Class Struggle in the Avatar: Legend of Korra

The Equalists vs. Benders social conflict growing in Avatar: Legend of Korra reflects a pretty big question I had with Avatar the Last Airbender: how benders commanded no special apparent social standing in spite of their massive natural advantages. AtLA was very good at establishing that bending was a practical art and a form of combat. These powers are even casually introduced, with waterbending used for fishing, airbending used for flight (obviously) and earthbending used to (get this) deliver mail. They're useful and practical and they fit into the whole world, and it's easy to think that somebody who can move tons and tons of earth or water  with a gesture would reap benefits from the natural consequences of their inborne abilities. A master earthbender could gather a lot of wealth by doing in seconds what mundane people would need years to do, and even if no privilege is accorded, there has to be some wealth that accumulates, and all wealth eventually becomes privilege.

Anyway, that divide doesn't happen at all in AtLA, but it shows up centrally in LoK. Non-benders suffer in a million ways. The police are benders and answer to a council of benders that--even if they're elected--appear to simply represent the four bending nations, rather than any sort of geographic or culturally distinct group within Republic City. All the crime we see except for expressly Equalist activities are performed by benders. As Equalist activity begins to spread in the city, the council responds by cracking down on non-benders and five minutes in one episode is the closest we get to a relatable non-benders other than Asami.

It's hard to sympathize with benders, too. Amon's little junta somehow goes off without (apparently) killing anybody at all, but every time a bender loses their bending everybody reacts like their were brutally murdered and their corpse desecrated in the street. I understand that it must be culturally appalling, like a roving female circumcision gang or something, but at the same time the bulk of the Avatar's world are non-benders who seem to survive just fine except for all the cultural oppression they suffer at the hands of benders.

The show even takes some effort to sort of hide the inequality they wrote into their own script: rather than an angry mob of non-benders sympathetic to Amon's cause, aggressive acts by Equalists are with like one exception carried out by  uniformed Equalist footsoldiers. The entire thing is framed as a squaring-off between the plucky hero and a military force, but the plucky hero is a tool of the establishment looking to maintain the status quo. Think about that for a minute. Realistically the Equalists look like a popular movement--all those footsoldiers aren't professional soldiers, they're freedom fighters.

Korra kind of sucks as the avatar, too. She is briefly faced with the reality that benders have privilege and threatens to punch the guy who tells her. Watching one episode, her rage for the injustice of imprisoning non-benders is there, but it doesn't look like she'll do much until her bender friends are arrested, too.

Cultural Intolerance

Recently I was accused of being intolerant of "Arab culture" on the basis that I believed that honor killings are wrong. Typically speaking, an honor-killing means murdering a young woman who violates a cultural taboo, such as wearing forbidden clothing or talking to a boy from outside her family. They're apparently very common in the Middle East and there is a fear that they're becoming more prevalent amongst the Middle Eastern diaspora.

I was surprised at the allegation, and immediately had to analyze it. Now, the offenses that typically lead to a woman being targeted for death are not just commonplace, they're almost natural. Expected. Part of healthy social immersion. Some of the "crimes" didn't just seem out-of-place, but the seemed patently unfair. I remember a news report from my childhood where a woman was raped and her family retaliated by killing her. One man explained simply: she shouldn't have been raped, and if she was raped, it's her fault.

The victims are exclusively female; because the rules are gender dimorphic, it is impossible for a man to commit a crime with an honor-killing as its sentence. That was offensive to my sensibilities right out, and I was given pause. Of course I'm going to disagree with someone being punished for something I consider to be a normal human activity, but then, I'm also going to insist that someone doing something I consider to be a crime be punished.

In one breath, I'm accusing the woman of being innocent and the killer of a crime. What they consider execution and thus an act of justice, I consider a murder. Now, it helps that I believe all forms of execution to be murder and that only the most exigent of circumstances could possibly pardon any form of killing but defense of the self and the explicit and immediate defense of others.

But what makes my cultural assumption (that killing a child for talking to a boy is wrong) any more accurate than the assumption that not worshiping Jesus is wrong? How do I weigh my personal intolerance against a broader scope of intolerances? The answer came in the best way I could have hoped for: an evolving liberal culture that frowns on honor-killings. That way, I can dismiss the honor-killing culture as a negative offshoot, a rotten branch of individuals to be weighed against the virtuous culture that I happen to agree with.

But at the end of the day, I decided that I just had to weigh the facts and decide when it's okay for me to be intolerant. This is one of those times.