MEME

[phaetonschariot]

1.) Go to my master fic list and pick out a line or two from one of my stories. (Must be a full line, please -- no sentence fragments or speech tags or other such nonsense.)

2.) I will respond with which story of mine I think it's from.

Comments

[royalladyemma]

Oh my sweet God in Heaven. I truly am so horrifed by what I have read that I am literally sick to my stomach and shaking like a leaf right now

[phaetonschariot]

Pretty much everyone who reads me is aware that I'm about the leftist leftist to ever left. I thought the sarcasm was enough to be obvious, but I was really upset when I wrote this - the original incident left me feeling literally ill with anger and I was crying as I checked the statistics - so to people unaware of my stance on race it may not have come through well enough. I'm sorry. :( I shall add a note that this is definitely not how I think, because if anything my race-fails in the past have tended towards sounding like I'm glamourising minorities and my sister and I half-joke about being racist towards white people.

Again, I'm really sorry this made you feel so awful, since having felt like that so recently myself I definitely never intended to do the same to someone else.

[royalladyemma]

No, I'm the one apologising here -- I should have realised in this day and age that no one would air their beliefs in such a way.

On the other hand, you wrote one H*LL of an inflammatory article -- you really know how to stir up the masses and make them come together over a common enemy!!

I have to admit the way it came across to me was shaped immediately by the two jokes at the very beginning. When I took those out of the equation, the rest of the article made better sense. I just remember jokes exactly like that going around my Uni and how awful I felt about it then, and they weren't even aimed at me. It was just that everybody found them hilarious - you couldn't go anywhere around campus without hearing them.

There were several comments to my post, all defending you. I apologised to each of them as well, and deleted my rant. It was totally undeserved and I sincerely apologise for it.

[scifiangel]

I think the reason more people haven't commented is that they thought you were serious instead of being satirical. I think they were afraid that they may go off on you if they got started. The very saddest thing is that I've actually met people like this many times in my life, as I grew up in the "deep" south of the United States. (Georgia, Florida, and Virginia.)

Thank God my parents were as color blind as they come. We lived in Southern California during the Worst racial riots in the 1960's. The Watts Riots that happened in the LA area. My Mom and her best friend were having coffee together while discussing how terrible the riots were. All of a sudden, my Mom stared at her friend and shouted, "Oh my God, you're black."

She had only just realized it, as it wasn't something she cared about. Her friend laughed till there were tears in her eyes.

I am very glad that you meant this as satire, because I would hate to think that anyone who loved Dr. Who would be so prejudice.

[phaetonschariot]

Sometimes I feel like, for a genuine misanthrope, I have way too much optimism in individuals. It actually didn't occur to me that this wasn't over the top enough to be obvious sarcasm because I'm lucky enough to usually be able to avoid people who really do think like that. I know they exist, it's just... it seems like someone thinking those things would be an obscene caricature rather than a real person. If anything the fact that it wasn't clear that I wasn't serious just really saddens me, not because people thought that of me, but because they had reason to think it was possible that someone could truly believe those things. And in a way that's actually worse than all those statistics, because as a society we can fail a group of people so utterly and completely and then don't even care about their suffering. It's definitely a harsh reminder of human nature.

[scifiangel]

I understand. There is so much more we need to do. And so much past to over come. African/Americans aren't the only ones that have been treated so badly in my country. In many ways the American Indians have been treated far, far worse. We nearly committed total genocide. And if it wasn't for casinos most Indian reservations would be at the poorest level in the country. It's a sad statement that their only income is from gambling.

I myself am 1/16th Cherokee, but because my Grandmother was told never to talk about it for fear of reprisals I know very little.

I pray some day the world would be more like SciFi, where purple aliens live next door, so who cares about the color of your skin.