How Not To Contribute
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, FORMATTING, WTF? APOLOGIES, TRYING TO FIX LJ-CUT
AHEM. APPARENTLY LJ-CUT DOES NOT LIKE BLOCK QUOTE.
Unless You Want To Be An Example Of What Not To Do
Responding to the Race Fail 09: how not to do it. (gerriwritinglog via metafandom)
There's not really a point in commenting on most of her post, as I hope the problems with it are self-evident (and people did a pretty good job of it in comments before they were frozen, more politely than she deserved) but this bit puzzled me the most.
Where does this all rambling and ranting lead?
Straight to that stupid meme that some people feel they should post in the fall-out of RaceFail '09. I'm not going to dignify its text with a copy here. Sufficient to say, I think the post itself is bigotry. I'm not going to turn into a Pharisee, sit in the temple, and wail that I've been bad, look how bad I am, look at how evil I am, and look at me trying to be good again. Excuse me, but no.
Now, before tonight, I had come to the conclusion that I wouldn't post on the issue, in that it felt meaningless for me to post something here about what I've read, as it would mostly come off as self-serving and self-congratulatory. Like. Go me! I'm reading about race! Aren't I a great enlightened white girl? [wanna be a good enlightened white girl and haven't kept up? try metafandom, and rydra_wong has been archiving links at her journal].
But this post pissed me off. I mean. Many posts have pissed me off in this whole thing, but the hypocrisy here boggles the mind. Why, given her very long, very offensive rant, does she end it with I think feeling required to post about the issue is bigotry, and I won't be pressured into it, so instead I go on a word-salad spree of confusion and self-aggrandizement. WHY POST AT ALL, THEN. WHY POST AND ADD TO THE FAIL?
Because clearly, there was an issue here, and somehow it became all about her. About the hurt/confusion/cluelessness of a white person. Again. Which makes me suspect she's responding to the issue without, you know, actually reading many of the posts, because it's pinged something personal. From a reply to a comment to the same post:
When the subject of racism comes up, I usually get an explicit or implicit "you don't understand because you haven't suffered like we have because you're white." I appreciate the fact that race causes problems for people. It's a pain in the ass, tbh. However, the blanket assumption that I haven't suffered because of my race, or from any other prejudice, really pisses me off. I do understand because while I haven't had that exact experience they're talking about, I have had many other ones that are just as bad if not worse.
Never in all the reading I've done over the last several months have I seen one PoC make that argument, or anything like it. It's a straw man. The fact that this late in the game it must still be pointed out that individual hardship is not the same thing as institutional, ingrained oppression makes me sad and angry. And the discussion of one institutional bigotry does not mean the others (sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism etc) don't exist. They're just not part of this particular conversation.
I get the impression she's had a difficult life, and doesn't feel she's been heard when it comes to that. But this conversation? Not the venue to air those grievances. They have nothing to do with this issue. Many of us here could write novels about our hardships and experiences of bigotry. Some of us grew up poor. Some of us grew up in addictive or abusive homes. Some of us were the only gay person in a small town where being outed could get us beat up, or killed. Some of us are ill, or not able-bodied, or struggling just to get out of bed in the morning because of depression. Some of the people going through all of those things are even people of color.
But the conversation isn't about our individual hardships, or other bigotries that are very real, but not the subject here. It's about wide-spread, institutional, often unconscious racism, and how that specifically plays out in the sf/f world. It's about how the color of your skin, your DNA, can automatically put you at a disadvantage the moment you're born -- before poverty, before illness, before sexuality. Before you speak your first word, you're put at a disadvantage in this culture. That's what this is about. And attempts to make it about anything else (class, gender, who's suffered the most) are disingenuous at best.
Look: if she felt pressured to post, and disliked that pressure, she had the choice to stay silent. She even had the choice of just stating that fact. The LJ police aren't coming around to check whether we've all made our obligatory donation to the conversation. So I struggled to understand what motivated her to even say anything. And oddly enough, I'd just been flipping through a book of feminist crit at work today, and happened upon "Passing for White, Passing for Black," by Adrian Piper. And she wrote this:
I believe that the preceptual and cognitive distortions that characterize any form of racism begin here, in the failure to see any such act of racist aggression as a defensive response to one's perceived attack on the aggressor's physical or psychological property, or conception of himself, or of the world.
This quote makes so much of the fail happening in this conversation, from Elizabeth Bear's to many of the other players, make sense to me. There's a perceived attack: the perceived part is key here. And the attack is on their conception of themselves as good people, and their subculture as welcoming and enlightened. They feel their (very real) problems are given second class status, are given short shrift, because of the discussion of the issue of race, as if anyone is going around ranking hardship. And that makes them angry. But this isn't a zero-sum game. No one is preventing you from discussing these other issues in another venue/forum -- they're just asking that in this conversation, we stick to race. Because bringing up other issues tends to silence the original discussion, or derail it, or make the environment feel hostile. And yeah, I think other posters have made this very point... but it's worth repeating.
There isn't a finite amount of fixing to be done with our culture, as if we have to conserve our compassion and resources: if we discuss race today, really discuss it without distractions, it doesn't mean we can't discuss class tomorrow.
