signal boost: racefail in j2 big bang

[seperis]

So guess how I spent my time between careful food choices and actual work (which was not as worky as one might hope:

Signal Boost for RaceFail J2 Fic by amazonziti, for anyone who happened to miss this one hitting their flists this morning. Recommended reading here where

Comments

[lurkerlynne]

Haiti is way, way to soon to be written as anything but the tragedy it is. Backdrop to romance? Wait, what?

[tricksterquinn]

I've read a large amount of this stuff about half a day ago (which is like eons in internet time, ha technology), so I'm sure to have missed recent developments, but it's an interesting one for me because of the issues of colonialism and racefail as separate from... Hm. How to put this? Previous racefail has, as I've read it, been primarily a discussion of race from a pretty American-centric perspective. This one is different because some of the things people have said in discussion have really made me stop and think about things outside of my cultural paradigm in ways which I am finding personally exceedingly valuable. I am not sure what precisely but something I read somewhere in the whole thing got me mulling about privilege from a slightly different angle than I'd ever approached it from before, though I'm worried that's on me because I've certainly read things which perhaps ought to have done that before

[eponymousanon]

I... wow. World War II, sure, go ahead and set your characters there. But Haiti?? In ten years, maybe the Haiti earthquake (or the Sichuan or the Boxing Day Tsunami) could be used as a "backdrop". Maybe. But using a natural disaster of that magnitude, a REAL LIFE disaster involving REAL PEOPLE being pulled from the rubble as she wrote it? That's horrible and shows extreme myopia on the side of the writer. I haven't read the fic, so I'm not going to comment on the race side of the issue-- but my initial reaction is that no matter the content, a disaster area that has ongoing rescue/recovery/refugee issues on a massive scale is not an appropriate "setting" for a romance story. A story about Haiti should be dealing with the emotional and physical devastation of the earthquake, not bringing two (rich, white) people together in gooey prose with children's bodies as a backdrop.

[kuhekabir]

i saw the bigbang post and i immediately skipped it because of the setting...i didnt even try to read it...

[archaeologist_d]

haven't read the story. Not going to. What really upsets me about this whole race!fail thing is the racist comments, on both sides. Just because you are black doesn't mean you are not racist, just because you are white doesn't mean you are not racist - and the reverse applies. Racists come in all colors and so do non-racists and assuming one or the other because of skin color alone is just wrong, imo. It's what you do that counts.

So talking about race can be very enlightening or it can drive people further apart.