The meaning of gestures, touch included, is not universal, it’s culturally mediated. Reading Gurwara’s gestures through a white western lens is… well, it leads to different conclusions than mine, though given that I have things in common w Gurwara that Molly and Brennan do not, perhaps it’s my reading that’s wrong.

But, and this part isn’t just about me and my biases: race is never irrelevant to power/status imbalances.

Cis white women tend to have the balance of power vs men of color *regardless* of their relative social status .(consider that a white woman could get in the PotUS’ face and scream abuse at him without being apprehended. It’s *unimaginable* that that could happen, except in the case of a Black man dealing with a white woman, knowing perfectly well that anything he does would be read as predatory.)

For cis white women, misogyny manifests a very different way than it does for any woc (or for trans white women the moment they get read as not-cis): as long as they are attractive to the straight cis white gaze they are precious objects for cis white men, worth of protection. This is horrible, yes; patriarchal thinking hurts us all. But it’s a different horrible from what the rest of us get.

The
rest of us are at best useful objects, men of color included, with the added danger for men of color that they will be viewed as tainting the purity of the precious objects, so anything they do can be read as predatory. (Not just men, either; little boys too. Consider Emmet Till.) And white women have always, always, weaponized that against the rest of us.

Most media plays along with that, so media literacy alone means that readers are biased towards seeing Gurwara as the Scary Brown Man. But if there’s realism here, his social power wrt Al is extremely constrained and dangerous to use, and even talking to her is a *risk* he’s taking every time.

So, you cannot look at age and social status and gender without taking race into account, or at least not without implicitly reinforcing white supremacy.

You’re welcome, and I wish the world was kinder :/

The colours are explored from a colour therapy perspective, not a theological one. The 4 main colours (yellow/orange, blue, red, white) are mentioned a couple of times in the guru granth sahib there’s not that great a meaning behind it. Culturally yellow was the colour of harvest. Yellow flags are displayed outside gurudwaras but have changed around a bunch of times. They’re flags to show “hey we’re here!”. I doubt he’s choosing to wear yellow because its theologically important. Probably just wearing yellow because it annoys his wife or kids.

Thanks for the interesting info! But he’s probably just wearing a yellow tie because it is part of the color palette Molly chose for this scene. Matches Alison’s hair. Early morning sunrise.

It would be interesting if the clothes had some cultural connotations, and it’s always great to have such things represented accurately and well. I don’t really think it qualifies as culturally insensitivity if an artist serendipitously rather than intentionally uses a color with possible significance to the maybe-cultural-background of a person they drew. If we find out later he’s from India or Myanmar it will be an interesting point to consider. For now. . . well to quote a napkin I once found – “You might be reading too much into this.”

Really, though I was just thinking Alison was due a good snark.

Oh, and this is apropos of the discussion of color in general, but it’s interesting that they’re associating yellow light with wakefulness. I know that a lot of artificial ‘warm’ or ‘yellow’ lighting doesn’t produce the wavelengths blue light that are supposed to activate the photo-receptors in your eyes that have something or other to do with (melatonin?) production that keeps you awake and helps regulate you circadian rhythm.

But even in the scientific community, you only have to go back a couple of decades to find people promoting the idea that yellow toned light is going to lead to more wakefulness, when pretty much the opposite is true. (As people age, the lenses in their eyes yellow, which filters out the blue light that helps set circardian rhythms via interactions with the pineal gland and a bunch of proteins which would actually take work to dig out of memory.* Anyhow, so that system tends to start to break down and dysregulate. Meanwhile, of course, we’ve come up with some awesome ways both of making the situations worse and better.)

TL;DR This shit is complicated, I’m not throwing stones.

* Also, the research in this area is very much ongoing. Something like 30% of the protein synthesis in the body is at least somewhat under diurnal regulation, and my last serious review of the literature was a couple of years ago, though I follow it casually.

I think part of it is this: When learning your native tongue, you might learn the formal “rules,” but you’re constantly absorbing informal chatter from everyone around. “How are you today” becomes “howzit goin” for example.

When learning a second language, depending on when and how you’re learning it, you’re learning it more formally. You’re not learning street English, you’re learning written or scholarly English. Especially if you then study philosophy, you might lean more towards “permit me to lay out this idea in order to effectively communicate my point to those reading my book” style of speech.