Whitey weighs in, news at eleven. (On getting it wrong and trying again.)
I'm working my way through rydra_wong's comprehensive list of posts on the recent blow-up around race, racism, and (sci-fi/fantasy) fiction in my spare time. I'm not even nearly finished -- I've been keeping track of the discussion only haphazardly before this -- but in the meantime I thought I would work through some of my thoughts in my own space. This has very little to do with sci-fi/fantasy (I would be much better at talking about romance novels), and more to do with being white and dumb on the internet.
It's mostly for my own self-improvement, really; I've learned a lot just typing it up. I'm sure it is old news to many of you. Feel free to scroll on by. [EDIT: it's unlocked now. Wurgh.]
---
What follows is based on my experience, and includes descriptions of my own failures. It's written in simple language, because I have to think about these things simplistically, or I get tangled up in my own thoughts. I wrote it mostly in the first person, because these are guidelines that I try to remember for myself, rather than injunctions I want to put as law to other people. It was also more productive for me to write it in the first person, because I wasn't putting it on some other racist white person, but on myself. Whoa! Get out of town.
If you read, I would appreciate it if you would let me know if I'm wrong, offensive, or unclear. I will edit and amend the entry accordingly. (I don't erase mistakes, as a rule, but I love me some marginalia!)
---
1. It's good to try to understand. Just learn the concept of "inside thoughts."
Here are a couple of things that have helped me to understand the position of people of color in debates like this in the past:
It is important for me to stop and think through this, though, NOT in a "but I've experienced what they're going through" way, but in a "I understand why they're reacting in the way they're reacting" way. Often I see white people saying, "why are you so angry?" in discussions of race. I've had that reaction myself. I don't like it when people are angry with me. I get scared. I've been socialized as a middle-class white woman to soothe or cajole people out of anger. However, this is one situation where I have to step back and not intervene; let them be angry, and stay angry. Doing the mental tricks above can help me to do that. [EDIT: It keeps tripping me up, so I'm making a note: by "let them be angry," I mean "not try to intervene and undermine their anger" rather than "magnanimously allow them to be angry." I don't get a say in someone else's emotions, is what I'm saying.]
However -- to risk beating a dead horse -- these thoughts have to stay inside thoughts. While I'm thinking the above things, I try to remind myself not to bring up my own experiences with oppression. There's nothing more painful than hearing "I suffered too!" or "No, I get it!" when you're trying to get sympathy and support. (You know when you're complaining to someone, and in the middle of your complaint they say, "If it makes you feel better, I lost my job yesterday." Has it ever actually made you feel better? It never makes me feel better. Usually it makes me feel like punching a hole in the wall and crying.)
I only figured this out embarrassingly recently, in a women's studies class, when a fellow student said, "being gay isn't as hard as being black, though." Whether or not it's true -- I have no basis for comparison -- it was dismissing my experience, reducing things to a hierarchy, and it made me shut down completely for the rest of the class period. (What's more, when you compare oppressions like that, you're disregarding people who have both. No black person was ever gay, after all. Right?)
vassilissa has some other ways to mentally frame the debate in a post here.
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2. White kid needs to stop talking about the time she realized what racism felt like.
I said above, "because I haven't had to deal with racism." I've heard many people -- from many races, believe it or not -- say that there is such a thing as "reverse racism." I don't think this is a productive phrase at all. The way that I have taught it is extremely simplified, but I think is a good starting point. I tell my students that there is prejudice, and there is racism. Racism is prejudice backed up with power. When you're talking about "reverse racism," it's unlikely that the reverse racism affected your ability to be protected from institutional repression. If it did, it was probably not race-related, but related to another form of oppression or power difference.
Power relations are never simple. That's the beauty of them, I think. Tyrannical power attempts to make power relations simple, but even then there are modes of resistance.
