The first step is realizing you have a problem...
International Blog Against Racism Week
I don't always manage to participate in various blogospheric initiatives, because I'm hell on deadlines and also because, for most of them, I don't have a strong incentive to enter the parade because it isn't anything different than what I usually do - and that is the same with this one: your odds of getting something here on feminism, or theocracy, or racism (or some combination of the above) are pretty good every time I hit the post button. But this initiative is to my mind too important to be let go by without all hands on deck, so to speak: fandom must deal with our own failings as we find them, in so far as we are a distinct ur-subculture composed of sub-subcultures, and these failings are part and parcel of the greater societal matrices from which we come, albeit with unique genre-specific flavorings. We are not Slans. --Do not ever forget this.
Fandom, then, not being exempt in any corner from any of the defects of mainstream culture, including oh-so-very-yes racism, it is incumbent on us to work to diagnose it in our own millieu and to deal with it like smallpox - although it won't be a matter of keeping a few examples around for the sake of science and backup vaccination, but rather a recognition that some diseases are more easily eradicated than others, but with work and cooperation and constant vigilance - and only with those three - even those can be better controlled, reduced, and rendered less harmful. Complacency - as in the recent resurgences of mumps - is the enemy of health, mens sana as corpore sano.
And sitting around patting one's selves on the back for having succeeded in virtue, while pointing around at all those other folks out there who have notably failed (or rather, not even tried) is about the illustration in the dictionary next to "complacent," along with "exceptionalism" and "blindness" and "general lack-of-clue".
There have been so many examples of it this past year, many of them from people who really ought to know better, that it can be daunting often to try to figure out what to tackle. (Which is why many of us just give up, overwhelmed, and don't post anything sometimes. But that's explanation, not excuse.)
My first post for IBARW '07 was oblique, as was my segue into sociopolitical commentary from purely formal (or mostly so) fannish litcrit; "The Marble Window" started out as a response to an asinine whiner going on about how femfans who say that men just don't understand what it's like to be a woman - that is to say, unpacking it, to live with the constant barrage of dehumanization and literal menace that is impressed upon us as soon as we start to approach puberty - are just as bad as (and implicitly, by the Hypocrite Gambit, even worse) the male fans they accuse of blindness, because after all no woman can understand what it's like to be a man, either, he argued. --And therefore (somehow) our anger at entrenched sexism in the media upper eschelons was invalidated.
Which, combined with the ever-present Bingo-squared Nice Guy™ whinge of "I'm not like THEM! Not All Men Are Sexist! You're Being Unfair!" gave me the image of the reformer prince standing safely above the hunger and privation and strife in the streets, and having all his concern be for his wounded feelings and his own personal burdens, and feeling indignant and betrayed by the lack of ego-plumping and the harsh words that came his way not personally but as representative of the Owner class.
And then while I was still turning this image over in my mind, and wondering how to express it, someone who should have known better at the time went on to accuse those in fandom who object to racial privilege as expressed in genre, of inauthenticity, and furthermore to warn, in an unintentionally-ironic version of that other antifeminist trope, "I'll give you something to cry about," that such lack of gratitude at being misrepresented in stereotypes favorable or unfavorable, or the public expression of it, would bring about a worse consequence, in that self-proclaimedly-non-racist white authors would just punish FoCs by not writing CoCs at all. And this not-at-all-veiled threat (along with Von at ObWi flipping out over someone calling rich people "assholes" and demanding an end to "class warfare" against billionaires) gave me the clincher for my Reformer Prince's rant, and oyceter's observations from inside of being that FoC too afraid to complain aloud for fear of being called a big ol' meanie by white so-called friends (so evocative to me of so many times I shut up and smiled and seethed inside as my male "friends" in school and at home mocked women) gave me the close.
