xanzpet: Enough Bullshit - Here's the bottom line: if you don't like something, don't read it. You certainly shouldn't post it and detail the reasons you believe it to be dreadful. -
witchqueen: Dog Whistles and Insults - One of the terms used this month was miscegenation [...]. Stories written in response to this theme included human/human, human/magical sapient (i.e. werewolf, house-elf), and human/goat. What follows are the e-mails we exchanged on the term. -
spiralsheep: In which our heroine suggests that some words are more equal than others - The reason why we sometimes hurt people when we confuse concepts such as race and species, or interracial sex and interspecies sex and bestiality, is because sometimes those mistakes have racist implications and reinforce harmful stereotypes. -
darkrosetiger: Your kink is my life--and no, that's not okay. - The problem is that if that's true, then the appropriate response should be "I'm sorry; I didn't realize that was offensive, and I'll be more aware in the future." In fandom, though, there are a number of responses to "please don't use that racist languag -
witchwillow: Of Death Eaters, Fans and Racism - I understand that as a kink community it can be all too easy to want to substitute one thing for another, for something that makes them as mods less likely to go 'eeeewh' etc. // But they weren't asked to change the kink prompt. -
annavtree: the way things seem - I understand that the community doesn't want to put limits on what members can imagine, that it strives to be a place of no judgment. However, 'miscegenation' is a word of judgment. -
neverneverfic: Fandom, why must you be so racist? - What the fuck fandom? I believe we've been over this before When someone says "that is offensive to me" the appropriate response is NEVER "i didn't mean to offend so you need to alter your feelings about it" -
kita0610: Say what now? - I am absolutely sure the mods at this HP comm didn't know that. Their goal was probably (I am guessing) to have artists render human/magical species work (Harry/House Elf, Hermoine/Unicorn, whatever). -
elynross: wtf. I mean, really, wtf. - but to throw those in someone's face as "proof" that they're wrong about what a word means connotationally, to ignore the historical and emotional baggage of a term, to deny words the power they have to carry a whole history of denigration and servitude a -
oulangi: Fandom is all fun and games until someone uses the "N" word. - It was a word specifically coined to spread racial hate and fear. The "genus" is meant to emphasize and lend a scientific credence to the racist idea that there are "distinct biological differences between whites and non-whites". Offensive, yes? -
telesilla: These are simple people. The common clay. You know...morons. - However, even the porn industry, for all it's devil-may-care, "we're only in it for the dough" attitude, doesn't equate the interracial kink with the bestiality kink. And even they know not to use "miscegenation" in the place of "interracial. -
fan_eunice: Ten/Rose...it's like B/A...sort of - Ten/Rose has become this weird mirror to the way I experienced Bjavascript:swap("dw")/A.[...]And it all comes down to two things the way we talk about things in fandom affecting the way we watch, and my absolute loathing of Soulmates 4Evah 'shipping. -
laurashapiro: Rambly fannish thoughts: Doctor Who, DS, erotic dynamics - I've been reading a bit of Doctor Who fic lately, the first time I've really invested myself in reading fic since my whirlwind Farscape obsession three years ago. My last serious fic fandom was Due South, and I keep bumping up against certain parallels. -
trinityofone: The first step. - Everyone makes mistakes, and everyone has subconscious prejudices/biases or areas of history or issues about which they're simply ignorant. EVERYONE. It doesn't make you a bad person. What matters is how you react when you're called on a mistake. -
thebratqueen: Oh for... - As a friendly tip: read the links you're using as your fact-checking sources[...]Wikipedia's entry takes all of two sentences before stating "Today, the term 'miscegenation' in English-speaking countries is often a loaded word and is by many considered of -
angiepen: An Official Assumption - OK, at this point I'm just officially assuming that any writer of multi-part stories who hasn't done something to make it easy for other people to nominate said multi-part stories for awards doesn't want their stories nominated. -
merryish: If you're looking for some stupid... - It's...a community. That's why you have to type < lj COMM > to make the tag for it. When you are part of a community, you accept that your right to freedom of expression ends where another person's right not to be hurt by you begins. It's how we keep from -
isiscolo: Isis's guide to recording awesome podfic - The downside of the recent explosion of podfic is that there is an awful lot of poorly-done podfic out there now. I was going to rant about it, but actually, I don't want to make readers feel bad about it - I want them to improve their recordings! -
annavtree: Sorry to stop the free flow of squee. It will resume shortly. - So, please, daily_deviant mods, feel free to call me an oversensitive person of color or wank seeking (despite not posting about this publicly until after you all forced this issue public and the fact that I am not a person of color) or whatever you want -
jennem: Dear Fandom, - Several intelligent, well respected members of fandom brought up the fact that they had never 1) heard the term miscegenation, and 2) had no inkling that it was racist[...]So, it appears that fandom is in need of a quick, compressed history lesson. -