Sometimes efforts to resist power relations are miscommunicated or misconstrued. For example, one of my former students was talking to me about the offenses of "whitey." When I reminded him that I was a whitey, he said, "no, you're different." I understood the kind of reversal of power he was interested in effecting, but he was doing it in a way that wasn't quite productive. I could call this "reverse racism." I could call a black person's refusal to shake hands with a white person "reverse racism." But first, the fact that I have to use the word "reverse" tells me exactly what "racism" means. [EDIT: just_katarin phrased it more clearly in the comments. "The term itself intimates that there is a 'correct' way to be racist and anything else is a reversal of the 'correct' way. So in addition to being bs and not true, it also sort of backs up the idea that racism is 'supposed' to be a certain way."] And second, it's the wrong dang phrase.
This is really hard for me to say, since I'm empathetic to a fault: no, I don't know how it feels. But I can imagine what it feels like, and react as best I can.
Here's a link that says this more clearly. The title of the post made me wince, but that's part of the point of it, and I think it's a good point. Why I Hate White Anti-Racists.
---
3. No, you don't get to get out of it.
What if I went to an all-black school? What if I lived in a town where there were tons of Indian kids? What if I moved to another country that's mostly non-white? What if I shopped at a Korean grocery store for most of my life? What if my maid was black, and she was just like family?*
Well, I might be less screwed up than some other white people. But I'm still being treated like a white person by everyone else.
But I'm a hodge-podge of different ethnicities, like French, German, Scottish... how come I don't get to claim that I'm biracial?
For the same reason that Obama is our first black president, not our first half-white president. It's about perception. I am perceived as white, and receive privilege as such.
But one time a black kid called me a name!
My life is SO HARD, amirite? (Link to a short LJ post on this subject.)
An example that my father and I were talking about tonight is relevant, I think. My parents live in a nearly all-black section of town. My dad is the nicest little gossip queen anyone on the block has ever met. He sits out on his stoop, smoking a cigarette, talking to people about their babies and how their house is doing and what their brother-in-law is up to. Everyone on the block knows his name. He fits in. They still call him "Mister Steve."
"You know why they call me Mister Steve and not just Steve, right?" he said.
"Yup," I said. "Old white man on premises."
"I got privilege just coming out of my pores," he said, cracked up laughing, and hacked up a lung.
* - Something a friend said to me once in the context of a conversation about racism. NB: This is not a good thing to say. Email me or comment if you need to talk about why.
---
4. Thank the good Lord for my kindergarten teacher, because that lesson on apologies still comes in handy.
Sometimes I am going to do or say something racist. Sometimes I do or say ageist or sizeist things, too. If I were a dude-identified biodude, I would probably do something transphobic and sexist. If I were straighterosexual, I would probably do something queerphobic. Often I don't realize I'm being a jackass, even after the fact. Sometimes I do realize it, and I fumble through fixing it and look even worse.
That's not okay, but it is going to happen. I was raised in certain contexts, I learned and am learning certain things, I have a certain perspective. But when I do something that is hurtful to another person, I have to apologize, even if I didn't know I was being hurtful. I have to practice apologizing, so that I can get better at it.
If I saw a pencil on the table, and picked it up, and then someone came up and said, "oh hey, that's my pencil," I would automatically say, "Sorry! I didn't realize! Jeez." Same thing goes here, only this time it's more hurtful for them ("HA! YOUR PENCIL... IN YOUR EYE!"), and equally more embarrassing for you ("I-- I'm sorry, Prime Minister. I had no idea that was you.").
How to apologize -- a really clear explanation. Shakesville has suggestions here that I liked. Alas, A Blog has the fantastically titled, How not to be insane when accused of racism. (A guide for white people.)
I try (operative word "try") to follow these three steps when I (inevitably, with great flair and flexibility) screw up:
I didn't realize this until navia called me out here. And even then, it took me a little bit to realize it. I was still operating from that assumption point. Yup, pretty shameful. Yup, pretty much the exact example of white privilege. I said something racist, right smack dab in the middle of a discussion about race. GOLD STAR FOR ME.