It was deliberately low-key, because that's what works most strongly on my "emotional intellect", the understated click of the pieces of situational irony falling into place, the incongruity of the wounded, invincibly-selfish prince seeing himself as the greatest victim of the social climate, seriously believing that the general insults of starving and bereaved people outweigh his utterly-sheltered, comfortable, can-walk-away-from-this-anytime existence - just because he cares about them, on some level that doesn't impact his ability to get a good night's sleep and go off and play on vacation at his private getaway, and being so impervious to reality that not even those closest to him dare any more to try to break through and show him the incongruousness, because his self-esteem is so fragile and his vanity so vast. And all the sorts of privilege are tangled together IRL, in a 3d matrix of intersecting dynamics, as well as my awareness of them being tangled together in my personal history, so the convergence of relevances is integral as well as inevitable.
But that's just one approach, and anything that gets those of us who are in the tower (if looking out from a lower window) to realize that we are that Prince full of absurd and even obscene self-centeredness, when we complain about other people, Othered people, complaining because it makes us uncomfortable, is to the good.
Because the refusal to change - which begins with the refusal to hear - is where arméd revolutions come from, in the long run: because no other option is left, when those in power refuse to even contemplate the possibility that they themselves may be answerable, may be part of an oppressive System, and that they may have to give up some of their own pride - and profit - to rectify the ongoing evils of it. And no, there aren't going to be pitchforks and torches in fannish circles over how people of color or women or GLBT citizens are represented, no matter what sorts of hyperbole the privileged princes of genre invoke.
But the nice, decent, respectable, oh-so-not-racist liberal white minds that won't even open up wide enough to acknowledge that writing Yet Another Magical Ethnic Sidekick Who Nobly Sacrifices Themselves To Save The Honky Hero, or turning all the canonical CoCs white to make a story more "mainstream", or turning all the canonically-high-status CoCs into serfs of various sorts in your AU fic, is at the very least Highly Problematic (and let's be honest, also at the very least indicative of deeply ingrained bigotry) - aren't going to be able to understand either why the umpteenth shooting of an innocent bystander who just happens to be black, and the framing of it as a "natural" reaction by the Forces of Law, Order, Justice & the Anglo-American Way, just might be that last straw.
And that may well be how we end up with a President Giuliani in 2008.
Rather than end on that happy note, I'll just point to an in-genre example of a work that - imho, and I stress this, including the "h" which I never use, because it isn't really my call, as I've said before, any more than it's Colin whatsit's or Mad Thinker Scott or whoever's call over what is degrading and depersonalizing when done to me - does a pretty good job of having an authentically-integrated cast despite being set in an alternate 19th-c Europe, and that is the steampunk saga Girl Genius* by the Foglios. All the major characters are, yes, white**; but at least there are a fair number of CoCs as secondary characters (both Good, Bad, and also Just Getting By) and also in background scenes.
This is, after all, a fantastic analogue of the Europe in which Pushkin's great-great-grandfather Maj. General. Abram Petrovitch Hannibal and Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas worked and lived; there's a Romany waitress and a black mechanic and a Chinese head surgeon and an African-American semi-ex-Pirate Queen and (whimsically, obviously, but still making a still-needed point) an African explorer, viewing the exotic and curious people of Europe, as well as an Italian actress who specializes in Native American roles on stage. It can be done - historical setting is not an all-exonerating excuse for white-on-white decor and obliviousness to racial issues. After all, we build the whole damn thing, we choose what to show and what to comment on, and what - or who - to leave out.
--And it can be done without the nigh-obligatory whining from the marble window about how the peasants are oppressing us, what's more.***
*I do have grave concerns with the apparent innate-ubermenschen setup of the Sparks, and the idea that engineering majors get an automatic Charisma bonus is pure Slannish fanservice, but we'll let that pass pro tem.
**Except for the ones who are polychrome, and monsters - and I would say that yes, at this point the Three Musketeers are definitely major charas in the series. I'm not sure I'm equal to an analysis of how the Jägerkin and other Constructs might function as analagous to discriminated-against ethnicities who are played against low-status mainstream society by the ruling elite, but somebody prolly oughta do it.
*** The Device I wish could be made real is the Sockifier. You know, the one that lets you run the command "Stick a sock in it" remotely. Ahem. What I meant to say was, it's a good thing there's no way to enforce commands like "Stick a sock in it!" because I find myself all too often uttering it when I open what's supposed to be an escape for me, and it's full of white/guy yammering about how hard it is on them now that they have to be all PC...
