Constant Sorrow
You want to know my personal association with the word "miscegenation"? I'm going to tell you anyway. I'd run across the word before and knew the definition, including the ugly connotation. But what I think of every time I see it is a scene in "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou" where a rich, white, Klan-leading political candidate sees a black man performing on stage with white men and yells, "That's miscegenation!" (Or, to be fair, maybe it was "They're miscegenated!") He expected the crowd to back him up and be outraged, but they were too busy enjoying the music.
The point is, it's a word, an idea, that's associated with a group that's probably *the* biggest symbol of racism we have in U.S. history. It's not an okay word. It's ugly. It implies that one half of the pairing it refers to is less than the other, even less than human, and the reason they're less is because their skin is a darker color than their "better" half.
And yet, it was not only chosen as a prompt in the daily_deviant community, but then defended by the moderators when someone brought to their attention that the word was racist. (To make matters worse, the prompt apparently was as much open to, say, Ron/Giant Squid as it was Ron/Dean--did I mention this was a Harry Potter community?--which has the unavoidable implication that Dean and the Giant Squid should be in the same category.)
witchqueen's original post about the issue is here.
There's ignorant, and then there's contributing to the problem. I can't cast stones at the ignorant; the more issues of race are discussed around fandom, the more I'm realizing I have to learn. And honestly, sometimes I struggle, partially because what I'm reading goes against some deeply ingrained beliefs (like "colorblind is good") and sometimes because I just want to say, I'm not a bad person, really!** But when your ignorance has been pointed out, you have to make a choice whether you're going to remain part of the problem or if you're going to apologize, fix the problem if possible, and at the very least not do it again. It's ridiculous, IMO, that the people who created this problem aren't willing to take steps to make it right.
**Which is not to say that the message is necessarily that I'm *not* a good person. It's an emotional reaction, and sometimes I have to step back and work through it before I can actually think about the issue and decide whether I agree or disagree.
The point is, it's a word, an idea, that's associated with a group that's probably *the* biggest symbol of racism we have in U.S. history. It's not an okay word. It's ugly. It implies that one half of the pairing it refers to is less than the other, even less than human, and the reason they're less is because their skin is a darker color than their "better" half.
And yet, it was not only chosen as a prompt in the daily_deviant community, but then defended by the moderators when someone brought to their attention that the word was racist. (To make matters worse, the prompt apparently was as much open to, say, Ron/Giant Squid as it was Ron/Dean--did I mention this was a Harry Potter community?--which has the unavoidable implication that Dean and the Giant Squid should be in the same category.)
witchqueen's original post about the issue is here.
There's ignorant, and then there's contributing to the problem. I can't cast stones at the ignorant; the more issues of race are discussed around fandom, the more I'm realizing I have to learn. And honestly, sometimes I struggle, partially because what I'm reading goes against some deeply ingrained beliefs (like "colorblind is good") and sometimes because I just want to say, I'm not a bad person, really!** But when your ignorance has been pointed out, you have to make a choice whether you're going to remain part of the problem or if you're going to apologize, fix the problem if possible, and at the very least not do it again. It's ridiculous, IMO, that the people who created this problem aren't willing to take steps to make it right.
**Which is not to say that the message is necessarily that I'm *not* a good person. It's an emotional reaction, and sometimes I have to step back and work through it before I can actually think about the issue and decide whether I agree or disagree.