I don't think I apologized well in that situation, because I responded right after talking at length with gerriwriteslog and getting the whammy of her last comment. Still, I apologized -- which I probably should have waited to do, to give myself some time to calm down so that I could acknowledge how much of an asshat I had been and make it less about me -- and then I shut up. When I got over my defensiveness (it MUST have been the result of misreading! I couldn't have been that DUMB and WHITE and RACIST, oh god) and my embarrassment (I'm supposed to be a good person! I'm such a worthless piece of shit) and came back to the comment, I went "well, crud, I screwed up bad that time." Then I went and reread some bell hooks and thought about how I could avoid that in the future.
It was a practice run, and I screwed it up. I'm a slow learner, though, and that's okay. Embarrassing, stupid, but okay. In the future I will take a walk before I acknowledge and apologize. That's my goal.
---
5. Whose job is it? My job! Time to put on my big girl panties! (They say "Thursday.")
What sucks about apologizing for saying or doing something racist is that the other person can refuse to respond. For someone who's constantly hoping that people will like her -- I was teased a lot in school, I usually blame my approval-seeking on that -- this is incredibly hard. Because when I apologize, aren't they supposed to reassure me? Reward me?
Nope. Sucks! But it's important to remember that it's not their job: it's my job.
This goes for educating myself, too. It is never the oppressed person's job to educate their oppressor. I should never expect someone to educate me, just because they've had experience having to deal with this crap every day of their lives. That means they're really tired of dealing with n00bs like me, and I should leave them alone and try to find the resources myself.
I have to clarify on that, from my own experience with a specific type of question. (Again, I'm kind of sharing my inside thoughts here, apologies if it sounds comparative.) When my good friend came to me and asked, "is it weird if you date someone with your name? Do you run into that? Is it weird?" I didn't flip out at her, because I knew she was in earnest and trying to figure something out that isn't very google-able. I said, "Well, sort of? The one time I did it we just had nicknames, really. It was mostly straight people talking about it that made it irritating." And then we talked it out, and I wasn't offended at all. If you want to ask a friend a question about a certain aspect of their identity, I think it's okay to ask, especially if you've had a hard time finding the information yourself, or want to find out more about your friend in particular.
Or when someone else screws up and I say, "WHOA NOT OKAY," and they say, "Wait, I don't understand, why not?" I'm happy to explain then. I didn't know that gyp was a slur for a long time, or that spaz was offensive to people from the UK (not sure of other countries, but that's the context I had the enlightening conversation in). Both times required me screwing up and having it explained; I've done the same thing in return for a lot of other people.
But no one should be required to help me out; when I am talking about racism, I need to check my demandy-pants at the door and do the grunt work myself. It's exhausting; so is living with racism. I have a responsibility to educate myself as constantly and consistently as I can, even when it's painful, and even when the people involved clearly think I'm a jackass white girl who's never going to learn. Just because someone is a person of color (what POC stands for, by the way), doesn't mean that they should have to explain racism to me, or defend themselves from my ignorance.
I'm not doing this for the approval of people of color, either. It's not their job to approve of me, or reward me. I'm doing this to be a better person; it's in my self-interest. (I may get punched in the face less often, which is generally my aim.) If I were to say, "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," that would be implying that my only aim in this whole discussion is not to get yelled at. Again, I really hate being yelled at, but that's not the goal here. The goal here is to be less racist. Sometimes that involves getting yelled at. (In my case, repeatedly!)
The Privilege of Politeness, by Angry Black Woman, explains how tone is linked to the demand to be educated, and why both are problematic.
---
5a. Wait, what were my job duties again? I'm sorry, I was asleep during training.
You only got this job because of who your father knows, I bet. Ha! Okay, stupid humor aside, here are some links to smarter people than I. The first list addresses the problem of "what to do" more directly, the second is just related work that I've read. I'll probably append both as I continue to read. This is in no way a complete list.
Oh, and a tip: if you're a white person, you might want to reconsider breaking out your one icon of a black person to comment on posts about race and racism. It smacks of trying too hard. I know, you really like Travis, I'm just saying it doesn't look good. I've been using my white boy with the scrap-metal prosthesis, mostly. Am I the only one who thinks about this sort of thing? Okay, maybe.
