je ne veux pas être complice
I am not a member of your community, and you may feel this is sufficient reason to disregard my email. However, I am a member of fandom and until today I have never been this embarrassed by that fact. I can understand reacting defensively to the suggestion one has perpetrated a racist slur, but as adults, we should be able to critically examine our acts and do our best to rectify mistakes and remedy hurts.
In case it is not evident, I object strongly to your use of the term "miscegenation" to describe a kink which you describe as not merely sexual relations between humans of different skin-tones, but between different species, even species which cannot be supposed even in the world of fiction to be able to give meaningful consent, such as goats. Do you realize you are equating sexual relations between two human beings with sexual abuse of animals?
To be clear: I find the interracial kink squicky, but I do not object to kinks which squick me. What I object to is your belief that your adherence to a policy, which, let us be clear, you made up, is more important than the human worth of any and every fan of colour. Treating people like human beings is not a high standard of behaviour to ask for.
I have contacted you privately in the hope you will reverse your decision to let the offensive term stand. However, I plan to publish this on my livejournal (brown_betty.livejournal.com) if I do not receive a satisfactory response. A satisfactory response at this point would include at minimum an apology to fans of colour for unintentionally using a slur, and substitution of some less hurtful term.
If you do not plan to make any such effort, please indicate in your response (if any) if you wish me to publish your response together with this letter when I do so.
Yours in whiteness,
Brown Betty
I received no response, but the next day at four, they posted their apology. It didn't meet the terms I said I would consider satisfactory in my letter, but I was feeling a bit silly for setting terms like that anyway. (I'm not a fan of colour, and on reflection, my authority to demand an apology on their behalf seemed pretty weak, and my grand-standing somewhat embarrassing.)
So, why am I posting? I'd really rather not, for one thing, the letter is a bit self-important, and self-centred. (Betty is embarrassed, quick, do something about it!)
Here is the daily_deviant mods' original public response. Compare to witchqueen's post here. Zvi linked to sources which disagreed with her account. The d_d mods did not link to zvi, so that there was only her word for it. The post by the d_d mods gives the impression that they are publishing the letter which zvi refers to her in correspondence and asks for permission to publish. Zvi has stated that the letter published is not the letter which she asked for permission to publish. They accuse her of defaming them, and their community members, in their public post to the community, but reading zvi's correspondence reveals no actual claims made about the moderators who she goes to moderate lengths to clarify that she does not consider them racist, merely thoughtless and stubborn, and certainly no allegations, false or otherwise, are made about the community members. Frankly, their post does them no credit.
Eventually, they responded with their apology. I described it to someone as "literally, the least they could do," and I am not a person to mis-use 'literally.' I can't say flamewarrior's post was the precipitating event, but this comment by kabal42, a d_d mod, contains the sentence "No offence was intended, but honestly, if sensible people (like you) had alerted us to the fact that there was someone out there who felt really, honestly hurt, then it would have been a quite different matter from being threatened and then wanked at."
I, and many others, read "sensible people" as "white people," but this is obviously a matter of opinion. What isn't is the fact that witchqueen, although not named, is apparently not someone who was not "really, honestly hurt" and that she threatened them.
If someone pointing out your public actions, not to lj abuse, or citizens for public decency, but to their friends-list, is "threatening" to you, then maybe you should ask yourself what that means about those actions.
Many, many commenters in the daily_deviant mod post said that they felt that zvi was owed an apology. I personally agreed, but felt her odds were poor. The mods have continued their policy of deafness. Frankly, I wrote them off as insensitive assholes.
Then I read coffeeandink's post here. The comment she links, as coffeeandink says, "caused me to change my initial positive estimate of their sincerity."
And thus I post. I don't think it will shame them into the apology zvi (in my opinion) deserves, but it's what I said I'd do.
If you want to comment telling me that you agree in principle, but think that zvi's correspondence could have been more polite, I'd like to ask you to try to rethink zvi's correspondence. If she'd contacted them to ask them to replace a gendered slur, or a piece of anti-gay propaganda with something more neutral, would the politeness shown have been enough for you? Consider studies like this one, which show that "a man who gets angry at work may well be admired for it but a woman who shows anger in the workplace is liable to be seen as "out of control" and incompetent." Imagine that zvi's correspondence was written by a white man: does it suddenly seem a lot more polite?
If the answer is no, that's okay. Thanks for putting up with my mental exercises anyway.
If you're going to be tedious in my comments about the word "honkey" though, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that being white means that I don't have to worry about my actions being seen as a reflection on anyone but myself, and ban the hell out of you.