than anything, because of my station in life. But me being racist against a black guy is just one more friggin’ straw on the camel’s back — I’m part of a larger organism that’s punching this dude in the face from every angle of society every single day, from birth through death. I am just another blow from something that is inescapable. And it’s the same with ladies versus dudes.
It’s about what’s institutionalized. It’s about power dynamic. And understanding this is like Empathy 101. Otherwise it’s like hearing about a tragic flood and saying “I have it just as bad ‘cuz I saw rain once.”
So, yeah, when someone says “OH BUT DUDES EXPERIENCE SEXISM TOO” I laugh for like five minutes and then send that guy’s post into the spam folder if I can because he’s totally a jackass.
I really hate this being your example. My (white) uncle married my (Japanese) Aunt, and there’s not a bit of “yellow fever” there. They’re a great couple with two great kids now, and every time I bring up my aunt, everyone assumes it’s yellow fever from my uncle – Sometimes, people actually just fall in love. I dunno, anytime someone brings it up I get frustrated, it feels like they’re trying to undermine my uncles love for her.
Just because there are non-creepy white dude/Asian woman couples doesn’t mean that there are also sketchy ones based in fetishism. My mom’s Chinese friend is married to a white guy and every time he opens his mouth to make a joke about Asians and all the Chinese people there laugh along politely I want to yell at him. On the other hand, my uncle is German and he and my Chinese aunt have a great and loving relationship, and nothing sketch there. It just bears to keep in mind that there is a potentially problematic aspect there.
How is typing “People” harder then “White guys”? You have a valid point in that some PEOPLE are “Ethnic hunt’n” but repeatedly saying “White guys do X” is akin to saying “Black guys do X”
adding gender/race limitations to your point jsut makes you sound just as bad as the Mexican girls who all have the Honky Fever.
I do it because white guys have the most power in this oppressive world, seem to be the worst offenders, and are always disproportionately upset when people single them out. Let’s spell it out again:
Men of colour who fetishize women from other ethnicities lack the power dynamic of holding white privilege. Their racially charged sexism is still terrible, but lacks a history of colonial oppression.
White women who fetishize men OR women of colour lack male privilege. They’re still racist, but don’t come from a history of war brides, war crimes in terms of rape, etc.
Unless you live in India or China, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t, this comment is so disingenuous that I’m not even sure how to finish this sentence. Come on, now. Be serious.
Honestly, the fetishization of Asian women is a much larger issue than someone mistaking a legit relationship to one founded on yellow fever. I’d rather everyone analyze their own relationship dynamics and maybe those of their close friends and relatives for unhealthy issues than assume all mixed race couples are unproblematic.
A person “going out of their way” to date a specific race isn’t racist. If I were to date someone from India and then next someone from Iraq, then someone from Russia, then someone from Japan…I’d be racist because I was dating Asians exclusively? Oh, well I guess I’m a Native American woman, so it’s probably fine. Only white men fit this equation.
That tumblr… was really depressing 🙁
My sister and I are half Japanese and I have 7 cousins who are half and several hapa friends, all of whose parents are very nice people who genuinely love each other. I had never even heard of the concept of orientalism until a few months ago… I had no idea it was this bad.
I think how severe it is depends on where you live, honestly. I never thought it was that bad either (as someone who lived most of my life in SE Ontario, which has a decent sized Chinese population), though as a guy I obviously never noticed as much as my female friends. I know it can be super gross in the USA, as in I have never heard of the majority of the anti-Asian racism that exists there until I started following blogs that discussed the subject (such as This is Not Japan and This is Not China). Disgusting things like “me so horny,” “me love you long time,” weird stereotypical accents that I had never heard about (“herro!”), pulling back the eyes, all kinds of things. I’ve only experienced such blatant anti-Asian racism personally once here, but I do get micoaggressions like randoms coming up to me and saying “ni hao” or insisting on knowing where I’m REALLY from or what my ethnicity is. My best friend, is also Chinese and presents in a feminine manner, got all sort of crap from white guys when she tried dating online, and even offline.
I don’t think it’s that stupid. I mean, they clearly favor her brother, and their only comment to Sal after she got all dressed up was that she was prettier with straight hair. A kid or young lady could easily put those things together. (Me, I would’ve suspected sexism first, but then, I don’t have to deal with race as constantly as Sal does.)
It remains to be seen whether they’re actually racist jerks or just favorite-playing jerks.
I would not put money against a lovely intersection of sexism and racism. Especially since they seem to want a sweet, lovely girl, and Sal’s…quite the opposite. I’d put it on a healthy helping of racism with a spoonful of sexism to top it off. Like mashed potatoes and gravy, they just mix so easy.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if sexism is figuring in here too. I mean the whole ‘good hair’ concept definitely has a gender component. I know black men are also targeted for their hair, but there is a level of ridicule and hatred reserved specifically for the hair/hair styling of black women.
Yeah, I’ve been kicking around the idea that it’s not so much that Sal’s hair makes her “blacker” than Walky, but that it’s more acceptable to the parents, to Linda who did after all marry a black man and have his children and Charles who chose to marry a white woman, that their son be black than that their daughter be black. Black is “manly”, white is “pretty”*, so their racial and sexual stereotypes synergize better that way than the other way around. (Hell, they’ve apparently skipped straight past “white” and gone for the Asian daughter. ‘Cause they’re, you know, so smart and pretty and well-behaved**, everything Sally or whatever her name is isn’t.)
But there’s also the fact that Walky’s effortlessly sliding through classes, while Sal tried private tutoring and has moved on to banging the TA for grades and is still failing. I’m not sure where this started; whether Sal’s underachieving because she didn’t get support and attention from her parents, or whether Sal didn’t get support and attention from her parents because she was underachieving, but it’s a viciously reinforcing cycle once embarked upon.
* Note, I do not subscribe to these myself; I’m just reporting what I’ve observed others to believe.
** ^ Again. And, seriously, this is Billie we’re talking about. The girl drinks like a fish and says “fuck” more than everyone else in the comic combined***. Not exactly your stereotypical submissive Asian maiden.
*** I haven’t actually counted, but I’m pretty sure.
Sal’s not saying that her parents look at them and think, “Walky is whiter than Sal, we like him better.”
The US just happens to favor “whiteness” and associates “white” qualities with success and privilege, albeit subconsciously. Sal is saying that her parents had higher hopes for Walky from the start because he possesses more “white” qualities and so seemed more likely to succeed.
(And as people mentioned in the previous page, “white” qualities are not just color-related)
I don’t understand what makes Sal’s theory stupid? Like, we can argue about whether we know enough as readers to agree with her, but we certainly don’t know anything that makes it ridiculous?
Not really, many users here consider it to be ridiculous.
It’s a typical denial excuse, putting the blame somewhere else. Walky seems like a goody-two-shoes while Sal is a trouble maker… who do you think parents are going to like better?
But it’s a lot easier just prettending it has something to do with skin colour, and put all the blame on the parents.
However, Sal’s statement in the last strip implies that the issue predates the convenience-store incident – in fact, she may have committed that crime because even negative attention beats no attention at all.
This comment section depresses me to hell sometimes
I’m going to stop reading it until all these feels are over *
(The Danny hate a few comics back almost stopped me reading it altogether-you guys can be so mean sometimes, and it’s showing here against Walky)
That wasn’t a dig at Walky (who’s being a lot more self-absorbed than Danny) but rather at the comments implying Sal deserved to be treated the way she has by her parents. They raised her, not the other way around.
…then there’s the part where the only time we see Sal interact with her parents, they tell her they don’t like when her hair is black-looking, and that she’s prettier when it’s straight and white.
I dunno if you’ve ever actually met a young black woman, but that right there is some fucking inflammatory shit.
Especially when it’s damaging in the other regard and young black women are telling other young black women that their hair is better white and straight. As a young black male, all the black girls with weaves and wigs make me sad. Especially since the really ghetto ones don’t have the money to make it look convincing.
I’m also kind of a Walky, in that I was the younger male half of a mixed race brother-sister duo, and I can attest to some of the bullshit that goes on between siblings and parents in this case. My sister straightened her hair all the way through high school, until she finally had something of an identity crisis and epiphany and both chopped her hair off and stopped straightening it. The fallout was predictably absolutely terrible as she caught an awful lot of flak from our father, notably enough the black parent in the equation. Fortunately, he’s come around since, and now we both have dreads, but the whole Sal/Walky/parents interaction this freshman weekend hit a hell of a lot closer to home than I’m comfortable with.
Nappster, I think you are right on the money with this situation. The only significant differences between your description of the parallels to your family’s experience back then and what it seems like is happening here is a giant pile of maternal favoritism for Walky over Sal and that while Walky seems perhaps oblivious to some of the internalized racism around him, Sal on the other hand seems like she may have been hyper-sensitive to it (and made a leap in her head that it’s related to the favoritism, perhaps because of this difference in their relative awareness/experience of it)
Billie isn’t wrong, unfortunately. And while their parents might never have meant to give Sal so many self-image issues, they might have done it subconsciously. Walky might have also been an easier child in terms of temperament and his apparent ease with school, so he might have avoided criticism that Sal got instead, further feeding into her image of Walky being the favourite.
Your comment is well written and sensible. Especially the subconscious part – I don’t think anyone is accusing Sal’s parents of going “Man, our child is so substandard with her curly hair. You know what we should do? Destroy her self-esteem by never giving her compliments and putting her brother on a pedestal. We are doing this, by the way, because of racism.”
Internalized racism is a hard thing to get rid of. It does work largely on the subconscious level.
So well put. It is astonishing me how many people here actually agree with Walky that favoring certain racial characteristics over others has to be, like, conscious and deliberate. And impossible to do if you like a black person??
Well, I think it’s difficult for people to see more subtle prejudices that are unfortunately the result of centuries of racism. Hair is especially a big talking point. An aspect of Sal’s parentage is that her mother is the white parent and likely never learned how to care for Sal’s hair, which might not have been helped by her father. Being mixed himself, he might have been raised with the concept of “good hair” as well, a poisonous concept in itself. The point being though, these are not always conscious decisions on a person’s part, rather something they have been taught by society that they are not even aware of, much less the harm they can cause a young child.
I still remember a mother coming into the salon once and asking if we would do a chemical relaxer on a four year old’s hair.
No, and I think that might even be part of the problem. Her parents likely never intended to make her feel this way, and would be horrified to learn they’ve made her feel like the unfavourite for so many years.
But because the slights Sal has felt over the years, that have just built up to this point that she finally lashes out at Walky, they’re not readily apparent to the people not experiencing them. Sal’s angry at Walky for being the golden child and skating through life, which isn’t his fault, but when she’s struggled for so many years just to get into college and earn some tiny positive recognition from her parents, the resentment can build.
It doesn’t help that after going so long without seeing her parents, the first thing her father comments on is her hair, and it’s not exactly a compliment. It was innocuous, but to her, it was just confirmation that nothing had changed.
Now THIS is what I’ve been waiting for! A nice throwback to Walky’s attitude from the latter part of “It’s Walky!”, I think I’ll go reread that for the upteenth time.
Because even if there was any truth to Sal’s words (which we do not know, though I doubt it), it isn’t even Walky’s fault, yet she is essentially taking it out on him.
She’s taking it out on him because he made fun of her for wearing that schoolgirl outfit, which she only did to please her parents, which she only has to do because he’s the favourite. Walky is, willfully or not, ignorant of all her unhappiness, and on top of that giving her a hard time for it.
except that Walky gets to benefit from and ignore the situation, which is harmful in itself. Walky can position himself as someone who earned the status he has, and basically say Sal is responsible for the lack of attention she gets from their parents. And going from the assumption that Sal is correct (and I think she probably is- I don’t think ideas like this come out of nowhere) that’s incredibly frustrating and painful. Walky refuses to acknowledge the possibility that there are uncomfortable reasons behind his favoritism because it upsets him. That’s unfair to to Sal.
” I don’t think ideas like this come out of nowhere”
Generally people don’t want to think poorly of their parents, and being racist is one of the biggest taboos in American society (I think, I’m Canadian). It’s a serious “accusation” from her, and one most people would think over before saying to someone else – especially if the situation is their parents being racist towards THEM. Even in yesterday’s comic, it only came out because of how angry and hurt Sal was. If Walky didn’t bring up her crimes, she may have just left it as “because you’re the favourite child.”
Also this whole storyline makes me so, so glad I’m an only child.
Right- it’s very clearly something she’s felt for a while- but hasn’t said. Sal only gets into it when things all start to pile up at once and it’s too much. It seems clear to me that in general she’d rather not discuss it- it’s revealing and personal and really really upsetting. If Sal was just saying it because she had victim complex, it seems to me this would have come up sooner. Instead it seems like a really raw and painful topic for her.
I don’t know. I’ve been doing a bit of archive reading today. While it isn’t Walky’s fault that Charles and Linda are favoring him over Sal, there’s been some behavior on his part that’s been equally hurtful to Sal.
When she first arrives at the school he mentions that he hasn’t talked to her in five years and weakly blames that on “rising postage costs”. Now granted, it could have been that neither Sal or Walky tried to communicate, but I think you can make a reasonable guess from her cold reaction and his sheepishness that she tried to communicate and he never responded. Not only that, but Walky makes it clear to Billie that he’s never tried to keep any tabs on her while she was away.
Later, when Sal’s response to Walky’s pajama jeans for girls is disapproval, specifically a “C’mon bro, be an adult.”, Walky immediately throws Sal’s past behavior in her face, in the hall of their new school at high volume. That’s not a reasonable reaction to someone’s not liking your pajama bottoms.
I like Walky, but I think he’s internalized how his parents treat Sal and that influences how he treats her as well.
I just checked that strip (/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/slamming/) and I think it’s interesting how sad Sal looks when she says it. Like she wants or expects better from him, not like she’s deliberately antagonizing him anymore like she was earlier over his favourite child status.
Why do you think that? All that’s happened to Walky is that someone (his own sister) accused his parents of being racist. What happened to Sal was her own brother making fun of her for trying to get her parents to act like they like her for once.
Yes, it was wrong of Walky to make fun of her in that regard. Just as it would be wrong for Walky to be a focal point of Sal’s blame over the situation.
I think its because Walky believes what she said doesn’t make much sense from a rational standpoint.
Yea Walky has “White” hair and Sal has “Black” hair, but Sal’s previous actions and behaviors aren’t excused from the picture. If anything its not like they did anything to exclude her purposely. They just paid more attention to Walky.
And after I reread the encounter with her parents, as soon as she got there, she practically left. She didn’t try and stay or communicate with her parents, she came in dressed nicely and expected some different form of reaction. She literally walked in the door and left as soon as she came.
Now mind you I’m not saying anything Mr and Mrs Walkerton have done weren’t wrong, but Sal has “Lets run away and not deal with my problems” syndrome coupled with bad communication. She thought sleeping with Jason would get her grade back up. She seems to hate communicating with people if shes not yelling at them. Hell, the closest thing she has for a best friend is a mute.
Whenever Sal has a problem and there is an answer she doesn’t like, she tries to make her own.
The point Sal was making is that the different treatment began before she started acting up. In that sense, you can disregard her previous actions.
I also can’t blame Sal. Her parents made zero effort to see her, in Move-In Day and during this weekend. She showed up even uninvited, greeted her parents, was totally ignored by one, and then – because she was clearly unwelcome by her mom – left. She said goodbye, she acted fairly politely in my opinion, and was completely and crushingly ignored by her own mother.
This still falls down to poor communication problems with both sides coming off wrong.
The Walkertons should of visited Sal granted, and her mom was ignoring her completely. But instead of saying something about it or trying to confront her calmly, she immediately left as soon as she came. We as the readers later learn that Mrs Walkerton has some… Control Issues. But while her father did make an insensitive statement, at least he was trying to start a conversation. You don’t go from “Hi” to “Statement” to “I have an appointment planned on a day where I can talk to my parents.”
And yea Walky was being a dick with the outfit comment. But to be fair, I think she should have came in dressed naturally, but that’s a different argument. The point stands Sal has terrible communication problems.
Honestly, in a situation like this, I think it’s up to the parents to compromise. Why should Sal try to interrupt her mother to start conversation when she knows it’s not going to go well? Why set herself up for more pain? I would do the exact same thing in her situation. She did her part by showing up and saying hi. Why should she have to force her mom to acknowledge her? As far as I’m concerned she did all she had to. Staying longer would have just resulted in more pain for her.
And yeah, you can go from “hi” to “insult about a subject she is sensitive about” (as we see when she tells Marcie she’s ashamed of her hair) to departure.
But it wasn’t intended as an insult. Mr Walkerton didn’t say “You look ugly with your hair curled.” He said “You look pretty with it straight.” There’s an entirely different context there.
And yea I can see what you’re saying about the parents being the one to make the first move, but its not like she came there oblivious to how her parents felt about her. Mrs Walkerton probably doesn’t believe she treated Sal wrong, and Sal probably disagrees. But if they don’t confront each other about it, it’ll just blow up in their face later on.
I don’t want to say Sal didn’t try hard enough, thats rude and stupid. I’m not Sal, and I don’t have the same struggles she has with communicating with her parents. But from what we’ve seen of Sal, she really has terrible communication skills. She didn’t talk to Danny about the main problem in “Its Walky”initially. In DoA, her advice to Joyce can be seen as “Don’t talk about it”. Sal can’t stay in place
If one person doesn’t take out the garbage cause its smelly, and YOU don’t wanna take out the garbage cause its smelly, its going to smell worse. Someone has to take out the garbage.
I’d argue it was a subtle insult. “Too bad. You look so pretty when it’s long and straight,” were his exact words, kind of implying she doesn’t look it now.
I agree that Sal has communication issues, but I can’t say I’d do things differently than she did around her parents. Confrontation is scary.
I don’t think that was that she was ashamed of her hair. Or, well, she may be, but I don’t think that’s what she was saying. She seems to have been saying that she was ashamed, and also having hair issues. And I think the reason for her shame was that she had just come from banging Jason on the floor of the supply closet, despite her resolution not to do so again.
i feel i gotta say this point, her hair being black is an informed trait to me. when it went poof that time ago, I assumed her mother was irish. From similar experiences (although not instant like that, obviously) with trying to straighten my own damn hair. You know the triplets from brave? not so cute a look on a teenager.
I really don’t think her friendship with Marcie has anything to do with her unwillingness to communicate: she freaking learned sign language for the express purpose of doing so.
No One said anything about treating her like shit, though I forgot Sal learned sign language for the moment. And it does speak volumes when the closest friend she has can’t “speak” like other people. From what we’ve seen of their relationship, they communicate well with each other. But almost every conversation Sal has had with someone in DoA has led to some form of disagreement or Argument.
So, maybe I’m the only one, but I’m not seeing how Walky’s the one being racist (as some commenters have claimed).
Might there be some subconscious racism from their parents (particularly from Mrs. Walkerton)? It’s entirely possible. That’s what it looks like from Sal’s perspective, although we haven’t seen enough of their prior home-life before the convenience store robberies to know if there’s reason to think it’s actual *racism* at work, or if there’s some other undiagnosed reason for Sal being the “unfavorite.” Without knowing their complete circumstances, we don’t know if Sal just happened to remind Mrs. W of something, or there was some other factor at work that pushed Walky to be the favorite over Sal.
It’s even possible that the treatment, which may have simply started off as a simple favoring of Walky rather than an actual disfavoring of Sal might have shifted over time. If Walky’s personality (considering how lazy he is, for instance, it’s conceivable that his parents might have focused on him because they figured he *needed* more parenting) led him to get more attention, Sal might have then perceived that as being slighting against her, and then she started acting out in an attempt to get attention, which only angered her parents, and then it becomes a vicious cycle.
There’s no doubt that Sal is the unfavorite for her parents, but since we’re only seeing Sal (who has been on the receiving end and so is hardly detached from the situation) and Walky (who seems to have been largely oblivious to the phenomenon prior to the robberies) and their perspectives, it seems likely that each of them, and by extension us, are not seeing the full picture. It’s also worth note that, apart from Sal’s hair being kinkier, Sal and Walky look pretty much the same. I’m not seeing how Walky would have been unaffected by any latent racism from their parents.
TL;DR: Walky was being a dick to Sal by making fun of what she wore in an attempt to appease their parents, and she was justified in being angry at him over it, but at the same time, Walky was also justified in getting angry at Sal’s accusing their parents of being outright racists.
I don’t think Walky’s being racist, just ignorant. I’m sure if he was aware of his privilege, he would take steps to deal with these issues in a more sympathetic fashion.
Of course, completely ignoring his sister’s point of view is a pretty dick move, though I understand the defensiveness.
Now I realise why I never saw how much Walky looked like Sal, it’s because I’ve never seen Walky scowl before. That second panel really shows how similar they look.
I wonder if he has opinions on the McDs wings that are being promoted right now. Abomination against nature? Or sublime extension of chickeny goodness?*
*note, I do not eat at McDs, I have no idea how they are myself
Don’t think so. For one thing I haven’t seen any evidence of not liking physical contact. He doesn’t always know what to do with his emotions, but they seem normal. The D&MM obsession seems normal for this ‘verse, since Dorothy and Joyce seem to share it. His lack of social filter seems high normal for his age but more a function of his having had it easy.
Someone needs to slap the sense into him until he goes back to Sal and apologizes for everything, and then changes his behavior to make up for it in the future.
Yeah, but it still rings true. And if you’ve spent any amount of time working with or dealing with these issues, you’ve seen that same reaction – the instant shut down, the defensive scowl – all the tell tale signs that the person was so upset by the idea that they instantly closed off the ability to actually think about it, for the moment. The whole thing feels painfully real.
I know you just said “like a racist”, but still, I wanted to add how I really hate how broadly that word has expanded while still carrying with it the exact same level of outrage.
The worst racist thinks that other races are polluting his gene pool, are of inferior lineage, and should be separated for everyones safety. It’s terrible. Walky was being an insensitive, oblivious jerk about racial issues. When you call someone like that a racist, you ratchet things up drastically so that of COURSE he’s going storm off.
Given the historical prevalence of the worst version , calling someone a racist is pretty big attack on someone’s morality. If that person was just oblivious, unthinking, or otherwise unaware, you’ve immediately lessened any likelihood that they’ll discuss the issue with you. I’ve seen so many discussions like this that could have gone better degenerate because one side just decided the other was an irredeemable racist.
Being racist, unintentionally or not, is ALWAYS significantly worse than being called racist. It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to perform eugenics – racism on a smaller scale is extremely harmful. Look up “microaggression” to see what effects even seemingly insignificant comments (“where do you come from?”/”you speak really good English!”/”wow you don’t sound black”/etc) can produce.
And all of those, if you want to convince someone of them, are I believe better argued by discussing the effects on others and why it’s insensitive.
It’s about the mindset of the listener. Some people, upon being told they are racist, will feel a desire to reexamine themselves. Honestly I think most people feel attacked and you’ve immediately reduced their likelihood of thinking empathetically and logically about it.
While that’s probably true, I think that decent people – people who want to be good people, who thought they weren’t racist and were trying to do things right – will examine themselves and consider this possibility. You can write off the rest.
I would like to think so, but I suppose I just have to strongly disagree with that. The best people I’ve ever know have been irrational on occasion, doubly so if they were being called out on their character.
Combined with the fact that once people have picked a side on an issue, they subconsciously reinforce what they chose, and now they ossify. No one is immune to implicit cognitive biases.
Personally, as someone who is queer and of colour (and an intersectional feminist ally), I have no time of day for you if you have issues with either of the two things unless you are a family member OR I was your friend before I find out and think there’s a good chance you can be redeemed. Otherwise not worth my well being.
I mean here’s the thing- yes, it’s absolutely a powerful word with a lot of impact. But I don’t understand why it shouldn’t be. Passive and unexamined racism occurs everyday and it plays a huge role in racial discrimination. You don’t have to be advocating genocide to be contributing to and benefiting from a racist society. Does it make people defensive? Does it hurt feelings? Well, yes. But I don’t know why its the responsibility of others to coddle people when they behave in harmful ways. People can absolutely respond that way if they like, but I don’t think we should shame people who chose to call a spade a spade.
I don’t care about hurt feelings. I’m saying that calling someone a racist diverts the whole discussion away from what was at the core of the problem. They were blind to something and being a jerk because of it. They need to examine their core assumptions because people are hurt by it. Now you’ve pulled out a powerful word, so that they have strong preconceptions of what you’re calling them.
If you want to flat out call people racists for stuff like that, feel free, but then your goal is only to shame people. Maybe some people will be shocked into re-examining their behavior by it, but most of the time you’re not going to help anyone understand the situation better that way. People do not think as logically when you put them on the defensive.
Again, it’s not your responsibility to coddle anyone. But if you want to promote people’s reexamination of their base assumptions, calling them racist is a terrible way to start a discussion.
Oh, as to “calling a spade a spade”, I suppose that in discussions that is true, and is totally their right. This is public discussion on the Internet, however, and that affects the tone and the likelihood for others to join in.
Two points that I really do believe from having been through these discussion many times in a very mixed race area where it’s a real issue:
(1) Lumping everybody in subconsciously encourage people to think of others with unexamined behaviors as just as irredeemable and unreasonable as the worst racists
(2) and decreases the likelihood for people to talk about race, something that is sorely lacking. I know many people who just avoid talking about it for fear of saying something wrong.
I’m not trying to shame anyone. I just think that the best, first recourse is point to the actual, provable indications of harm that certain behaviors do to minorities, and emphasize that this is no way to treat people.
I’m on board with this. Walky said something insensitive, and was oblivious to the difference in treatment he and Sal have received, but I honestly don’t think anywhere in his mind was the thought of “She’s blacker than I am”. And as naive or carefree as Walky often seems, it is incredibly unlikely that his race *never* became an issue in his youth; indeed, he’s probably been on the receiving end of it many times.
So for Sal to out and say that her problems are his fault, because he’s “whiter” than she is, and that he and her parents are both racist for it, is incredibly infuriating to him. In analysis, maybe his actions were somewhat racist, but it was never an intentional act on his part, so he doesn’t see it that way. To him, Sal’s basically just dumped all her problems on him, and made the very severe accusation of racism against him and his parents. No wonder he’s upset.
