Was My Response "Racist?"
The following interesting exchange occurred with minor fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear, who clearly grasps neither myself nor conditions in Cuba, at http://matociquala.livejournal.com/1754006.html.
She wrote a comment about what a fun place was Cuba to visit. And I sarcastically replied:
Also, you have the thrill of knowing that you're free, that the worst the regime will do to you is expel you, while all the natives you see are living as terrified slaves of a madman. That must give the tourist a major power rush -- that and all the desperate Cuban women who'll do anything for a shot at marrying a foreigner and thus being able to leave Castro's paradise ...
To which she responded:
I have been trying for some time to figure out what to say in response to this, and it has to boil down to--I find this comment to be racist, and I'm freezing this thread.
... making it fairly obvious that it had neither ever entered her head that the Cuban people were hyper-friendly to foreigners in part because their own lives are crap, nor that these crappy lives were in any way the fault of the Castro regime, nor that she understood the point I was attempting to make.
She then froze the thread.
So I replied to a different part of the post:
How was that "racist?" I made that sarcastic post because I'm aware of and care about the suffering of the Cuban people.
I'm not really expecting any coherent reply: I suspect I'll get banned and/or the post deleted.
But really: was my response "racist" (or could it have reasonably been taken that way)? And why is it that some apparently intelligent people only look at a country from the POV of how convenient it is for them to visit, and don't bother to think about what it must be like to live there?
Personally, I think it's far more "racist" (actually, self-centered) to treat another country, especially one under a totalitarian dictatorship, as some sort of theme park created to amuse oneself.
What do you think?
She wrote a comment about what a fun place was Cuba to visit. And I sarcastically replied:
Also, you have the thrill of knowing that you're free, that the worst the regime will do to you is expel you, while all the natives you see are living as terrified slaves of a madman. That must give the tourist a major power rush -- that and all the desperate Cuban women who'll do anything for a shot at marrying a foreigner and thus being able to leave Castro's paradise ...
To which she responded:
I have been trying for some time to figure out what to say in response to this, and it has to boil down to--I find this comment to be racist, and I'm freezing this thread.
... making it fairly obvious that it had neither ever entered her head that the Cuban people were hyper-friendly to foreigners in part because their own lives are crap, nor that these crappy lives were in any way the fault of the Castro regime, nor that she understood the point I was attempting to make.
She then froze the thread.
So I replied to a different part of the post:
How was that "racist?" I made that sarcastic post because I'm aware of and care about the suffering of the Cuban people.
I'm not really expecting any coherent reply: I suspect I'll get banned and/or the post deleted.
But really: was my response "racist" (or could it have reasonably been taken that way)? And why is it that some apparently intelligent people only look at a country from the POV of how convenient it is for them to visit, and don't bother to think about what it must be like to live there?
Personally, I think it's far more "racist" (actually, self-centered) to treat another country, especially one under a totalitarian dictatorship, as some sort of theme park created to amuse oneself.
What do you think?