How to be complicit in RaceFail.
I'm feeling stressed and bothered by the world.
It's not enough that rasfc is dead, the attempt to make something useful out of it is rapidly devolving into a big fight which I am no doubt doing more than my share of contributing to, because I'm naive enough to think that most human beings don't like hurting other human beings and would be interested in learning how to stop when they find out they do.
Now rasfc is coming back to haunt me from the grave.
You see, Pat Wrede mentioned the premise of The Thirteenth Child on rasfc quite some time ago, and I was horrified by the "no native Americans" bit, and thought "are you sure that's a good idea?".
But I didn't say anything out loud. Not on the newsgroup, and not in a private email to Pat.
There are many reasons I particularly didn't raise it on rasfc. I was pretty aware I'd already been labelled the PC commie fight-starter, I knew well from experience how the group dealt with sexism and yet there were still actual female participants; there didn't seem to be any visible PoC in the group and I just didn't want to find out in how many ways and how spectacularly the group could fail on racism.
And Pat Wrede was one of the most esteemed and valuable participants on the group - she's shared writing advice very generously, explained a variety of concepts in great detail and with vivid examples. I could just see how the group would turn on me for "attacking" such a thoroughly nice person, who'd never once said anything anyone would have been able to imagine I might be able to disagree with.
I didn't send her email, because I did feel like a bit of a visitor, as not a writer myself, and not contributing all that much to the writing discussion, and a fairly new participant, and she was one of the contributors who saved rasfc from being all Fail all the time. And I'm pretty sure my final giving-up on the group has something to do with the fact that Pat Wrede hasn't been on there for a year or more.
Also, I will bluntly admit that because this was before (the most recent round of) RaceFail, I didn't fully understand how much of a problem "Little House on the Prairie with magic and no Indians" was.
During this year's RaceFail, one of the links I read was this review of Little House on the Prairie, by a descendant of the very Osage at the edge of the story. I read the review in horrified recognition - that yes, I had read that book as a child, fascinated and charmed by Laura's adventures, and yes, it had had Indians in it, presented as dangerous subhumans. And even though it's over 30 years since I read it, I felt dirty for enjoying it at the time and not recognising the cruelty of the treatment of the Osage in that story, and the cruelty of their treatment at the time being written about.
Laura Ingalls Wilder and her people did their best to eliminate and minimise the Osage - the deliberate treatment of the Osage at the hands of both the US government and the white settlers is horrific and cruel, and the attitudes towards them, as dangerous and subhuman, when it's pretty clear it was the white men with their guns determined to take the land - which already clearly belonged to other people - who were truly dangerous and perhaps not subhuman, but certainly not paragons of what humans can be.
And it occurred to me that I, as a white child, was taught racism, was taught that it was okay to treat people who weren't white as subhuman and/or exotic, a bit of exciting flavour added to a story always of course about white people, by books like this. It wouldn't have taken me as long to Get It and work up the courage to start saying something about the racism around me if so many of my childhood books weren't from such a white point of view, with PoC as subhuman if not completely absent.
So I see a scenario with a white American writer, attempting to re-create the thrill she felt as a child reading the Little House books in a new audience, and perhaps aware that the actual Little House books have what are now recognised to be some problematic attitudes. And she chose to deal with the problem by entirely eliminating the people who the problematic attitudes were focussed on, rather than thinking hard about the problematic attitudes themselves.
And she lived in a time and place, surrounded by other people, so that either no-one told her that this was not a good idea, or she didn't hear them. Not least one of the places she frequented was already so problematic with respect to issues of racism that at least one person who did see that it wasn't a good idea, didn't dare tell her, partly because her attitudes were generally so much less bad than many other people's in the group.
Heaps of people have written a great deal of interesting stuff about The Thirteenth Child and the racism therein,
naraht is your guide. I don't think I can bear to read more of her links than I have, because I just cannot get over how Pat Wrede didn't think this was a bad idea, nor that I didn't have the guts to even just ask her about it.
I'm experiencing a number of other life-stressors as well. But I have to put this to bed before I can get onto tackling them, it seems. I would appreciate it if (white) people commenting would rein in any tendency to tell me I couldn't be expected to solve this problem; I know this is symptomatic of a very large social problem and I can't fix it on my own, but I do think I can do my bit to make it all a bit less worse, and in this instance I didn't. The moment I heard Thirteenth Child was out now, so soon after the first part of RaceFail09, I could see what was going to happen. So I'm not writing this to get sympathy, I'm warning other white people: don't make my mistake.