This is pretty much the problem with all those straight/white/cis/male individuals who refuse to believe we live in anything but a meritocracy and racism and sexism are over. They feel attacked, and naturally get defensive. Of course, that doesn’t mean we are obligated to be infinitely patient and educate them at every turn, but you’re not really gonna change much by yelling at people who don’t understand how privilege works.
No, as an activist and member of a couple social minorities (I’m disabled and queer) I’ve had it patiently explained to me several times that it is, in fact, my job to explain things to each new person, with the infinite patience of a saint for their misgenderings and casual insults. Every day is a brand new day on the job. Which, you know, it’s funny, but I don’t remember signing up for the job, just by being born. I think I’m probably owed some back pay, too, come to think of it…
That sucks, and it’s an unfair expectation, but I understand where people are coming from on that front. I’m really dedicated to that end myself, as I want to effect change as much as humanly possible (though I have limited opportunities to do so). Still, you are well within your rights to be angry about these issues – it’s just, lashing out won’t really do much. But as you said, it should not be your job.
^^Yes to this.
One time a black man was arrested in our town for stealing a really nice car.
The man was Levar Burton of Star Trek NG, and the car was his own. The cops just thought he stole it because he was black.
btw this happened in Northern California.
I think the problem here is that you’re conflating “is acting racist” with “is a racist”. Racist as an adjective applies to everyone at some point in their lives; there is basically no person who is magically immune to racial prejudice. Racist as a noun is much harder to define.
We can argue whether Walky is “a racist” (I agree it’s an extreme term, and shouldn’t be used for him.) The original point that IN THIS ONE COMIC, he was using a racist argument, is completely different. And objectively true.
Now my mind is all a-twitter, re-examining everything I’ve seen them do here. Is Sal schtupping Jason because he is so very, VERY White(tm), in addition to being a potential gateway to further academic success, which she subconsciously associates as something her parents would approve of?
Not even Walky got out of this day scotch free. Hell the only not hurt by this are Mike and Joe… Oh well tomorrow is a new day, new opportunities to screw them over too.
So the dad is biracial and they’re a quarter? Did we know that already? I don’t know why I assumed they were the halfies.
In any case that post above about treating their daughter differently subconsciously is along the lines of what I was thinking. I’ve got a cousin who has boy and girl twins and she has preferred little girls for forever, so even if she doesn’t see it, it’s very blatant how differently she punishes the two for the exact same crime. The little girl can do no wrong while I’m sure the boy has memorized every detail on every corner in the house.
So if the preference for Walky started in a similar way – be it because how less ethnic he is or something else – I totally understand how it came about. Glad Billy was there to witness this. Maybe it’ll bring her and Sal closer – or at least talk more about multi-racial experiences. I haven’t read any of the other comics yet, so I’d like to learn more about Billy.
Frankly, give the way we are expected to accept gay relationships, bi relationships, inter-racial relationships, polyandrogynous relationships, and people arbitrarily deciding that they are males trapped behind women’s genitalia (or vice-versa), why should incest be the one and only taboo that we still are shocked about?
Think about it before tearing me a new one. I’m not saying that I’m in favor of it either, but if something starts going down a slippery slope it’s generally going to go all the way to the bottom.
Well, a big part of incest being taboo has to do with it usually being a parent and child, or older and younger siblings by a significant degree, and it is RARELY consensual. Admittedly, this would be covered by the usual rape/sexual abuse laws, so who knows? The genetic drift issues with incest are pretty rare at this point, so the bigger concern is generally abuse of a relationship already in place, and that isn’t “slippery slope” at all, in the way you have described.
Initial reaction: good job Walky, for not buying into Sal’s explanation right away! Skepticism is always good. Maybe it means he’s going to put in some effort into this relationship!
4th/5th panel reaction: Whoops, nope, he was using it just to maintain his existing views in the laziest way possible and stormed out like a child. F-, would not Walky again.
I’m a little puzzled by this. Walky racism (or not) aside, does Sal have any proof that this is about relative levels of blackness? It’s not like race has to be the only motivator.
All I can remember that might support such an assertion is her dad preferring her hair straight.
I’m not really certain that that would mean anything, though. Are you racist if you don’t find certain genetic traits attractive? If so, I’m probably in trouble. :/
I mean, she’s talking about her whole childhood. I assume moments like the ‘straight hair’ comment and such are more about illustrating it to us, the readers. Presumably Sal has had a lifetime of experiences backing up her feelings- not just the ones we’ve happened to see in this story line, ya dig?
That’s possibly true, but the immense vagueness really makes me think Sal is full of crap (in terms of broad strokes). I mean we have virtually no evidence of how Sal and Walky’s parents treat them besides the hair comment.
Its very possible that Sal has built up a persecution complex off various minor incidents. Or maybe I’m being unfairly skeptical.
We have the scene where her mom totally ignores her in favour of trying to set up a date with Walky’s girlfriend’s family. If that isn’t preferential treatment, I don’t know what is.
Like Walky said, she did rob a convenience store. I don’t feel like we have seen enough to accurately evaluate whether he parents are racially biased against her (I could very well be forgetting some key scene earlier) but by this point in her life their attitude could also be affected by her behavior.
she also says that her parents have been treating her differently since BEFORE that incident, so. It’s very likely that she robbed a convenience store because negative attention is better than no attention.
Did you keep detailed records of your childhood? Do you faithfully record every event that occurs in your life?
I don’t understand this inclination to discount Sal just because she didn’t video tape her entire life and doesn’t have a notarised record of everything that happened to her.
Yeah, all she has is her word, but what about Walky? It’s not like he has any more “evidence” than she does.
Yes, and Walky did say she robbed a convenience store. It fact, he says it again and again. I can think of two occasions when he throws that in her face to shut her up. Walky isn’t exactly unbiased where his sister is concerned either.
I still think she could turn out to be completely wrong though. They do play favorites with Walky from what we have seen but it could be based off of anything. There are tons of potential things, he’s also male and the big one to me is that he is younger. Not only younger but the baby. Parents often give tons of attention to the youngest child. Then the more attention they gave him the more Sal acted out to get their attention, that’s standard too. Before long they might say things like “Why can’t you be more like Walky?”. Then she turns out to be really independent and he winds up being hapless, which just continues the pattern of him getting all the attention..
Of course she could be right too, it could have a lot or at least partly to do with racism. I just don’t feel like it’s for sure since it’s only her judgement call made as a teenager, she hasn’t even been around her parents much (at all?) since being shipped off to private boarding school. This is the same teenager that made the judgement call that robbing a convenience store was a good idea.
It could be based on anything, but I’m inclined to say that she would have a better idea of what, than someone looking in from the outside (us), would have. Since she’s been there her whole life.
I think it has more to do with grades, the one shes trying to bang Jason for. She at one points threatened to run them over if they didn’t appreciate her getting a good grade.
I had an older sister that was constantly at odds with my parents growing up while I was treated much better. This isn’t at all the same thing since I come from a white family, but I think it’s the attitudes of everyone that conflict with each other. I was a very quiet shy person growing up while my sister was very brash and stubborn.
I’m not saying what Sal and Walky are going through are the same thing, but I think attitudes and personalities of people make the difference with families than looks. I could be very wrong on this, but I’m definitely leaning toward Walky’s side rather than Sal’s. Not saying Sal is wrong, just saying I agree with Walky. Then again what do I know? Like I said, I’m white lol.
Of course, your example *might* have the cause and effect flipped. Which came first, the brash behavior or the clashing? Or maybe the two of them cause a negative feedback loop that only reinforces the worst behaviors on both sides?
I don’t know your family at all, but I’d guess something like this is the case with Sal.
Huh. Here I thought Sal and Walky were half white/ half East Indian , given their parents’ respective ethnicities. Wouldn’t have guessed that they’re both WORD REMOVED OMFG
ok. prickly, you can’t use that word. it is a designation that was used to deny loooooots of people rights, amongst a category of words used to that same end. basically it is a sub category of the “one drop rule.” look that up. then you will know how to be kinder!
There’s an m-word and a q-word and an o-word and probably others that I forget just now, and as long as you don’t feel the need to use terminology developed to describe the ancestry of people-as-livestock, you’re probably safe from using them accidentally.
Having googled the q-word, yeah, I’m not really in danger of accidentally using it around the office. I was worried it was a more modern word. Ignorance of racism isn’t a valid excuse for making someone uncomfortable.
Yes but they are obviously non-identical given they are different sexes. Given they developed from different eggs their genes could have developed in radically different ways. You get half and half from your parents, not a blend so they’re likely 50% genetically different.
Okay, but we had like 20 comment threads about this yesterday too, and skin tone is clearly not the only way interpret Sal’s comment. I mean given that a whole sub-section of the storyline has been dedicated to hair…
(Plus, they’re not identical twins, so the argument doesn’t stand up anyways. I mean, they do have the same skin tone, but not all twins do.)
Given that she says it started at BIRTH, it seems like skin color would really be the only factor she COULD be referring to. Most newborns don’t really have much personality or cultural identity that could define them as “whiter”
Frankly, as a mixed race person person with a slightly darker older sister, I find the whole concept of “shades of whiteness” a bit offensive. Growing up, our situation was a bit reversed from Sal and Walky here. My sister was more like our non-white dad, both in appearance, personality, and possessing “nonwhite personality traits” (as the discussion usually labels these things). I felt she was favored (or at least had an easier relationship with him) as a result. In truth, it had far more to do with just our personalities than it did with any of our racial traits. But its not easy to feel like your parent prefers your sibling (cain and abel much?), and it wasn’t until i really dealt with some of my own internalized racism and the feelings I had about what was expected of me based on my racial identity that I realized how little my being “whiter” than my sister really had to do with my relationship with my dad. I may be projecting onto Sal here, but it seems like she may be doing the same thing. I don’t doubt that their parents displayed some favoritism even before she broke the law (though I doubt that was her first serious misbehavior). If this issue of Walky being “whiter” is really something she’s never spoken about openly before, it’s very possible that it’s something she built up in her head based on comments like the one about her hair to explain the favoritism without having to take responsibility for her own actions (acting out to get attention isn’t her fault if her parent(s)’s racism meant she could NEVER earn their approval). We don’t know much about how their parents really treated them or whether her accusation holds any water, but we do know Sal is pretty immature and blames her parents for her misbehavior.
Actually, it theoretically is possible for identical twins to be different genders.
The way this would happen is the original egg would have XY and therefore be male, but when this egg splits into two to form twins, though it should have XY, the Y for some reason is not there, possibly due to incorrect DNA replication, an enzyme not functioning properly or possibly the egg splitting before a second Y has been formed, leaving the original with XY but the other one as X0 (the 0 represents the lack of a second chromosome).
The one with XY would develop into a male, but, the one that is X0 would develop into a female because they only have an X to determine their gender.
This is likely not the case as X0 females tend to be short and Sal seems quite tall but, it is still theoretically possible for ‘identical’ twins to not be the same gender and there actually was a news story at one point about identical twins that had different skin colours due to a mutation so not all ‘identical’ twins actually look identical, even if their DNA is still almost completely identical.
Most comments I see here is that the follow this logic:
* Sal has self-image issues.
* Sal claims her parents are racist and liked her less because she was darker than her (TWIN) brother.
–> Therefore, her parents MUST be (subconsciously) racist and Walky is essentially a huge dick who doesn’t care for her sister.
You people amaze me…
The fact that Sal has a self-image issue could be the reason why she thinks her parents disliked her more than her brother due to her looks, not the other way around. We clearly lack some information to make a proper judgment here. Why do you simply assume Sal is right?
From what we know, Sal was a far worse daughter than Walky, and she just avoided spending more than 5 minutes her parents…
So evidence is kind of against her claims so far…
I do think that Walky is the favorite however I don’t think he’s at any fault nor do I actually think that the Walkertons are racist. I think that Sal just wants a reason to blame Walky, her competition for her parent’s affection.
This does not prove Sal is correct in her perceptions. I personally think it is incredibly likely, but all Willis was doing was correcting all of the people who assume that race ends at skin color.
* Sal has self image issues – Yes, largely focused on her racial appearances and the lengths she goes to to “pass” as, as Walky put it once, generically beige.
* Sal claims her parents are racist… – Actually, Walky is the first one to call it racist, not Sal. Also, Sal being blacker has nothing to do with her being darker, and this has been explained. Do her parents like Walky better? Based on how they’ve treated Sal this weekend, it definitely seems like it. I mean, they’ve kept her and Walky separated for five years, and now they barely acknowledge her when she’s in the same room. It seems some people here seem to think favoring one child is different from disfavoring the other, and I can’t really see how it is.
And one last, giant point: Why oh why, considering everything we’ve seen go down this weekend, do you think that the parents are really likely to magically redeem themselves of all they’re shortcomings? Even if Sal is imagining the reason for the favoritism, that would be a failure on the parents part for not actually getting to know their daughter and doing the responsible, adult thing and talking to we about it. That said, I believe that, based on the strip thus far, that Sal does have some very real reasons to feel the way she does. And at this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised with a flashback reveal of some childhood bleaching cream trauma, though that seems too extreme and not the path we’re going down.
that is pretty much my sister to a tee, just replace racist with sexist. She decided my parents preferred their son to her because they never yelled at me, missing the fact that as a teenager she was fucking insane to the point of smashing windows when she didn’t get the car she demanded. To this day she honestly believes she was an angel growing up, and can’t even remember coming home in a police car. The irony is i thought SHE was the favourite because she was the high acheiver.
To be fair I believe that my black heritage actually made be more racist against black people and white people and… You know what, the list might be shorter if I just say who I’m not judgmental against.
Going back on the archives, it seems that Walky has encountered an emotional outburst from Sal before and his response was “I cannot deal with these female emotions”
To be fair to Walky, if his teacher was Sal, she has the tendency to make very sudden and grave accusations, has a very short temper, and as we’re learning in this week’s strip, he never really understood why she felt that way (because she never told him, and he was a young kid and didn’t know how to ask).
Is it sexist of him to apply it to all women? Of course it is, but hopefully it’s something he’s learning to change. Sal’s still an enigma to him though.
To be fair, Salay not have had a chance to talk to Walky about this since we don’t know when Sal began to recognize her treatment as the result if her parents’ racial preferences. While she may have acted out due to neglect, it’s entirely possible that she only came to this particular revelation during her stay at a catholic school in Tennessee. Hate to say it, but five years in a more southern state can make you plenty more aware of racial issues…
We have more than her word, we have the encounter with her parents, where she was ignored by one and verbally backhanded by the other within a few minutes of stepping in the door. Her mom didn’t even bother to find out where she went; when the dean asked where Sal was she just said, “I don’t know. She does her own thing.”
Is that evidence for the cause being racial? It’s definitely the beginning of it. Her father’s comment on her hair is definitely racially charged, though at least he spoke to her. That’s the other thing about that scene, we had the lovely image of the her dad paying more attention to her than her mom, and actually addressing more talk bubbles at her than he does Walky, nicely splitting the parental attention down racial lines.
We also have today’s strip, where Walky does not do a stellar job of defending his parents. In fact, he rage-quits in a way that seems to only lend more credence to Sal’s accusation. But most telling is Billie’s choice of metaphor, a get out of jail free card. It implies that Walky’s parents are already in said jail and cannot get away with being racist simply because they’re in a mixed relationship. Since Billie knows the family very well, I consider that good evidence that this issue is not something Sal is just making up.
All of that aside though, what’s wrong with taking Sal at her word? She’s clearly hurt and neglected, and she knows more about her family life than we ever will. I say she’s credible until proven otherwise. Anything else seems too dismissive to me.
Because the only difference between their parents is their race, right? I mean it couldn’t be that their dad is just more forgiving, or that their mom has an unhealthy fixation on Walky’s future (which we know she does) or any of a plethora of other reasons, Billie saying that Walky was wrong does not equate saying that Sal was right. We can’t take Sal’s word because it’s clearly compromised her ability to think about things clearly and calmly. She’s pissed and pissed people aren’t reasonable. Also, how the hell does not wanting to talk to someone who is screaming at you constitute a rage-quit?
Thank you, Kladeos. And Andiemus: I think Linda is probably pretty forgiving considering Walky’s tendency to put his foot in his mouth She certainly wasn’t upset over how he made an ass of himself in front of the dean/her former husband. Speaking of which, she doesn’t appear to be holding a grudge against her ex-husband in any noticeable way. Not that everyone has to have baggage, but if she was that unforgiving I would think we’d see something. And it’s been like five years since Sal’s crimes so she’s had plenty of time to forgive, or at least acknowledge her.
Saying it could be any number of other things doesn’t really cut it when there’s evidence in the story that backs Sal up. Sal is shown to be treated differently by her two parents, and this treatment happens to correspond to the race she can pass as. Her dad, who treats her the nicest thus far, says he prefers her with a more Walkyish, stereotypically whiter hairstyle. This is narrative fact, and not to be ignored.
Also, you can’t discount someone’s emotions just because they’re angry. People can get pissed for perfectly valid, legitimate reasons. Pissed people can be reasonable. Notice that Sal listens to Walky’s response in this strip, waiting for him to give a real answer? To dismiss her ideas because of her anger is to be no better than Walky refusing to deal with female emotions. It’s a personal attack on her and her feelings, not the point she’s making, and that’s not cool. Go read this as homework and take it to heart: http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2012/07/labeling-women-crazy/
Now, Billie clearly chose sides in this because she offered this statement unprompted and in direct opposition to what Walky was saying. It takes a large amount of conviction to just interrupt an argument like that, and her response is reasonable and supportive of Sal’s claim. If she wasn’t taking sides, she would have been very quick to say something to neutralize her position on the matter. But she’s not playing politics, she’s calling Walky out on a false assumption.
And Walky so totally rage-quits. Yes, Sal yells at him, but then she stops and listens. Walky then attacks her mental well-being, repeats her own argument back to her (slightly skewed to mock it), and then leaves. Once Billie shows support for Sal, Walky is then faced with dealing with two(!) women and their emotions in an argument he knows he can’t win. So he scowls and leaves in a puff of wangst.
Just remember that if you call Walky a racist because you believe Sal over him, you’re still erasing and belittling the lived experience of a black person (Walky) and telling him that HIS personal experience of racism is wrong. So, those people who think that Walky must be wrong don’t get the moral high ground over those who think Sal is wrong. So don’t be so quick to say Walky has to be wrong.
Except Walky hasn’t actually given his personal experience on how they were raised. He hasn’t even made a counter-argument to Sal’s. All he’s done is personally attacked her by calling her crazy, and repeated her own argument back to her in a mocking way. He hasn’t even defended his own earlier point that Sal’s treatment is due to her criminal past. In order for us to consider Walky’s opinion on the matter, he has to actually give one instead of just attacking Sal’s.
More importantly perhaps, I don’t think we’re saying Walky is racist. We’re talking about their parents. Walky is guilty of willful ignorance and sexist gaslighting, but I don’t see enough evidence to say he’s racist by any stretch.
Billie’s right. *Refer to a single anecdote that should speak for all mixed people.* Sorry, not my experience, honey. Oh, and sorry about your grandparents’ apparent bigotry.
Not sure if you’re giving me sass and if you are, I’m not sure why, haha. But Billie might be talking from her own experience. She’s mixed, isn’t she? Maybe she’s seen it firsthand in her life. Maybe that’s why she drinks.
I’m just saying it DOES happen. I just used my own experience as an example. It sucks, but it happens. People are weird, and by weird I mean stupid.
As for Sal, unless we learn more about her and Walky’s backstory, we can’t really know. Gotta admit,less answers makes it fun to speculate.
Okay even if what she said is somehow true, and I am not certain that it is, what right did she have to throw all of that in Walky’s face?
As far as I can tell he does not suck up to their parents or throw the respect they have for him in her face.
I think there is more some deep-seated jealousy on her part more than any fictitious racial aspect.
I don’t know, he’s thrown the convenience store robbing in her face before, once because she disapprove of pajama jeans. Walky and Sal obviously have issues with each other, and most of that probably stems from their parents’ treatment. If one parents favors a child, that child is going to internalize that and treat their sibling accordingly.
I’d say it’s different. Walky knee-jerks at racism, and not being able to pyjama pants? He ignores female ‘feel-feels’? Walky’s not deliberatly being a dick or racist, it looks like he’s trying to not grow up, and’ll lash at anything that threatens that. I reckon his relationship with his girlfriend’ll help him get over it, since it’s the right mix of childish/adult (cartoons/sex) and dorothy’s temperment is right to let him be goofy as an adult and see that it’s acceptable. When they break up, he’ll retreat into kid things HARD.
You put your finger on something, Willis. I must commend you on your spot-on portrayals of the difficulties and insecurities we deal with in our society as we explore the fraught topics of sexuality, race, etc.
I also think why Walky stomped out like that was when Billie decided to chime in say that basically his parents were racists. he was upset and angry when Sal said it, but he became furious when she butted in with the comment. this was obviously a very personal/family issue and Billie (even if she was caught between it) interjected at a terrible point.
Changing the subject; Does anyone else think that Leslie(and Willis) will use the photo shoot at the Portland, Oregon Ducati dealership as part of a lesson of sexism in advertising? It would certainly fit in with her gender studies class.
It’s been shown that Sal’s mom ignored her in favor of calling Walky’s girlfriend. It’s also shown that Sal’s dad told her she looked prettier with straight hair. I can see why Sal could think it is a race issue. She has had a lifetime of non-acceptance and comparison to Walky, the golden (caramel) one. The one Mom is in love with.
The issue between the Sal and the other Walkertons actually is not totally racial, but Sal has focused on her hair, probably to avoid the incredible pain of recognising the all the ways she has been put down and ignored. Mom totally ignores her when she walked into the room. How many thousands of times has that happened before? I don’t know but I would guess a hell of a lot.
Walky is the one who is a brainiac. He doesn’t even have to study for his grades; Sal is flunking math, despite screwing Jason. I remember how angry she got when she said,”I’m not dumb!” How many times has she been compared unfavorably to Walky in terms of the smarts department. I believe once again that it has been a lot.
I think only part of it is the difficult hair (having hair like Sals can be very hard to manage….I have that kind of hair and I know), part of it is that she is not gifted, and part of it is that she is a girl….and not Mom Walkerton’s favorite.
I agree with Peruhains comment. Mr. Willis does indeed explore difficult and hot topics of our society. And he does it very well.
I also have to commend this entire thread. This is an excellent discussion among a diverse group of people on racism and sexism. People are putting their feeling out there and other people are listening. It’s great.
It really is. No name calling, no screaming. Just listening to each other.
Frankly, I think the race stuff here is mostly a red herring. I guess its possible that Sal was treated differently because Walky was somehow seen as the “whiter” one, but this is the first we’ve really heard of it, I’m not seeing the evidence right now.
What is really, visibly wrong here is the way a brother and sister are treating each other. Sal is making some incredibly harsh accusations, but she’s laying all of her emotions out on the table. Walky should be able to plainly see that his sister must be living with an outstanding amount of pain to be saying what she’s saying, whether it’s true or not, but he doesn’t seem to show a shred of empathy or even concern. We don’t really know what the content of their upbringing was, but both of them clearly have SERIOUS problems.
I’ve gotta say, this arc is particularly painful for me to read, strikes a chord.
WHOA! All Walky did was say “hey sis – yr hair’s straight again” after he saw it curly like 2-3 hours ago – and all of a sudden he’s in the wrong for not IMMEDIATELY ACCEPTING his parents are racist scum?
Maybe some of y’all should think about his feelings as well, that’s all I’m saiyng……………………cause it CERTAINLY doesnt look like Sal is thinking of her bro’s feelings in this at all either………………
Frankly, I don’t think we’ve got any specific reason to say that Walky’s being racist at all here, it’s his lack of empathy for his own sister that’s got me concerned. It doesn’t seem to bother him that she’s in pain. Whether she’s correct or incorrect is besides the point.
I am thinking about his feelings, though, if anything he was the first one I identified with after reading the last strip. I thought he’d be completely gutted by what she said, I sure would be. Instead he seems to be trying to shrug it off as irrational, but emotions are real whether they are rational or not. We don’t actually know what he’s feeling right now, he hasn’t shown us yet.
To him she may have always been the one acting out for no reason. I know it’s not fair to hold the other universe against her but Sal has a long history of being angry and wrong about everything.
I believe she feels wronged, I believe she feels she knows why but I doubt she’s actually right about the reasons. Though I guess she could be since for some reason Willis seemed determined to give her the same problems she had in the other universe but needed a new situation to do so.
I understand why Walky would get upset, nobody wants to think their parents might be racists, especially not if that’s the reason they’ve been favored.
its hard to feel bad for someone when they’re taking it out on you. Especially when it’s this extreme. and gutted doesn’t just mean you get sad. he could take it as a betrayel, which would fit the image here.
He proceeded to mock her attempts at dressing up for the parents.
She expressed insecurities over her relationship with her parents.
He blamed her for her shitty relationship with her parents.
This is when we get to the racism allegations.
If you were to properly truncate this it would be “All Walky did was say ‘hey sis – it’s your own fault mom and dad don’t like you'” and now all of a sudden he’s in the wrong for yadda yadda yadda.
Sure, but in a healthy relationship, a brother should be able to make a remark about his sister’s sudden change in hairstyle, or a particularly unusual outfit without an episode. Sal clearly had a chip on her shoulder, and to her credit, was completely honest about it. He sure as hell picked the wrong time to bring up the robberies, though. What bugs me is that he seems to be more interested in winning the argument than addressing the problem.
Well, think about it, haven’t you ever tried to talk to a sibling or family member when they were angry or upset? As ugly as it is, I think they’re actually both better off for having had this confrontation. If anything, the worst decision Walky’s making right now is walking away instead of laying out his own emotions.
I don’t see him as even trying to argue with her or try to win anything. To me his comments seem jests or attempts to defuse the situation. It’s not until she bring up the race allegations he gets pissed and begins to argue.
Him bringing up the robbery wasn’t an accusation or mockery or him trying make her feel bad, just a natural reaction to he accusing him of being the fave which is hurtful however you look at: “People who love you love you for no good reason”
I can maybe give him the benefit of the doubt for being caught off guard. There’s no doubt that Sal is being extremely hurtful here, she basically accused him of stealing her parents love by being born the wrong tint of “generically beige”. But honestly, if your own sister comes up to you and tells you that your parents didn’t love her as much, is the brotherly thing to say, “Yes, but here’s why!”
It’s to say… well I don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to say to that. Maybe it’s to just give her a hug and cry for little while.
