from the department of redundancy department
Over the course of the last two or three months, a conversation about white privilege, racism and writing characters of color has been sprawling across the internet, starting in the blogs of professional science fiction authors, spilling over into the blogs and livejournals of writers and fans. Because I live with sparkymonster (the rockstar who has a del.icio.us tag labeled forcluelesswhitepeople), this has been a conversation that I have while jostling for space in front of the bathroom mirror when I put on my makeup in the morning, so I've said less about it in this medium than I could have. (I've had less to say on livejournal in general lately, blame it on my having been distracted by watching possibly escaped carnies try to pitch baseball games.)
This has been going on since, swear to God, mid-January, but earlier this month, the crapfest took a wrinkle that involved outing people who engage on the internet using pseudonyms and it seems to have pushed itself into the Livejournal zeitgeist. Like I said above, there's a built-in part to my daily routine that involves coming home, cooking dinner and forcing J to watch sports while she tells me about what new racist bullshit she's encountered on the internet, it's hard for me to fathom that anyone could think that just because this entire mess has been nicknamed "RaceFail" that this means it's just a Livejournal wank in the same category as such great Livejournal wanks as the murder/suicide pacts of Harry/Hermione shippers, HEAD IS PASTEDE ON YAY and that time that girl who claimed she was channeling the spirit of Frodo faked or own death or whatever.
But apparently this is not the case. And since we can't all stand around in my bathroom and put on eye makeup and talk about why Will Shutterly sucks, here is:
Some Advice for White Fans Who Have Only Recently Encountered RaceFail.
If you've only started seeing occasional posts about it on your friends list in the last couple weeks, it's not just a Livejournal grudge wank. It didn't even start on Livejournal. A reasonably good summary of what happened (it's tricky because the offenders in question have been diva-deleting like crazy) is here. So now that we're all on the same page, what next?
1. You, as a white person, do not have to make a post about RaceFail in order to prove that you are on the right side of RaceFail, but if you've thought about it enough to wonder whether you should make a post, you could probably stand to think about it a little bit more. The sound bite is something like: "Post and say that you're against Racefail, or your silence can be interpreted as agreement!" I do think that this is unrealistic, because even this corner of the internet that we loosely call "fandom" is a big huge sprawling series of lily pads, and not everyone has had the same exposure to the source material and it's not like we're a bunch of people standing in a ballroom and half of us are having a philosophical argument about racism and the other half are huddled in a corner trying to talk about the weather. But it's not quite that simple. pop_fantastic actually does a great job of dismantling why it's not that simple here, so just go read that, I'll wait.
2. The only thing you may learn from RaceFail is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I think some people are afraid to say anything about RaceFail is because it has become this huge, awful sprawling thing that is a pretty accurate working model for racism in American society, with its institutionality and its stereotypes and its messy white guilt and its silenced people of color. Nobody is going to fix what has happened here, very little good is going to come out of it. It's okay if the only thing you take from having engaged in this mess is which professional science fiction authors are people you can respect and which ones aren't. Take all the books written by asshats and make an Orson Scott Card Memorial Wing on your bookshelf (we did this at our house but it's pretty small, Elizabeth Bear is prone to epitheting, which drives me batshit, so I've never really enjoyed her writing). Let's put it this way: I love football. And every time someone tells me that they love Tony Dungy, I start a conversation about how he used his football-related fame to lend publicity and monetary support to an organization that is part of the ex-gay movement, and therefore I do not think he is the Nicest Man in Professional Football [TM]. And now I'm going to have a similar conversation every time someone tries to lend me an Elizabeth Bear book, and I encourage you to consider doing the same.
3. The only thing you may learn from RaceFail is that we're all a whole lot more racist than you previously wanted to suspect. This is something I've been thinking about since the presidential election: there are many, many ways in which electing a black president was a huge step for race relations in this country, but I do think there has been a slight boomerang effect. I said right after the election, when people were getting in line to be idiots about how people of color passed Proposition 8, that before Barack Obama was elected, we didn't know how much we didn't know about racism in American society. Now, at the very least, we know how much we don't know. And I think the timing of RaceFail supports my theory that there is a certain type of over-educated white person who likes to play devil's advocate on the internet. And this person thinks that now that the most recent presidential election has proven that racism in this country can't quite possibly be that bad, it's safe for them to share their convoluted pseudo-intellectual theories about the intersectionality of race and a marginalization that they themselves happened to have experienced. And somehow, the math always magically adding up to equal that they, the unique beautiful white marginalized snowflake, have it worse off than people of color. And this sucks, it fucking sucks. And so if all we can all take from this is a reality check that says, "people in this country still have really ill-conceived, privileged opinions about racism," that's something we probably all needed anyway.