It's not enough that rasfc is dead, the attempt to make something useful out of it is rapidly devolving into a big fight which I am no doubt doing more than my share of contributing to, because I'm naive enough to think that most human beings don't like hurting other human beings and would be interested in learning how to stop when they find out they do.
Now rasfc is coming back to haunt me from the grave.
You see, Pat Wrede mentioned the premise of The Thirteenth Child on rasfc quite some time ago, and I was horrified by the "no native Americans" bit, and thought "are you sure that's a good idea?".
But I didn't say anything out loud. Not on the newsgroup, and not in a private email to Pat.
There are many reasons I particularly didn't raise it on rasfc. I was pretty aware I'd already been labelled the PC commie fight-starter, I knew well from experience how the group dealt with sexism and yet there were still actual female participants; there didn't seem to be any visible PoC in the group and I just didn't want to find out in how many ways and how spectacularly the group could fail on racism.
And Pat Wrede was one of the most esteemed and valuable participants on the group - she's shared writing advice very generously, explained a variety of concepts in great detail and with vivid examples. I could just see how the group would turn on me for "attacking" such a thoroughly nice person, who'd never once said anything anyone would have been able to imagine I might be able to disagree with.
I didn't send her email, because I did feel like a bit of a visitor, as not a writer myself, and not contributing all that much to the writing discussion, and a fairly new participant, and she was one of the contributors who saved rasfc from being all Fail all the time. And I'm pretty sure my final giving-up on the group has something to do with the fact that Pat Wrede hasn't been on there for a year or more.
Also, I will bluntly admit that because this was before (the most recent round of) RaceFail, I didn't fully understand how much of a problem "Little House on the Prairie with magic and no Indians" was.
During this year's RaceFail, one of the links I read was this review of Little House on the Prairie, by a descendant of the very Osage at the edge of the story. I read the review in horrified recognition - that yes, I had read that book as a child, fascinated and charmed by Laura's adventures, and yes, it had had Indians in it, presented as dangerous subhumans. And even though it's over 30 years since I read it, I felt dirty for enjoying it at the time and not recognising the cruelty of the treatment of the Osage in that story, and the cruelty of their treatment at the time being written about.
Laura Ingalls Wilder and her people did their best to eliminate and minimise the Osage - the deliberate treatment of the Osage at the hands of both the US government and the white settlers is horrific and cruel, and the attitudes towards them, as dangerous and subhuman, when it's pretty clear it was the white men with their guns determined to take the land - which already clearly belonged to other people - who were truly dangerous and perhaps not subhuman, but certainly not paragons of what humans can be.
And it occurred to me that I, as a white child, was taught racism, was taught that it was okay to treat people who weren't white as subhuman and/or exotic, a bit of exciting flavour added to a story always of course about white people, by books like this. It wouldn't have taken me as long to Get It and work up the courage to start saying something about the racism around me if so many of my childhood books weren't from such a white point of view, with PoC as subhuman if not completely absent.
So I see a scenario with a white American writer, attempting to re-create the thrill she felt as a child reading the Little House books in a new audience, and perhaps aware that the actual Little House books have what are now recognised to be some problematic attitudes. And she chose to deal with the problem by entirely eliminating the people who the problematic attitudes were focussed on, rather than thinking hard about the problematic attitudes themselves.
And she lived in a time and place, surrounded by other people, so that either no-one told her that this was not a good idea, or she didn't hear them. Not least one of the places she frequented was already so problematic with respect to issues of racism that at least one person who did see that it wasn't a good idea, didn't dare tell her, partly because her attitudes were generally so much less bad than many other people's in the group.
Heaps of people have written a great deal of interesting stuff about The Thirteenth Child and the racism therein,
naraht is your guide. I don't think I can bear to read more of her links than I have, because I just cannot get over how Pat Wrede didn't think this was a bad idea, nor that I didn't have the guts to even just ask her about it.
I'm experiencing a number of other life-stressors as well. But I have to put this to bed before I can get onto tackling them, it seems. I would appreciate it if (white) people commenting would rein in any tendency to tell me I couldn't be expected to solve this problem; I know this is symptomatic of a very large social problem and I can't fix it on my own, but I do think I can do my bit to make it all a bit less worse, and in this instance I didn't. The moment I heard Thirteenth Child was out now, so soon after the first part of RaceFail09, I could see what was going to happen. So I'm not writing this to get sympathy, I'm warning other white people: don't make my mistake.