Walky walking away. Seems to be some kind of theme for his story. Usually he does it before he gets hurt, though. I don’t know if he knew he could be hurt. This could be a learning experience for both of them.
Although that will depend on Sal to follow him and forcing him to talk. Be brave, Sal. Just a little longer. Please.
There’s no doubt Sal believes absolutely that what she says about her parents is true. That doesn’t mean she’s right.
When we don’t get the support and acceptance we need from our parents one of the main responses is to look for a reason. Being able to say ‘this is why this happens’ can be a powerful coping mechanism, even if it doesn’t actually make the pain any less. So if you’re an unloved or unfavourite child you can become powerfully invested in whatever explanation you believe explains your second class status.
I’m not arguing Walky’s status as the favourite – the most recent story arc makes that clear. I’m arguing that we don’t have enough evidence to know if it’s for the reasons Sal thinks it is. Personally, based on the way Mrs Walkerton was acting, I think her preference for Walky is more sex based. Her attitude seemed to be ‘this is my male child’ (with a side order of ‘this is my smart child’), not ‘this is my whiter child.
It’s also possible that racial prejudice Sal has experienced elsewhere has inclined her to think of racism first whenever she encounters someone who doesn’t care for her.
or that walky is still a massive child and the parents are reacting to that, while sal has made repeated adult choices which makes the clearly mother-henning parent back off as that one’s “flown the nest”.
Deep down, I just want Sal and Walky to hug each other and say that they love each other. 🙁 It’s always tragic when siblings carry this kind of baggage between each other. I think I would be devastated if I didn’t have a positive relationship with my sister.
That’s supposed to be her old HS colors, which I’ve narrowed down to the orange and blue of Silver Creek HS in Sellersburg IN. The orange has probably faded a bit.
I think the people giving Walky a hard time need to give him a break.
For starters everyone saying he provoked this needs to re-read those pages. He obviously didn’t mean anything harmful by it and as Billie pointing out right at the start “Him you might have to spell it out for”. They were either said in jest (The way he talks to everyone and the way everyone talks to him) or to try and change the topic/cool things down.
Remember this whole exchange did not take place over a week of comics but in less than a minute. Can everyone here say they would have reacted quickly and perfectly when they were 18? It’s not easy to do when it comes at you as such a surprise and is delivered by an angry yelling person.
Sal started yelling and swearing at him the moment this conversation began and he tried to defuse it several times. Its only now he’s spit back and he’s honestly been more restrained than I would have been. “You never had to try to be their fave” is frankly in insulting. He likely did a lot to get parental approval and to be told that was “Nothing” would have gotten me yelling at her two strips ago.
Finally, even assuming their parents treated Walky better than Sal, THIS ISN’T HIS FAULT. The relationships problems between Sal and her parents are their problems. It has obviously never even crossed his mind until now.
Also given how easily lefties and social justice people (Of who I am one) throw out the accusation of racism people seem to forget what a serious accusation and insult it is. Being a racist is only one step below a pedophile in the eyes of society. For Sal to throw these sort of accusations at the parents they love is never going to be easy for Walky to hear at the best of times, nevermind when she is yelling and swearing and he’s not ready for it.
Considered the fact he’s been completely blind sided and how emotionally charged the subject matter is Walky has responded in a pretty subdued manner. If I was this subdued in a similar situation it’d only be because of cowardice.
And as a final note, while it’s not really related to the parent relationship, on a wider societal level does anyone doubt Walky encounters just as much racism as Sal does given he is obviously not white?
People tend to forget that pain is pain. Just because you are, say, depressed for no reasons doesn’t mean it can’t be as cutting as if you lost a child.
“And as a final note, while it’s not really related to the parent relationship, on a wider societal level does anyone doubt Walky encounters just as much racism as Sal does given he is obviously not white?”
Walky may have concluded that any prejudice he encounters happens because he acts like an idiot. Which wouldn’t bother him, because acting like an idiot is his own choice.
(skims comments) So….Does nobody else think that Walky’s stutter in his response seems telling? Like he’s trying to rationalize a dozen little behaviors in his parents that just came to mind without acknowledging them out loud?
I suspect Sal’s right simply because that seems like the direction the storyline wants to go. I highly doubt Willis is going to turn around and pull out a “Actually, Sal is just paranoid! Boy it sure is dumb when black people think people are being racist, but they’re actually wrong! Good thing you’ve got a white guy to write a story about how that can happen.” No, I do not think that is going to be the outcome. It is almost certain that Sal is actually right that her parents have treated herself and Walky differently over the years, and racial characteristics have been a big reason way.
Even if this weren’t fiction, where we can make obvious guesses about narrative arcs and authorial intention, I’d still be inclined to believe Sal, since she’s lived it and I haven’t.
Also, if you check the cast page, Walky and Sal have different skin tones there.
No, Willis seems to have flat out said their skin colour is the same in the comments and that skin colour is not the point. It’s more subtle, more insidious and not entirely due to race. Given racism is itself generally regarded to be irrational it’s not something you can simply measure by opening up Photoshop and checking the colour tables on Walky and Sal.
Given his past writing I doubt Willis is going to be so blunt as to put blame entirely on the parents or have it be entirely due to racism, sub-conscious or not. Life is generally more complicated.
While that’s true (so there’s probably some amount of racial component to Linda’s bad parenting towards Sal), the fact that Walky and Sal do look so similar (and the fact that we’re only getting the kids’ perspective of the whole thing) makes it seem to me that that’s not the only thing going on.
I suspect that we are going to end up seeing the whole picture at some point, and while some amount of latent racism might come into play, it looks from here like the actual causes are going to be a lot more complicated than racism alone.
I don’t doubt it’ll end up being more complicated than just that, but it’s really annoying how people keep on claiming that there is no difference between the two of them because their skin tone is the same.
Walkie’s face.
He’s like,
“Really? You’re going to get TECHNICAL about calling my parents racists? REALLY?”
To be honest, I’d strut the fuck out too. That was the right move. I bet he felt like he was getting all ganged up on right then. Trying to prolong the argument would have just made things worse.
Billie is right, but it wasn’t really the right moment to bring it up. It’s a rational, logical argument and the Walkerton siblings are quite emotional at the moment.
Anyone who says they wouldn’t either start yelling back or leave is one in a hundred, nevermind to do so while 18.
I’d probably stay and try to resolve the issue. It’s actually really hard for me being the way I am, because people will get upset and try to cut off the “argument” early. I don’t understand social cues or people all that well, and it honestly baffles me every time it happens. Of course, I am one of the ~2% people (in the US, at least) diagnosed with ASD, so that might have something to do with it.
Y’know, since Billie has had more exposure to the Walkertons than to her own parents, she may be seeing the sexist/racist overtones on how they treat Sal and Walky.
Or, you know, Sal’s perspective is just extremely warped.
She was what, 13 when she held up the convenience store? That about middle school age, when there starts to be more of a difference between advanced and regular classes. Their parents disappointment may have only been caused by Sal being in lower-level classes/having worse grades.
As for the racism element, I’m going with Walky on this. Yes, Billie has a point, but its less likely than having racist classmates, who are going to see you as you struggle in class.
Okay, so for the people debating this in terms of pure skin colour or even hair “type” are missing the point. You can’t define who is more or less black/white because race is a construct and not an easily marked out and delineated reality. Racists do not go about with a colour chart and carefully check skin tone before commencing their assault. Sal’s parents did not consciously compare her and her brother and decide one was a nigger baby and deserves less love (Or at least previous experience of Willis’s skilled writing makes me believe they didn’t).
If you look at most famous genocides: The Holocaust, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, they’re committed by people who to outsiders seem no different. I have to assume one of the reasons Jews were made to wear yellow stars and funny clothes is without them it was too hard for Christian Europeans to tell the difference.
Race isn’t one of those external, definable, verifiable things like science. It’s an internal, solipsistic opinion, like your taste in films. The point is not that Sal is more or less white/black than David, it’s that she/her parents see her as such and find that more/less preferable and this may not even be a conscious expression.
It’s waaaaaaaaaay more complicated than just skin tone and hair type as you can see from the shitty job I have done explaining it.
I guess the best testimony for this comes from the numerous mixed race commentators who have testified that they have been on the receiving end of racism from both sides: To white people they seem black but to black people they can be too white. It’s not a reality but a perception, but none the less harmful for being so ephemeral.
You make some good points, Pinja. But I think in this case, based on Sal’s exact words (that it started at BIRTH) the implication is that being “whiter” must have had something to do with appearance. Even the social/cultural constructs which define Walky’s personality as “whiter” than hers don’t really apply to newborn infants. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of her belief that identifying as “less white” than Walky played a role in their parents’ favoritism, considering how similar Sal and Walky are in appearance, her specific claim that it began at birth makes me skeptical of the accuracy of her assessment as a whole.
Reading the comic, I had assumed that if there is a prejudiced element behind this (not doubting Sal, just don’t know where the comic is going) it was probably something more…gender based. That isn’t to say it isn’t still racist, but considering how alike Sal and Walky, it does seem that gender is the only big differentiation that would have been obvious from toddlerhood on.
Maybe Mr Walkerton had an African-American mother who was an activist and proud of who she was. So when Sal was born, her mother attributed racial characteristics to her because of the association with female Walkertons.
Or maybe one of the Grandmother was just much more invested in the idea of Sal not being white enough because she was a girl (Walky’s appearance coming under less scrutiny) and it comes from that.
No, Billy, it does not, but Occam’s Razor. Which requires more explanation? A woman who hates half of the mixed-race population for arbitrary reasons and whose hatred is so intense that it leads her to hate her own daughter, or a woman who prefers one child over another for reasons like gender, academic achievement (remember she thinks he’s going to medical school to be all uber-successful and shit), or even just because? There is no reason that we (or you) have seen to think that it’s a simple matter of pigmentation that leads to favoritism except the word of one VERY distraught 18-year-old.
You seem to think racism exists only in extreme hatred of another race. Racism can be subtle and unconscious. Little statements, like the one Charles made, are because society values looking “white”. This makes looking anything else but “white” looked down upon. Does Charles hate his daughter? No, but Charles tends to value looking “white” because that’s society’s perception of beauty. It’s a racist statement, but subtly and unintentionally so.
Ok, one, that’s profoundly bad English, given that racism isn’t an unconscious thing any more than Marxism because the suffix -ism means ideology and a subconscious ideology is a conflict in terms, and two, even if that awfully simplified sociological theory is true, then Sal is being even more stupid for blaming her parents for something beyond their control.
That’s a willfully limited view of what racism means, and until now I didn’t really think anyone believed something like that. The majority of racist people probably think they’re not racist because they’re not doing anything extreme like trying to reinstate segregation. Doesn’t mean they’re not racist. Racism is often subconscious, and can sometimes be changed, so you’re wrong on both counts.
Well these subtle statements are reinforcing the idea of “[insert race here] is inferior” (in this case, black) that is central to the ideology of racism, so I feel comfortable saying that the statements are racist. As the people saying them are not necessarily conscious of the racist implications, subconscious racism is an accurate statement. If you have a preferred term for this, let me know.
And Sal isn’t blaming them because society is is racist, she is blaming them for prejudicial behavior that she believes is based on their subconscious racism. And that behavior isn’t beyond their control.
I can think of good reasons for almost everything:
Linda pushing Walky towards pre-med? She’d be doing him no favours just letting him drift and he doesn’t really want to do Telecommunications so until he find something he does want to do why not get him to do something productive.
Their dad’s comments on Sal’s hair? Yeah I can see the problem with them regarding her self image but they weren’t meant to be intentionally harmful. Every parent says something like this every week.
Sending her away to Catholic school? I can think of a lot of good reasons, if not ideal ones: What if her criminal associations were leading her into danger and further crime and sending them away was the only way to break that contact? What if it put David into danger? An offhand comment suggests Sal and her mother were having really heated arguments towards the end and there is a point where such things would be harmful to Walky. Sometimes these schools can be the least bad option.
What I cannot excuse however is Linda ignoring Sal when she showed up earlier in the strip. The kind of things that would justify Linda disowning her are way beyond what Sal is capable of and also don’t explain her dad is pleased to see her. I mean she didn’t even say a word, give a smile. She couldn’t spare one moment for her daughter.
That’s really shitty behaviour.
So whether or not it has a racial component I’m inclined to side with Sal in saying her mother has treated her badly and by extension her dad has failed to call her out on it. I don’t think it has anything to do with Walky (Save making her look worse by comparison) but she has been treated worse.
I think it bears mentioning that while they are bad parents to Sal, they aren’t entirely bad since they have done a good job with David: He’s fit, intelligent and well adjusted. I don’t think Sal can be blameless, even if her parents do get most of the blame. Linda is domineering but not so much that she forced Sal into committing crimes (Possibly violent crimes).
I whole heartedly agree. We don’t have enough info as the audience to know whether racial bias against Sal really played a role in their favoritism or if that was simply something she misinterpreted to explain it to herself (or whether doing THAT would be to let herself off the hook for her behavior or genuinely based on feeling neglected and desperately trying to understand WHY). But they are pretty shitty parents to Sal in any case for the favoritism towards Walky
Sending her away to Catholic School and having almost no contact with her for FIVE YEARS is an issue, though.
I mean, what did Linda do during long vacations? Send Sal off to some summer camp before she could unpack? Did Sal get to see any member of her family for extended periods of time during those five years?
If not that can count as neglect and isolation. And that is a bad thing to do to anyone, much less your own kid.
Sorry, kind of a sensitive subject for me. This kind of abuse happened to a close relative for two years.
…Man, this page and some of the comments are a little triggering for me. I had a rather extreme, abusive version of Sal’s parent-favouring- although race was a none-issue, and I never committed any crimes, the favourite elder sibling did.
It continued (albeit to a lesser extent) after I left home, and only started to lift after I started transitioning to male (well, once they accepted my transition anyway.) So either, it was because I was raised as a girl; because I refused to act as a girly girl; or my brother received his treatment for being a boy. Regardless, the only reason I can see is gender.
The comments are really reminding me of one thing- to this day, NOBODY else in the family will, or can, admit there was a problem. I don’t doubt that Walky and his parents see no issue, because I grew up with the same.
It’s sexism, not racism. Look at the way Walky acts. I’ve seen other comments on this page about how Walky has a “oh god not these female emotions” thing going on. He’s been really disturbingly callous to Joyce’s and Sal’s problems.
Only here can the examplar of white male privilege be Walky. Well played Mr. Willis.
Also, most of the cast behaves like teenagers…because they are. Not very self aware, confident or comfortable. In the midst of yelling at each other, sibs are not likely to undertake a serious analysis of their past relationship.
I feel like it’s only on the strips relating to race do people go to such lengths to deny that oppression is happening. It’s like the tail end of that Malcolm X quote, “If you stick a knife in my back…
…They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
I’m of mixed race (luckily for me I look much more white than not), and I am definitely sympathetic and aware of the baggage that comes with it. I do want to say though that people are being unfair to Walky and his parents. We only have Sal’s word, and only in a single emotional outburst, that there has ever been any discrimination within the family.
At the heart of every negative racial interaction I’ve ever had, there’s been three things going on. What’s in the other person’s conscious mind, subconscious mind, and my own insecurities. Obviously I always have my own opinion on the relative proportions of those three variables, but my own insecurity is always a part of the equation. Knowing how little we know, it’s impossible to say how much of this is coming exclusively from Sal’s insecurity, rather than other people’s actions or thoughts.
Granted, you could argue, at the very least, that Sal’s parents failed to make her feel comfortable about her race, but I don’t think that’s quite fair either. This is seemingly the first time she’s raised the subject with a family member, you can’t reassure people about insecurities you don’t know exist.
Funny thing about racism is you don’t have to “be a racist” to engage in it. You don’t have to bear anyone any ill-will at all, or even be aware of what you’re doing. It’s insidious that way.
I just realized that it’s likely that Sal recognizes the racism in her family because of her experiences in the south. It’s likely Sal was just as uninformed about microaggressions and subtle racist attitudes before she left home as Linda, Charles, and Walky seem to be. But experiences in a state where racism is more likely to be obviously present may have led to educating herself on race.
Willis sure tackles some hot topics. I read the FAQ and saw that Joyce is an autobiographical character. It is very interesting to see his intellectual growth though her.
One other thing: Im not saying Sal didn’t experience some bias because she may have, but I think she’s using that as too much of a crutch to justify her actions. Just my two cents anyway.
I think that we simply don’t have enough information to tell whether Sal’s accusation is true or not. The only interactions we’ve seen between the Walkerton family have all taken place AFTER she robbed that store and got shipped off to boarding school. Sal hasn’t presented any evidence to back up her claim, and while, as Billy foot-in-mouth-why-are-you-getting-in-the-middle-of-a-family-argument pointed out, Walky’s only sentence defending them is not exactly iron-clad, it’s a pretty heavy accusation to throw at your parents. Especially since her comment is that it started AT BIRTH, not even as the kids grew up and Walky displayed more “white” personality traits (don’t even get me started on the inherent racism involved in defining mixed race people on a spectrum of how white vs ethnic they behave).
Given what we do know (pretty much ONLY that their parents displayed favoritism for Walky even when they were little), its entirely possible that the issue of race in their parents’ favoritism is almost entirely in her head and that the severity and harshness of their present day behavior towards her is at least in part the result of her own poor choices. It’s equally possible that Walky really was just completely oblivious to a very real racial bias within his family. It seems MOST LIKELY however that any such racial element had more to do with her misbehaving for attention and the vicious cycle that creates. Her father (and I assume that it would come mainly from her dad and some internalized racism he possesses, rather than from their mother who was at least un-racist enough to marry a half-black man, would it seem reasonable for her to then display favor towards her kids based on race?) may have increased his racially charged comments and/or bias as a result of worrying that she would fall into negative black stereotypes, like say the exact kind of CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR she displayed that got her shipped off to boarding school.
Additionally, I think it’s very telling that even as she dressed up and tried to put on the illusion of being the good catholic schoolgirl daughter, she actually un-straightened her hair. If she was really trying to make them think she was fitting into the ideal she believes they want from her, wouldn’t that include straightening her hair to be whiter? It almost seems like a deliberate attempt to bait them into making a comment she can use to prove/justify her belief that their favoritism is racially based.
I didn’t realize that, but thinking back you may be right. It had been a while since she showed up I think, and I forgot her hair had comically curled itself already. That makes far more sense then
So, it has occurred to all these people doubting the direction this storyline is heading (that Sal’s parents made her feel lesser for her racial characteristics), or claiming that Sal may not be justified in having the feelings she has…
If this storyline ends with Sal being wrong, its moral is literally “Man, black people sure are silly, always thinking other people are racist when I, David Willis, don’t notice any racism! It’s not valid for black people to feel mistreated if they can’t explain objectively why they feel that way!”
…Yup. That definitely sounds like a storyline David Willis, Social Justice Writer, would write.
No offense intended, Spiny, but thats kind of BS. If the storyline ends that way and THAT is the moral you take away, you already HAVE a racist interpretation by making Sal represent all black people. This story is about one family and the issues involved in the favoritism they have displayed between their children. I don’t know if there really has been a racial component to it, but I believe Sal really believes its true. Her feelings are valid even if she’s incorrect (in that she has the right to feel them). There’s something inherently racist (and sadly very common) about making ethnic people/characters represent their entire race and equating their individual experience and perspective with that of the group as a whole
To clarify, I did not mean that Sal’s experiences represent all black people’s, or all biracial people, or all white people’s. And I agree that her feelings are valid even if she’s somehow “objectively” incorrect.
My point was that David Willis establishing a storyline where a character feels slighted because of her race, and then having it end with her being “wrong”, would be really fucked up. And it’s weird how many commenters think that’s the message Willis is going to send.
Last I checked, there were very few people in the world that were clairvoyant/telepaths, minority or not.
Can minorities not misread people’s intentions? Are you suggesting it is impossible for a person to feel persecuted when they are not being persecuted?
Does this mean MRA’s actually have valid points (they FEEL persecuted, man! It’s fucked up for you to suggest they might be wroooooonnggg!)
/Disclosure: I do not think most MRA’s have valid feelings of opression. This disclosure is necessary due to, I am sure, the number of “BUT WHAT ABOUT MEEEENNNSSSS” folks that have joined these comment threads in the past. God knows Sinfest gets ’em.
Eh, there was a Shorpacked storyline where Leslie thought Galasso had been displaying sexist hiring/promotion policies. It turns out she was mistaken: he didn’t even understand the differences between males and females well enough to recognize gender on sight and it was simply a coincidence that he had being promoting men over women. Granted he’s a CRAZY person but its not like the moral there was that Leslie was over-reacting or out-of-line for bringing it up.
You are right though that it would be very difficult to really prove that race had NOTHING to do with the Walkertons’ favoritism. Race is such a complicated issue that it plays a role in ways we don’t always realize are even happening. For example, their dad’s comment to Sal about her hair. That could be an indicator that she’s right and there really is an overt aspect of racial bias going on. Or he could have just known that she liked having her hair straight for practical reasons and he was trying to encourage her to be herself around them instead of trying to play a role. OR he could know nothing about her preferences and really just think it looked better (possibly because he has some internalized racism about “good hair” or possibly because he REALLY just thinks SHE looks better with straight hair regardless of the associations with racial identity). OR! It was just a thing he said without thinking about it, and like almost all children she attached special significance to everything her parents say around her.
Aww… I just went back to read the strips where Sal talks to her parents and damned if her dad didn’t tell her her hair was prettier when it was straight.
On a non-racism-related note, I’ve gotta say I like the symmetry of panel three. It’s a nice reminder of how much alike the twins are beneath the vastly different masks they show the world.
Also, I’m hoping that Sunday of Freshman Family Weekend gives us some Billie/Walkerton parents interaction. We didn’t get any of that today, because she spent the whole day with Ruth, and, as hard as I ship that, I’m also curious what the Walkertons’ relationship with their ersatz adopted daughter is really like.
Also I want to see Billie try to explain to the parents how Sal is trying to make up for her criminal past by becoming a costumed vigilante. It’ll be awful and hilarious.
I wouldn’t have thought to comment on this before, but I had been reading through the archives the other day, and I remember when Joyce asked Walky about what race he was, he replied that his sister was black and he was generically beige. So he’s sort of already shown that Sal isn’t wrong to think that her family considers her to be “more black” than her twin.
This is less related, more just thinking about It’s Walky, but it’s interesting to see the issues of favoritism cropping up in the Walkerton family again and I’m curious how they will continue to play out.
I’m not enjoying the sadness of this storyline, but I appreciate it.
It was just as enigmatic when he said it then as it’s being presented now, but it could definitely qualify as foreshadowing. If you look at panel two, it’s clear that Willis is showing us that they are meant to look exactly the same. My best guess, speaking as a multi-ethnic person (I looked almost exactly like Walky as a teenager)- I think he was referring more to personal identity? Sal sees herself as black, Walky sees himself as having no specific racial identity.
The way their parents see them is still shrouded in mystery…
I find it interesting that people seem mostly to be assuming it’s MRS. Walkerton who was the parent most influenced by race in her favoritism. True, she totally ignores Sal when she shows up (perhaps she has simply written off her daughter after the criminal incident, harsh but not racist), but its their dad who comments on preferring his daughter’s hair straight: a classic example of internalized racism and the best/only in-strip evidence that backs up Sal’s claim that the favoritism was racially based (but hardly definitive given that Sal herself prefers her hair straight). Assuming Sal is correct, it seems to make more sense to me that the racial aspect would have stemmed from some degree of internalized racism from the father: approving of Walky for acting “white” and encouraging Sal to do the same/discouraging her from expressing her identity as anything else. Billie’s comment even specifically applies to HIM not their mom (who is just white). We don’t have a lot of evidence about any of this, but we do know Mrs. Walkerton married a black man (since in America, being mixed black-and-white generally means being considered just black) and Mr. Walkerton married a white woman. Granting them the benefit of the doubt that neither is simply a racial fetishist, if either of them has demonstrated a preference for non-black here, its the dad.
When I first read the strip where she gets it straightened again, I thought her expression in the last panel was just a sadness at hiding her real self from her parents. But bearing in mind the comment her father made about her hair and her now openly stated belief that her parents’ favoritism was based on Walky being “whiter”, it looks more like she’s just really sad because she’s thinking that she’s internalized this bias too. Take a look: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/straighten/
Wow, I just went back and noticed that in the one where her dad comments on her hair, she also mentions that he “rag[s] on her” for being late all the time (CPT anyone?). He may not MEAN any of these comments that way, but I can see why she, as the unfavorite in general, might pick up on them and think there was a racial aspect to it all
Like you said, we don’t really know much about their relationship right now, but Charles doesn’t strike me as a man of conditional love. He came off as genuinely happy to have his family together, and sad to see Sal leave.
I think you are right. I didn’t mean to imply that he was withholding or anything short of very genuinely happy to have his kids together again and very sad to see Sal rushing out instead of spending time with them, especially in counter-point to their mother who ignored her while focusing on Walky. I don’t think Sal’s belief that there was an element of race in the favoritism of Walky over Sal in their family is accurate. It seems to me like Sal MAY have picked up on what she sees (accurately or not) as elements of internalized racism in her father and at some point in her childhood made a connection in her mind between that and the favoritism her mother displays. Walky being “whiter” in her opinion is why she gets comments from her dad about her hair and her lateness while Walky doesn’t have to deal with such comments.
In actuality it seems like only their mother is really displaying favoritism from what we’ve seen, but not in a way which implies to me any racial element (just shitty parenting). But Sal continuously refers to BOTH their parents as playing favorites, not just the mom, which makes me wonder why she blames her dad as well
The last thought before I got some sleep was “What is Mike going to think of a scowling roommate”. Since he’s only seen Walky in a good mood or embaressed.
Honestly, I think walkys personality is proof enough that sals right about this being a longterm issue. You don’t that kind of babyish, entitled attitude out of a few years of “harmless” preference.
I notice a lot of people saying that what Walky says is just what a racist would say.
I would point out it is also congruent with being someone who has no idea what Sal is talking about and is too stunned to react to the situation rationally.
I’m going to say that I think Sal has had to deal with a lot of racism in her life but I’m going to guess that it’s not her parents who have been racist. I actually think it’s much worse. I think her parents favored Walky because he’s much SMARTER than Sal.