I should really go finish the last three chapters of Cliff-Dwellers, or answer some of my unanswered comments. Whoops! I have read so much over the past week that I've gotten weirdly sensitive to light, and my eyeball-direction is sort of wonky. But I still love the 19th century in America, so I'm counting it a win.
It's mostly for my own self-improvement, really; I've learned a lot just typing it up. I'm sure it is old news to many of you. Feel free to scroll on by. [EDIT: it's unlocked now. Wurgh.]
---
What follows is based on my experience, and includes descriptions of my own failures. It's written in simple language, because I have to think about these things simplistically, or I get tangled up in my own thoughts. I wrote it mostly in the first person, because these are guidelines that I try to remember for myself, rather than injunctions I want to put as law to other people. It was also more productive for me to write it in the first person, because I wasn't putting it on some other racist white person, but on myself. Whoa! Get out of town.
If you read, I would appreciate it if you would let me know if I'm wrong, offensive, or unclear. I will edit and amend the entry accordingly. (I don't erase mistakes, as a rule, but I love me some marginalia!)
---
1. It's good to try to understand. Just learn the concept of "inside thoughts."
Here are a couple of things that have helped me to understand the position of people of color in debates like this in the past:
- With subtle racism: "they're feeling how I feel when someone asks me what I want my wedding to be like." When someone talks about their dream wedding, it's not like my feelings are coherent and easy to parse, but I know that they're bad feelings. I'm left out of the conversation, and I feel angry and hurt. It's not because the person is trying to make me feel bad, but they're talking about something I probably won't be able to have, and have never allowed myself to daydream about.
- With overt racism: "they're feeling how I felt when another woman wouldn't let me into the bathroom, except minus the shock and plus the weariness." (And maybe minus the nearly peeing myself and the shame, but I can't speak for all occurrences.) It also reminds me of how the difficulty of being a woman and finding a bathroom (if you can't pee standing up) gets twice as hard when you're butch, because you have to find a women's bathroom that's safe for you to enter. This makes me feel unsafe, exposed, frightened, and even desperate. If I choose to use a men's restroom, then I feel like I'm invading enemy territory, and fear being found out. If I pee in public, I run the risk of getting arrested.
- With representative images: "they're feeling how I feel when I watch television, or see a movie where the strong white woman and/or queer person dies at the end." Sure, there are examples when that doesn't happen -- as people often scramble to point out when I bring it up -- but there aren't many, and there aren't enough. Seeing a queer person who is happy and non-stereotypical on-screen makes me feel happy, teary-eyed, excited. I get nervous for the person, and watch them like a hawk, hoping they won't lose their significant other/turn out to be straight/turn out to be a stereotype/die horribly/die horribly of AIDS. If things do go awry in one of those all-too-familiar ways, I slump back in my seat and mutter "figures." I actually cried after I watched Kissing Jessica Stein, because it hurt me so much to be promised a gay romcom and to have it yanked away.
It is important for me to stop and think through this, though, NOT in a "but I've experienced what they're going through" way, but in a "I understand why they're reacting in the way they're reacting" way. Often I see white people saying, "why are you so angry?" in discussions of race. I've had that reaction myself. I don't like it when people are angry with me. I get scared. I've been socialized as a middle-class white woman to soothe or cajole people out of anger. However, this is one situation where I have to step back and not intervene; let them be angry, and stay angry. Doing the mental tricks above can help me to do that. [EDIT: It keeps tripping me up, so I'm making a note: by "let them be angry," I mean "not try to intervene and undermine their anger" rather than "magnanimously allow them to be angry." I don't get a say in someone else's emotions, is what I'm saying.]
However -- to risk beating a dead horse -- these thoughts have to stay inside thoughts. While I'm thinking the above things, I try to remind myself not to bring up my own experiences with oppression. There's nothing more painful than hearing "I suffered too!" or "No, I get it!" when you're trying to get sympathy and support. (You know when you're complaining to someone, and in the middle of your complaint they say, "If it makes you feel better, I lost my job yesterday." Has it ever actually made you feel better? It never makes me feel better. Usually it makes me feel like punching a hole in the wall and crying.)