I don't always manage to participate in various blogospheric initiatives, because I'm hell on deadlines and also because, for most of them, I don't have a strong incentive to enter the parade because it isn't anything different than what I usually do - and that is the same with this one: your odds of getting something here on feminism, or theocracy, or racism (or some combination of the above) are pretty good every time I hit the post button. But this initiative is to my mind too important to be let go by without all hands on deck, so to speak: fandom must deal with our own failings as we find them, in so far as we are a distinct ur-subculture composed of sub-subcultures, and these failings are part and parcel of the greater societal matrices from which we come, albeit with unique genre-specific flavorings. We are not Slans. --Do not ever forget this.
Fandom, then, not being exempt in any corner from any of the defects of mainstream culture, including oh-so-very-yes racism, it is incumbent on us to work to diagnose it in our own millieu and to deal with it like smallpox - although it won't be a matter of keeping a few examples around for the sake of science and backup vaccination, but rather a recognition that some diseases are more easily eradicated than others, but with work and cooperation and constant vigilance - and only with those three - even those can be better controlled, reduced, and rendered less harmful. Complacency - as in the recent resurgences of mumps - is the enemy of health, mens sana as corpore sano.
And sitting around patting one's selves on the back for having succeeded in virtue, while pointing around at all those other folks out there who have notably failed (or rather, not even tried) is about the illustration in the dictionary next to "complacent," along with "exceptionalism" and "blindness" and "general lack-of-clue".
There have been so many examples of it this past year, many of them from people who really ought to know better, that it can be daunting often to try to figure out what to tackle. (Which is why many of us just give up, overwhelmed, and don't post anything sometimes. But that's explanation, not excuse.)
My first post for IBARW '07 was oblique, as was my segue into sociopolitical commentary from purely formal (or mostly so) fannish litcrit; "The Marble Window" started out as a response to an asinine whiner going on about how femfans who say that men just don't understand what it's like to be a woman - that is to say, unpacking it, to live with the constant barrage of dehumanization and literal menace that is impressed upon us as soon as we start to approach puberty - are just as bad as (and implicitly, by the Hypocrite Gambit, even worse) the male fans they accuse of blindness, because after all no woman can understand what it's like to be a man, either, he argued. --And therefore (somehow) our anger at entrenched sexism in the media upper eschelons was invalidated.
Which, combined with the ever-present Bingo-squared Nice Guy™ whinge of "I'm not like THEM! Not All Men Are Sexist! You're Being Unfair!" gave me the image of the reformer prince standing safely above the hunger and privation and strife in the streets, and having all his concern be for his wounded feelings and his own personal burdens, and feeling indignant and betrayed by the lack of ego-plumping and the harsh words that came his way not personally but as representative of the Owner class.
And then while I was still turning this image over in my mind, and wondering how to express it, someone who should have known better at the time went on to accuse those in fandom who object to racial privilege as expressed in genre, of inauthenticity, and furthermore to warn, in an unintentionally-ironic version of that other antifeminist trope, "I'll give you something to cry about," that such lack of gratitude at being misrepresented in stereotypes favorable or unfavorable, or the public expression of it, would bring about a worse consequence, in that self-proclaimedly-non-racist white authors would just punish FoCs by not writing CoCs at all. And this not-at-all-veiled threat (along with Von at ObWi flipping out over someone calling rich people "assholes" and demanding an end to "class warfare" against billionaires) gave me the clincher for my Reformer Prince's rant, and oyceter's observations from inside of being that FoC too afraid to complain aloud for fear of being called a big ol' meanie by white so-called friends (so evocative to me of so many times I shut up and smiled and seethed inside as my male "friends" in school and at home mocked women) gave me the close.