All I want to say is that her dad didn’t ignore her. In fact, he was upset that she was leaving. Sal planned her exit. She made sure she had a way out so she could leave ASAP.
Her mom ignored her though, and was more focused on Walky. I can’t and won’t deny that. But it irks me to see everyone saying that her parents didn’t give two shits about her being there. Her dad’s expression was sad when she said she had planned a hair appointment that would take hours for that afternoon.
Racism might be involved in the bigger picture, I don’t know. Children get favored for a myriad of reasons, race/racial traits being one of them. But her parents DO LOVE HER. And they wanted to see her. Maybe her mom came off as ignoring her because Sal simply didn’t stay long enough! (Though a glance in her general direction is NOT a greeting.)
Just putting this out there! What do you guys think? Also I apologize if this has been referenced. I didn’t read the whole comments section…yeah yeah, shame on me and all that. 🙂
“But her parents DO LOVE HER. And they wanted to see her.”
We don’t have any concrete that her mom cares about her, in my opinion. And they didn’t make any effort to see her. Her mom saw her come in and said nothing, just continued badgering Walky. At the very least, if she cared, she would’ve said something before Sal left.
There’s already been discussion about how Charles’ comment about Sal’s hair was inappropriate. We have Sal dressing up in her high school uniform (which she wore for 4 years) and which her parents fail to recognize. Her mom doesn’t acknowledge her, her father makes an insensitive comment and neither of them seem particularly concerned when she leaves. Nor do they try to make any later plans with her.
There really isn’t a whole lot of evidence that they do want to see her.
Linda doesn’t even know or care what her daughter’s called, much less where she went after she left Walky’s room. (Though, to be fair, she calls Walky “David”, too. I don’t think Linda really gives a shit about either of her children, but in Walky’s case it takes the form of ignoring his desires to shape him into what she wants, whereas she’s given up on shaping Sal and is just ignoring her entirely.) As I commented on that strip, the friggin’ Dean, who has never met Sal, showed more interest in her in one speech balloon than Linda has the entire comic. And even that interest was blithely dismissed by Linda.
Charles at least greeted Sal when she showed up, but his conversation with her was laced with criticism of her appearance – which she’d already put effort into making “nice” for them – complete with racial undertones.
If I were Sal, and I were walking into that, you damn betcha I’d have an escape route prepared.
So I went through the comics where Sal meets their parents on the family day. Mom was clearly all about Walky. She didn’t even acknowledge Sal; instead, kept going on about Walky’s girlfriend. Dad, on the other hand, seemed happy to see her and seemed genuinely sad that she had scheduled her hair appointment that afternoon.
I suppose Mom being the dominant person in the family, her favorite got more attention?
Outside of Billie it kind of feels like both sides of this argument are wrong about different things. Although this incarnation of Sal isn’t a particularly likeable character for me so I might be biased.
Billie there in the last panel, expressing what everyone’s thinking about this storyline. Good job on the meta there, Billie. And Willis. Cookies for everyone.
It might be passed the point where people are still talking about this but just chucking in my two cents.
We don’t have enough evidence to say that Sal is right or wrong about her parents.
Having seen what their mother said about Walky’s future and knowing what we know about Walky’s personality I think we can conclude that their parents may have directed more attention to walky. and it’s very likely that Sal saw that as a rejection of her.
and given the high probability of availability error on Sal’s part ( I doubt she ever went up to her parents and said “I notice you pay a lot of attention to Walkie and I feel that your approval of me is lacking. Is it because I display more Afro-centric traits then my brother”) it’s likely that she concluded that it was her apparent “blackness” that was the cause of her parent’s neglect.
Confirmation bias would then build support for that assumption leading Sal to rebel. Her parents, not understanding the the reason for her actions as I doubt that Sal has ever confronted them about this given Walky’s shock at the idea, would likely respond by becoming stricter towards her rebellious behavior which would strengthen her conviction that her parents were racist towards her.
this cycle would eventually culminate in the convenience store robbery. Given that Sal’s mother has a strong view about the life that Walky will have we can also surmise that she had similar plans for Sal as well. the conviction, even if a juvenile one, would likely preclude that plan coming to fruition so Mrs. Walky would have cut Sal off and that would have been in Sal’s mind the final confirmation that it was her “Blackness” that was the cause of her parent’s disapproval of her.
this sin’t to say that she isn’t right just given the actual evidence we’ve seen one could easily conclude that Linda’s parents didn’t approve of her breaking it off with the University President to mary Sal and Walky’s father. So to prove them wrong she decided that her kids would become hugely successful in order to win back her parent’s love. While Sal seemed confident and driven enough Walky was happy to just glide by and that wouldn’t lead to him becoming a world famous surgeon and chief of staff of a major world class hospital. So Linda and by extension her husband tried to motivate walky by paying more attention to him. After all sal would be fine. But when Sal got older she started acting out and being unruly and disrespectful. If this continued she would ruin her future and prove Linda’s parents right about her decision. So Lida became strict with Sal but that never seemed to work and she just got worse and worse and Walky was just so easy to deal with no calls from school no angry parents calling to complain. and finally that call from the police…. that’s it all her hard work ruined. Sal had thrown her life away for what? Obviously to spite her, so fine ship her off to catholic school let them deal with her she had to put all of her effort into Walky now He needs to shine.
That’s all very detailed, but the fact is that it just isn’t justified to neglect your kids like Sal’s parents clearly do. Hell, even with Walky Linda clearly cares more about living vicariously through him than what he wants. That’s fucked up.
First post for me here. I’d like to say, I really love this comic. I found it the other day for the first time and literally read it front to back. Didn’t do so great at work the next day… ;P
Anyway, I’d say it’s much too early to jump to any conclusion regarding Sal & Walky’s parents. We haven’t seen much of the wider family dynamic between them, and while many have said that one or the other of Sal or Walky must be right and the other wrong that’s just not necessarily true.
It is entirely possible that Sal and Walky were *treated* virtually identically, but *needed* something entirely different from their parents. It’s also possible that they tried to treat both their children equally, but as a parent you discover that that can be REALLY hard when your children are as different people as Sal and Walky clearly are.
All we know for certain is that Sal feels that she didn’t get what she needed, and has acted out because of it.
I’m not saying that is the case, but it’s really dangerous to jump to conclusions and throw around loaded terms like racism and sexism without having anything other than a handful of vague clues about how these people (ok, fictional characters, but whatever) actually treat each other.
I think that’s doubly true when you’re discussing a type of family where, quite frankly, you’re not generally expecting overt or intentional forms of racism – though its not impossible, as Billie notes.
However, the only hint we have of that so far is Sal’s father’s statement that he thinks she’s prettier with straight hair… By itself hardly a damning indictment of racism. I personally find it interesting that she intentionally changed her hairstyle to one that she felt her father would disapprove of before meeting him. Not quite sure what I make of that though.
Sal did not *intentionally* change her hair to be curly, the one her father would disapprove of. She was so surprised, it just sorta poofed back to its natural, curly state.
wow, I said some pretty ignorant things in this comment section back when I still cared about typing properly, lol
in other news, I didn’t comment about it at the time, but it’s really cool that sal and walky are a quarter black, just like me
/feels represented
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good job Billie
Well, she would know.
Come to think of it – all three of ’em are Barely Legal Interracial Teenz® OMG
Yeah… hold that thought before it grows legs and runs into the hands of one of the fan-artists here.
by the time you replied to his post, it was already to late, someone is prolly sketching that right now. And it’s prolly Willis.
Rule 34 bro, rule 34.
Pfft, you think they waited until Jay Eff made that post?
There is approximately 43 images on the Paheal site including what they call rule 8. Too late on the rule 34 buddy too late on that.
And there’s only one of them that I think is actually humorous..
Urban Dictionary has four different definitions of Rule 8 and none of them make sense in this context. Explain?
Well, if they use rule 8 from the same list that rule 34 comes from (Rules of the Internet), then it should be “There are no real rules about posting”, which is immediately followed by “There are no real rules about moderation, either — Enjoy your ban”. Take from that what you will….
Why does that sound like a kid show parody? “Barely legal, barely legal, interracial teens! Interracial teens! Barely legal interracial teens!” Or something like that that cant actually be captured in text form.
I suspect you just summoned a bunch of weirdos to this comment section with those search terms.
Well make al ine of toy and call it BLITZ! We’ll make MILLIONS!
Awesome. Because when I think “blitz”, I think “people who are cool with ethnic mixing”.
Ballsy move, Walky.
let’s see how it works out for him, cotton.
Sal really likes to smile, doesn’t she?
Almost as much as Ethan’s mom.
And Mike (At least sober Mike)
What are you talking about? Mike is always smiling. I have never met a more cheerful person in my life. Heck, he will make your mom smile for a nickel.
Last panel should be the title of the book this ends up in.
Agreed.
Basically.
^^^^THIS.
In the same font too.
Pretty much.
yyyaaaaayyy
Yup.
have the title in tiny text in the corner of the cover, too
I’m holding out for “(Being mixed is not a) Get out of racism free card”. Snappy, no?
Yuuuup
I can’t say anything profound so I’m going to comment on Walky’s gorilla-like posture in the next to last panel.
He is an angry ape.
That’s racist!
Sorry, couldn’t resist…
Trukk not Walky.
Top marks
oh no! ::implodes::
that’s Species-ist!
He’s like a trained ape.
Without the training.
Ugh…On top of all this, King K.Rool stole my Bananas again!!!
He’s transforming into Monkey Master.
I am sooo blogging this on my cave wall later.
That went as well as could be expected.
Good job Billie, trying to stand up for Sal! Also, truth.
I’m curious what Dorothy will have to say when she hears about this.
“I’m so glad my family is functional.”
Everyone glares at Dorothy*
[Dorothy slinks back to her corner and returns to her studies]
Standing up for Sal? Or trying to set off Amazi-Girl’s arch-nemesis!
Amazi-Girl is immune to racists.
is it cause racism is a form of criticism or is this a separate immunity.
Walky would be more threatening if he wasen’t so damn adorable when he was angry.
you know, it’s so infuriating being told that about yourself….
“you’re so cute when you’re angry.”
“really. were you actually listening or just enjoying the show?”
I wish I was cute when I was angry. Or when I feel any other kind of emotion.
Being cute is useful sometimes, but very overrated.
You might try putting li’l bows in your dreads.
Cute intimidates no one. Trust me, being angry and everyone dismissing you on the grounds that they find you adorable is infuriating.
im to big to be cute
Yeah, I was often told I was endearing when I yelled, screamed, and destroyed things. Thankfully that part of my life is over.
Now you’re not angry, or you’re just not endearing?
Not angry. I stopped working fast food and am in school using my brainz.
“Oh, I’m cute when I’m angry? Just wait a minute cause I’m about to get gorgeous.”
Walky doesn’t take his sister’s guff lying down. Good on him for having a spine, usually he just bumbles about.
I don’t know if Sal is giving him ‘guff’. No matter what I think she believes it (and honestly I think Sal is probably onto something here). She’s not just lashing out at him out of no where- she’s responding to a long ignored tension- one the Walky benefits from, but does not acknowledge.
yeah for real. this isn’t coming out of nowhere. walky ignoring this has got to be pretty hurtful for sal to take. and it sounds like she knows that this would be his reaction.
: ( : (
Right, like I’m sure Walky is reeling and feeling pretty defensive right now. it’s not an easy thing to hear, particularly if you have this concept in your head of having ‘earned’ the regard and affection you have. but it’s a lot easier for him than it is for Sal to grow up living it, and unable to ignore it.
p-p-p-p-PRIVILEGE, y’all
we all gotta look at it
+1 to both rachel and fit-to-freak
+1 more
that is, I am agreeing with you if that wasn’t clear by my cheerleader post
It’s obvious the family like Walky better but I find the notio nthat Walky is whiter kind of baffling. Aren’t they the exact same color?!
Please see yesterday’s comments section.
he’s less obviously black.
in truth, their coloration is a storytelling device. in families that mixed, it’s not unknown to have one child come out pretty dark, one pretty close to white, and others in between. mendelian crapshoot, basically.
I know a family with a decidedly celtic mother and a technically mixed father (jamaican grandfather, some kind of european grandmother but I haven’t ever met/seen her) – who, all the same, is dark, curly haired and heavyset enough that he’s done a fine job of dressing up as Mr T for charity gigs before.
Their kids are basically Sal and Walky, even down to the hair, but with a more pronounced skin tone difference and less of the criminal intent (though the son is still a cloudcuckoolander)… They’re certainly more “mixed” than their dad, but far from homogenous at the same time.
So yeah, one half truth in cartooning, one half truth in commenting.
Yes, they are the same color both are RGB: (206, 168, 126) I checked on panel 3 where they are holding hands, similar lighting. She’s nuts.
That said, perceived racism is just as painful as actual racism. If I think someone treated me badly due to my race I feel light shit, regardless of what the rational actually was (I can’t read their mind and know it was due to something else).
Not to say she wasn’t treated differently. Two of my cousins (sisters) were always treated differently my their mother. The younger the obvious favorite. Played out a bit differently though… the older one got a PhD and the younger one partied through college. People are different.
I dunno, my sister acted like she was the eternal martyr of the family who was always being treated poorly and that was pure horseshit. She really seemed to believe it though.
Precisely. Sal *perceives* that Walky is the more popular one of the two, but the question here is, if she had dressed as herself and interacted with her parents in her normal manner, would they have acted any different?
Remember, the only interaction we have seen between the Walkerton parents and Sal is her putting on the mask of “Good Catholic Girl” and making excuses to not be around.
I can’t see how that would’ve made the interaction better. Obviously they sent her to Catholic boarding school to “straighten” her out. As it is, putting her best foot forward, she barely got acknowledged.
her best foot forward looked pretty fake to me. Maybe they’re not idiots and saw she was putting on some front with them
I’m kinda like Sal in that my mom wants me to be someone I’m not. If I pretended, like Sal, to be that person she soul be over the moon and all over me. The fact that Sal put in the effort to please them matters, ESPECIALLY considering it’s unlike how she usually is.
*she wold be
Her effort was fake, of course. But the fact is, she made that effort and they barely even glanced at her. They are *her parents*, and they didn’t even try to act like it.
Now, is Sal correct about the reason why? I’ve no idea. But it’s simply not deniable that her parents completely shirked their side of the relationship.
they could view her so blatantly fake effort as disdain for them. That she thinks they’re so stupid that any act no matter how false would fool them
That’s beside the point, Jason. They are her parents. They owe her enough consideration to act like her parents, at the very least. They failed her.
In other words, he’s at least partially angry about having to let go of his fool’s paradise, and deal with being caught in the middle of the reality of his family. Hair not being naturally ‘white’ enough being the issue or no (I think it’s gender, mainly), he’s just not enough like their snotty mother to have a clean conscience without at least considering Sal may be one to something.
or perhaps he’s upset because his sister literally just said “Mom only loved you more because you’re whiter”. That doesn’t have to be true to make someone uncomfortable or pissed. One doesn’t have to actually be privileged to take offense at that.
/though to be fair, maybe she is right, since I’ve only recently started reading the comic and fear archive binges.
Saying mom only likes you better ’cause your whiter is pretty cheap to hear when you’ve lived your life as an adjusted, if juvenile, person and your sister goes out and robs a store.
*Holds up finger, opens mouth.*
*thinks it over*
*Drops finger, closes mouth.*
Well she did just insult his parents.
I kind of see this as Walky interpreting his sister’s outburst as just a pathetic “Not my fault” excuse since he never saw any favouritism growing up, although it is heavily implied. To him, it didn’t start until she broke the law. And as he’s stated, he’s naive enough to think a mixed race marriage eliminates racism.
But to blame race on it? That their mother favoured the child more of her skin type than the father’s? I think we need to see some flashbacks or something because we haven’t seen enough of the Walkertons to say whether Sal is just raging or actually has a point.
why not just take sal at her word? only she would know how she feels.
For Walky to react anything like constructive would require him to think and develop in ways that are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more stressful than he’ll ever-
Oh shit i think we found Walky’s Danny side.
AAAHHH NOOOO NOT THE DANNYSIDE AAAAHHHHHH
All shall Danny…and dispair!!!!
Nothing besides remain, aside from that colossal fuck up.
Because Walkly’s experiences are no less legitimate? It’s entirely possible their parents played favorites. It’s entirely possible Walky was blind to it. But just making this as simple as “Sal-Right” “Walky-Wrong” is dismissive of his own experiences. Billie is right that being mixed-race isn’t a “get out of jail free card” for racism (it’s pretty darn possible for anyone to be culpible in that regard), but delegitimizing Walky’s connection to his identity as a means to then dismiss his own personal opinions and perspective on his childhood is pretty messed up. He has every right to be upset. (Not that Sal doesn’t as well).
Aw geeze, I said Walkly.
wasn’t saying anything about walky’s experiences! just saying sal’s feelings are ok and delegitimizing HERS was the topic of david herbert’s comment.
Yes, sorry! Wasn’t trying to say you were either, more referring to Sal’s behavior and why Walky might validly be upset. I apologize if I implied otherwise though!
yay wooo reasonable discussions about race woooo!
Their feelings are fine, but they’re not entitled to their own facts – the simple truth is that at least one of them is wrong, since their supposed experiences are in direct contradiction with each other.
Not necessarily.
They could both see the same experience differently.
Their parents *COULD* be treating them differently, and showing Walky favor. Walky might be too dense to SEE it that way, but it doesn’t mean Sal’s wrong. On the other foot, Sal’s reasoning as to WHY Walky is the favorite could be just as wrong too.
Everyone could be wrong!
and that’s the best kind of wrong.
Er, what you described would mean Walky’s wrong. Either they are showing favoritism, or they are not – it’s really that simple. They can both be wrong, but they can’t both be right.
I basically have no patience for the kind of “everyone’s ‘experiences’ are of equal value, even when they are an incorrect evaluation of what actually happened” thinking that Sgore was engaging in. If Walky is wrong, then his experience is less legitimate.
because this is how she feels about other people’s beliefs.
I mean…they’re her parents too, obviously? So it’s not like Sal’s some stranger saying “Hey, your mom’s racist!”
I suspect it’s the dad, since a) the dad is the one who married a white woman b) the dad is the one who commented that her hair looked better straight (ie, whiter, and seriously, that’s the first thing out of your mouth when you see your daughter?). That is to say, among some black people, internalized raicism, where you consciously or subconsciously favor whiteness or features associated with whiteness, is def. a thing.
*Full disclosure– Mixed race myself; find it easy to pass for white. Life has been _way_ less difficult for me than for my more obviously black brother and sister.
I dunno if stonewalling really counts as standing up. It’d take more spine to actually have a conversation about it and find out where she’s coming from, you know?
It doesn’t look to me like he’s stone-walling Sal, he’s storming out because of Billie. I don’t know if she is just making a devil’s-advocate “well, technically…” kind of comment or implying that she agrees with Sal’s assessment of the Walkerton’s (or at least their mixed race dad), but either way, if I were in his position, I would be pretty pissed off if she was interjecting in the middle of a really personal sibling confrontation like this
I’d also like to point out the way she said it she may have seen and heard things back when they were in town. Remember, she grew up with him. She knew about him and his family. It is very possible that she saw certain behaviors the supported Sal’s claims but never knew how to bring it up.
Hmm, both interesting points.
Interesting reaction, Walky. Also, Billie is standing up for Sal! And speaking sense!
Not that Billie is ever contrarian just for the sake of it… no, not her! Never! 😉
But she would know! And if she was just being contrarian, then she’d be a lot more aggressive about it! Instead, she’s speaking up and acting uncomfortable, which makes me think she means what she says but still doesn’t want to say it and really doesn’t want to be there.
Billie would certainly know. Let’s keep in mind that she has been a family friend of the Walkertons at least since grade school, and that she is close enough to Charles and Linda as to accidentally calling them “mom and dad”. (They got at least one daughter they like!)
She’ll troubled teen your faaace!
…did I do it right?
FAAAAAAAAAAAACE!!!!
My furious refreshing has been rewarded!
this sounds gross!
but that’s ok.
So that’s what the kis are calling it these days.
And just like Billie’s shirt says Walky is GONS.
And just like the other half says, this situation is a DRAG.
*golf clap* Excellent bon mot, good doctor.
And just think, we have one more day of the weekend left!
Yaaay weekennnnnnd
But everyone will leave in the early afternoon to drive home, so surely fewer things can go horrible wrong, right. Right??
Or at least different things will go horribly wrong.
😀
Things will go wrong within proportion to the timeframe we have for things to go wrong.
The day will take as many strips as Willis wills.
Walky. Walky. Walky. 🙁
Billy is an adorable voice of reason.
I want Sal to get all the hugs. Where’s Mrs. Warner? Her hug super powers are needed.
Meanwhile Ms. Warner jumps out of a moving car* I’M NEEDED *flies off into the night*
The Huggler is one of Amazi-Girl’s closest allies in the Justice League of Indiana.
Her Cookies of Crimefighting are even more effective on super-villains than Hostess Fruit Pies.
zomgggg this is an AMAZING image
She’ll hug the evil out of youu!!!
get evil y’all!
… is that the message?
what I’m saying is that I want mrs warner-brand hugs.
It’d probably like being hugged by a pillow made of love.
Mr. Warner’s a lucky man. HE PROBABLY GETS ENDLESS SNUGGLES.
Your drawing instruments are calling you.
“ENDLESS SNUGGLES”
I want to start a death metal band and write songs about fluffy kittens, adorable bunnies, and warm hugs that smell like cinnamon rolls and name it “ENDLESS SNUGGLES.” We will be a new branch of death metal, cuddlecore. Fuck yes. 😀
A cowl with a heart on the forehead like purple Hawkeye’s H.
Bandoliers with Oatmeal and Raisin cookies like shuriken.
Totes incorporating this into my superhero AU fan comic!
This is completely irrelevant to the topic but-
ZOMG your Grav is ADORABLE!
Thank you! I linked the full picture in the comments section of the Josh/Ethan post. Waiting for Willis to see it and hopefully put it up. :’B
I dunno, I used to know a guy who was pretty darn dead-eye with a Hostess Fruit Pie…
(Shout out to Killjoy Bob, if he’s reading.)
Oh dear, Christmas will be fun. Especially when Sal gets another lump of coal for her pile.
Walky seems to have had the right intention in the second panel but the wrong phrasing.
Either way i like him considerably more than Sal at the moment because that theory is just plain stupid.
After reading some of the other comments, im just waiting for the replies of people dumping evidence from this universe and others that Sal is right.
That parents can be biased in how they treat their children?
I agree that sal’s parents like Walky so much more, but I don’t think it’s because of colour.
It’s hard to say for certain what the reason is, though based on what we know we can’t dismiss the idea of subconscious racism. What we can say that Walky’s defense of them based on their being a mixed-race couple is pretty flawed. If I had a penny for every mixed-race couple based in fetishism (I’m looking at you, white dudes with Asian girlfriends), I’d be rich.
I have to agree with you- frankly the way this storyline has played has at least strongly implied some kind of subconscious racism is going on. Which is really complicated and not an easy thing to examine or remove.
SERIOUSLY
“it’s complicated and not an easy thing…”
yes yes y’all, and we don’t stop
What about Asian women with white dudes?
+1
Are you asking me? Usually white dudes into (East) Asian women have “yellow fever,” or what decent people like to call a dehumanizing fetish. When you chase after women (or men, though that takes out the misogyny) of a certain ethnicity you reduce their identity to solely their appearance and their cultural stereotype. The way these men talk about women makes me want to puke then stab them. They say super gross, racist, misogynistic, fetishist things like “Chinese women really know how to please a man. They’re princesses in public and whores in the bedroom. They haven’t been corrupted by western feminism and know a woman’s place is supporting her man.” They fail to see their Asian girlfriends as real people, just walking sexual fantasies. Obviously white men who are into (Asians/black women/Latinas/whatever) have varying degrees of fetishist mind sets and behaviours, but it still boils down to reducing a person down to the preconceived notions about her ethnicity.
Also apparently my gravatar changes on my phone?
I think your assessment is true when the attraction is based SOLELY on race. But it’s important to distinguish that it’s not (in and of itself) racist, objectifying, or reductive to find someone of a different race attractive or even to have a preference for the appearance of people from a different race. A man or woman may be into Asian/African/Indian/Hispanic partners, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean they only see them as fetish objects. It’s very possible that as far as sexual/romantic attraction they simply have a preference for the set of facial features, body types, and yes even cultural attitudes commonly found within that group. That’s no more INHERENTLY objectifying than finding redheads particularly attractive, preferring tall/short men/women, or finding glasses or a specific accent sexy.
For example, I was friends with a white woman in college who dated almost exclusively dark skinned black men. Over the four years we were in school, she had maybe three serious relationships, all of them with dark skinned black guys. She did not see them solely as sexual objects and she was not a racist. She simply found dark skin attractive and so the men she chose to date tended to possess that feature.
There is nothing wrong with finding other races attractive, yes. What I take issue with is people who “chase” or exclusively go after very specific ethnicities due to their fetishization of them. For example, people with “yellow fever” or “jungle fever.” As i described below though, I’m wary of people who say something like “I’m only into X race because they possess Y features” because individuals’ physical appearances differ greatly even within races, and to generalize is erasing the people who fall outside the stereotype.
I’m even more suspicious of people who claim to be in a group because of “cultural attitudes” UNLESS they belong to the same culture. Unless you’re part of that culture, as an outsider, you will never fully grasp it and to generalize that you’re into people of the culture based on your limited understanding of it is deeply problematic. I say this because I’ve heard, way too many times, that guys are into Asian women because they’re “submissive.” Fuck that.
That was a pretty egregious generalization there, honestly. I mean, if you’d been talking about dudes in general it would have been bad enough, but you specifically mentioned WHITE dudes into east asian women, as though there’s never been a black man or a hispanic man with a dehumanizing race fetish (or, read another way, no such thing as a man who’s capable of seeing his partner as a human being – but I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here).
Look, I’m never going to sit here and talk about “discrimination against white men,” because I know what the difference is between personal prejudice and institutionalized discrimination, but you should probably examine the things you were saying a little more closely, okay?
I don’t see what’s wrong with what I said. I guess I could have said white dudes who are almost exclusively into Asian women instead of leaving out to “exclusively” part, but I stand by it.