I only figured this out embarrassingly recently, in a women's studies class, when a fellow student said, "being gay isn't as hard as being black, though." Whether or not it's true -- I have no basis for comparison -- it was dismissing my experience, reducing things to a hierarchy, and it made me shut down completely for the rest of the class period. (What's more, when you compare oppressions like that, you're disregarding people who have both. No black person was ever gay, after all. Right?)
vassilissa has some other ways to mentally frame the debate in a post here.
---
2. White kid needs to stop talking about the time she realized what racism felt like.
I said above, "because I haven't had to deal with racism." I've heard many people -- from many races, believe it or not -- say that there is such a thing as "reverse racism." I don't think this is a productive phrase at all. The way that I have taught it is extremely simplified, but I think is a good starting point. I tell my students that there is prejudice, and there is racism. Racism is prejudice backed up with power. When you're talking about "reverse racism," it's unlikely that the reverse racism affected your ability to be protected from institutional repression. If it did, it was probably not race-related, but related to another form of oppression or power difference.
Power relations are never simple. That's the beauty of them, I think. Tyrannical power attempts to make power relations simple, but even then there are modes of resistance.
Sometimes efforts to resist power relations are miscommunicated or misconstrued. For example, one of my former students was talking to me about the offenses of "whitey." When I reminded him that I was a whitey, he said, "no, you're different." I understood the kind of reversal of power he was interested in effecting, but he was doing it in a way that wasn't quite productive. I could call this "reverse racism." I could call a black person's refusal to shake hands with a white person "reverse racism." But first, the fact that I have to use the word "reverse" tells me exactly what "racism" means. [EDIT: just_katarin phrased it more clearly in the comments. "The term itself intimates that there is a 'correct' way to be racist and anything else is a reversal of the 'correct' way. So in addition to being bs and not true, it also sort of backs up the idea that racism is 'supposed' to be a certain way."] And second, it's the wrong dang phrase.
This is really hard for me to say, since I'm empathetic to a fault: no, I don't know how it feels. But I can imagine what it feels like, and react as best I can.
Here's a link that says this more clearly. The title of the post made me wince, but that's part of the point of it, and I think it's a good point. Why I Hate White Anti-Racists.
---
3. No, you don't get to get out of it.
What if I went to an all-black school? What if I lived in a town where there were tons of Indian kids? What if I moved to another country that's mostly non-white? What if I shopped at a Korean grocery store for most of my life? What if my maid was black, and she was just like family?*
Well, I might be less screwed up than some other white people. But I'm still being treated like a white person by everyone else.
But I'm a hodge-podge of different ethnicities, like French, German, Scottish... how come I don't get to claim that I'm biracial?
For the same reason that Obama is our first black president, not our first half-white president. It's about perception. I am perceived as white, and receive privilege as such.
But one time a black kid called me a name!
My life is SO HARD, amirite? (Link to a short LJ post on this subject.)
An example that my father and I were talking about tonight is relevant, I think. My parents live in a nearly all-black section of town. My dad is the nicest little gossip queen anyone on the block has ever met. He sits out on his stoop, smoking a cigarette, talking to people about their babies and how their house is doing and what their brother-in-law is up to. Everyone on the block knows his name. He fits in. They still call him "Mister Steve."
"You know why they call me Mister Steve and not just Steve, right?" he said.
"Yup," I said. "Old white man on premises."
"I got privilege just coming out of my pores," he said, cracked up laughing, and hacked up a lung.
* - Something a friend said to me once in the context of a conversation about racism. NB: This is not a good thing to say. Email me or comment if you need to talk about why.
---
4. Thank the good Lord for my kindergarten teacher, because that lesson on apologies still comes in handy.
Sometimes I am going to do or say something racist. Sometimes I do or say ageist or sizeist things, too. If I were a dude-identified biodude, I would probably do something transphobic and sexist. If I were straighterosexual, I would probably do something queerphobic. Often I don't realize I'm being a jackass, even after the fact. Sometimes I do realize it, and I fumble through fixing it and look even worse.