If you are asking yourself "But I do want to do something, what can I do, what should I do?" sparkymonster has some good advice here. But if you are looking for bullet points to salvage from the crapfest, the ones above are the ones I would recommend. They're worth thinking about anyway, and if a stupid internet wankfest has served as a reminder, well, at least the stupid internet wankfest did one good thing.
This has been going on since, swear to God, mid-January, but earlier this month, the crapfest took a wrinkle that involved outing people who engage on the internet using pseudonyms and it seems to have pushed itself into the Livejournal zeitgeist. Like I said above, there's a built-in part to my daily routine that involves coming home, cooking dinner and forcing J to watch sports while she tells me about what new racist bullshit she's encountered on the internet, it's hard for me to fathom that anyone could think that just because this entire mess has been nicknamed "RaceFail" that this means it's just a Livejournal wank in the same category as such great Livejournal wanks as the murder/suicide pacts of Harry/Hermione shippers, HEAD IS PASTEDE ON YAY and that time that girl who claimed she was channeling the spirit of Frodo faked or own death or whatever.
But apparently this is not the case. And since we can't all stand around in my bathroom and put on eye makeup and talk about why Will Shutterly sucks, here is:
Some Advice for White Fans Who Have Only Recently Encountered RaceFail.
If you've only started seeing occasional posts about it on your friends list in the last couple weeks, it's not just a Livejournal grudge wank. It didn't even start on Livejournal. A reasonably good summary of what happened (it's tricky because the offenders in question have been diva-deleting like crazy) is here. So now that we're all on the same page, what next?
1. You, as a white person, do not have to make a post about RaceFail in order to prove that you are on the right side of RaceFail, but if you've thought about it enough to wonder whether you should make a post, you could probably stand to think about it a little bit more. The sound bite is something like: "Post and say that you're against Racefail, or your silence can be interpreted as agreement!" I do think that this is unrealistic, because even this corner of the internet that we loosely call "fandom" is a big huge sprawling series of lily pads, and not everyone has had the same exposure to the source material and it's not like we're a bunch of people standing in a ballroom and half of us are having a philosophical argument about racism and the other half are huddled in a corner trying to talk about the weather. But it's not quite that simple. pop_fantastic actually does a great job of dismantling why it's not that simple here, so just go read that, I'll wait.
2. The only thing you may learn from RaceFail is who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. I think some people are afraid to say anything about RaceFail is because it has become this huge, awful sprawling thing that is a pretty accurate working model for racism in American society, with its institutionality and its stereotypes and its messy white guilt and its silenced people of color. Nobody is going to fix what has happened here, very little good is going to come out of it. It's okay if the only thing you take from having engaged in this mess is which professional science fiction authors are people you can respect and which ones aren't. Take all the books written by asshats and make an Orson Scott Card Memorial Wing on your bookshelf (we did this at our house but it's pretty small, Elizabeth Bear is prone to epitheting, which drives me batshit, so I've never really enjoyed her writing). Let's put it this way: I love football. And every time someone tells me that they love Tony Dungy, I start a conversation about how he used his football-related fame to lend publicity and monetary support to an organization that is part of the ex-gay movement, and therefore I do not think he is the Nicest Man in Professional Football [TM]. And now I'm going to have a similar conversation every time someone tries to lend me an Elizabeth Bear book, and I encourage you to consider doing the same.
3. The only thing you may learn from RaceFail is that we're all a whole lot more racist than you previously wanted to suspect. This is something I've been thinking about since the presidential election: there are many, many ways in which electing a black president was a huge step for race relations in this country, but I do think there has been a slight boomerang effect. I said right after the election, when people were getting in line to be idiots about how people of color passed Proposition 8, that before Barack Obama was elected, we didn't know how much we didn't know about racism in American society. Now, at the very least, we know how much we don't know. And I think the timing of RaceFail supports my theory that there is a certain type of over-educated white person who likes to play devil's advocate on the internet. And this person thinks that now that the most recent presidential election has proven that racism in this country can't quite possibly be that bad, it's safe for them to share their convoluted pseudo-intellectual theories about the intersectionality of race and a marginalization that they themselves happened to have experienced. And somehow, the math always magically adding up to equal that they, the unique beautiful white marginalized snowflake, have it worse off than people of color. And this sucks, it fucking sucks. And so if all we can all take from this is a reality check that says, "people in this country still have really ill-conceived, privileged opinions about racism," that's something we probably all needed anyway.
If you are asking yourself "But I do want to do something, what can I do, what should I do?" sparkymonster has some good advice here. But if you are looking for bullet points to salvage from the crapfest, the ones above are the ones I would recommend. They're worth thinking about anyway, and if a stupid internet wankfest has served as a reminder, well, at least the stupid internet wankfest did one good thing.