I agree that all men, no matter their ethnicity, can racially fetishize. I specify white guys because a) it seems to be more prevalent with them, though obviously what I’m exposed to here in terms of diversity could be different from what you see; and b) because with white men you get the double whammy of racism and misogyny. With men of colour you still get the misogyny, but the power dynamics in terms of race are different because both parties are still minorities.
Keep in mind I’m not talking about guys who are into dating any race, as in they’ll find women attractive regardless of their race. I’m talking specifically about guys are more attracted to X race to other races, who go out of their way to date someone of X race, or who make broad fetishizing generalizations like “X are so hot because they are/do Y!”
X can be East Asians, South Asians, African-Americans, other people of African descent, Latinas, mixed-race people, etc.
Oh, I think I just understood your wording, my bad. Asian women chasing after white men is very, very different in terms of historical context and oppression. While whey men chasing Asian women reeks of racism (orientalism) and sexism, you cannot be racist or sexist against white men, especially given the context of colonialism and the fact that white men in Asia have a long history of raping and trafficking local women (and making bad romanticized plays about it). If anything I think a lot of women of colour who exclusively go after white men probably harbour internalized racism.
So any White Male who likes east-asian features is a racist misogynist ?
“Thanks” for the insult.
What you’re saying is that every white person dating out of his ethnicity is just having a slavery fetish and that every other person dating a white one is just a submissive self victim. That’s bullshit. Liking a certain type of physical traits is not the same as dehumanizing.
Racists and sexits must be fighted, but you are making broad generalizations here.
Wooooo deliberately misunderstanding the distinction between “chasing”/”fetishizing” women of a certain race and “dating” women of a certain race.
(the woo was sarcastic, so you know)
Every white male who goes out of his way to date a certain ethnicity is racist. Yes.
Also, usually “liking certain physical traits” is just an excuse because Asian people do not all look the same. Just like black people do not all look the same. Han Chinese (and I bring up Chinese people as examples more because that’s what I am, and feel more comfortable talking about us) are as diverse looking as, say, white British people. Saying, for example, of but I just like the way their X looks is assuming they all have X and that people of other ethnicities do not have X. Or saying, “but all Asians are so cute!” is reinforcing the idea of Asian people being submissive and nonthreatening.
But Asian people do tend to share certain physical traits. That’s why it’s generally easy to tell if someone is Asian or not with a quick glance.
That’s debatable. Asia is a bigass continent with many ethnicities. If you’re talking about East Asian specifically, may I point out that some northern Native American, like Inuits, look “Asian?” And so Aboriginal Russians? And so do interesting mixes of people – some latin@ mixed people look “Asian,” for instance.
There is a huge difference between preferring blonds to preferring Asians.
There is a reason native americans and inuit look like east asians.
But they’re not East Asians. So when people say, I like East Asians because they look like X, and only East Asians, they don’t actually mean they like X feature.
there isn’t really, it’s a personal preference. Limiting it to a smaller demographic doesn’t make it any better or worse.
I love how you keep saying “White guys” constantly too. Because black guys, white girls, black girls or other races/gender combos are never guilty of having “expletive” fever. Nope.
I’m pretty sure I explained why I keep using “white guys” earlier, but in a nutshell, I see this kind of thing more with white guys, and the issues of racism are enhanced with white guys than guys of other races. And with girls of any race you don’t have the misogyny.
Limiting it to a smaller demographic that share the same alleged features means it’s not about the features, it is about the ethnicity and all the stereotypes and baggage that comes with that.
I’m really saying the same over and over. It’d be nice if people read upthread before trying to refute me.
People like you are the reason why I disliked the jughead comic Willis posted.
“You cannot be racist or sexist against white men” really? Really?
At what level of genetic mix is one considered “Immune” to racism?
Not meaningfully you can’t. Context, both institutional and historical, is important.
I’d say it’s hilarious the lengths to which reactions in the comments to this and the previous strip have tried to minimalize the internalized racism of a fictional character, and (either by extension or in parallel) avoid having to examine that maybe, just MAYBE, their own worldview comes from a position of privilege that ought to be more closely examined (which is the lesson Walky is SUPPOSED to take from this)…but it’s much more depressing than hilarious.
At the very least, it proves 100% that Walky’s anger is over being called out on the racism he’s taken for granted. OR, in other words, it’s okay when Joyce is depicted rejecting information that doesn’t fit her worldview (because ha ha, we’re not like HER, amirite??? Oh those wacky fundamentalists!) but nog forbid we should stop and consider whether we’re doing the exact same thing. Uncomfortable truths and rigid ideology are things that happen to OTHER people, didn’t you know?
To add on to what Dave said, I think it’s surprising and maybe ironic(?) to find comments like yours on this webcomic considering that it’s clear Willis is trying to shake up minds, touch on “controversial”/”social justice” issues and get people who may not of their own accord interact with those topics to think about them. Race is just one of them – also what it means to religiously conservative in a world that’s rapidly becoming more “progressive,” what it means to be gay in a world that may try to define someone by their sexual orientation, what it means to be held to different standards because you’re a woman instead of a man. But also race – how white people, and people who are perceived as white, inherently have more power (“privilege”) than people who are coded as PoC or more obviously mixed.
Really what I’m saying is, a huge part of my enjoyment of DoA ties into to Willis’s social commentary. And if you either don’t agree with it or are not willing to open your mind and consider what he’s trying to convey in his stories, what’s the point of reading it?
You can certainly be racist against white folks and sexist against dudes. But there’s a huge difference between some black guy being racist against me and me being racist against a black guy. If a black guy’s racist against me, oh no, that is one person who doesn’t like me. It’s unpleasant, but I can move on. It’s racism, sure, but it’s a curiosity more than anything, because of my station in life. But me being racist against a black guy is just one more friggin’ straw on the camel’s back — I’m part of a larger organism that’s punching this dude in the face from every angle of society every single day, from birth through death. I am just another blow from something that is inescapable. And it’s the same with ladies versus dudes.
It’s about what’s institutionalized. It’s about power dynamic. And understanding this is like Empathy 101. Otherwise it’s like hearing about a tragic flood and saying “I have it just as bad ‘cuz I saw rain once.”
So, yeah, when someone says “OH BUT DUDES EXPERIENCE SEXISM TOO” I laugh for like five minutes and then send that guy’s post into the spam folder if I can because he’s totally a jackass.
I really hate this being your example. My (white) uncle married my (Japanese) Aunt, and there’s not a bit of “yellow fever” there. They’re a great couple with two great kids now, and every time I bring up my aunt, everyone assumes it’s yellow fever from my uncle – Sometimes, people actually just fall in love. I dunno, anytime someone brings it up I get frustrated, it feels like they’re trying to undermine my uncles love for her.
Just because there are non-creepy white dude/Asian woman couples doesn’t mean that there are also sketchy ones based in fetishism. My mom’s Chinese friend is married to a white guy and every time he opens his mouth to make a joke about Asians and all the Chinese people there laugh along politely I want to yell at him. On the other hand, my uncle is German and he and my Chinese aunt have a great and loving relationship, and nothing sketch there. It just bears to keep in mind that there is a potentially problematic aspect there.
Since it’s not letting me reply where I wanna:
How is typing “People” harder then “White guys”? You have a valid point in that some PEOPLE are “Ethnic hunt’n” but repeatedly saying “White guys do X” is akin to saying “Black guys do X”
adding gender/race limitations to your point jsut makes you sound just as bad as the Mexican girls who all have the Honky Fever.
I do it because white guys have the most power in this oppressive world, seem to be the worst offenders, and are always disproportionately upset when people single them out. Let’s spell it out again:
Men of colour who fetishize women from other ethnicities lack the power dynamic of holding white privilege. Their racially charged sexism is still terrible, but lacks a history of colonial oppression.
White women who fetishize men OR women of colour lack male privilege. They’re still racist, but don’t come from a history of war brides, war crimes in terms of rape, etc.
Because Indian and Chinese men don’t outnumber white males by a wide margin… Mmhmm. “World Issues”
Unless you live in India or China, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t, this comment is so disingenuous that I’m not even sure how to finish this sentence. Come on, now. Be serious.
At this point you’re not even replying to anything remotely related to what I said.
Honestly, the fetishization of Asian women is a much larger issue than someone mistaking a legit relationship to one founded on yellow fever. I’d rather everyone analyze their own relationship dynamics and maybe those of their close friends and relatives for unhealthy issues than assume all mixed race couples are unproblematic.
Examples of some really disgusting fetishizing men chasing after Asian women: http://creepywhiteguys.tumblr.com/
A person “going out of their way” to date a specific race isn’t racist. If I were to date someone from India and then next someone from Iraq, then someone from Russia, then someone from Japan…I’d be racist because I was dating Asians exclusively? Oh, well I guess I’m a Native American woman, so it’s probably fine. Only white men fit this equation.
…You realize those are all different ethnicities right?
That tumblr… was really depressing 🙁
My sister and I are half Japanese and I have 7 cousins who are half and several hapa friends, all of whose parents are very nice people who genuinely love each other. I had never even heard of the concept of orientalism until a few months ago… I had no idea it was this bad.
I think how severe it is depends on where you live, honestly. I never thought it was that bad either (as someone who lived most of my life in SE Ontario, which has a decent sized Chinese population), though as a guy I obviously never noticed as much as my female friends. I know it can be super gross in the USA, as in I have never heard of the majority of the anti-Asian racism that exists there until I started following blogs that discussed the subject (such as This is Not Japan and This is Not China). Disgusting things like “me so horny,” “me love you long time,” weird stereotypical accents that I had never heard about (“herro!”), pulling back the eyes, all kinds of things. I’ve only experienced such blatant anti-Asian racism personally once here, but I do get micoaggressions like randoms coming up to me and saying “ni hao” or insisting on knowing where I’m REALLY from or what my ethnicity is. My best friend, is also Chinese and presents in a feminine manner, got all sort of crap from white guys when she tried dating online, and even offline.
Backward, turn backward, oh Time, in your flight;
I thought of the right words I needed last night.
…….apologies to Elizabeth Chase Allen
I don’t think it’s that stupid. I mean, they clearly favor her brother, and their only comment to Sal after she got all dressed up was that she was prettier with straight hair. A kid or young lady could easily put those things together. (Me, I would’ve suspected sexism first, but then, I don’t have to deal with race as constantly as Sal does.)
It remains to be seen whether they’re actually racist jerks or just favorite-playing jerks.
I would not put money against a lovely intersection of sexism and racism. Especially since they seem to want a sweet, lovely girl, and Sal’s…quite the opposite. I’d put it on a healthy helping of racism with a spoonful of sexism to top it off. Like mashed potatoes and gravy, they just mix so easy.
MOTHERFUCKING DELICIOUS Y’ALL
just kidding that sounds like a pretty bummer dinner : (
I really agree with you on that.
Yeah, I wouldn’t be shocked at all if sexism is figuring in here too. I mean the whole ‘good hair’ concept definitely has a gender component. I know black men are also targeted for their hair, but there is a level of ridicule and hatred reserved specifically for the hair/hair styling of black women.
Yeah, I’ve been kicking around the idea that it’s not so much that Sal’s hair makes her “blacker” than Walky, but that it’s more acceptable to the parents, to Linda who did after all marry a black man and have his children and Charles who chose to marry a white woman, that their son be black than that their daughter be black. Black is “manly”, white is “pretty”*, so their racial and sexual stereotypes synergize better that way than the other way around. (Hell, they’ve apparently skipped straight past “white” and gone for the Asian daughter. ‘Cause they’re, you know, so smart and pretty and well-behaved**, everything Sally or whatever her name is isn’t.)
But there’s also the fact that Walky’s effortlessly sliding through classes, while Sal tried private tutoring and has moved on to banging the TA for grades and is still failing. I’m not sure where this started; whether Sal’s underachieving because she didn’t get support and attention from her parents, or whether Sal didn’t get support and attention from her parents because she was underachieving, but it’s a viciously reinforcing cycle once embarked upon.
* Note, I do not subscribe to these myself; I’m just reporting what I’ve observed others to believe.
** ^ Again. And, seriously, this is Billie we’re talking about. The girl drinks like a fish and says “fuck” more than everyone else in the comic combined***. Not exactly your stereotypical submissive Asian maiden.
*** I haven’t actually counted, but I’m pretty sure.
Sal’s not saying that her parents look at them and think, “Walky is whiter than Sal, we like him better.”
The US just happens to favor “whiteness” and associates “white” qualities with success and privilege, albeit subconsciously. Sal is saying that her parents had higher hopes for Walky from the start because he possesses more “white” qualities and so seemed more likely to succeed.
(And as people mentioned in the previous page, “white” qualities are not just color-related)
Well put!
I don’t understand what makes Sal’s theory stupid? Like, we can argue about whether we know enough as readers to agree with her, but we certainly don’t know anything that makes it ridiculous?
Only that Walky considers her theory ridiculous. But unfortunately it’s entirely possible.
Not really, many users here consider it to be ridiculous.
It’s a typical denial excuse, putting the blame somewhere else. Walky seems like a goody-two-shoes while Sal is a trouble maker… who do you think parents are going to like better?
But it’s a lot easier just prettending it has something to do with skin colour, and put all the blame on the parents.
However, Sal’s statement in the last strip implies that the issue predates the convenience-store incident – in fact, she may have committed that crime because even negative attention beats no attention at all.
What about her part where she said it started before the crimes? (Assuming we’re trusting her on that fact, if not the reason.)
Justifying the parents playing favourites, by labelling one of their children a ‘trouble maker’ or ‘hard work’ or whatever, is victim blaming.
This comment section depresses me to hell sometimes
I’m going to stop reading it until all these feels are over *
(The Danny hate a few comics back almost stopped me reading it altogether-you guys can be so mean sometimes, and it’s showing here against Walky)
That wasn’t a dig at Walky (who’s being a lot more self-absorbed than Danny) but rather at the comments implying Sal deserved to be treated the way she has by her parents. They raised her, not the other way around.
…then there’s the part where the only time we see Sal interact with her parents, they tell her they don’t like when her hair is black-looking, and that she’s prettier when it’s straight and white.
I dunno if you’ve ever actually met a young black woman, but that right there is some fucking inflammatory shit.
Especially when it’s damaging in the other regard and young black women are telling other young black women that their hair is better white and straight. As a young black male, all the black girls with weaves and wigs make me sad. Especially since the really ghetto ones don’t have the money to make it look convincing.
I’m also kind of a Walky, in that I was the younger male half of a mixed race brother-sister duo, and I can attest to some of the bullshit that goes on between siblings and parents in this case. My sister straightened her hair all the way through high school, until she finally had something of an identity crisis and epiphany and both chopped her hair off and stopped straightening it. The fallout was predictably absolutely terrible as she caught an awful lot of flak from our father, notably enough the black parent in the equation. Fortunately, he’s come around since, and now we both have dreads, but the whole Sal/Walky/parents interaction this freshman weekend hit a hell of a lot closer to home than I’m comfortable with.
Nappster, I think you are right on the money with this situation. The only significant differences between your description of the parallels to your family’s experience back then and what it seems like is happening here is a giant pile of maternal favoritism for Walky over Sal and that while Walky seems perhaps oblivious to some of the internalized racism around him, Sal on the other hand seems like she may have been hyper-sensitive to it (and made a leap in her head that it’s related to the favoritism, perhaps because of this difference in their relative awareness/experience of it)
Billie isn’t wrong, unfortunately. And while their parents might never have meant to give Sal so many self-image issues, they might have done it subconsciously. Walky might have also been an easier child in terms of temperament and his apparent ease with school, so he might have avoided criticism that Sal got instead, further feeding into her image of Walky being the favourite.
Your comment is well written and sensible. Especially the subconscious part – I don’t think anyone is accusing Sal’s parents of going “Man, our child is so substandard with her curly hair. You know what we should do? Destroy her self-esteem by never giving her compliments and putting her brother on a pedestal. We are doing this, by the way, because of racism.”
Internalized racism is a hard thing to get rid of. It does work largely on the subconscious level.
Agreed and agreed.
So well put. It is astonishing me how many people here actually agree with Walky that favoring certain racial characteristics over others has to be, like, conscious and deliberate. And impossible to do if you like a black person??
Well, I think it’s difficult for people to see more subtle prejudices that are unfortunately the result of centuries of racism. Hair is especially a big talking point. An aspect of Sal’s parentage is that her mother is the white parent and likely never learned how to care for Sal’s hair, which might not have been helped by her father. Being mixed himself, he might have been raised with the concept of “good hair” as well, a poisonous concept in itself. The point being though, these are not always conscious decisions on a person’s part, rather something they have been taught by society that they are not even aware of, much less the harm they can cause a young child.
I still remember a mother coming into the salon once and asking if we would do a chemical relaxer on a four year old’s hair.
No, and I think that might even be part of the problem. Her parents likely never intended to make her feel this way, and would be horrified to learn they’ve made her feel like the unfavourite for so many years.
But because the slights Sal has felt over the years, that have just built up to this point that she finally lashes out at Walky, they’re not readily apparent to the people not experiencing them. Sal’s angry at Walky for being the golden child and skating through life, which isn’t his fault, but when she’s struggled for so many years just to get into college and earn some tiny positive recognition from her parents, the resentment can build.
It doesn’t help that after going so long without seeing her parents, the first thing her father comments on is her hair, and it’s not exactly a compliment. It was innocuous, but to her, it was just confirmation that nothing had changed.
Well put.
Now THIS is what I’ve been waiting for! A nice throwback to Walky’s attitude from the latter part of “It’s Walky!”, I think I’ll go reread that for the upteenth time.
Also, is the second to last panel reminding anyone else of, “I bid you good day, sir! GOOD. DAY.”
It reminds me of the many times Gilligan used “Good Night” as a punchline on Gilligan’s Island.
I SAID GOOD DAY!!!
But Yotomoe…
Do you not understand how Good of a Day I’m announcing upon you!?
Yes, what Billie said is true.
That said, I think that Walky actually has more of a right to be angry at the moment than Sal does. Just my opinion.
Do you feel like getting into why?
Because even if there was any truth to Sal’s words (which we do not know, though I doubt it), it isn’t even Walky’s fault, yet she is essentially taking it out on him.
She’s taking it out on him because he made fun of her for wearing that schoolgirl outfit, which she only did to please her parents, which she only has to do because he’s the favourite. Walky is, willfully or not, ignorant of all her unhappiness, and on top of that giving her a hard time for it.
…no.
He was MAKING FUN OF HER while Willis has already shown us more than enough to imply that she’s correct.
Walky was being a dick.
except that Walky gets to benefit from and ignore the situation, which is harmful in itself. Walky can position himself as someone who earned the status he has, and basically say Sal is responsible for the lack of attention she gets from their parents. And going from the assumption that Sal is correct (and I think she probably is- I don’t think ideas like this come out of nowhere) that’s incredibly frustrating and painful. Walky refuses to acknowledge the possibility that there are uncomfortable reasons behind his favoritism because it upsets him. That’s unfair to to Sal.
” I don’t think ideas like this come out of nowhere”
Generally people don’t want to think poorly of their parents, and being racist is one of the biggest taboos in American society (I think, I’m Canadian). It’s a serious “accusation” from her, and one most people would think over before saying to someone else – especially if the situation is their parents being racist towards THEM. Even in yesterday’s comic, it only came out because of how angry and hurt Sal was. If Walky didn’t bring up her crimes, she may have just left it as “because you’re the favourite child.”
Also this whole storyline makes me so, so glad I’m an only child.
Right- it’s very clearly something she’s felt for a while- but hasn’t said. Sal only gets into it when things all start to pile up at once and it’s too much. It seems clear to me that in general she’d rather not discuss it- it’s revealing and personal and really really upsetting. If Sal was just saying it because she had victim complex, it seems to me this would have come up sooner. Instead it seems like a really raw and painful topic for her.
I don’t know. I’ve been doing a bit of archive reading today. While it isn’t Walky’s fault that Charles and Linda are favoring him over Sal, there’s been some behavior on his part that’s been equally hurtful to Sal.
When she first arrives at the school he mentions that he hasn’t talked to her in five years and weakly blames that on “rising postage costs”. Now granted, it could have been that neither Sal or Walky tried to communicate, but I think you can make a reasonable guess from her cold reaction and his sheepishness that she tried to communicate and he never responded. Not only that, but Walky makes it clear to Billie that he’s never tried to keep any tabs on her while she was away.
Later, when Sal’s response to Walky’s pajama jeans for girls is disapproval, specifically a “C’mon bro, be an adult.”, Walky immediately throws Sal’s past behavior in her face, in the hall of their new school at high volume. That’s not a reasonable reaction to someone’s not liking your pajama bottoms.
I like Walky, but I think he’s internalized how his parents treat Sal and that influences how he treats her as well.
I just checked that strip (/book-2/01-pajama-jeans/slamming/) and I think it’s interesting how sad Sal looks when she says it. Like she wants or expects better from him, not like she’s deliberately antagonizing him anymore like she was earlier over his favourite child status.
Personally I read it as a “c’mon dude, really?” reaction myself. Either way, I don’t think Walky’s reaction was reasonable.
Why do you think that? All that’s happened to Walky is that someone (his own sister) accused his parents of being racist. What happened to Sal was her own brother making fun of her for trying to get her parents to act like they like her for once.
Yes, it was wrong of Walky to make fun of her in that regard. Just as it would be wrong for Walky to be a focal point of Sal’s blame over the situation.
I think its because Walky believes what she said doesn’t make much sense from a rational standpoint.
Yea Walky has “White” hair and Sal has “Black” hair, but Sal’s previous actions and behaviors aren’t excused from the picture. If anything its not like they did anything to exclude her purposely. They just paid more attention to Walky.
And after I reread the encounter with her parents, as soon as she got there, she practically left. She didn’t try and stay or communicate with her parents, she came in dressed nicely and expected some different form of reaction. She literally walked in the door and left as soon as she came.
Now mind you I’m not saying anything Mr and Mrs Walkerton have done weren’t wrong, but Sal has “Lets run away and not deal with my problems” syndrome coupled with bad communication. She thought sleeping with Jason would get her grade back up. She seems to hate communicating with people if shes not yelling at them. Hell, the closest thing she has for a best friend is a mute.
Whenever Sal has a problem and there is an answer she doesn’t like, she tries to make her own.
The point Sal was making is that the different treatment began before she started acting up. In that sense, you can disregard her previous actions.
I also can’t blame Sal. Her parents made zero effort to see her, in Move-In Day and during this weekend. She showed up even uninvited, greeted her parents, was totally ignored by one, and then – because she was clearly unwelcome by her mom – left. She said goodbye, she acted fairly politely in my opinion, and was completely and crushingly ignored by her own mother.
man, when you spell it out like that I just get all FROWNY : ( : ( : (
This still falls down to poor communication problems with both sides coming off wrong.
The Walkertons should of visited Sal granted, and her mom was ignoring her completely. But instead of saying something about it or trying to confront her calmly, she immediately left as soon as she came. We as the readers later learn that Mrs Walkerton has some… Control Issues. But while her father did make an insensitive statement, at least he was trying to start a conversation. You don’t go from “Hi” to “Statement” to “I have an appointment planned on a day where I can talk to my parents.”
And yea Walky was being a dick with the outfit comment. But to be fair, I think she should have came in dressed naturally, but that’s a different argument. The point stands Sal has terrible communication problems.
Honestly, in a situation like this, I think it’s up to the parents to compromise. Why should Sal try to interrupt her mother to start conversation when she knows it’s not going to go well? Why set herself up for more pain? I would do the exact same thing in her situation. She did her part by showing up and saying hi. Why should she have to force her mom to acknowledge her? As far as I’m concerned she did all she had to. Staying longer would have just resulted in more pain for her.
And yeah, you can go from “hi” to “insult about a subject she is sensitive about” (as we see when she tells Marcie she’s ashamed of her hair) to departure.
But it wasn’t intended as an insult. Mr Walkerton didn’t say “You look ugly with your hair curled.” He said “You look pretty with it straight.” There’s an entirely different context there.
And yea I can see what you’re saying about the parents being the one to make the first move, but its not like she came there oblivious to how her parents felt about her. Mrs Walkerton probably doesn’t believe she treated Sal wrong, and Sal probably disagrees. But if they don’t confront each other about it, it’ll just blow up in their face later on.
I don’t want to say Sal didn’t try hard enough, thats rude and stupid. I’m not Sal, and I don’t have the same struggles she has with communicating with her parents. But from what we’ve seen of Sal, she really has terrible communication skills. She didn’t talk to Danny about the main problem in “Its Walky”initially. In DoA, her advice to Joyce can be seen as “Don’t talk about it”. Sal can’t stay in place
If one person doesn’t take out the garbage cause its smelly, and YOU don’t wanna take out the garbage cause its smelly, its going to smell worse. Someone has to take out the garbage.
I’d argue it was a subtle insult. “Too bad. You look so pretty when it’s long and straight,” were his exact words, kind of implying she doesn’t look it now.
I agree that Sal has communication issues, but I can’t say I’d do things differently than she did around her parents. Confrontation is scary.
I believe the term is “backhanded compliment”.
I don’t think that was that she was ashamed of her hair. Or, well, she may be, but I don’t think that’s what she was saying. She seems to have been saying that she was ashamed, and also having hair issues. And I think the reason for her shame was that she had just come from banging Jason on the floor of the supply closet, despite her resolution not to do so again.
(Er, no pun intended.)
i feel i gotta say this point, her hair being black is an informed trait to me. when it went poof that time ago, I assumed her mother was irish. From similar experiences (although not instant like that, obviously) with trying to straighten my own damn hair. You know the triplets from brave? not so cute a look on a teenager.
I really don’t think her friendship with Marcie has anything to do with her unwillingness to communicate: she freaking learned sign language for the express purpose of doing so.
Thank you! As if Marcie being mute makes her friendship automatic . . . Or means you can treat her like shit without any repercussions.
No One said anything about treating her like shit, though I forgot Sal learned sign language for the moment. And it does speak volumes when the closest friend she has can’t “speak” like other people. From what we’ve seen of their relationship, they communicate well with each other. But almost every conversation Sal has had with someone in DoA has led to some form of disagreement or Argument.
Indeed, what Billie said is definitely true (I’m a white guy, but I’m not blind to what happens to those around me).
That said, I disagree completely with your claim about Walky. Sal definitely has more of a justifiable reason to be mad.
(I rephrased it because EVERYONE always has the _right_ to be mad, they just don’t always have a _justification_.)
