Kelsier is NOT Racist!

[not an Evil Librarian]

This is an inaccuracy I have been noticing more and more lately. I have read many posts accusing Kelsier of being racist. This is simply untrue. He has prejudices based off of social class and privilege rather than race. His prejudice is not unfounded either considering how the nobles have treated the Skaa for a thousand years. 

[Seon Are he/him]

To be fair, Skaa and Nobles were designed to have different physical attributes, making them in a way both social classes and races.

[not an Evil Librarian]

yes, but a thousand years of interbreeding has virtually wiped out all differences between Skaa and Nobles. Aside from that, Kelsier does not believe that the Skaa are any different physiologically from the Nobles.

[Calderis he/him]

I'm sorry, but it's both. 

In systems of systemic racism, class and race become so inextricably intertwined that trying to tear the two apart is futile. 

Yes, the skaa and nobles had interbreeding to a point that there were no obvious physical differences, but there were still two major differences that persisted. The fertility rates (which were necessary to maintain the skaa population in the face of the brutality they suffered), and frequency of allomancy. No one without noble blood was an Allomancer. 

Kelsier may not have noted a difference in physiology, but he did note one of psychology that he thought meant that as a whole the nobility should die. Up to and including the fact that he thought sparing Elend was "misguided." 

Call it racist. Call it classist. Either way I agree. 

[+Ark1002]

Kelsier was racist. I think he was justified in his racism tho

[Pagliacci he/him]

50 minutes ago, Calderis said:

I'm sorry, but it's both. 

In systems of systemic racism, class and race become so inextricably intertwined that trying to tear the two apart is futile. 

Yes, the skaa and nobles had interbreeding to a point that there were no obvious physical differences, but there were still two major differences that persisted. The fertility rates (which were necessary to maintain the skaa population in the face of the brutality they suffered), and frequency of allomancy. No one without noble blood was an Allomancer. 

Kelsier may not have noted a difference in physiology, but he did note one of psychology that he thought meant that as a whole the nobility should die. Up to and including the fact that he thought sparing Elend was "misguided." 

Call it racist. Call it classist. Either way I agree. 

Exactly and besides, race isn't a biological category, it's a political one.

[Wyndlerunner he/him]

Was Kelsier racist? No. Was Kelsier prejudiced? Oh storms yes! 

I fall more into the classist camp- Kelsier was against the aristocracy. His P.O.V.'s don't seem to portray any fixation or even care for the minor physical differences between Skaa and Nobles, i;e the birth rate issue. His actions to me seem more comparable to the French Revolution than they do to racist hate crimes, i;e the KKK.

[Calderis he/him]

Hell. It's not exactly something most people are looking for, but the class/race dichotomy comes up in the book itself. 

Kelsier and the crew are clinging to their lineages and justifying their actions based on that, and Vin rips into them for not knowing what it's like to live as skaa, because they don't. Class wise they live closer to the racial line they demonize than they do the skaa they fight for. 

And she was absolutely right.

Edit: and as I brought up on the "is Kel good/evil?" thread, it goes well beyond class and the way that they live, when even Breeze was scared of Kel finding out that he was noble. 

Quote

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Seventeen - Part Two

Sazed calls Breeze by his real name–Ladrian–for the first time in this chapter, I believe. Breeze doesn't like going by this name. You'll see later that he tries to get people (or, rather, Sazed, who is the only one who uses Breeze's real name) to avoid calling him Ladrian.

The reason is simple. Ladrian is the name that Breeze went by when he was growing up. He's actually the only one on the crew who is a full-blooded nobleman. (More on this in book two.) None of the others know this, of course. He's come to the underground from the opposite direction of everyone else–down from the top. He has let some few people know that his real name is Ladrian (mostly on accident, when he was younger) and the name has stuck.

It's a common enough name in the Final Empire, but someone COULD theoretically connect him to one Lord Ladrian who disappeared from noble society some number of years back. He doesn't, of course, want anyone in the underground to know he's actually a full-blooded nobleman, otherwise he would loose credibility–and maybe even gain the anger of people like Kelsier, who hate the nobility unilaterally.

So, he pretends that he finds the name unsuitable for other reasons, and asks people to just call him Breeze. None of this, of course, gets to come out in the book. Otherwise, I wouldn't have just told it to you. I just don't have the chance to develop Breeze as I would like here. So, those of you reading this can feel vindicated in the fact that you've gotten some true insider information! Breeze will, for those of you who are his fans, get some viewpoints in the next book, which will expand his character somewhat.

Mistborn: The Final Empire Annotations (Jan. 5, 2007)

 

Edited May 19, 2019 by Calderis

[king of nowhere]

Kelsier was deeply prejudiced against the nobles, which was actually justified considering the whole situation. He was a well intentioned extremist, but he was the person that was needed.

whether we would call him racist or not is only a matter of semantics.

[+robardin he/him]

Kelsier's self-justified motivations are altruistic - "I will bring down the Final Empire, headed by the Lord Ruler who created and maintains a nobility who abuse and oppress most of humanity as skaa" - but a lot of his actions are rather egotistic.

And the hypocrisy that Vin calls him out on, of "hating and killing nobles indiscriminately when he himself is half-noble, was raised passing for noble, and dresses and lives in comfort like a nobleman", goes even deeper.

He set himself up as a messianic figure of "The Survivor" and "Lord of the Mists" to inspire a skaa rebellion in the North. OK, that was a self-sacrificing trump card, and he literally put his life on the line to make it happen. But how much of that was truly necessary to get a new religion going, and how much of that was about himself?

Remember, that was always his backup plan, in case the "eleventh metal" didn't help him defeat TLR in person in some way, as he'd hoped it might. ("If you're reading this, then I failed to figure out how to use it when I faced the Lord Ruler.")

So what was his "Plan A", had the eleventh metal been some kind of Kill Move for defeating TLR? 

1. Draw TLR out for a one-on-one showdown in public with me.
2. Burn the eleventh metal.
3. Down goes Rashek! DOWN GOES RASHEK! ... I hope?
   1. YES!!!.... OK, now what?
   2. NO??? ... He kills me dramatically in public view, but then OreSeur poses as me, tada, new religion!

It's a little chilling to realize that his "Plan A" was likely to be something along the lines of taking over from The Lord Ruler as a figure of worship and domination.

This is partly revealed by Vin's unspoken parting comment to him in Secret History. "How much was about you?"

But even more revealing is the fact that instead of moving Beyond, he insisted on finding a way to return to the Physical Realm... To go South to set himself up as a very Lord Ruler-like figure of worship driven by his bequeathed use of the Metallic Arts. And just look at how the Southerners treat Metalborn in this framework! They have to create new honorifics every time they speak to one of them - that implies that non-Metalborn basically never talk to Metalborn except in rare and likely formal circumstances!

So never mind "hating nobles when you really are one yourself", he dedicated himself to eliminating The Lord Ruler who set up a ruling structure based on power, domination, and Allomancy that centered around worshiping himself as a god, and then went about doing almost the exact same thing, with himself at the center.

[Karger he/him]

On 5/20/2019 at 10:03 AM, robardin said:

It's a little chilling to realize that his "Plan A" was likely to be something along the lines of taking over from The Lord Ruler as a figure of worship and domination.

Considering the political system that Reshek created not having some kind of messianic figure take over from TLR would only lead to problems as we saw with Elend.  I would also like to categorize Kelsier's arrogance as a quality that is separate from his racism.