On LJ, my impression is that there is a central core of, primarily American, well educated left-wing thinkers who talk about racism all the time in public, another group who link to various race related articles with or without comment, and everyone else will only touch on the subject directly in private and that only occasionally.
I suspect that our meters for discussion of race may vary or we aren't in very similar circles. I found in my four years on LJ that race was almost never touched upon, or if it was, it would lead to a giant wankfest, a la SGA. Sometimes people would critique shows on race, but the comments would get increasingly virulent. And I think this is where experiences differ; ever since I have been on LJ, I have been painfully aware that the main fannish world is extremely white and extremely uncomfortable with being called out on that fact. This is, of course, not noting groups like deadbrowalking that make themselves spaces for fans of color. But in general, if people just stumble into fandom, they stumble into a very white space.
Well, it is always hard to quantify non-participation and even harder to find out the reasons for it. My general impression is that fandom as a whole hates wank and will avoid wider meta issues because they are perceived as leading to wank. (They may have a point about that last one.)
To be honest, I think fandom avoids race in a way that cannot be explained by the desire to avoid wank. I think the desire to avoid heated topics is a part of it, but after having seen multiple conversations being drowned out by protests of "We are colorblind!" or "Why must you talk about race?" I find it hard to believe that it's just the desire to avoid wank-potential. Of course, there's the fact that fans see race as a wanky issue to begin with, which I would argue is because the climate is very unfriendly to those trying to seriously and continually discuss race. Also, fans generally don't seem to have much of a problem looking closely at slash or LJ social dynamics.
As regards active attempts to shut conversations down, I didn't see any of that myself in the SGA debates, although I have seen a lot of people say it happened so I assume that was mostly in the SGA-specific discussions, which I never saw. In the wider meta discussions I never saw anyone who was clearly attempting to shut the conversation down except for when tempers had already got really heated.
By "shutting down," I generally mean the trend of being shouted down for being racist whenever someone mentions that a show's racial politics are dodgy, the immediate attempts to direct the conversation to whiteness, the attempts to not look at white oppression of POC but to rather focus on red herring topics like "reverse racism" and "But POC are racist too!" I don't think everyone does it consciously; I in fact think many people have such a knee-jerk reaction that they do it subconsciously. I think fandom as a whole is extremely uncomfortable acknowledging white privilege and as such will go to great extremes to avoid it in conversation. Of course, I don't think everyone in fandom is like that, and I do think things have changed in the last year (when I started noticing), but there is still a long, long way to go.
I suspect that our meters for discussion of race may vary or we aren't in very similar circles. I found in my four years on LJ that race was almost never touched upon, or if it was, it would lead to a giant wankfest, a la SGA. Sometimes people would critique shows on race, but the comments would get increasingly virulent. And I think this is where experiences differ; ever since I have been on LJ, I have been painfully aware that the main fannish world is extremely white and extremely uncomfortable with being called out on that fact. This is, of course, not noting groups like deadbrowalking that make themselves spaces for fans of color. But in general, if people just stumble into fandom, they stumble into a very white space.
Well, it is always hard to quantify non-participation and even harder to find out the reasons for it. My general impression is that fandom as a whole hates wank and will avoid wider meta issues because they are perceived as leading to wank. (They may have a point about that last one.)
To be honest, I think fandom avoids race in a way that cannot be explained by the desire to avoid wank. I think the desire to avoid heated topics is a part of it, but after having seen multiple conversations being drowned out by protests of "We are colorblind!" or "Why must you talk about race?" I find it hard to believe that it's just the desire to avoid wank-potential. Of course, there's the fact that fans see race as a wanky issue to begin with, which I would argue is because the climate is very unfriendly to those trying to seriously and continually discuss race. Also, fans generally don't seem to have much of a problem looking closely at slash or LJ social dynamics.
As regards active attempts to shut conversations down, I didn't see any of that myself in the SGA debates, although I have seen a lot of people say it happened so I assume that was mostly in the SGA-specific discussions, which I never saw. In the wider meta discussions I never saw anyone who was clearly attempting to shut the conversation down except for when tempers had already got really heated.
By "shutting down," I generally mean the trend of being shouted down for being racist whenever someone mentions that a show's racial politics are dodgy, the immediate attempts to direct the conversation to whiteness, the attempts to not look at white oppression of POC but to rather focus on red herring topics like "reverse racism" and "But POC are racist too!" I don't think everyone does it consciously; I in fact think many people have such a knee-jerk reaction that they do it subconsciously. I think fandom as a whole is extremely uncomfortable acknowledging white privilege and as such will go to great extremes to avoid it in conversation. Of course, I don't think everyone in fandom is like that, and I do think things have changed in the last year (when I started noticing), but there is still a long, long way to go.
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