NO.
Walky acted racist, was called on it by two people, and responded by getting all in a huff.
^^^^^
So, maybe I’m the only one, but I’m not seeing how Walky’s the one being racist (as some commenters have claimed).
Might there be some subconscious racism from their parents (particularly from Mrs. Walkerton)? It’s entirely possible. That’s what it looks like from Sal’s perspective, although we haven’t seen enough of their prior home-life before the convenience store robberies to know if there’s reason to think it’s actual *racism* at work, or if there’s some other undiagnosed reason for Sal being the “unfavorite.” Without knowing their complete circumstances, we don’t know if Sal just happened to remind Mrs. W of something, or there was some other factor at work that pushed Walky to be the favorite over Sal.
It’s even possible that the treatment, which may have simply started off as a simple favoring of Walky rather than an actual disfavoring of Sal might have shifted over time. If Walky’s personality (considering how lazy he is, for instance, it’s conceivable that his parents might have focused on him because they figured he *needed* more parenting) led him to get more attention, Sal might have then perceived that as being slighting against her, and then she started acting out in an attempt to get attention, which only angered her parents, and then it becomes a vicious cycle.
There’s no doubt that Sal is the unfavorite for her parents, but since we’re only seeing Sal (who has been on the receiving end and so is hardly detached from the situation) and Walky (who seems to have been largely oblivious to the phenomenon prior to the robberies) and their perspectives, it seems likely that each of them, and by extension us, are not seeing the full picture. It’s also worth note that, apart from Sal’s hair being kinkier, Sal and Walky look pretty much the same. I’m not seeing how Walky would have been unaffected by any latent racism from their parents.
TL;DR: Walky was being a dick to Sal by making fun of what she wore in an attempt to appease their parents, and she was justified in being angry at him over it, but at the same time, Walky was also justified in getting angry at Sal’s accusing their parents of being outright racists.
I’m not sure why this registered as a reply instead of a stand-alone post…
are you in college/ what college do you go to if you don’t mind?
I am. University of Evansville. Why do you ask?
I just know someone named Henry who reads this comic, haha. A different one apparently.
I don’t think anybody’s saying he’s racist because he indignant over the accusation.
He did however express that indignation by basically pulling the “black friend” card in defense of his mother.
I don’t think Walky’s being racist, just ignorant. I’m sure if he was aware of his privilege, he would take steps to deal with these issues in a more sympathetic fashion.
Of course, completely ignoring his sister’s point of view is a pretty dick move, though I understand the defensiveness.
Now I realise why I never saw how much Walky looked like Sal, it’s because I’ve never seen Walky scowl before. That second panel really shows how similar they look.
Yay for Billie!
Walky just walked out after some talky.
heh, nice
Last panel: Billie says what we’re all thinking.
hopefully!
holy cow Walky’s mad?!
Walky only emotion isn’t mcnuggets?
Hey! Be fair! His two emotions are mcnuggets and lust.
LUST FOR MCNUGGETS!
I wonder if he has opinions on the McDs wings that are being promoted right now. Abomination against nature? Or sublime extension of chickeny goodness?*
*note, I do not eat at McDs, I have no idea how they are myself
Mmmm, Dorothy made out of McNuggets….
Mad cow McNuggets? You better dispose of those things post-haste.
I’d ask if you meant mad chicken, but then I remembered what’s actually in those nuggets.
That reminds me. Am I the only one who sees Walky as having undiagnosed Asperger’s Syndrome?
Don’t think so. For one thing I haven’t seen any evidence of not liking physical contact. He doesn’t always know what to do with his emotions, but they seem normal. The D&MM obsession seems normal for this ‘verse, since Dorothy and Joyce seem to share it. His lack of social filter seems high normal for his age but more a function of his having had it easy.
Walky reacted just like a racist.
tough how that works out some times : (
all my comments lately end with : (
Someone needs to slap the sense into him until he goes back to Sal and apologizes for everything, and then changes his behavior to make up for it in the future.
Preferably Ruth. With a pipe wrench.
yaaaaaay ruth plus a pipe wrench OH GOD I LOVE RUTH FOREVER
Apologize for EVERYTHING? Maybe apologize for being a dick, but I don’t think that it’s that pertinent. He’s just gotta be more considerate.
OMG I agree with Yotomoe
you could throw in the occasional D:
Yeah, but it still rings true. And if you’ve spent any amount of time working with or dealing with these issues, you’ve seen that same reaction – the instant shut down, the defensive scowl – all the tell tale signs that the person was so upset by the idea that they instantly closed off the ability to actually think about it, for the moment. The whole thing feels painfully real.
Yeah. I hope he cools down and thinks it over, though.
I know you just said “like a racist”, but still, I wanted to add how I really hate how broadly that word has expanded while still carrying with it the exact same level of outrage.
The worst racist thinks that other races are polluting his gene pool, are of inferior lineage, and should be separated for everyones safety. It’s terrible. Walky was being an insensitive, oblivious jerk about racial issues. When you call someone like that a racist, you ratchet things up drastically so that of COURSE he’s going storm off.
Given the historical prevalence of the worst version , calling someone a racist is pretty big attack on someone’s morality. If that person was just oblivious, unthinking, or otherwise unaware, you’ve immediately lessened any likelihood that they’ll discuss the issue with you. I’ve seen so many discussions like this that could have gone better degenerate because one side just decided the other was an irredeemable racist.
Being racist, unintentionally or not, is ALWAYS significantly worse than being called racist. It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to perform eugenics – racism on a smaller scale is extremely harmful. Look up “microaggression” to see what effects even seemingly insignificant comments (“where do you come from?”/”you speak really good English!”/”wow you don’t sound black”/etc) can produce.
And all of those, if you want to convince someone of them, are I believe better argued by discussing the effects on others and why it’s insensitive.
It’s about the mindset of the listener. Some people, upon being told they are racist, will feel a desire to reexamine themselves. Honestly I think most people feel attacked and you’ve immediately reduced their likelihood of thinking empathetically and logically about it.
While that’s probably true, I think that decent people – people who want to be good people, who thought they weren’t racist and were trying to do things right – will examine themselves and consider this possibility. You can write off the rest.
I would like to think so, but I suppose I just have to strongly disagree with that. The best people I’ve ever know have been irrational on occasion, doubly so if they were being called out on their character.
Combined with the fact that once people have picked a side on an issue, they subconsciously reinforce what they chose, and now they ossify. No one is immune to implicit cognitive biases.
Registering my support for the “please don’t write off folks who suffer from extremely common flaws in human cognition” sentiment.
Personally, as someone who is queer and of colour (and an intersectional feminist ally), I have no time of day for you if you have issues with either of the two things unless you are a family member OR I was your friend before I find out and think there’s a good chance you can be redeemed. Otherwise not worth my well being.
I mean here’s the thing- yes, it’s absolutely a powerful word with a lot of impact. But I don’t understand why it shouldn’t be. Passive and unexamined racism occurs everyday and it plays a huge role in racial discrimination. You don’t have to be advocating genocide to be contributing to and benefiting from a racist society. Does it make people defensive? Does it hurt feelings? Well, yes. But I don’t know why its the responsibility of others to coddle people when they behave in harmful ways. People can absolutely respond that way if they like, but I don’t think we should shame people who chose to call a spade a spade.
I don’t care about hurt feelings. I’m saying that calling someone a racist diverts the whole discussion away from what was at the core of the problem. They were blind to something and being a jerk because of it. They need to examine their core assumptions because people are hurt by it. Now you’ve pulled out a powerful word, so that they have strong preconceptions of what you’re calling them.
If you want to flat out call people racists for stuff like that, feel free, but then your goal is only to shame people. Maybe some people will be shocked into re-examining their behavior by it, but most of the time you’re not going to help anyone understand the situation better that way. People do not think as logically when you put them on the defensive.
Again, it’s not your responsibility to coddle anyone. But if you want to promote people’s reexamination of their base assumptions, calling them racist is a terrible way to start a discussion.
Oh, as to “calling a spade a spade”, I suppose that in discussions that is true, and is totally their right. This is public discussion on the Internet, however, and that affects the tone and the likelihood for others to join in.
Two points that I really do believe from having been through these discussion many times in a very mixed race area where it’s a real issue:
(1) Lumping everybody in subconsciously encourage people to think of others with unexamined behaviors as just as irredeemable and unreasonable as the worst racists
(2) and decreases the likelihood for people to talk about race, something that is sorely lacking. I know many people who just avoid talking about it for fear of saying something wrong.
I’m not trying to shame anyone. I just think that the best, first recourse is point to the actual, provable indications of harm that certain behaviors do to minorities, and emphasize that this is no way to treat people.
I’m on board with this. Walky said something insensitive, and was oblivious to the difference in treatment he and Sal have received, but I honestly don’t think anywhere in his mind was the thought of “She’s blacker than I am”. And as naive or carefree as Walky often seems, it is incredibly unlikely that his race *never* became an issue in his youth; indeed, he’s probably been on the receiving end of it many times.
So for Sal to out and say that her problems are his fault, because he’s “whiter” than she is, and that he and her parents are both racist for it, is incredibly infuriating to him. In analysis, maybe his actions were somewhat racist, but it was never an intentional act on his part, so he doesn’t see it that way. To him, Sal’s basically just dumped all her problems on him, and made the very severe accusation of racism against him and his parents. No wonder he’s upset.
This is pretty much the problem with all those straight/white/cis/male individuals who refuse to believe we live in anything but a meritocracy and racism and sexism are over. They feel attacked, and naturally get defensive. Of course, that doesn’t mean we are obligated to be infinitely patient and educate them at every turn, but you’re not really gonna change much by yelling at people who don’t understand how privilege works.
No, as an activist and member of a couple social minorities (I’m disabled and queer) I’ve had it patiently explained to me several times that it is, in fact, my job to explain things to each new person, with the infinite patience of a saint for their misgenderings and casual insults. Every day is a brand new day on the job. Which, you know, it’s funny, but I don’t remember signing up for the job, just by being born. I think I’m probably owed some back pay, too, come to think of it…
That sucks, and it’s an unfair expectation, but I understand where people are coming from on that front. I’m really dedicated to that end myself, as I want to effect change as much as humanly possible (though I have limited opportunities to do so). Still, you are well within your rights to be angry about these issues – it’s just, lashing out won’t really do much. But as you said, it should not be your job.
” but I honestly don’t think anywhere in his mind was the thought of “She’s blacker than I am””
Except Walky himself said “[Sal]’s black, I’m beige”.
^^Yes to this.
One time a black man was arrested in our town for stealing a really nice car.
The man was Levar Burton of Star Trek NG, and the car was his own. The cops just thought he stole it because he was black.
btw this happened in Northern California.
I think the problem here is that you’re conflating “is acting racist” with “is a racist”. Racist as an adjective applies to everyone at some point in their lives; there is basically no person who is magically immune to racial prejudice. Racist as a noun is much harder to define.
We can argue whether Walky is “a racist” (I agree it’s an extreme term, and shouldn’t be used for him.) The original point that IN THIS ONE COMIC, he was using a racist argument, is completely different. And objectively true.
Now my mind is all a-twitter, re-examining everything I’ve seen them do here. Is Sal schtupping Jason because he is so very, VERY White(tm), in addition to being a potential gateway to further academic success, which she subconsciously associates as something her parents would approve of?
Woah.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
Your gravatar is perfect for your response.
Billie sums up my reaction to this whole day.
All three months of it.
So I guess both have different reasons to be angry about their upbringing?
IT’S WALKY
…because Parent’s Day Weekend What the Fuck
Not even Walky got out of this day scotch free. Hell the only not hurt by this are Mike and Joe… Oh well tomorrow is a new day, new opportunities to screw them over too.
OH MY GOD I JUST REMEMBERED WHERE AMBERS MOM IS.
With Amber? She and Joe’s dad stopped banging hours ago.
It’s the end of the day, when they say bye to their kids, they could’ve started up again.
Since I’m both races I’ll be accepted by EVERYBODY!
Yeah, sure. Lemme know how that works out for you.
So the dad is biracial and they’re a quarter? Did we know that already? I don’t know why I assumed they were the halfies.
In any case that post above about treating their daughter differently subconsciously is along the lines of what I was thinking. I’ve got a cousin who has boy and girl twins and she has preferred little girls for forever, so even if she doesn’t see it, it’s very blatant how differently she punishes the two for the exact same crime. The little girl can do no wrong while I’m sure the boy has memorized every detail on every corner in the house.
So if the preference for Walky started in a similar way – be it because how less ethnic he is or something else – I totally understand how it came about. Glad Billy was there to witness this. Maybe it’ll bring her and Sal closer – or at least talk more about multi-racial experiences. I haven’t read any of the other comics yet, so I’d like to learn more about Billy.
Is it wrong that in the first couple panels, I was kinda hoping Walky and Sal would make out?
Yes…Very Yes!
Keroshino….we need to talk.
Uh..my comment was in response to the question “is it wrong”
I can’t help it that my smiling Walky gravatar approves!
Oh, I thought you approve of incest…..I’ll stay in the corner out of shame.
Frankly, give the way we are expected to accept gay relationships, bi relationships, inter-racial relationships, polyandrogynous relationships, and people arbitrarily deciding that they are males trapped behind women’s genitalia (or vice-versa), why should incest be the one and only taboo that we still are shocked about?
Think about it before tearing me a new one. I’m not saying that I’m in favor of it either, but if something starts going down a slippery slope it’s generally going to go all the way to the bottom.
Ignoring everything else: “arbitrarily deciding” is not generally how that works.
Well, a big part of incest being taboo has to do with it usually being a parent and child, or older and younger siblings by a significant degree, and it is RARELY consensual. Admittedly, this would be covered by the usual rape/sexual abuse laws, so who knows? The genetic drift issues with incest are pretty rare at this point, so the bigger concern is generally abuse of a relationship already in place, and that isn’t “slippery slope” at all, in the way you have described.
“Genetic drift?” Jeez, I need sleep, that makes no sense. I meant the issues with excessive inbreeding, sorry.
That’s… wow, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that’s worse than Faz/Dina.
That’s the best ship ever.
Also, Marrying a black dude kinda doesn’t mean that you can’t have racial preference.
Initial reaction: good job Walky, for not buying into Sal’s explanation right away! Skepticism is always good. Maybe it means he’s going to put in some effort into this relationship!
4th/5th panel reaction: Whoops, nope, he was using it just to maintain his existing views in the laziest way possible and stormed out like a child. F-, would not Walky again.
I’m a little puzzled by this. Walky racism (or not) aside, does Sal have any proof that this is about relative levels of blackness? It’s not like race has to be the only motivator.
All I can remember that might support such an assertion is her dad preferring her hair straight.
I’m not really certain that that would mean anything, though. Are you racist if you don’t find certain genetic traits attractive? If so, I’m probably in trouble. :/
I mean, she’s talking about her whole childhood. I assume moments like the ‘straight hair’ comment and such are more about illustrating it to us, the readers. Presumably Sal has had a lifetime of experiences backing up her feelings- not just the ones we’ve happened to see in this story line, ya dig?
That’s possibly true, but the immense vagueness really makes me think Sal is full of crap (in terms of broad strokes). I mean we have virtually no evidence of how Sal and Walky’s parents treat them besides the hair comment.
Its very possible that Sal has built up a persecution complex off various minor incidents. Or maybe I’m being unfairly skeptical.
We have the scene where her mom totally ignores her in favour of trying to set up a date with Walky’s girlfriend’s family. If that isn’t preferential treatment, I don’t know what is.
Like Walky said, she did rob a convenience store. I don’t feel like we have seen enough to accurately evaluate whether he parents are racially biased against her (I could very well be forgetting some key scene earlier) but by this point in her life their attitude could also be affected by her behavior.
she also says that her parents have been treating her differently since BEFORE that incident, so. It’s very likely that she robbed a convenience store because negative attention is better than no attention.
And we ONLY have her word for that.
Did you keep detailed records of your childhood? Do you faithfully record every event that occurs in your life?
I don’t understand this inclination to discount Sal just because she didn’t video tape her entire life and doesn’t have a notarised record of everything that happened to her.
Yeah, all she has is her word, but what about Walky? It’s not like he has any more “evidence” than she does.
Yes, and Walky did say she robbed a convenience store. It fact, he says it again and again. I can think of two occasions when he throws that in her face to shut her up. Walky isn’t exactly unbiased where his sister is concerned either.
I still think she could turn out to be completely wrong though. They do play favorites with Walky from what we have seen but it could be based off of anything. There are tons of potential things, he’s also male and the big one to me is that he is younger. Not only younger but the baby. Parents often give tons of attention to the youngest child. Then the more attention they gave him the more Sal acted out to get their attention, that’s standard too. Before long they might say things like “Why can’t you be more like Walky?”. Then she turns out to be really independent and he winds up being hapless, which just continues the pattern of him getting all the attention..
Of course she could be right too, it could have a lot or at least partly to do with racism. I just don’t feel like it’s for sure since it’s only her judgement call made as a teenager, she hasn’t even been around her parents much (at all?) since being shipped off to private boarding school. This is the same teenager that made the judgement call that robbing a convenience store was a good idea.
They’re twins. The most he can be younger by is a few hours.
Btdubs, they’re twins. (Not disagreeing with your comment, just giving information.)
It could be based on anything, but I’m inclined to say that she would have a better idea of what, than someone looking in from the outside (us), would have. Since she’s been there her whole life.
I think it has more to do with grades, the one shes trying to bang Jason for. She at one points threatened to run them over if they didn’t appreciate her getting a good grade.
I had an older sister that was constantly at odds with my parents growing up while I was treated much better. This isn’t at all the same thing since I come from a white family, but I think it’s the attitudes of everyone that conflict with each other. I was a very quiet shy person growing up while my sister was very brash and stubborn.
I’m not saying what Sal and Walky are going through are the same thing, but I think attitudes and personalities of people make the difference with families than looks. I could be very wrong on this, but I’m definitely leaning toward Walky’s side rather than Sal’s. Not saying Sal is wrong, just saying I agree with Walky. Then again what do I know? Like I said, I’m white lol.
indeed! let’s read and learn and figure out why there seems to be more to this than meets the eye!
Of course, your example *might* have the cause and effect flipped. Which came first, the brash behavior or the clashing? Or maybe the two of them cause a negative feedback loop that only reinforces the worst behaviors on both sides?
I don’t know your family at all, but I’d guess something like this is the case with Sal.
Damn,sometimes you just need too keep it shut
Walky looks like he’s walking bowlegged in the sixth panel
Maybe he has stayed indoors too long and developed Rickets.
Huh. Here I thought Sal and Walky were half white/ half East Indian , given their parents’ respective ethnicities. Wouldn’t have guessed that they’re both WORD REMOVED OMFG
ok. prickly, you can’t use that word. it is a designation that was used to deny loooooots of people rights, amongst a category of words used to that same end. basically it is a sub category of the “one drop rule.” look that up. then you will know how to be kinder!
Actually, that word is derogatory (because of its connections with slavery and colonialism). You might not want to use it anymore.
*winces* Please don’t use that.
Yeah, maybe if you don’t wanna get into your sister’s crazy thoughts don’t ask her about her weird behavior.
Looks like no one here is flinging about the q-word here, what with this revelation of Papa Walkerton’s bi-racialness. Excellent. Carry on.
Fuck, I spoke too soon. Bad Prickly! Bad! Not a good word!
: ( two comments up buddy : (
I don’t even know how to respond.
ok I’ll figure something out
It wasn’t there while I was typing up my comment (and reading Wikipedia about it). I even did a keyword search on the forum. Bleah.
I haven’t even heard of that.
welcome one and all to a big bummer
I didn’t know it about it either. I guess there had to be some word for that.
There’s a q-word? I’m not sure if I’m happy I missed this, or worried that now I don’t know about offensive word that I should avoid.
There’s an m-word and a q-word and an o-word and probably others that I forget just now, and as long as you don’t feel the need to use terminology developed to describe the ancestry of people-as-livestock, you’re probably safe from using them accidentally.
Aw geez, that’s a lot of letter words.
Having googled the q-word, yeah, I’m not really in danger of accidentally using it around the office. I was worried it was a more modern word. Ignorance of racism isn’t a valid excuse for making someone uncomfortable.
Being mixed rarely ever gives you a ‘Get Out Of Racism’ card, in fact the chances are, you risk being given the Two For One Racism branding instead.
YAAAAYYYYYY?
2-Racisms for the price of 1!
Yes but they are obviously non-identical given they are different sexes. Given they developed from different eggs their genes could have developed in radically different ways. You get half and half from your parents, not a blend so they’re likely 50% genetically different.
I think…
Walky is going to have a hard time believing his parents don’t love sal the way they love him, whether it’s racist based or not.
Noone wants to hear that their parents are assholes.
If you call my mom an asshole we’re gonna throw down.
Yep, and it can be worse for a favorite child like walky.
Actually Walky acknowledges this right away, saying something along the lines “well, I didn’t steal stores sis. You kind of earned that second place”.
Sal: “Everybody loves Walky…” *channeling Robert*
Ironic, considering Robert’s a cop instead of a criminal.
You know thinking about it, she thinks her twin brother looks whiter then her, her TWIN brother
Okay, but we had like 20 comment threads about this yesterday too, and skin tone is clearly not the only way interpret Sal’s comment. I mean given that a whole sub-section of the storyline has been dedicated to hair…
(Plus, they’re not identical twins, so the argument doesn’t stand up anyways. I mean, they do have the same skin tone, but not all twins do.)
Given that she says it started at BIRTH, it seems like skin color would really be the only factor she COULD be referring to. Most newborns don’t really have much personality or cultural identity that could define them as “whiter”
Frankly, as a mixed race person person with a slightly darker older sister, I find the whole concept of “shades of whiteness” a bit offensive. Growing up, our situation was a bit reversed from Sal and Walky here. My sister was more like our non-white dad, both in appearance, personality, and possessing “nonwhite personality traits” (as the discussion usually labels these things). I felt she was favored (or at least had an easier relationship with him) as a result. In truth, it had far more to do with just our personalities than it did with any of our racial traits. But its not easy to feel like your parent prefers your sibling (cain and abel much?), and it wasn’t until i really dealt with some of my own internalized racism and the feelings I had about what was expected of me based on my racial identity that I realized how little my being “whiter” than my sister really had to do with my relationship with my dad. I may be projecting onto Sal here, but it seems like she may be doing the same thing. I don’t doubt that their parents displayed some favoritism even before she broke the law (though I doubt that was her first serious misbehavior). If this issue of Walky being “whiter” is really something she’s never spoken about openly before, it’s very possible that it’s something she built up in her head based on comments like the one about her hair to explain the favoritism without having to take responsibility for her own actions (acting out to get attention isn’t her fault if her parent(s)’s racism meant she could NEVER earn their approval). We don’t know much about how their parents really treated them or whether her accusation holds any water, but we do know Sal is pretty immature and blames her parents for her misbehavior.
Hair texture, natural ease in a predominately white culture, and mannerisms.
She also thinks he looks more masculine.
They are SO identical, in the it’s walky universe walky put oon a wig and he looked just like sal
Also when they got switched in time-stopped Canada.
And you can even see it in panel #3
They are self-evidently not identical; they’re different genders. They’re twins, and look very similar, but they cannot be identical.
Actually, it theoretically is possible for identical twins to be different genders.
The way this would happen is the original egg would have XY and therefore be male, but when this egg splits into two to form twins, though it should have XY, the Y for some reason is not there, possibly due to incorrect DNA replication, an enzyme not functioning properly or possibly the egg splitting before a second Y has been formed, leaving the original with XY but the other one as X0 (the 0 represents the lack of a second chromosome).
The one with XY would develop into a male, but, the one that is X0 would develop into a female because they only have an X to determine their gender.
This is likely not the case as X0 females tend to be short and Sal seems quite tall but, it is still theoretically possible for ‘identical’ twins to not be the same gender and there actually was a news story at one point about identical twins that had different skin colours due to a mutation so not all ‘identical’ twins actually look identical, even if their DNA is still almost completely identical.
It’s not even theoretical. It’s very rare, but it happens.
“GOOD NIGHT. I HAVE TO USE THE BATHROOM.” And then Walky did the poop-strut out of the room.
Scene.
“Poop-strut” is absolutely part of my vocabulary now. That is awesome.
It’s weird seeing Walky be serious in this way.
He isn’t very good at it, evidently.
Dude, Walky does have balls of steel.
perhaps that is why he is walking bowlegged?
That last panel summarized this whole arc in a few words.
Most comments I see here is that the follow this logic:
* Sal has self-image issues.
* Sal claims her parents are racist and liked her less because she was darker than her (TWIN) brother.
–> Therefore, her parents MUST be (subconsciously) racist and Walky is essentially a huge dick who doesn’t care for her sister.
You people amaze me…
The fact that Sal has a self-image issue could be the reason why she thinks her parents disliked her more than her brother due to her looks, not the other way around. We clearly lack some information to make a proper judgment here. Why do you simply assume Sal is right?
From what we know, Sal was a far worse daughter than Walky, and she just avoided spending more than 5 minutes her parents…
So evidence is kind of against her claims so far…
So, what you are saying is that Sal’s arguement is hugely one sided?
I do think that Walky is the favorite however I don’t think he’s at any fault nor do I actually think that the Walkertons are racist. I think that Sal just wants a reason to blame Walky, her competition for her parent’s affection.
Except she’s not blaming him. She’s taking out her anger, frustration and pain on him, but she’s blaming her parents.
Quoth the Willis:
This does not prove Sal is correct in her perceptions. I personally think it is incredibly likely, but all Willis was doing was correcting all of the people who assume that race ends at skin color.
Silly Willis… if I wanted to pay attention, I would be studying.
The fact that I am on the internet discussing a web-comic with strangers pretty much illustrates my null willingness to pay attention.
* Sal has self image issues – Yes, largely focused on her racial appearances and the lengths she goes to to “pass” as, as Walky put it once, generically beige.
* Sal claims her parents are racist… – Actually, Walky is the first one to call it racist, not Sal. Also, Sal being blacker has nothing to do with her being darker, and this has been explained. Do her parents like Walky better? Based on how they’ve treated Sal this weekend, it definitely seems like it. I mean, they’ve kept her and Walky separated for five years, and now they barely acknowledge her when she’s in the same room. It seems some people here seem to think favoring one child is different from disfavoring the other, and I can’t really see how it is.