That's not okay, but it is going to happen. I was raised in certain contexts, I learned and am learning certain things, I have a certain perspective. But when I do something that is hurtful to another person, I have to apologize, even if I didn't know I was being hurtful. I have to practice apologizing, so that I can get better at it.
If I saw a pencil on the table, and picked it up, and then someone came up and said, "oh hey, that's my pencil," I would automatically say, "Sorry! I didn't realize! Jeez." Same thing goes here, only this time it's more hurtful for them ("HA! YOUR PENCIL... IN YOUR EYE!"), and equally more embarrassing for you ("I-- I'm sorry, Prime Minister. I had no idea that was you.").
How to apologize -- a really clear explanation. Shakesville has suggestions here that I liked. Alas, A Blog has the fantastically titled, How not to be insane when accused of racism. (A guide for white people.)
I try (operative word "try") to follow these three steps when I (inevitably, with great flair and flexibility) screw up:
- Say sorry.
- Ask if there's anything I can do to fix my mistake.
- Sit down and shut up.
I didn't realize this until navia called me out here. And even then, it took me a little bit to realize it. I was still operating from that assumption point. Yup, pretty shameful. Yup, pretty much the exact example of white privilege. I said something racist, right smack dab in the middle of a discussion about race. GOLD STAR FOR ME.
I don't think I apologized well in that situation, because I responded right after talking at length with gerriwriteslog and getting the whammy of her last comment. Still, I apologized -- which I probably should have waited to do, to give myself some time to calm down so that I could acknowledge how much of an asshat I had been and make it less about me -- and then I shut up. When I got over my defensiveness (it MUST have been the result of misreading! I couldn't have been that DUMB and WHITE and RACIST, oh god) and my embarrassment (I'm supposed to be a good person! I'm such a worthless piece of shit) and came back to the comment, I went "well, crud, I screwed up bad that time." Then I went and reread some bell hooks and thought about how I could avoid that in the future.
It was a practice run, and I screwed it up. I'm a slow learner, though, and that's okay. Embarrassing, stupid, but okay. In the future I will take a walk before I acknowledge and apologize. That's my goal.
---
5. Whose job is it? My job! Time to put on my big girl panties! (They say "Thursday.")
What sucks about apologizing for saying or doing something racist is that the other person can refuse to respond. For someone who's constantly hoping that people will like her -- I was teased a lot in school, I usually blame my approval-seeking on that -- this is incredibly hard. Because when I apologize, aren't they supposed to reassure me? Reward me?
Nope. Sucks! But it's important to remember that it's not their job: it's my job.
This goes for educating myself, too. It is never the oppressed person's job to educate their oppressor. I should never expect someone to educate me, just because they've had experience having to deal with this crap every day of their lives. That means they're really tired of dealing with n00bs like me, and I should leave them alone and try to find the resources myself.
I have to clarify on that, from my own experience with a specific type of question. (Again, I'm kind of sharing my inside thoughts here, apologies if it sounds comparative.) When my good friend came to me and asked, "is it weird if you date someone with your name? Do you run into that? Is it weird?" I didn't flip out at her, because I knew she was in earnest and trying to figure something out that isn't very google-able. I said, "Well, sort of? The one time I did it we just had nicknames, really. It was mostly straight people talking about it that made it irritating." And then we talked it out, and I wasn't offended at all. If you want to ask a friend a question about a certain aspect of their identity, I think it's okay to ask, especially if you've had a hard time finding the information yourself, or want to find out more about your friend in particular.
Or when someone else screws up and I say, "WHOA NOT OKAY," and they say, "Wait, I don't understand, why not?" I'm happy to explain then. I didn't know that gyp was a slur for a long time, or that spaz was offensive to people from the UK (not sure of other countries, but that's the context I had the enlightening conversation in). Both times required me screwing up and having it explained; I've done the same thing in return for a lot of other people.