So, to fulfill the OP's notion of obligatory self-flagellation: You know how I know I'm privileged? I could cite the oft-mentioned bit about how participating/reading/thinking about race is an option for me, but it's been said way more eloquently than I could ever pull off.
How I know I'm privileged is simple: when I interact with people on LJ or elsewhere online, I have the luxury of assuming they're just like me. White, American, middle-class, college educated, mostly heterosexual, mostly healthy, in their twenties or thirties. But what I've learned from meeting in Real Life the people I knew first on LJ is that all of these assumptions I make, that the people I'm conversing with are just like me? Completely unfounded. Ridiculously inaccurate. And that right there is my privilege. And I'm not alone in it: it seems to me that a big part of the fail on the part of the publishes sf/f authors has been a kind of secret shock that there are fans of color out there, interacting with their texts, and willing to talk about it on the internets. People that aren't just like them, who might see their books from a different perspective.
Because people of color? They don't have the luxury of assuming everyone they interact with is just like them. They have to be careful, because they don't know who is going to turn out to be casually (or not so casually) racist. They don't know when a space they thought was safe is going to turn on them, just for speaking up about their truths, or for doing nothing at all, even, but being themselves.
When it happened to Adrian Piper, in a prestigious graduate school program, when a professor she'd admired said something incredibly racist to her, this is what she experienced (from the same essay):
What I felt was numb, and then shocked and terrified, disoriented, as though I'd been awakened from a sweet dream of unconditional support and approval and plunged into a nightmare of jeering contempt...Finally, there was the groundless shame of the inadvertant impostor, exposed to public ridicule or accusation. For this kind of shame, you don't actually need to have done anything wrong. All you need to do is care about others' image of you, and fail in your actions to reinforce their positive image of themselves. Their ridicule and accusations then function to both disown and degrade you from their status, to mark you not as having done wrong but as being wrong. This turns you into something bogus relative to their criterion of worth, and false relative to their criterion of authenticity... The devaluation of status consequent on such exposure is, then, absolute; and the suspicion of fraudulence spreads to all areas of interaction.
boldface added, because of the particular relevence to all of the different ways in which these points in particular have recurred in posts and comments by white people, again and again, over the course of this discussion. From accusations that the people speaking up are all sock-puppets to questioning the legitimacy of pseudonyms, to seeing all critique as attack and slander, it's all here.
The essay I quoted was in the anthology "New Feminist Criticism : art,
identity, action," edited by Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer & Arlene
Raven and published by Icon Editions in 1994.
AHEM. APPARENTLY LJ-CUT DOES NOT LIKE BLOCK QUOTE.
Unless You Want To Be An Example Of What Not To Do
Responding to the Race Fail 09: how not to do it. (gerriwritinglog via metafandom)
There's not really a point in commenting on most of her post, as I hope the problems with it are self-evident (and people did a pretty good job of it in comments before they were frozen, more politely than she deserved) but this bit puzzled me the most.
Where does this all rambling and ranting lead?
Straight to that stupid meme that some people feel they should post in the fall-out of RaceFail '09. I'm not going to dignify its text with a copy here. Sufficient to say, I think the post itself is bigotry. I'm not going to turn into a Pharisee, sit in the temple, and wail that I've been bad, look how bad I am, look at how evil I am, and look at me trying to be good again. Excuse me, but no.
Now, before tonight, I had come to the conclusion that I wouldn't post on the issue, in that it felt meaningless for me to post something here about what I've read, as it would mostly come off as self-serving and self-congratulatory. Like. Go me! I'm reading about race! Aren't I a great enlightened white girl? [wanna be a good enlightened white girl and haven't kept up? try metafandom, and rydra_wong has been archiving links at her journal].
But this post pissed me off. I mean. Many posts have pissed me off in this whole thing, but the hypocrisy here boggles the mind. Why, given her very long, very offensive rant, does she end it with I think feeling required to post about the issue is bigotry, and I won't be pressured into it, so instead I go on a word-salad spree of confusion and self-aggrandizement. WHY POST AT ALL, THEN. WHY POST AND ADD TO THE FAIL?
Because clearly, there was an issue here, and somehow it became all about her. About the hurt/confusion/cluelessness of a white person. Again. Which makes me suspect she's responding to the issue without, you know, actually reading many of the posts, because it's pinged something personal. From a reply to a comment to the same post:
When the subject of racism comes up, I usually get an explicit or implicit "you don't understand because you haven't suffered like we have because you're white." I appreciate the fact that race causes problems for people. It's a pain in the ass, tbh. However, the blanket assumption that I haven't suffered because of my race, or from any other prejudice, really pisses me off. I do understand because while I haven't had that exact experience they're talking about, I have had many other ones that are just as bad if not worse.
Never in all the reading I've done over the last several months have I seen one PoC make that argument, or anything like it. It's a straw man. The fact that this late in the game it must still be pointed out that individual hardship is not the same thing as institutional, ingrained oppression makes me sad and angry. And the discussion of one institutional bigotry does not mean the others (sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism etc) don't exist. They're just not part of this particular conversation.