And one last, giant point: Why oh why, considering everything we’ve seen go down this weekend, do you think that the parents are really likely to magically redeem themselves of all they’re shortcomings? Even if Sal is imagining the reason for the favoritism, that would be a failure on the parents part for not actually getting to know their daughter and doing the responsible, adult thing and talking to we about it. That said, I believe that, based on the strip thus far, that Sal does have some very real reasons to feel the way she does. And at this point, I wouldn’t even be surprised with a flashback reveal of some childhood bleaching cream trauma, though that seems too extreme and not the path we’re going down.
that is pretty much my sister to a tee, just replace racist with sexist. She decided my parents preferred their son to her because they never yelled at me, missing the fact that as a teenager she was fucking insane to the point of smashing windows when she didn’t get the car she demanded. To this day she honestly believes she was an angel growing up, and can’t even remember coming home in a police car. The irony is i thought SHE was the favourite because she was the high acheiver.
Well, Sal’s life isn’t very good right now, have we all forgotten the British assistant teacher or whatever.
To be fair I believe that my black heritage actually made be more racist against black people and white people and… You know what, the list might be shorter if I just say who I’m not judgmental against.
Non-racism list:
– {space reserved}
You know, no matter how advanced we are, we never be able to stop being a racist prick. And by we, I mean the human race.
Going back on the archives, it seems that Walky has encountered an emotional outburst from Sal before and his response was “I cannot deal with these female emotions”
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/to-navigate/
Yeah it’s been established that Walky’s sexist, what with all his “ew girl things!” talk.
or he’s trying to cling to his childhood.
Doesn’t matter the reason, his attitude towards “girly” traits and items is sexist.
To be fair to Walky, if his teacher was Sal, she has the tendency to make very sudden and grave accusations, has a very short temper, and as we’re learning in this week’s strip, he never really understood why she felt that way (because she never told him, and he was a young kid and didn’t know how to ask).
Is it sexist of him to apply it to all women? Of course it is, but hopefully it’s something he’s learning to change. Sal’s still an enigma to him though.
To be fair, Salay not have had a chance to talk to Walky about this since we don’t know when Sal began to recognize her treatment as the result if her parents’ racial preferences. While she may have acted out due to neglect, it’s entirely possible that she only came to this particular revelation during her stay at a catholic school in Tennessee. Hate to say it, but five years in a more southern state can make you plenty more aware of racial issues…
“Recognize” implies that that is in fact the cause of the disparity, which we really have no basis for assuming other than Sal’s word.
We have more than her word, we have the encounter with her parents, where she was ignored by one and verbally backhanded by the other within a few minutes of stepping in the door. Her mom didn’t even bother to find out where she went; when the dean asked where Sal was she just said, “I don’t know. She does her own thing.”
Is that evidence for the cause being racial? It’s definitely the beginning of it. Her father’s comment on her hair is definitely racially charged, though at least he spoke to her. That’s the other thing about that scene, we had the lovely image of the her dad paying more attention to her than her mom, and actually addressing more talk bubbles at her than he does Walky, nicely splitting the parental attention down racial lines.
We also have today’s strip, where Walky does not do a stellar job of defending his parents. In fact, he rage-quits in a way that seems to only lend more credence to Sal’s accusation. But most telling is Billie’s choice of metaphor, a get out of jail free card. It implies that Walky’s parents are already in said jail and cannot get away with being racist simply because they’re in a mixed relationship. Since Billie knows the family very well, I consider that good evidence that this issue is not something Sal is just making up.
All of that aside though, what’s wrong with taking Sal at her word? She’s clearly hurt and neglected, and she knows more about her family life than we ever will. I say she’s credible until proven otherwise. Anything else seems too dismissive to me.
Good post.
Because the only difference between their parents is their race, right? I mean it couldn’t be that their dad is just more forgiving, or that their mom has an unhealthy fixation on Walky’s future (which we know she does) or any of a plethora of other reasons, Billie saying that Walky was wrong does not equate saying that Sal was right. We can’t take Sal’s word because it’s clearly compromised her ability to think about things clearly and calmly. She’s pissed and pissed people aren’t reasonable. Also, how the hell does not wanting to talk to someone who is screaming at you constitute a rage-quit?
Thank you, Kladeos. And Andiemus: I think Linda is probably pretty forgiving considering Walky’s tendency to put his foot in his mouth She certainly wasn’t upset over how he made an ass of himself in front of the dean/her former husband. Speaking of which, she doesn’t appear to be holding a grudge against her ex-husband in any noticeable way. Not that everyone has to have baggage, but if she was that unforgiving I would think we’d see something. And it’s been like five years since Sal’s crimes so she’s had plenty of time to forgive, or at least acknowledge her.
Saying it could be any number of other things doesn’t really cut it when there’s evidence in the story that backs Sal up. Sal is shown to be treated differently by her two parents, and this treatment happens to correspond to the race she can pass as. Her dad, who treats her the nicest thus far, says he prefers her with a more Walkyish, stereotypically whiter hairstyle. This is narrative fact, and not to be ignored.
Also, you can’t discount someone’s emotions just because they’re angry. People can get pissed for perfectly valid, legitimate reasons. Pissed people can be reasonable. Notice that Sal listens to Walky’s response in this strip, waiting for him to give a real answer? To dismiss her ideas because of her anger is to be no better than Walky refusing to deal with female emotions. It’s a personal attack on her and her feelings, not the point she’s making, and that’s not cool. Go read this as homework and take it to heart: http://www.doctornerdlove.com/2012/07/labeling-women-crazy/
Now, Billie clearly chose sides in this because she offered this statement unprompted and in direct opposition to what Walky was saying. It takes a large amount of conviction to just interrupt an argument like that, and her response is reasonable and supportive of Sal’s claim. If she wasn’t taking sides, she would have been very quick to say something to neutralize her position on the matter. But she’s not playing politics, she’s calling Walky out on a false assumption.
And Walky so totally rage-quits. Yes, Sal yells at him, but then she stops and listens. Walky then attacks her mental well-being, repeats her own argument back to her (slightly skewed to mock it), and then leaves. Once Billie shows support for Sal, Walky is then faced with dealing with two(!) women and their emotions in an argument he knows he can’t win. So he scowls and leaves in a puff of wangst.
Just remember that if you call Walky a racist because you believe Sal over him, you’re still erasing and belittling the lived experience of a black person (Walky) and telling him that HIS personal experience of racism is wrong. So, those people who think that Walky must be wrong don’t get the moral high ground over those who think Sal is wrong. So don’t be so quick to say Walky has to be wrong.
Except Walky hasn’t actually given his personal experience on how they were raised. He hasn’t even made a counter-argument to Sal’s. All he’s done is personally attacked her by calling her crazy, and repeated her own argument back to her in a mocking way. He hasn’t even defended his own earlier point that Sal’s treatment is due to her criminal past. In order for us to consider Walky’s opinion on the matter, he has to actually give one instead of just attacking Sal’s.
More importantly perhaps, I don’t think we’re saying Walky is racist. We’re talking about their parents. Walky is guilty of willful ignorance and sexist gaslighting, but I don’t see enough evidence to say he’s racist by any stretch.
waaaaalsss of teeext
Billie’s right. I’m the same ethnicity as my grandparents and they didn’t like me as much as my cousins cuz I’m darker than they are
Billie’s right. *Refer to a single anecdote that should speak for all mixed people.* Sorry, not my experience, honey. Oh, and sorry about your grandparents’ apparent bigotry.
Don’t be a dick to Nalem. She doesn’t deserve it. If you wanna be a dick to anyone, then be a dick to me.
Not sure if you’re giving me sass and if you are, I’m not sure why, haha. But Billie might be talking from her own experience. She’s mixed, isn’t she? Maybe she’s seen it firsthand in her life. Maybe that’s why she drinks.
I’m just saying it DOES happen. I just used my own experience as an example. It sucks, but it happens. People are weird, and by weird I mean stupid.
As for Sal, unless we learn more about her and Walky’s backstory, we can’t really know. Gotta admit,less answers makes it fun to speculate.
Okay even if what she said is somehow true, and I am not certain that it is, what right did she have to throw all of that in Walky’s face?
As far as I can tell he does not suck up to their parents or throw the respect they have for him in her face.
I think there is more some deep-seated jealousy on her part more than any fictitious racial aspect.
I don’t know, he’s thrown the convenience store robbing in her face before, once because she disapprove of pajama jeans. Walky and Sal obviously have issues with each other, and most of that probably stems from their parents’ treatment. If one parents favors a child, that child is going to internalize that and treat their sibling accordingly.
I’d say it’s different. Walky knee-jerks at racism, and not being able to pyjama pants? He ignores female ‘feel-feels’? Walky’s not deliberatly being a dick or racist, it looks like he’s trying to not grow up, and’ll lash at anything that threatens that. I reckon his relationship with his girlfriend’ll help him get over it, since it’s the right mix of childish/adult (cartoons/sex) and dorothy’s temperment is right to let him be goofy as an adult and see that it’s acceptable. When they break up, he’ll retreat into kid things HARD.
You don’t have to deliberately be a jerk or racist. Doesn’t mean you’re not one/both.
You put your finger on something, Willis. I must commend you on your spot-on portrayals of the difficulties and insecurities we deal with in our society as we explore the fraught topics of sexuality, race, etc.
I also think why Walky stomped out like that was when Billie decided to chime in say that basically his parents were racists. he was upset and angry when Sal said it, but he became furious when she butted in with the comment. this was obviously a very personal/family issue and Billie (even if she was caught between it) interjected at a terrible point.
Anyone else get the feel that now that he’s storming out, that gives us WEEKS to wait for this issue to be brought up and/or addressed again??
Possibly.
Yup
That depends, weeks in our time or weeks in DoA time?
Changing the subject; Does anyone else think that Leslie(and Willis) will use the photo shoot at the Portland, Oregon Ducati dealership as part of a lesson of sexism in advertising? It would certainly fit in with her gender studies class.
Reminds me of the Hawkeye Initiative.
It’s been shown that Sal’s mom ignored her in favor of calling Walky’s girlfriend. It’s also shown that Sal’s dad told her she looked prettier with straight hair. I can see why Sal could think it is a race issue. She has had a lifetime of non-acceptance and comparison to Walky, the golden (caramel) one. The one Mom is in love with.
The issue between the Sal and the other Walkertons actually is not totally racial, but Sal has focused on her hair, probably to avoid the incredible pain of recognising the all the ways she has been put down and ignored. Mom totally ignores her when she walked into the room. How many thousands of times has that happened before? I don’t know but I would guess a hell of a lot.
Walky is the one who is a brainiac. He doesn’t even have to study for his grades; Sal is flunking math, despite screwing Jason. I remember how angry she got when she said,”I’m not dumb!” How many times has she been compared unfavorably to Walky in terms of the smarts department. I believe once again that it has been a lot.
I think only part of it is the difficult hair (having hair like Sals can be very hard to manage….I have that kind of hair and I know), part of it is that she is not gifted, and part of it is that she is a girl….and not Mom Walkerton’s favorite.
I agree with Peruhains comment. Mr. Willis does indeed explore difficult and hot topics of our society. And he does it very well.
I also have to commend this entire thread. This is an excellent discussion among a diverse group of people on racism and sexism. People are putting their feeling out there and other people are listening. It’s great.
It really is. No name calling, no screaming. Just listening to each other.
Frankly, I think the race stuff here is mostly a red herring. I guess its possible that Sal was treated differently because Walky was somehow seen as the “whiter” one, but this is the first we’ve really heard of it, I’m not seeing the evidence right now.
What is really, visibly wrong here is the way a brother and sister are treating each other. Sal is making some incredibly harsh accusations, but she’s laying all of her emotions out on the table. Walky should be able to plainly see that his sister must be living with an outstanding amount of pain to be saying what she’s saying, whether it’s true or not, but he doesn’t seem to show a shred of empathy or even concern. We don’t really know what the content of their upbringing was, but both of them clearly have SERIOUS problems.
I’ve gotta say, this arc is particularly painful for me to read, strikes a chord.
WHOA! All Walky did was say “hey sis – yr hair’s straight again” after he saw it curly like 2-3 hours ago – and all of a sudden he’s in the wrong for not IMMEDIATELY ACCEPTING his parents are racist scum?
Maybe some of y’all should think about his feelings as well, that’s all I’m saiyng……………………cause it CERTAINLY doesnt look like Sal is thinking of her bro’s feelings in this at all either………………
Frankly, I don’t think we’ve got any specific reason to say that Walky’s being racist at all here, it’s his lack of empathy for his own sister that’s got me concerned. It doesn’t seem to bother him that she’s in pain. Whether she’s correct or incorrect is besides the point.
I am thinking about his feelings, though, if anything he was the first one I identified with after reading the last strip. I thought he’d be completely gutted by what she said, I sure would be. Instead he seems to be trying to shrug it off as irrational, but emotions are real whether they are rational or not. We don’t actually know what he’s feeling right now, he hasn’t shown us yet.
To him she may have always been the one acting out for no reason. I know it’s not fair to hold the other universe against her but Sal has a long history of being angry and wrong about everything.
I believe she feels wronged, I believe she feels she knows why but I doubt she’s actually right about the reasons. Though I guess she could be since for some reason Willis seemed determined to give her the same problems she had in the other universe but needed a new situation to do so.
I understand why Walky would get upset, nobody wants to think their parents might be racists, especially not if that’s the reason they’ve been favored.
its hard to feel bad for someone when they’re taking it out on you. Especially when it’s this extreme. and gutted doesn’t just mean you get sad. he could take it as a betrayel, which would fit the image here.
More precisely
He remarked on her hair.
She made it clear this was a sensitive subject.
He proceeded to mock her attempts at dressing up for the parents.
She expressed insecurities over her relationship with her parents.
He blamed her for her shitty relationship with her parents.
This is when we get to the racism allegations.
If you were to properly truncate this it would be “All Walky did was say ‘hey sis – it’s your own fault mom and dad don’t like you'” and now all of a sudden he’s in the wrong for yadda yadda yadda.
Sure, but in a healthy relationship, a brother should be able to make a remark about his sister’s sudden change in hairstyle, or a particularly unusual outfit without an episode. Sal clearly had a chip on her shoulder, and to her credit, was completely honest about it. He sure as hell picked the wrong time to bring up the robberies, though. What bugs me is that he seems to be more interested in winning the argument than addressing the problem.
He picked the wrong time to even enter the room really. She’s clearly not in the mood for company.
Feel like a lot of people would’ve seen the way she lashed out after having her hair brought up and just decided they’d come back later.
Well, think about it, haven’t you ever tried to talk to a sibling or family member when they were angry or upset? As ugly as it is, I think they’re actually both better off for having had this confrontation. If anything, the worst decision Walky’s making right now is walking away instead of laying out his own emotions.
I don’t see him as even trying to argue with her or try to win anything. To me his comments seem jests or attempts to defuse the situation. It’s not until she bring up the race allegations he gets pissed and begins to argue.
Him bringing up the robbery wasn’t an accusation or mockery or him trying make her feel bad, just a natural reaction to he accusing him of being the fave which is hurtful however you look at: “People who love you love you for no good reason”
I can maybe give him the benefit of the doubt for being caught off guard. There’s no doubt that Sal is being extremely hurtful here, she basically accused him of stealing her parents love by being born the wrong tint of “generically beige”. But honestly, if your own sister comes up to you and tells you that your parents didn’t love her as much, is the brotherly thing to say, “Yes, but here’s why!”
It’s to say… well I don’t know what the hell you’re supposed to say to that. Maybe it’s to just give her a hug and cry for little while.
I’m pretty sure Walky trying to give Sal a hug in that situation would involve him getting bruised shortly thereafter 🙁
Walky walking away. Seems to be some kind of theme for his story. Usually he does it before he gets hurt, though. I don’t know if he knew he could be hurt. This could be a learning experience for both of them.
Although that will depend on Sal to follow him and forcing him to talk. Be brave, Sal. Just a little longer. Please.
I’m not sure Sal continuing to follow him and yell would be productive.
/e eats popcorn
There’s no doubt Sal believes absolutely that what she says about her parents is true. That doesn’t mean she’s right.
When we don’t get the support and acceptance we need from our parents one of the main responses is to look for a reason. Being able to say ‘this is why this happens’ can be a powerful coping mechanism, even if it doesn’t actually make the pain any less. So if you’re an unloved or unfavourite child you can become powerfully invested in whatever explanation you believe explains your second class status.
I’m not arguing Walky’s status as the favourite – the most recent story arc makes that clear. I’m arguing that we don’t have enough evidence to know if it’s for the reasons Sal thinks it is. Personally, based on the way Mrs Walkerton was acting, I think her preference for Walky is more sex based. Her attitude seemed to be ‘this is my male child’ (with a side order of ‘this is my smart child’), not ‘this is my whiter child.
It’s also possible that racial prejudice Sal has experienced elsewhere has inclined her to think of racism first whenever she encounters someone who doesn’t care for her.
or that walky is still a massive child and the parents are reacting to that, while sal has made repeated adult choices which makes the clearly mother-henning parent back off as that one’s “flown the nest”.
Deep down, I just want Sal and Walky to hug each other and say that they love each other. 🙁 It’s always tragic when siblings carry this kind of baggage between each other. I think I would be devastated if I didn’t have a positive relationship with my sister.
Something to say about this comic that isn’t about the race discussion. Something to say about this comic that isn’t about the race discussion…
Billie still has tits and she’s still hot.
Though I don’t think that mustard color really works on her.
That’s supposed to be her old HS colors, which I’ve narrowed down to the orange and blue of Silver Creek HS in Sellersburg IN. The orange has probably faded a bit.
I think I recall Willis saying specifically that Billie’s high school is fictional.
I think the people giving Walky a hard time need to give him a break.
For starters everyone saying he provoked this needs to re-read those pages. He obviously didn’t mean anything harmful by it and as Billie pointing out right at the start “Him you might have to spell it out for”. They were either said in jest (The way he talks to everyone and the way everyone talks to him) or to try and change the topic/cool things down.
Remember this whole exchange did not take place over a week of comics but in less than a minute. Can everyone here say they would have reacted quickly and perfectly when they were 18? It’s not easy to do when it comes at you as such a surprise and is delivered by an angry yelling person.
Sal started yelling and swearing at him the moment this conversation began and he tried to defuse it several times. Its only now he’s spit back and he’s honestly been more restrained than I would have been. “You never had to try to be their fave” is frankly in insulting. He likely did a lot to get parental approval and to be told that was “Nothing” would have gotten me yelling at her two strips ago.
Finally, even assuming their parents treated Walky better than Sal, THIS ISN’T HIS FAULT. The relationships problems between Sal and her parents are their problems. It has obviously never even crossed his mind until now.
Also given how easily lefties and social justice people (Of who I am one) throw out the accusation of racism people seem to forget what a serious accusation and insult it is. Being a racist is only one step below a pedophile in the eyes of society. For Sal to throw these sort of accusations at the parents they love is never going to be easy for Walky to hear at the best of times, nevermind when she is yelling and swearing and he’s not ready for it.
Considered the fact he’s been completely blind sided and how emotionally charged the subject matter is Walky has responded in a pretty subdued manner. If I was this subdued in a similar situation it’d only be because of cowardice.
And as a final note, while it’s not really related to the parent relationship, on a wider societal level does anyone doubt Walky encounters just as much racism as Sal does given he is obviously not white?
People tend to forget that pain is pain. Just because you are, say, depressed for no reasons doesn’t mean it can’t be as cutting as if you lost a child.
Well put. +1 internet for you.
“And as a final note, while it’s not really related to the parent relationship, on a wider societal level does anyone doubt Walky encounters just as much racism as Sal does given he is obviously not white?”
Walky may have concluded that any prejudice he encounters happens because he acts like an idiot. Which wouldn’t bother him, because acting like an idiot is his own choice.
(skims comments) So….Does nobody else think that Walky’s stutter in his response seems telling? Like he’s trying to rationalize a dozen little behaviors in his parents that just came to mind without acknowledging them out loud?
Or he’s surprised, taken off guard by an accusation that to him is both emotionally charged and comes from nowhere.
Has no one else’s mind gone blank in a similar situation?
Billie also stuttered. Just seems like a stutter kind of conversation.
pretty sure it was established upthread that the accusation isn’t coming from nowhere
I suspect Sal’s right simply because that seems like the direction the storyline wants to go. I highly doubt Willis is going to turn around and pull out a “Actually, Sal is just paranoid! Boy it sure is dumb when black people think people are being racist, but they’re actually wrong! Good thing you’ve got a white guy to write a story about how that can happen.” No, I do not think that is going to be the outcome. It is almost certain that Sal is actually right that her parents have treated herself and Walky differently over the years, and racial characteristics have been a big reason way.
Even if this weren’t fiction, where we can make obvious guesses about narrative arcs and authorial intention, I’d still be inclined to believe Sal, since she’s lived it and I haven’t.
Also, if you check the cast page, Walky and Sal have different skin tones there.
“Also, if you check the cast page, Walky and Sal have different skin tones there.”
Not on my 18-inch computer monitor they don’t, or if it is it is so subtle that these 59-year-old eyes can’t tell the difference.
No, Willis seems to have flat out said their skin colour is the same in the comments and that skin colour is not the point. It’s more subtle, more insidious and not entirely due to race. Given racism is itself generally regarded to be irrational it’s not something you can simply measure by opening up Photoshop and checking the colour tables on Walky and Sal.
Given his past writing I doubt Willis is going to be so blunt as to put blame entirely on the parents or have it be entirely due to racism, sub-conscious or not. Life is generally more complicated.
It’s the hair, guys, the hair.
While that’s true (so there’s probably some amount of racial component to Linda’s bad parenting towards Sal), the fact that Walky and Sal do look so similar (and the fact that we’re only getting the kids’ perspective of the whole thing) makes it seem to me that that’s not the only thing going on.
I suspect that we are going to end up seeing the whole picture at some point, and while some amount of latent racism might come into play, it looks from here like the actual causes are going to be a lot more complicated than racism alone.
I don’t doubt it’ll end up being more complicated than just that, but it’s really annoying how people keep on claiming that there is no difference between the two of them because their skin tone is the same.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
I’ve been thinking about that Phillip Larkin poem all throughout this storyline.
Walkie’s face.
He’s like,
“Really? You’re going to get TECHNICAL about calling my parents racists? REALLY?”
To be honest, I’d strut the fuck out too. That was the right move. I bet he felt like he was getting all ganged up on right then. Trying to prolong the argument would have just made things worse.
Billie is right, but it wasn’t really the right moment to bring it up. It’s a rational, logical argument and the Walkerton siblings are quite emotional at the moment.
Anyone who says they wouldn’t either start yelling back or leave is one in a hundred, nevermind to do so while 18.
I’d probably stay and try to resolve the issue. It’s actually really hard for me being the way I am, because people will get upset and try to cut off the “argument” early. I don’t understand social cues or people all that well, and it honestly baffles me every time it happens. Of course, I am one of the ~2% people (in the US, at least) diagnosed with ASD, so that might have something to do with it.
Y’know, since Billie has had more exposure to the Walkertons than to her own parents, she may be seeing the sexist/racist overtones on how they treat Sal and Walky.
Or, you know, Sal’s perspective is just extremely warped.
She was what, 13 when she held up the convenience store? That about middle school age, when there starts to be more of a difference between advanced and regular classes. Their parents disappointment may have only been caused by Sal being in lower-level classes/having worse grades.
As for the racism element, I’m going with Walky on this. Yes, Billie has a point, but its less likely than having racist classmates, who are going to see you as you struggle in class.
We really haven’t gotten enough of the story to be sure
You would know, Billie.
Okay, so for the people debating this in terms of pure skin colour or even hair “type” are missing the point. You can’t define who is more or less black/white because race is a construct and not an easily marked out and delineated reality. Racists do not go about with a colour chart and carefully check skin tone before commencing their assault. Sal’s parents did not consciously compare her and her brother and decide one was a nigger baby and deserves less love (Or at least previous experience of Willis’s skilled writing makes me believe they didn’t).
If you look at most famous genocides: The Holocaust, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, they’re committed by people who to outsiders seem no different. I have to assume one of the reasons Jews were made to wear yellow stars and funny clothes is without them it was too hard for Christian Europeans to tell the difference.
Race isn’t one of those external, definable, verifiable things like science. It’s an internal, solipsistic opinion, like your taste in films. The point is not that Sal is more or less white/black than David, it’s that she/her parents see her as such and find that more/less preferable and this may not even be a conscious expression.
It’s waaaaaaaaaay more complicated than just skin tone and hair type as you can see from the shitty job I have done explaining it.
I guess the best testimony for this comes from the numerous mixed race commentators who have testified that they have been on the receiving end of racism from both sides: To white people they seem black but to black people they can be too white. It’s not a reality but a perception, but none the less harmful for being so ephemeral.
This still runs into the same problem, what evidence have we seen that Walky is in fact more white than Sal, whatever the hell that means?
My point was no such evidence could possibly exist except in the mind of a person who thinks its evidence.
Although those people could be Sal and Linda.
You make some good points, Pinja. But I think in this case, based on Sal’s exact words (that it started at BIRTH) the implication is that being “whiter” must have had something to do with appearance. Even the social/cultural constructs which define Walky’s personality as “whiter” than hers don’t really apply to newborn infants. While I don’t doubt the sincerity of her belief that identifying as “less white” than Walky played a role in their parents’ favoritism, considering how similar Sal and Walky are in appearance, her specific claim that it began at birth makes me skeptical of the accuracy of her assessment as a whole.
For starters, Walky calls Sal “black” and himself “beige.”
I think that was a joke in hindsight….
Reading the comic, I had assumed that if there is a prejudiced element behind this (not doubting Sal, just don’t know where the comic is going) it was probably something more…gender based. That isn’t to say it isn’t still racist, but considering how alike Sal and Walky, it does seem that gender is the only big differentiation that would have been obvious from toddlerhood on.
Maybe Mr Walkerton had an African-American mother who was an activist and proud of who she was. So when Sal was born, her mother attributed racial characteristics to her because of the association with female Walkertons.
Or maybe one of the Grandmother was just much more invested in the idea of Sal not being white enough because she was a girl (Walky’s appearance coming under less scrutiny) and it comes from that.
