Writercon 2009: -ism in Fandom
At Writercon 2009 this last weekend, I was on a panel entitled "Evil In Our Midst: Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Fandom." And before I start talking about it, I want to give some background, because as I discovered through some conversations at the con, some of the people who attended weren't aware of why the convention decided to host this particular panel at this particular time.
Last January, there began a multi-fandom imbroglio which has come to be known as Racefail 2009. It started when science fiction writer Elizabeth Bear posted an essay on "Writing the Other," and blogger Avalon's Willow posted a reply detailing her issues with Bear's portrayal of non-white characters in a particular book. It quickly expanded into a weeks-long debate about problems with the portrayal of characters of color in science fiction and fantasy literature, and race issues in the F&SF community in general. This argument raged across the SF blogosphere and parts of Livejournal, and involved many professional writers and editors as well as many prominent fans.
has compiled a list of links here. Fair warning, it is enormous, but a couple of summaries are linked to at the top.
As an aside, this is not the first time that LJ fandom has had this kind of discourse. The various discussions of race in canon and fanfic in BtVS and SGA fandom over the last five to ten years come to mind. However, it may have been among the first large-scale internet discussion of this sort within the literary SF community (there have, of course, been numerous smaller-scale discussions in many venues, online and off, in the past.)
While Racefail is the elephant in the living room, there have been several other similar incidents this year in the F&SF community. The debate over Patricia Wrede's decision to excise Native Americans from her alternate history The Thirteenth Child, the more recent incident involving Harlan Ellison's racial slurs against K. Tempest Bradford, the "Your Father's Readercon" debacle... I could go on, but it gets depressing.
So that's the recent fannish historical background. Now I want to define some terms. We didn't really get into that at the panel, and in retrospect I wish we had done a little of it.
'Privilege' is a term that gets thrown around a lot in these discussions, and in this context, it's a word which may not mean what you think it means. It's not about individual people being mean, or being racists or homophobes or whatever. It's about the biases that are built into our society. When those biases are in our favor, it is incredibly hard for us to see them, or to acknowledge that others may not have them.
Simply by virtue of being white, I partake of a certain set of privileges in this society. I partake of another set of privileges by identifying as the gender I was born as, and another set by having a certain level of income, and so on. On the other hand, I do not partake of the privileges inherent in being born male, or straight. Everyone has their own collection of privileges and lack of privileges, ways in which society is biased in their favor, and ways in which it is not.
If one is a member of a privileged group, there is often an enormous amount of resistance to the idea that one is privileged. Most of us (and I definitely include myself in this) don't like to think that we have some unearned and unasked-for advantage. We have gotten to where we are by our own hard work and talent. If someone points out my privilege, it can be intensely uncomfortable. I may get defensive, or angry, or go into denial. (I know this because at various times I've had all those reactions.)
When discussions about race, gender, queerness, or any other non-privileged group are going on, there is a tendency for members of the privileged group (sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not) to try to make it All About Them. This is what is meant by 'derailment.' Discussions of how rape is a huge problem for women get derailed by "But men get raped too!" Discussions of race get derailed by "But POC can be racist too!" and so on. All those things may be true, and worthy of discussion in their own forum, but a forum which has been specifically designated for discussions about the problems of the non-privileged group is not the place for that discussion. When the entirety of U.S. society is set up to cater to the needs of straight people, I do not appreciate it, for example, when a conversation about gay rights gets co-opted to talk about the problems faced by unmarried straight couples.
And this happens all the time. It happened constantly during Racefail. It happens constantly in a hundred smaller discussions every day. This stuff is painful for everybody, so it's only natural that we want to deflect it, avoid it, pretend it doesn't exist, or that if there is a problem, it's shared equally by everyone. And if you happen to be a member of the privileged group, you can do that. You can leave the discussion and retreat into a box where everything is set up to make you comfortable. The member of the non-privileged group can't do that. They can't back off from being gay or transgendered or old or fat or differently abled or being whatever racial, ethnic, or religious group they are. They are that way 24/7, and they have to deal with it 24/7.
So at long last I come around to last weekend's panel again. For the most part, the panel went pretty well; we discussed a lot of these issues in a specifically fannish context; I don't want to do a full panel report because I don't think a panelist has a very objective view of how the panel went. What I want to talk about is this:
Toward the end of the panel, a member of the audience stood up to talk. I don't know what it was she intended to say. But what it sounded like she was launching into was the "As a member of Privileged Group A, I feel oppressed by the fact that everyone else claims to be more oppressed than I am," speech. (A speech I'm woefully familiar with, as I've given variations of it myself in the past.) I repeat, I don't know her, and I don't know if that's what she meant to say. But that's the way it came off to me.
That particular speech is infuriating to non-members of Privileged Group A. Those of us on the panel were quite literally stunned into silence by the realization that after talking about all this for an hour and a half, someone was, apparently, doing a classic derailment. Another audience member called them on it, and it stopped there. But afterwards, I had a conversation with a third audience member, who felt that silencing the first person, after we'd been urging people to talk about these issues, was hypocritical, and wiped out any points that may have been made earlier.
So this entire post, I suppose, is in answer to that conversation, and an attempt to explain why that particular gambit elicited that particular response, and why it was an inappropriate thing to say in that venue. People in Privileged Group A (whatever A may stand for at any given time or place) do need to talk out their own issues with being privileged. But they don't get to co-opt a space that's been set up to discuss the issues of non-A people in order to do so.