jacquez: Fandom, Racism, and Me. - I didn't know that racism also hurts me and other white people like me, the people in power.[...]Except it does. It makes me smaller. Unless I do something about it, racism's structure in this country makes me part of the problem, and I don't want to be p -
tzikeh: Miscegen Nation - If anyone has lied about anything that daily_deviant, or its users, did, I've yet to see it.//Here are a few more words the Admins might want to look up: Cut. Your. Losses. -
bethbethbeth: witchqueen made a post about racism and - The truth is that apart from experiencing a feeling of vague discomfort when I read the word, I didn't react strongly to its use in the headers of fic/art posts and I didn't raise any official objection. This was a mistake -
teh_no: Miscegenation - words having power in fandom is nothing new. It's not rape, it's non-con. It's not child porn, it's chan. It's not incest, it's Wincest ...]So while we may be obliged to tolerate the content of a story, there's nothing that says we need to tolerate what i -
shay_renoylds: In relation to witchqueen's post - But guess what happens if those words ARE changed right away -- they get swept under the rug and people suddenly ignore the issue like it never happened. I don't, personally, agree with the lack of action but I stand by their decision to keep their own wo -
seperis: does this say something about education? - I get the entire 'do not want to censor or whatever' except I honestly *don't* in this case. This is not a test case for the fucking Supreme Court; no one is rioting, threatening, or trying to restrict your free speech, laws will not be passed or overturn -
coffeeandink: Harry Potter and the Racist Daily Deviant Moderators - Even aside from the loadedness of equating interracial and interspecies sex, the term "miscegenation" is generally considered offensive because it has historically been used[...]with the implication that the white partner was "polluted" by the "bestial na -
thelastgoodname: So I had heard the argument about marrying your dog - I knew that there were people out there who thought legalizing gay marriage would eventually lead to people wanting to marry their dogs or something [...]But now I find that this dog-marrying thing can arise from straight relationships, too -
lavvyan: Slash and Emotions - yes, fanfiction is all about making things happen that obviously wouldn't happen on screen, but it's still nice to have the characters we fell in love with like, you know, actually stay in character. -
rahirah: Cakeus interruptus - Throwing a fit about a bad review is not going to make the people who don't like the story like it any better. If the story actually has problems, it's not going to make the problems go away. -
yeloson: The problem isn't that we're offended - When you think you have the right to insult people with words, images, or stereotypes that HAVE killed people, and that taking it away is some kind of hassle, that's white supremacy -
etrangere: Ooops, racism - No, I am not saying that you should bow and let anyone who pulls a "Racist!" card get their way, but you should seriously consider your own prejudices. Because it's likely you have some, and no, it's not going to kill you to admit it, rectify, appology. -
poisontaster: I bit my tongue until it bled - We are responsible for the words that we use. It doesn't always matter if we intended to give offense or not. The moral culpability may be different, but the end result is the same. -
rivkat: HP, encyclopedias, etc. - Daily Deviant prompt was selected from an encyclopedia "of sex-themed words." It seems unlikely to me that the definition therein included sex between humans and "magical creatures." So the policy of the community is not "we won't alter prompts." -
flamewarrior: Clueless white people - I've seen a couple of posts around which are fics or art using the daily_deviant prompt of "miscegenation". When I saw them, I blinked, thought, "No, surely not," and dismissed it from my mind. As an ally to People of Colour, I have failed to the n-th deg -
solvent90: just when I think I've run out of obvious to state - So. Have you got that? Jo Rowling, bless her, has apparently written racism out of the world - not just the modern world, but the history of the world, so that the term "miscegenation" has none of its historical weight. -
elynross: Words, Power, Freedom, and Responsibility - It seems almost invariable: every time issues of racism and sexism come up in fandom, eventually someone picks up and waves the flag of FREEDOM OF SPEECH and cries CENSORSHIP. -
mamadeb: Words, you see, do hurt - I don't understand how people at this point in our history could think such things are acceptable, or that protesting such things are censorship. -
drelmo: I Don't Have an Answer - Does the underclass have the unchecked power to designate offensive terms? 'Cause, I think, most of the educated white people I know,[...]would tend to think you're an idiot if you start complaining that the use of the word niggardly was racist -
lamardeuse: I don't have much to add - - That's why the term "miscegenation" is a little fraught, historically and in the present, for people of colour. -
jonquil: Verbal Self-Defense: How to Lose - Thinking about racism makes me feel shame. That's because racism is ugly, and because my people (and I) have been complicit in that ugliness. However, when I feel shame, that doesn't make the person who upset me wrong. -