No, Billy, it does not, but Occam’s Razor. Which requires more explanation? A woman who hates half of the mixed-race population for arbitrary reasons and whose hatred is so intense that it leads her to hate her own daughter, or a woman who prefers one child over another for reasons like gender, academic achievement (remember she thinks he’s going to medical school to be all uber-successful and shit), or even just because? There is no reason that we (or you) have seen to think that it’s a simple matter of pigmentation that leads to favoritism except the word of one VERY distraught 18-year-old.
You seem to think racism exists only in extreme hatred of another race. Racism can be subtle and unconscious. Little statements, like the one Charles made, are because society values looking “white”. This makes looking anything else but “white” looked down upon. Does Charles hate his daughter? No, but Charles tends to value looking “white” because that’s society’s perception of beauty. It’s a racist statement, but subtly and unintentionally so.
Ok, one, that’s profoundly bad English, given that racism isn’t an unconscious thing any more than Marxism because the suffix -ism means ideology and a subconscious ideology is a conflict in terms, and two, even if that awfully simplified sociological theory is true, then Sal is being even more stupid for blaming her parents for something beyond their control.
That’s a willfully limited view of what racism means, and until now I didn’t really think anyone believed something like that. The majority of racist people probably think they’re not racist because they’re not doing anything extreme like trying to reinstate segregation. Doesn’t mean they’re not racist. Racism is often subconscious, and can sometimes be changed, so you’re wrong on both counts.
Well these subtle statements are reinforcing the idea of “[insert race here] is inferior” (in this case, black) that is central to the ideology of racism, so I feel comfortable saying that the statements are racist. As the people saying them are not necessarily conscious of the racist implications, subconscious racism is an accurate statement. If you have a preferred term for this, let me know.
And Sal isn’t blaming them because society is is racist, she is blaming them for prejudicial behavior that she believes is based on their subconscious racism. And that behavior isn’t beyond their control.
Okay, so, parenting.
I can think of good reasons for almost everything:
Linda pushing Walky towards pre-med? She’d be doing him no favours just letting him drift and he doesn’t really want to do Telecommunications so until he find something he does want to do why not get him to do something productive.
Their dad’s comments on Sal’s hair? Yeah I can see the problem with them regarding her self image but they weren’t meant to be intentionally harmful. Every parent says something like this every week.
Sending her away to Catholic school? I can think of a lot of good reasons, if not ideal ones: What if her criminal associations were leading her into danger and further crime and sending them away was the only way to break that contact? What if it put David into danger? An offhand comment suggests Sal and her mother were having really heated arguments towards the end and there is a point where such things would be harmful to Walky. Sometimes these schools can be the least bad option.
What I cannot excuse however is Linda ignoring Sal when she showed up earlier in the strip. The kind of things that would justify Linda disowning her are way beyond what Sal is capable of and also don’t explain her dad is pleased to see her. I mean she didn’t even say a word, give a smile. She couldn’t spare one moment for her daughter.
That’s really shitty behaviour.
So whether or not it has a racial component I’m inclined to side with Sal in saying her mother has treated her badly and by extension her dad has failed to call her out on it. I don’t think it has anything to do with Walky (Save making her look worse by comparison) but she has been treated worse.
And that is sucky parenting.
Oh, shit, one more thing:
I think it bears mentioning that while they are bad parents to Sal, they aren’t entirely bad since they have done a good job with David: He’s fit, intelligent and well adjusted. I don’t think Sal can be blameless, even if her parents do get most of the blame. Linda is domineering but not so much that she forced Sal into committing crimes (Possibly violent crimes).
You have an interesting definition of well-adjusted.
Not disagreeing, at least in a relative sense. Just observing that it would never, ever have occurred to me to use that descriptor of him.
Possibly because his particular brand of self-centered eccentricity is extremely familiar.
Wait a moment… Walky alias “Fifty-McNuggets”-David Walkerton… well adjusted?
Walky is not well adjusted (oh, and that is a good thing, I think).
Pretty much
What does your taste in fast food have to do with how “well-adjusted” you are?
If buying and eating fifty McNuggets is not well-adjusted, I don’t want to be well-adjusted.
Walky is a perfectly normal, well-adjusted… eight year old.
It’s those other ten years that are the problem.
I whole heartedly agree. We don’t have enough info as the audience to know whether racial bias against Sal really played a role in their favoritism or if that was simply something she misinterpreted to explain it to herself (or whether doing THAT would be to let herself off the hook for her behavior or genuinely based on feeling neglected and desperately trying to understand WHY). But they are pretty shitty parents to Sal in any case for the favoritism towards Walky
Sending her away to Catholic School and having almost no contact with her for FIVE YEARS is an issue, though.
I mean, what did Linda do during long vacations? Send Sal off to some summer camp before she could unpack? Did Sal get to see any member of her family for extended periods of time during those five years?
If not that can count as neglect and isolation. And that is a bad thing to do to anyone, much less your own kid.
Sorry, kind of a sensitive subject for me. This kind of abuse happened to a close relative for two years.
…Man, this page and some of the comments are a little triggering for me. I had a rather extreme, abusive version of Sal’s parent-favouring- although race was a none-issue, and I never committed any crimes, the favourite elder sibling did.
It continued (albeit to a lesser extent) after I left home, and only started to lift after I started transitioning to male (well, once they accepted my transition anyway.) So either, it was because I was raised as a girl; because I refused to act as a girly girl; or my brother received his treatment for being a boy. Regardless, the only reason I can see is gender.
The comments are really reminding me of one thing- to this day, NOBODY else in the family will, or can, admit there was a problem. I don’t doubt that Walky and his parents see no issue, because I grew up with the same.
WAIT WAIT
It’s sexism, not racism. Look at the way Walky acts. I’ve seen other comments on this page about how Walky has a “oh god not these female emotions” thing going on. He’s been really disturbingly callous to Joyce’s and Sal’s problems.
Wouldn’t it follow that his behavior was learned?
Only here can the examplar of white male privilege be Walky. Well played Mr. Willis.
Also, most of the cast behaves like teenagers…because they are. Not very self aware, confident or comfortable. In the midst of yelling at each other, sibs are not likely to undertake a serious analysis of their past relationship.
I feel like it’s only on the strips relating to race do people go to such lengths to deny that oppression is happening. It’s like the tail end of that Malcolm X quote, “If you stick a knife in my back…
…They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
I’m of mixed race (luckily for me I look much more white than not), and I am definitely sympathetic and aware of the baggage that comes with it. I do want to say though that people are being unfair to Walky and his parents. We only have Sal’s word, and only in a single emotional outburst, that there has ever been any discrimination within the family.
At the heart of every negative racial interaction I’ve ever had, there’s been three things going on. What’s in the other person’s conscious mind, subconscious mind, and my own insecurities. Obviously I always have my own opinion on the relative proportions of those three variables, but my own insecurity is always a part of the equation. Knowing how little we know, it’s impossible to say how much of this is coming exclusively from Sal’s insecurity, rather than other people’s actions or thoughts.
Granted, you could argue, at the very least, that Sal’s parents failed to make her feel comfortable about her race, but I don’t think that’s quite fair either. This is seemingly the first time she’s raised the subject with a family member, you can’t reassure people about insecurities you don’t know exist.
Honestly, that went about as well as could be expected.
Also:
Funny thing about racism is you don’t have to “be a racist” to engage in it. You don’t have to bear anyone any ill-will at all, or even be aware of what you’re doing. It’s insidious that way.
I just realized that it’s likely that Sal recognizes the racism in her family because of her experiences in the south. It’s likely Sal was just as uninformed about microaggressions and subtle racist attitudes before she left home as Linda, Charles, and Walky seem to be. But experiences in a state where racism is more likely to be obviously present may have led to educating herself on race.
Willis sure tackles some hot topics. I read the FAQ and saw that Joyce is an autobiographical character. It is very interesting to see his intellectual growth though her.
One other thing: Im not saying Sal didn’t experience some bias because she may have, but I think she’s using that as too much of a crutch to justify her actions. Just my two cents anyway.
I think that we simply don’t have enough information to tell whether Sal’s accusation is true or not. The only interactions we’ve seen between the Walkerton family have all taken place AFTER she robbed that store and got shipped off to boarding school. Sal hasn’t presented any evidence to back up her claim, and while, as Billy foot-in-mouth-why-are-you-getting-in-the-middle-of-a-family-argument pointed out, Walky’s only sentence defending them is not exactly iron-clad, it’s a pretty heavy accusation to throw at your parents. Especially since her comment is that it started AT BIRTH, not even as the kids grew up and Walky displayed more “white” personality traits (don’t even get me started on the inherent racism involved in defining mixed race people on a spectrum of how white vs ethnic they behave).
Given what we do know (pretty much ONLY that their parents displayed favoritism for Walky even when they were little), its entirely possible that the issue of race in their parents’ favoritism is almost entirely in her head and that the severity and harshness of their present day behavior towards her is at least in part the result of her own poor choices. It’s equally possible that Walky really was just completely oblivious to a very real racial bias within his family. It seems MOST LIKELY however that any such racial element had more to do with her misbehaving for attention and the vicious cycle that creates. Her father (and I assume that it would come mainly from her dad and some internalized racism he possesses, rather than from their mother who was at least un-racist enough to marry a half-black man, would it seem reasonable for her to then display favor towards her kids based on race?) may have increased his racially charged comments and/or bias as a result of worrying that she would fall into negative black stereotypes, like say the exact kind of CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR she displayed that got her shipped off to boarding school.
Additionally, I think it’s very telling that even as she dressed up and tried to put on the illusion of being the good catholic schoolgirl daughter, she actually un-straightened her hair. If she was really trying to make them think she was fitting into the ideal she believes they want from her, wouldn’t that include straightening her hair to be whiter? It almost seems like a deliberate attempt to bait them into making a comment she can use to prove/justify her belief that their favoritism is racially based.
The hair become curly again was completely unintentional, though.
I didn’t realize that, but thinking back you may be right. It had been a while since she showed up I think, and I forgot her hair had comically curled itself already. That makes far more sense then
So, it has occurred to all these people doubting the direction this storyline is heading (that Sal’s parents made her feel lesser for her racial characteristics), or claiming that Sal may not be justified in having the feelings she has…
If this storyline ends with Sal being wrong, its moral is literally “Man, black people sure are silly, always thinking other people are racist when I, David Willis, don’t notice any racism! It’s not valid for black people to feel mistreated if they can’t explain objectively why they feel that way!”
…Yup. That definitely sounds like a storyline David Willis, Social Justice Writer, would write.
No offense intended, Spiny, but thats kind of BS. If the storyline ends that way and THAT is the moral you take away, you already HAVE a racist interpretation by making Sal represent all black people. This story is about one family and the issues involved in the favoritism they have displayed between their children. I don’t know if there really has been a racial component to it, but I believe Sal really believes its true. Her feelings are valid even if she’s incorrect (in that she has the right to feel them). There’s something inherently racist (and sadly very common) about making ethnic people/characters represent their entire race and equating their individual experience and perspective with that of the group as a whole
To clarify, I did not mean that Sal’s experiences represent all black people’s, or all biracial people, or all white people’s. And I agree that her feelings are valid even if she’s somehow “objectively” incorrect.
My point was that David Willis establishing a storyline where a character feels slighted because of her race, and then having it end with her being “wrong”, would be really fucked up. And it’s weird how many commenters think that’s the message Willis is going to send.
Why would that be fucked up?
Last I checked, there were very few people in the world that were clairvoyant/telepaths, minority or not.
Can minorities not misread people’s intentions? Are you suggesting it is impossible for a person to feel persecuted when they are not being persecuted?
Does this mean MRA’s actually have valid points (they FEEL persecuted, man! It’s fucked up for you to suggest they might be wroooooonnggg!)
/Disclosure: I do not think most MRA’s have valid feelings of opression. This disclosure is necessary due to, I am sure, the number of “BUT WHAT ABOUT MEEEENNNSSSS” folks that have joined these comment threads in the past. God knows Sinfest gets ’em.
Eh, there was a Shorpacked storyline where Leslie thought Galasso had been displaying sexist hiring/promotion policies. It turns out she was mistaken: he didn’t even understand the differences between males and females well enough to recognize gender on sight and it was simply a coincidence that he had being promoting men over women. Granted he’s a CRAZY person but its not like the moral there was that Leslie was over-reacting or out-of-line for bringing it up.
You are right though that it would be very difficult to really prove that race had NOTHING to do with the Walkertons’ favoritism. Race is such a complicated issue that it plays a role in ways we don’t always realize are even happening. For example, their dad’s comment to Sal about her hair. That could be an indicator that she’s right and there really is an overt aspect of racial bias going on. Or he could have just known that she liked having her hair straight for practical reasons and he was trying to encourage her to be herself around them instead of trying to play a role. OR he could know nothing about her preferences and really just think it looked better (possibly because he has some internalized racism about “good hair” or possibly because he REALLY just thinks SHE looks better with straight hair regardless of the associations with racial identity). OR! It was just a thing he said without thinking about it, and like almost all children she attached special significance to everything her parents say around her.
Aww… I just went back to read the strips where Sal talks to her parents and damned if her dad didn’t tell her her hair was prettier when it was straight.
Poor Sal. Poor Walky, too.
On a non-racism-related note, I’ve gotta say I like the symmetry of panel three. It’s a nice reminder of how much alike the twins are beneath the vastly different masks they show the world.
Also, I’m hoping that Sunday of Freshman Family Weekend gives us some Billie/Walkerton parents interaction. We didn’t get any of that today, because she spent the whole day with Ruth, and, as hard as I ship that, I’m also curious what the Walkertons’ relationship with their ersatz adopted daughter is really like.
Also I want to see Billie try to explain to the parents how Sal is trying to make up for her criminal past by becoming a costumed vigilante. It’ll be awful and hilarious.
Dammitalltohell, Sal is *NOT* Amazi-girl.
Pretty sure Billie doesn’t know that.
You know that, and I know that…
No, we all know it’s
GalassoAmber, but the last we heard of Billie‘s research, she had concluded it was Sal.I wouldn’t have thought to comment on this before, but I had been reading through the archives the other day, and I remember when Joyce asked Walky about what race he was, he replied that his sister was black and he was generically beige. So he’s sort of already shown that Sal isn’t wrong to think that her family considers her to be “more black” than her twin.
This is less related, more just thinking about It’s Walky, but it’s interesting to see the issues of favoritism cropping up in the Walkerton family again and I’m curious how they will continue to play out.
I’m not enjoying the sadness of this storyline, but I appreciate it.
It was just as enigmatic when he said it then as it’s being presented now, but it could definitely qualify as foreshadowing. If you look at panel two, it’s clear that Willis is showing us that they are meant to look exactly the same. My best guess, speaking as a multi-ethnic person (I looked almost exactly like Walky as a teenager)- I think he was referring more to personal identity? Sal sees herself as black, Walky sees himself as having no specific racial identity.
The way their parents see them is still shrouded in mystery…
Yes, that makes sense. Thanks!
I find it interesting that people seem mostly to be assuming it’s MRS. Walkerton who was the parent most influenced by race in her favoritism. True, she totally ignores Sal when she shows up (perhaps she has simply written off her daughter after the criminal incident, harsh but not racist), but its their dad who comments on preferring his daughter’s hair straight: a classic example of internalized racism and the best/only in-strip evidence that backs up Sal’s claim that the favoritism was racially based (but hardly definitive given that Sal herself prefers her hair straight). Assuming Sal is correct, it seems to make more sense to me that the racial aspect would have stemmed from some degree of internalized racism from the father: approving of Walky for acting “white” and encouraging Sal to do the same/discouraging her from expressing her identity as anything else. Billie’s comment even specifically applies to HIM not their mom (who is just white). We don’t have a lot of evidence about any of this, but we do know Mrs. Walkerton married a black man (since in America, being mixed black-and-white generally means being considered just black) and Mr. Walkerton married a white woman. Granting them the benefit of the doubt that neither is simply a racial fetishist, if either of them has demonstrated a preference for non-black here, its the dad.
When I first read the strip where she gets it straightened again, I thought her expression in the last panel was just a sadness at hiding her real self from her parents. But bearing in mind the comment her father made about her hair and her now openly stated belief that her parents’ favoritism was based on Walky being “whiter”, it looks more like she’s just really sad because she’s thinking that she’s internalized this bias too. Take a look: http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/straighten/
Wow, I just went back and noticed that in the one where her dad comments on her hair, she also mentions that he “rag[s] on her” for being late all the time (CPT anyone?). He may not MEAN any of these comments that way, but I can see why she, as the unfavorite in general, might pick up on them and think there was a racial aspect to it all
Like you said, we don’t really know much about their relationship right now, but Charles doesn’t strike me as a man of conditional love. He came off as genuinely happy to have his family together, and sad to see Sal leave.
I think you are right. I didn’t mean to imply that he was withholding or anything short of very genuinely happy to have his kids together again and very sad to see Sal rushing out instead of spending time with them, especially in counter-point to their mother who ignored her while focusing on Walky. I don’t think Sal’s belief that there was an element of race in the favoritism of Walky over Sal in their family is accurate. It seems to me like Sal MAY have picked up on what she sees (accurately or not) as elements of internalized racism in her father and at some point in her childhood made a connection in her mind between that and the favoritism her mother displays. Walky being “whiter” in her opinion is why she gets comments from her dad about her hair and her lateness while Walky doesn’t have to deal with such comments.
In actuality it seems like only their mother is really displaying favoritism from what we’ve seen, but not in a way which implies to me any racial element (just shitty parenting). But Sal continuously refers to BOTH their parents as playing favorites, not just the mom, which makes me wonder why she blames her dad as well
The last thought before I got some sleep was “What is Mike going to think of a scowling roommate”. Since he’s only seen Walky in a good mood or embaressed.
He’d probably just show Walky how to scowl properly. Step one, walking bow-legged afterwards should be avoided.
Honestly, I think walkys personality is proof enough that sals right about this being a longterm issue. You don’t that kind of babyish, entitled attitude out of a few years of “harmless” preference.
I notice a lot of people saying that what Walky says is just what a racist would say.
I would point out it is also congruent with being someone who has no idea what Sal is talking about and is too stunned to react to the situation rationally.
The fact that no one else seems to notice the tweets to right about the comments is wrinkling my brain. Also meta upon meta.
For now, Billie seems to be winning the who’s growing up the most since starting college contest. Joyce is her strongest contender I think.
When rereading this, I keep coming back to the fifth panel. Interestingly, a very (emotionally speaking) ugly look.
Given that this (and the behaviour in the following panel) is unusual for him, pleasant if he later regrets it.
I’m going to say that I think Sal has had to deal with a lot of racism in her life but I’m going to guess that it’s not her parents who have been racist. I actually think it’s much worse. I think her parents favored Walky because he’s much SMARTER than Sal.
(I think Sal would be horrified by that)
All I want to say is that her dad didn’t ignore her. In fact, he was upset that she was leaving. Sal planned her exit. She made sure she had a way out so she could leave ASAP.
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/04-just-hangin-out-with-my-family/appointment/
Her mom ignored her though, and was more focused on Walky. I can’t and won’t deny that. But it irks me to see everyone saying that her parents didn’t give two shits about her being there. Her dad’s expression was sad when she said she had planned a hair appointment that would take hours for that afternoon.
Racism might be involved in the bigger picture, I don’t know. Children get favored for a myriad of reasons, race/racial traits being one of them. But her parents DO LOVE HER. And they wanted to see her. Maybe her mom came off as ignoring her because Sal simply didn’t stay long enough! (Though a glance in her general direction is NOT a greeting.)
Just putting this out there! What do you guys think? Also I apologize if this has been referenced. I didn’t read the whole comments section…yeah yeah, shame on me and all that. 🙂
“But her parents DO LOVE HER. And they wanted to see her.”
We don’t have any concrete that her mom cares about her, in my opinion. And they didn’t make any effort to see her. Her mom saw her come in and said nothing, just continued badgering Walky. At the very least, if she cared, she would’ve said something before Sal left.
There’s already been discussion about how Charles’ comment about Sal’s hair was inappropriate. We have Sal dressing up in her high school uniform (which she wore for 4 years) and which her parents fail to recognize. Her mom doesn’t acknowledge her, her father makes an insensitive comment and neither of them seem particularly concerned when she leaves. Nor do they try to make any later plans with her.
There really isn’t a whole lot of evidence that they do want to see her.
Linda doesn’t even know or care what her daughter’s called, much less where she went after she left Walky’s room. (Though, to be fair, she calls Walky “David”, too. I don’t think Linda really gives a shit about either of her children, but in Walky’s case it takes the form of ignoring his desires to shape him into what she wants, whereas she’s given up on shaping Sal and is just ignoring her entirely.) As I commented on that strip, the friggin’ Dean, who has never met Sal, showed more interest in her in one speech balloon than Linda has the entire comic. And even that interest was blithely dismissed by Linda.
Charles at least greeted Sal when she showed up, but his conversation with her was laced with criticism of her appearance – which she’d already put effort into making “nice” for them – complete with racial undertones.
If I were Sal, and I were walking into that, you damn betcha I’d have an escape route prepared.
So I went through the comics where Sal meets their parents on the family day. Mom was clearly all about Walky. She didn’t even acknowledge Sal; instead, kept going on about Walky’s girlfriend. Dad, on the other hand, seemed happy to see her and seemed genuinely sad that she had scheduled her hair appointment that afternoon.
I suppose Mom being the dominant person in the family, her favorite got more attention?
That was what I was trying to convey in my last post but I don’t think I managed to very well. :/
But then the dad made a comment about how her hair looks nicer straight, and that kinda’ ruined the whole thing. 🙁
YESSSSSSSSSSSS BILLIE’S PANEL
I WANT TO WALK AROUND STAMPING IT ON PEOPLE’S FOREHEADS
Outside of Billie it kind of feels like both sides of this argument are wrong about different things. Although this incarnation of Sal isn’t a particularly likeable character for me so I might be biased.
Billie there in the last panel, expressing what everyone’s thinking about this storyline. Good job on the meta there, Billie. And Willis. Cookies for everyone.
What would really make this complete is if Joyce showed up and asked to touch Sal’s hair.
It might be passed the point where people are still talking about this but just chucking in my two cents.
We don’t have enough evidence to say that Sal is right or wrong about her parents.
Having seen what their mother said about Walky’s future and knowing what we know about Walky’s personality I think we can conclude that their parents may have directed more attention to walky. and it’s very likely that Sal saw that as a rejection of her.
and given the high probability of availability error on Sal’s part ( I doubt she ever went up to her parents and said “I notice you pay a lot of attention to Walkie and I feel that your approval of me is lacking. Is it because I display more Afro-centric traits then my brother”) it’s likely that she concluded that it was her apparent “blackness” that was the cause of her parent’s neglect.
Confirmation bias would then build support for that assumption leading Sal to rebel. Her parents, not understanding the the reason for her actions as I doubt that Sal has ever confronted them about this given Walky’s shock at the idea, would likely respond by becoming stricter towards her rebellious behavior which would strengthen her conviction that her parents were racist towards her.
this cycle would eventually culminate in the convenience store robbery. Given that Sal’s mother has a strong view about the life that Walky will have we can also surmise that she had similar plans for Sal as well. the conviction, even if a juvenile one, would likely preclude that plan coming to fruition so Mrs. Walky would have cut Sal off and that would have been in Sal’s mind the final confirmation that it was her “Blackness” that was the cause of her parent’s disapproval of her.
this sin’t to say that she isn’t right just given the actual evidence we’ve seen one could easily conclude that Linda’s parents didn’t approve of her breaking it off with the University President to mary Sal and Walky’s father. So to prove them wrong she decided that her kids would become hugely successful in order to win back her parent’s love. While Sal seemed confident and driven enough Walky was happy to just glide by and that wouldn’t lead to him becoming a world famous surgeon and chief of staff of a major world class hospital. So Linda and by extension her husband tried to motivate walky by paying more attention to him. After all sal would be fine. But when Sal got older she started acting out and being unruly and disrespectful. If this continued she would ruin her future and prove Linda’s parents right about her decision. So Lida became strict with Sal but that never seemed to work and she just got worse and worse and Walky was just so easy to deal with no calls from school no angry parents calling to complain. and finally that call from the police…. that’s it all her hard work ruined. Sal had thrown her life away for what? Obviously to spite her, so fine ship her off to catholic school let them deal with her she had to put all of her effort into Walky now He needs to shine.
Family… what are you going to do.
That’s all very detailed, but the fact is that it just isn’t justified to neglect your kids like Sal’s parents clearly do. Hell, even with Walky Linda clearly cares more about living vicariously through him than what he wants. That’s fucked up.
First post for me here. I’d like to say, I really love this comic. I found it the other day for the first time and literally read it front to back. Didn’t do so great at work the next day… ;P
Anyway, I’d say it’s much too early to jump to any conclusion regarding Sal & Walky’s parents. We haven’t seen much of the wider family dynamic between them, and while many have said that one or the other of Sal or Walky must be right and the other wrong that’s just not necessarily true.
It is entirely possible that Sal and Walky were *treated* virtually identically, but *needed* something entirely different from their parents. It’s also possible that they tried to treat both their children equally, but as a parent you discover that that can be REALLY hard when your children are as different people as Sal and Walky clearly are.
All we know for certain is that Sal feels that she didn’t get what she needed, and has acted out because of it.
I’m not saying that is the case, but it’s really dangerous to jump to conclusions and throw around loaded terms like racism and sexism without having anything other than a handful of vague clues about how these people (ok, fictional characters, but whatever) actually treat each other.
I think that’s doubly true when you’re discussing a type of family where, quite frankly, you’re not generally expecting overt or intentional forms of racism – though its not impossible, as Billie notes.
However, the only hint we have of that so far is Sal’s father’s statement that he thinks she’s prettier with straight hair… By itself hardly a damning indictment of racism. I personally find it interesting that she intentionally changed her hairstyle to one that she felt her father would disapprove of before meeting him. Not quite sure what I make of that though.
Sal did not *intentionally* change her hair to be curly, the one her father would disapprove of. She was so surprised, it just sorta poofed back to its natural, curly state.
Walky, dude, that’s like, 75% white right there.
wow, I said some pretty ignorant things in this comment section back when I still cared about typing properly, lol
in other news, I didn’t comment about it at the time, but it’s really cool that sal and walky are a quarter black, just like me
/feels represented