Race, Fandom, and the Shoes of Other People--Part 1

[hederahelix]

This is a long post. Those of you who know me know that when I say something's going to be quick, it often ends up to be 15 pages, so when I say it's long, I'm really not messing around

Comments

[moxie_brown]

Hi. Butting in to say, while I can't speak to this well-written post and the reactions to it, when the big fandom "discussion" happened a few weeks back, there was a lot of disagreement. I stepped into the fray when I noticed that some people were trying to turn the criticism from an issue about internalized racism into one about authorship/individual intent. Which just to me was very offensive, so I had to speak up

[hederahelix]

I guess I don't see where you're coming from, and I would really like to figure out what I'm missing. What is it about race that this discussion closes down? What is it that people can't disagree with

[canlib]

Pardon me for butting in here (really good original post by the way

[hederahelix]

I think that this is one of the hardest concepts for people to understand. All too often I hear people talk about sexism as something that men do to women, and I'm like, huh, what about Phyllis Schlafly? I think it's a lot easier for us to talk about villains and heroes than to think about the fact that all of us are simultaneously both.

That said, I would be sad if the only thing that people took away from this is that POC can be racist.

I keep thinking about this one moment in Black. White when Nick, the African American son in the experiment, was in an RV with a bunch of white kids and the question of using the n-word came up. Nick was like, "No man, it's fine to use it," and most of the white kids jumped on the bandwagon. (Nick's parents, when they found out, had a fit and dragged him off to the barbershop to get schooled, but that's another story

We should have talked about this yesterday!

[laurashapiro]

This is tangential to the race discussion, so I don't want to derail, but dude. Email me. Ask Me About My Femininity.

hederahelix, this is a fucking awesome post.

[litalex]

that's just wow and amazingly brilliant and... wow. You've thought this issue out a lot more (and a lot better) than I ever did and here I am, a Chinese-American (of course, I'm living in Hong Kong right now, but I did spend more than a decade living in the States).

P.S. light blue on dark blue is very difficult to read... (but that doesn't detract from the content of your post, of course)

[hederahelix]

Well, I'm glad you liked it. Thanks for leaving a comment.

Apologies about the format. It's the first one I found to swtich to. My old journal format, while pretty, made these comment windows show up at very light grey text in a white box in tiny, tiny font, and I figured that people would want to talk about this post. I'll try, later today, to switch to something else easier on the eyes.

[kitzen_kat]

So much I could comment on but I"m still thinking about this. Gotta bookmark this.

[hederahelix]

There is no statute of limitations on comments in my journal. Come back whenever you want.

Here via rydra_wong

[spiralsheep]

Yes. Thank you.

Onwards to part 2... :-)