I get the impression she's had a difficult life, and doesn't feel she's been heard when it comes to that. But this conversation? Not the venue to air those grievances. They have nothing to do with this issue. Many of us here could write novels about our hardships and experiences of bigotry. Some of us grew up poor. Some of us grew up in addictive or abusive homes. Some of us were the only gay person in a small town where being outed could get us beat up, or killed. Some of us are ill, or not able-bodied, or struggling just to get out of bed in the morning because of depression. Some of the people going through all of those things are even people of color.
But the conversation isn't about our individual hardships, or other bigotries that are very real, but not the subject here. It's about wide-spread, institutional, often unconscious racism, and how that specifically plays out in the sf/f world. It's about how the color of your skin, your DNA, can automatically put you at a disadvantage the moment you're born -- before poverty, before illness, before sexuality. Before you speak your first word, you're put at a disadvantage in this culture. That's what this is about. And attempts to make it about anything else (class, gender, who's suffered the most) are disingenuous at best.
Look: if she felt pressured to post, and disliked that pressure, she had the choice to stay silent. She even had the choice of just stating that fact. The LJ police aren't coming around to check whether we've all made our obligatory donation to the conversation. So I struggled to understand what motivated her to even say anything. And oddly enough, I'd just been flipping through a book of feminist crit at work today, and happened upon "Passing for White, Passing for Black," by Adrian Piper. And she wrote this:
I believe that the preceptual and cognitive distortions that characterize any form of racism begin here, in the failure to see any such act of racist aggression as a defensive response to one's perceived attack on the aggressor's physical or psychological property, or conception of himself, or of the world.
This quote makes so much of the fail happening in this conversation, from Elizabeth Bear's to many of the other players, make sense to me. There's a perceived attack: the perceived part is key here. And the attack is on their conception of themselves as good people, and their subculture as welcoming and enlightened. They feel their (very real) problems are given second class status, are given short shrift, because of the discussion of the issue of race, as if anyone is going around ranking hardship. And that makes them angry. But this isn't a zero-sum game. No one is preventing you from discussing these other issues in another venue/forum -- they're just asking that in this conversation, we stick to race. Because bringing up other issues tends to silence the original discussion, or derail it, or make the environment feel hostile. And yeah, I think other posters have made this very point... but it's worth repeating.
There isn't a finite amount of fixing to be done with our culture, as if we have to conserve our compassion and resources: if we discuss race today, really discuss it without distractions, it doesn't mean we can't discuss class tomorrow.
So, to fulfill the OP's notion of obligatory self-flagellation: You know how I know I'm privileged? I could cite the oft-mentioned bit about how participating/reading/thinking about race is an option for me, but it's been said way more eloquently than I could ever pull off.
How I know I'm privileged is simple: when I interact with people on LJ or elsewhere online, I have the luxury of assuming they're just like me. White, American, middle-class, college educated, mostly heterosexual, mostly healthy, in their twenties or thirties. But what I've learned from meeting in Real Life the people I knew first on LJ is that all of these assumptions I make, that the people I'm conversing with are just like me? Completely unfounded. Ridiculously inaccurate. And that right there is my privilege. And I'm not alone in it: it seems to me that a big part of the fail on the part of the publishes sf/f authors has been a kind of secret shock that there are fans of color out there, interacting with their texts, and willing to talk about it on the internets. People that aren't just like them, who might see their books from a different perspective.
Because people of color? They don't have the luxury of assuming everyone they interact with is just like them. They have to be careful, because they don't know who is going to turn out to be casually (or not so casually) racist. They don't know when a space they thought was safe is going to turn on them, just for speaking up about their truths, or for doing nothing at all, even, but being themselves.
When it happened to Adrian Piper, in a prestigious graduate school program, when a professor she'd admired said something incredibly racist to her, this is what she experienced (from the same essay):
What I felt was numb, and then shocked and terrified, disoriented, as though I'd been awakened from a sweet dream of unconditional support and approval and plunged into a nightmare of jeering contempt...Finally, there was the groundless shame of the inadvertant impostor, exposed to public ridicule or accusation. For this kind of shame, you don't actually need to have done anything wrong. All you need to do is care about others' image of you, and fail in your actions to reinforce their positive image of themselves. Their ridicule and accusations then function to both disown and degrade you from their status, to mark you not as having done wrong but as being wrong. This turns you into something bogus relative to their criterion of worth, and false relative to their criterion of authenticity... The devaluation of status consequent on such exposure is, then, absolute; and the suspicion of fraudulence spreads to all areas of interaction.
boldface added, because of the particular relevence to all of the different ways in which these points in particular have recurred in posts and comments by white people, again and again, over the course of this discussion. From accusations that the people speaking up are all sock-puppets to questioning the legitimacy of pseudonyms, to seeing all critique as attack and slander, it's all here.
The essay I quoted was in the anthology "New Feminist Criticism : art,
identity, action," edited by Joanna Frueh, Cassandra L. Langer & Arlene
Raven and published by Icon Editions in 1994.