But no one should be required to help me out; when I am talking about racism, I need to check my demandy-pants at the door and do the grunt work myself. It's exhausting; so is living with racism. I have a responsibility to educate myself as constantly and consistently as I can, even when it's painful, and even when the people involved clearly think I'm a jackass white girl who's never going to learn. Just because someone is a person of color (what POC stands for, by the way), doesn't mean that they should have to explain racism to me, or defend themselves from my ignorance.
I'm not doing this for the approval of people of color, either. It's not their job to approve of me, or reward me. I'm doing this to be a better person; it's in my self-interest. (I may get punched in the face less often, which is generally my aim.) If I were to say, "I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't," that would be implying that my only aim in this whole discussion is not to get yelled at. Again, I really hate being yelled at, but that's not the goal here. The goal here is to be less racist. Sometimes that involves getting yelled at. (In my case, repeatedly!)
The Privilege of Politeness, by Angry Black Woman, explains how tone is linked to the demand to be educated, and why both are problematic.
---
5a. Wait, what were my job duties again? I'm sorry, I was asleep during training.
You only got this job because of who your father knows, I bet. Ha! Okay, stupid humor aside, here are some links to smarter people than I. The first list addresses the problem of "what to do" more directly, the second is just related work that I've read. I'll probably append both as I continue to read. This is in no way a complete list.
- "Check My What?": On Privilege and What You Can Do About It. Enjoyable, to the point, organized in easy-reading list fashion. Also addresses how to approach a "minority" space.
- sparkymonster has some suggestions for what you can do. See the link at the bottom to throughadoor's post, which is interesting reading.
- I got quite a few of the links in this post from sparkymonster's delicious tag "forcluelesswhitepeople." (HEY THAT'S ME! GUYS, DID YOU SEE I HAVE MY OWN TAG? I'M FAMOUS!)
- Advice for white people and white fen in particular, by deepad.
- shewhohashope has some good quick and dirty responses to common complaints during these debates. And then the short and snappy version, which I like even more.
- I really like the way cryptoxin phrases it at the end of this post, which is short and direct. She advises sticking with it when it's most uncomfortable, and not rushing to a safe perch.
- On JanerBlog, a writer goes through critiquing race issues in her own writing, with example plot descriptions.
- At the end of every book I read, I ask myself, "Where were the people of color? What were they doing?" This is because, as critical works by Toni Morrison and Eric Sundquist have shown, white characters do not and cannot exist out of context with people of color. When the people of color are not in the picture, I have to ask myself where they are. When they are in the picture, I have to ask how much of what I saw was based on "the way these things tend to go." I don't know if you want to do this, but it's what I do.
- Want some suggestions on non-whiteywhitewhite books to read? harborshore has a handful listed here, with brief quotations and descriptions. verb_noire is a new start-up press inspired by this problem. 50books_poc is another place to get book ideas.
- ultranos-fic has some interesting observations about what it's like to be "in the middle" of these discussions.
- If you want a shortcut to the beginning of this debate, go to this post. In the header, there is a link to Elizabeth Bear's post, Avalon's Willow's open letter in response, and below the header, Bear's response. Willow responded to a comment here. Please beware the comments on these posts if you are tired or cranky at all. Please.
- Or you can just read the sum up at Queer Geek Theory. ithiliana sums up here. An amazing summary of the original imbroglio -- thank you to sensational for the link -- is provided here, with accurate timeline and complete links.
Oh, and a tip: if you're a white person, you might want to reconsider breaking out your one icon of a black person to comment on posts about race and racism. It smacks of trying too hard. I know, you really like Travis, I'm just saying it doesn't look good. I've been using my white boy with the scrap-metal prosthesis, mostly. Am I the only one who thinks about this sort of thing? Okay, maybe.
I should really go finish the last three chapters of Cliff-Dwellers, or answer some of my unanswered comments. Whoops! I have read so much over the past week that I've gotten weirdly sensitive to light, and my eyeball-direction is sort of wonky. But I still love the 19th century in America, so I'm counting it a win.