i need a hand to help me lift some kind of hope inside of me

[ivy_chan]

Since I'm not in the fandom in question as well as being offline for a good deal of time, it took me a while to be alerted to the issue of the SPN-fic that spawned a new bout of racefail and meta. In short, someone wrote a story, during the earthquake in Haiti, about the two actors from Supernatural falling in love. While in Haiti. It showcased

Comments

[saralinda]

Agreeing with celarania--so, so tasteless. And after reading the quotes from the fic--no desire to read the whole thing for multiple reasons--it's just blind racism. Really. The trope of "white man brown sidekick" has been around for hundreds of years, as has "white man saves brown woman from brown man." It just amazes me how it is still internalized by our culture; that in our postmodern (post-postmodern?) time, it still gets offered up in this way.

That's probably because I am who I am and I actually THINK about this stuff on a regular basis, I suppose.

It made me think of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe's novel, which shamelessly puts forward black men as objects of suffering and sympathy, can be very difficult to read. And then you realize how important the sympathy it generated was to bring whites over to the side of abolition. Politically and socially influential, the first major slave novel. It still remains one of the most popular books in US history. But still, it's mimicry, contains a great deal of racism, and in our day and age mimicry does NOT fly. Context matters.

And this fic, as you and the others have pointed out--purely self-serving. It was funny, because some of the passages did elicit that feeling of sympathy, but not for subjects, for objects. Case in point the final scene where Abraham IS a cat. *wipes vomit from self*

Excellent essay on the patois and Fanon. It's been a while since I read "The Wretched of the Earth" but it stands out as one of my favorite works on language and power, so well-written. (I, who am not a fan of psychoanalytical theory or at least don't like to push it too far, highly approve of this book.) Now I'm going to re-read it. I really feel for jazzypom and any other post-colonial people, although I can't begin to understand what it must be like to live under that condition. Privilege comes with blindness, and the best bet is to go the Socratic route and admit I know nothing.

And I can't tell you how often I get into arguments with people about "All Americans should be forced to learn/speak English." And how often what I have to say does not sink in at all. The one place I feel I can make a difference in this way of thinking is in the classroom when I teach early American lit, and we take America's beginnings from a multicultural perspective as a contact zone rather than the blank slate so many of them think it was.

I'm going to hazard a guess here: this fic arose at a very specific time, colored by tea-parties, distrust of our first black president (even his goddamn place of BIRTH WTF), economic struggles (all those Other People taking America's wealth--let's blame them instead of the true culprits of greedy businesses, warmongers, and crooked politicians THANK YOU FUCKING BUSH AND CHENEY)---which of course leads to immigration being a huge issue, because when you're not doing well money-wise you tend to close ranks and get xenophobic, a failing and failed war effort to aid other brown people abroad (OSTENSIBLY), etc etc. A fic celebrating benevolent white Americans aiding helpless dark people abroad seems to chime with all of these other social and economic conditions.

[ivy_chan]

Fic took place as the Haitian death tolls were coming in, even, showing you how much this author was able to connect with them as people. Good god.

And I think Americans should be made to learn another language aside from English, preferably Spanish because of our close proximity to South America and Mexico and the high rate of our Spanish-speaking citizens, but that's just me. Bi or multilingualism is better, to me, than strict adherence to one tongue.