It was deliberately low-key, because that's what works most strongly on my "emotional intellect", the understated click of the pieces of situational irony falling into place, the incongruity of the wounded, invincibly-selfish prince seeing himself as the greatest victim of the social climate, seriously believing that the general insults of starving and bereaved people outweigh his utterly-sheltered, comfortable, can-walk-away-from-this-anytime existence - just because he cares about them, on some level that doesn't impact his ability to get a good night's sleep and go off and play on vacation at his private getaway, and being so impervious to reality that not even those closest to him dare any more to try to break through and show him the incongruousness, because his self-esteem is so fragile and his vanity so vast. And all the sorts of privilege are tangled together IRL, in a 3d matrix of intersecting dynamics, as well as my awareness of them being tangled together in my personal history, so the convergence of relevances is integral as well as inevitable.
But that's just one approach, and anything that gets those of us who are in the tower (if looking out from a lower window) to realize that we are that Prince full of absurd and even obscene self-centeredness, when we complain about other people, Othered people, complaining because it makes us uncomfortable, is to the good.
Because the refusal to change - which begins with the refusal to hear - is where arméd revolutions come from, in the long run: because no other option is left, when those in power refuse to even contemplate the possibility that they themselves may be answerable, may be part of an oppressive System, and that they may have to give up some of their own pride - and profit - to rectify the ongoing evils of it. And no, there aren't going to be pitchforks and torches in fannish circles over how people of color or women or GLBT citizens are represented, no matter what sorts of hyperbole the privileged princes of genre invoke.
But the nice, decent, respectable, oh-so-not-racist liberal white minds that won't even open up wide enough to acknowledge that writing Yet Another Magical Ethnic Sidekick Who Nobly Sacrifices Themselves To Save The Honky Hero, or turning all the canonical CoCs white to make a story more "mainstream", or turning all the canonically-high-status CoCs into serfs of various sorts in your AU fic, is at the very least Highly Problematic (and let's be honest, also at the very least indicative of deeply ingrained bigotry) - aren't going to be able to understand either why the umpteenth shooting of an innocent bystander who just happens to be black, and the framing of it as a "natural" reaction by the Forces of Law, Order, Justice & the Anglo-American Way, just might be that last straw.
And that may well be how we end up with a President Giuliani in 2008.
Rather than end on that happy note, I'll just point to an in-genre example of a work that - imho, and I stress this, including the "h" which I never use, because it isn't really my call, as I've said before, any more than it's Colin whatsit's or Mad Thinker Scott or whoever's call over what is degrading and depersonalizing when done to me - does a pretty good job of having an authentically-integrated cast despite being set in an alternate 19th-c Europe, and that is the steampunk saga Girl Genius* by the Foglios. All the major characters are, yes, white**; but at least there are a fair number of CoCs as secondary characters (both Good, Bad, and also Just Getting By) and also in background scenes.
This is, after all, a fantastic analogue of the Europe in which Pushkin's great-great-grandfather Maj. General. Abram Petrovitch Hannibal and Gen. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas worked and lived; there's a Romany waitress and a black mechanic and a Chinese head surgeon and an African-American semi-ex-Pirate Queen and (whimsically, obviously, but still making a still-needed point) an African explorer, viewing the exotic and curious people of Europe, as well as an Italian actress who specializes in Native American roles on stage. It can be done - historical setting is not an all-exonerating excuse for white-on-white decor and obliviousness to racial issues. After all, we build the whole damn thing, we choose what to show and what to comment on, and what - or who - to leave out.
--And it can be done without the nigh-obligatory whining from the marble window about how the peasants are oppressing us, what's more.***
*I do have grave concerns with the apparent innate-ubermenschen setup of the Sparks, and the idea that engineering majors get an automatic Charisma bonus is pure Slannish fanservice, but we'll let that pass pro tem.
**Except for the ones who are polychrome, and monsters - and I would say that yes, at this point the Three Musketeers are definitely major charas in the series. I'm not sure I'm equal to an analysis of how the Jägerkin and other Constructs might function as analagous to discriminated-against ethnicities who are played against low-status mainstream society by the ruling elite, but somebody prolly oughta do it.
*** The Device I wish could be made real is the Sockifier. You know, the one that lets you run the command "Stick a sock in it" remotely. Ahem. What I meant to say was, it's a good thing there's no way to enforce commands like "Stick a sock in it!" because I find myself all too often uttering it when I open what's supposed to be an escape for me, and it's full of white/guy yammering about how hard it is on them now that they have to be all PC...