So. How was your weekend?
Last January, there began a multi-fandom imbroglio which has come to be known as Racefail 2009. It started when science fiction writer Elizabeth Bear posted an essay on "Writing the Other," and blogger Avalon's Willow posted a reply detailing her issues with Bear's portrayal of non-white characters in a particular book. It quickly expanded into a weeks-long debate about problems with the portrayal of characters of color in science fiction and fantasy literature, and race issues in the F&SF community in general. This argument raged across the SF blogosphere and parts of Livejournal, and involved many professional writers and editors as well as many prominent fans.
has compiled a list of links here. Fair warning, it is enormous, but a couple of summaries are linked to at the top.
As an aside, this is not the first time that LJ fandom has had this kind of discourse. The various discussions of race in canon and fanfic in BtVS and SGA fandom over the last five to ten years come to mind. However, it may have been among the first large-scale internet discussion of this sort within the literary SF community (there have, of course, been numerous smaller-scale discussions in many venues, online and off, in the past.)
While Racefail is the elephant in the living room, there have been several other similar incidents this year in the F&SF community. The debate over Patricia Wrede's decision to excise Native Americans from her alternate history The Thirteenth Child, the more recent incident involving Harlan Ellison's racial slurs against K. Tempest Bradford, the "Your Father's Readercon" debacle... I could go on, but it gets depressing.
So that's the recent fannish historical background. Now I want to define some terms. We didn't really get into that at the panel, and in retrospect I wish we had done a little of it.
'Privilege' is a term that gets thrown around a lot in these discussions, and in this context, it's a word which may not mean what you think it means. It's not about individual people being mean, or being racists or homophobes or whatever. It's about the biases that are built into our society. When those biases are in our favor, it is incredibly hard for us to see them, or to acknowledge that others may not have them.
Simply by virtue of being white, I partake of a certain set of privileges in this society. I partake of another set of privileges by identifying as the gender I was born as, and another set by having a certain level of income, and so on. On the other hand, I do not partake of the privileges inherent in being born male, or straight. Everyone has their own collection of privileges and lack of privileges, ways in which society is biased in their favor, and ways in which it is not.
If one is a member of a privileged group, there is often an enormous amount of resistance to the idea that one is privileged. Most of us (and I definitely include myself in this) don't like to think that we have some unearned and unasked-for advantage. We have gotten to where we are by our own hard work and talent. If someone points out my privilege, it can be intensely uncomfortable. I may get defensive, or angry, or go into denial. (I know this because at various times I've had all those reactions.)
When discussions about race, gender, queerness, or any other non-privileged group are going on, there is a tendency for members of the privileged group (sometimes with the best of intentions, sometimes not) to try to make it All About Them. This is what is meant by 'derailment.' Discussions of how rape is a huge problem for women get derailed by "But men get raped too!" Discussions of race get derailed by "But POC can be racist too!" and so on. All those things may be true, and worthy of discussion in their own forum, but a forum which has been specifically designated for discussions about the problems of the non-privileged group is not the place for that discussion. When the entirety of U.S. society is set up to cater to the needs of straight people, I do not appreciate it, for example, when a conversation about gay rights gets co-opted to talk about the problems faced by unmarried straight couples.
And this happens all the time. It happened constantly during Racefail. It happens constantly in a hundred smaller discussions every day. This stuff is painful for everybody, so it's only natural that we want to deflect it, avoid it, pretend it doesn't exist, or that if there is a problem, it's shared equally by everyone. And if you happen to be a member of the privileged group, you can do that. You can leave the discussion and retreat into a box where everything is set up to make you comfortable. The member of the non-privileged group can't do that. They can't back off from being gay or transgendered or old or fat or differently abled or being whatever racial, ethnic, or religious group they are. They are that way 24/7, and they have to deal with it 24/7.
So at long last I come around to last weekend's panel again. For the most part, the panel went pretty well; we discussed a lot of these issues in a specifically fannish context; I don't want to do a full panel report because I don't think a panelist has a very objective view of how the panel went. What I want to talk about is this:
Toward the end of the panel, a member of the audience stood up to talk. I don't know what it was she intended to say. But what it sounded like she was launching into was the "As a member of Privileged Group A, I feel oppressed by the fact that everyone else claims to be more oppressed than I am," speech. (A speech I'm woefully familiar with, as I've given variations of it myself in the past.) I repeat, I don't know her, and I don't know if that's what she meant to say. But that's the way it came off to me.
That particular speech is infuriating to non-members of Privileged Group A. Those of us on the panel were quite literally stunned into silence by the realization that after talking about all this for an hour and a half, someone was, apparently, doing a classic derailment. Another audience member called them on it, and it stopped there. But afterwards, I had a conversation with a third audience member, who felt that silencing the first person, after we'd been urging people to talk about these issues, was hypocritical, and wiped out any points that may have been made earlier.
So this entire post, I suppose, is in answer to that conversation, and an attempt to explain why that particular gambit elicited that particular response, and why it was an inappropriate thing to say in that venue. People in Privileged Group A (whatever A may stand for at any given time or place) do need to talk out their own issues with being privileged. But they don't get to co-opt a space that's been set up to discuss the issues of non-A people in order to do so.
So. How was your weekend?