Let's talk Privilege

[tanndell]

Two rants in a month?  I'm on a roll.  But I believe that I genuinely have something to say about the recent outrage regarding a certain fic set in Haiti in the spn_j2_bigbang.  Again, it's something that's been intensely discussed and fantastic points about privilege, racism and ignorance have been highlighted, but as a FoC there are responses

Comments

[muccamukk]

I like your first point. There were a number of fics out there with Americans (and others) processing their feelings about 9/11. I'm in comics fandom, and a lot of canon talked about that too (to varying degrees of effectiveness, Captain America worked pretty well. The one with Doom crying, not so much). If I really, really felt like I needed to write about Haiti, however, I sure as shit wouldn't use it as a backdrop. I'd probably use Jericho Drumm (originally from Haiti, now lives in New Orleans) either as a POV character, or if I didn't feel confident in that level of insight, have a non-Hatian character with him as POV character. In any case, I'd do a hell of a lot more reading about Haiti than I've already done for writing Jericho in other things.

To completely eschew it is both privileged and escapist.

Word. I had a discussion over in my post about how even when one does not write characters of colour in a story, one is still writing them. By leaving CoC out, the author is writing them as not interesting/important enough to be in the story.

But yeah, this story had a lot of issues, it wasn't just about a white author writing characters of colour. It was about an author writing characters of colour really freaking poorly.

[tanndell]

Thank you for reading and commenting. I appreciated your post so much that I'm glad you took a look at mine. As a comics fan (though not in the comics fandom per se) Jericho Drumm (though his nom-de-plume still icks me slightly) would be an interesting character to examine the Haiti issue through, but I think I could tolerate a fic that used white characters, if it examined it well. Bruce Wayne finding that all the money in the world wasn't good enough to just make the problems go away for example... I don't mind white PoVs, I just have aproblem when they are used to subsume the narrative of the culture that is being explored

[muccamukk]

I liked the post that talked about how this story was essentially White Man's Burden porn. (Possibly In the same way that Left Behind is Rapture porn for Evangelicals).

Well, Doctor Voodoo is vaguely better than Brother Voodoo, I think. Still. I'm currently Very Concerned about him, and am mentally prepping an angry letter. No year is a good year to kill of one's only Haitian character, but this year is worse than most.