lierdumoa:

I wrote the following in a post earlier today:

Please understand that when you propose to re-tell Firefly “minus the racism.”

That Firefly is in and of itself Joss Whedon’s attempt to retell the story of 1) the American post-Civil War deep South “minus the racism” 2) cowboys vs. injuns reavers “minus the racism” 3) Manifest Destiny “minus the racism.”

Quite a few people didn’t seem to know what I was referring to.

Allow me to explain.

To start, here are some quick and easy results from googling “firefly confederate”:

○ Firefly, Serenity and Confederate Politics
○ What Haunts Me About Firefly

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And here are some direct quotes from the Firefly wiki [link]:

The confederacy of planets and moons that formed the Independent Faction was doomed from the start.

While leaders among the scattered outer worlds expressed concern over the formation of the Union of Allied Planets, most folk didn’t much care, figuring it wouldn’t affect them.

Note the use of the terms ‘confederacy’ and ‘union.’

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❝A CIVIL WAR NOVEL INSPIRED THE FIREFLY UNIVERSE. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels from author Michael Shaara was Joss Whedon’s inspiration for creating Firefly. It follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon modeled the series and world on the Reconstruction Era, but set in the future.❞

~ Rudie Obias, “23 Fun Facts About Firefly” [source]

❝The appeal of post-war survivors scraping by on the outskirts of society—in a science-fiction context—struck a chord with Whedon. “I was taken with the idea of a civil war and rebuilding from the point of view of people who had lost the war,” he says. “There were people after the war who internalized it so terribly that it completely destroyed them.”❞ 

~ Joss Whedon interview with MoviesOnline [source]

As you can see, there’s no need to debate whether or not the parallels between Firefly’s browncoats and American Civil War confederates are intentional – Joss Whedon has said so himself.

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Note similarities between Malcolm Reynolds’ character biography and the biography of actual confederate general Jubal Anderson Early.

From the Jubal Early entry on Wikipedia [link]:

When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas by horseback, where he hoped to find a Confederate force still holding out. He proceeded to Mexico, and from there, sailed to Cuba and Canada. Living in Toronto, he wrote his memoir, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America, which focused on his Valley Campaign. The book was published in 1867.

Early was pardoned in 1868 by President Andrew Johnson, but still remained an “unreconstructed rebel”. In 1869, he returned to Virginia and resumed the practice of law. He was among the most vocal of those who promoted the Lost Cause movement.

From the Malcolm Reynolds entry on the Firefly Wiki [link]:

His contempt for the Alliance never completely disappeared (although he once said that he “wouldn’t mind makin’ a buck off ‘em”, and was shown in multiple episodes willing to steal Alliance supplies for a job, as long as it doesn’t affect the people), and, although he was on the losing side of the Unification War, years later he still wasn’t convinced it was the wrong one. Mal expressed what seemed to be his manifesto—"[The Alliance] will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.“ His anti-government attitude was reflected in his choice to live on a spaceship, drifting from world to world, as far away from Alliance interference as possible.

See also: 

Firefly Wiki article on the Battle of Serenity Valley 

vs 

Wikepedia article on the Battle of Shenandoah Valley.

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The name Jubal Early probably sounds familiar to you even if you know nothing about Civil War history.

❝The bounty hunter in ‘Objects in Space’, the final episode of Joss Whedon’s series Firefly is named Jubal Early because Joss Whedon knew from Nathan Fillion, who played the main character Malcolm Reynolds, that he was his ancestor. For dramatic irony regarding his name, he is played by Richard Brooks, an African-American man.❞ 

~ another excerpt from the Jubal Early Wikipedia page

Yes, that’s right. Joss Whedon asked a black actor to play a lunatic rapist bounty hunter named after a real life confederate general.  Joss Whedon has even stated in a different MoviesOnline interview that he “loves that character.”

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Now I mentioned “cowboys vs injuns reavers” earlier:

In the unaired pilot Simon Tam explicity refers to the reavers as “savages”  – one of the more popular Native American slurs used by settlers in the North American “Old West.” In the same episode we see Mal and Zoe riding through an open plain on horseback wearing chaps and carrying shotguns. Right from the get-go we have protagonists dressed like cowboys in a spaghetti western, shit-talking an entire culture of supposedly “mindless savages” (yet not so mindless they can’t still practice guerrilla warfare in a fairly organized fashion).

Recommended reading: The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality

The episode “Bushwhacked” features a character – the lone survivor of a reaver ambush – who’s “gone native” and become a reaver himself. He completes his transformation from sane pilgrim into savage reaver by “cuttin’ on himself” to making himself “look like one of them” – which he accomplishes by giving himself facial piercings which I, for one, found oddly reminiscent of those worn in certain Native American and Pacific Islander cultures.

He proceeds to attack the Firefly crew using guerrilla style tactics.

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People want to believe that they can weed out the Orientalism, shovel off the bastardization of the Chinese language, and jackhammer their way through the thick crust of Asian cultural appropriation to reveal a better, purer show buried underneath.

But they can’t.

Firefly’s bedrock is racist.

Firefly is racist from its terraformed surface all the way down to its molten core.