: Friday, March 6, 2009
- beachlass: Racism - I'm a white Canadian woman. I'm racist. It shows when I'm surprised when a woman of colour tells me she's a midwife. Or when I opt out of reading about RaceFail09 because it doesn't personally affect me. I'm anti-racist, too. And I work on being a good ally. -
- zvi_likes_tv: Pingbacks! Yes! - Okay, so, LJ announced Pingbacks and a lot of people were like Whut? or Do Not Want!, which made zvi go :(. Why? Because pingbacks can be AWESOME, people. -
- arallara: How Not To Be An Ally - being an ally requires one to be honest with oneself and with others when reacting to criticism. Being an ally does not mean lying about one's reaction in order to appear to be a Good White Person and serve as some kind of role model for the cause. I mean thanks to Bear for demonstrating so clearly how that will not end well, heh. -
- popelizbet: I have stayed quiet about something for too long - It was Internet Wank that first made me aware of anti-racism, that led me to read bell hooks, that informed and sharpened my senses to the hundred thousand permutations of derailing and silencing and dismissing that take place[...]But that does not make this constant battle a good thing. The pain of the people who have been called names and dismissed and silenced is not an object lesson to inform my ignorance. -
- were_duck: RaceFail: thoughts. - I just want to say, dear clueless white people, reading up on racism is important. It is really important. It is important to your social networks, to your families, to your friends, to your fandoms, to your jobs, to your countries. It is worth it to you as a human being -
- sheafrotherdon: Are you fucking kidding me? - To now discover that this was, way back when, rooted in a whole other expression - however silent, although I suspect, given some of the criticisms aired by Bull et al in comments to Bear's response to Avalon's Willow, that Bear was not keeping quiet about her feelings to her friends - of power and privilege and an assumption of rightness . . . words don't exactly fail, but they become a whole lot more profane. -
- rahirah: Sigh - I'm looking at this stuff from the outside, and I don't get to tell people who are looking at it from the inside how they ought to feel about it. Any more than they get to tell me how I ought to feel about being a dumpy middle-aged lesbian. -
- jonquil: The moving pixel writes - That's how I see the world having changed. Tell me what I got wrong. Tell your friends how dumb I am. Invite your friends to leap in and tell me how much lower I am than Arne Saknussemm's graffiti. That's the way computer-mediated communication works nowadays, and you can't put the egg back in the chicken. -
- truepenny: I put my foot in my mouth way back at the beginning of this discussion - I personally do not want people of color to feel unwelcome, excluded, alienated, or silenced, and I am sorry as all hell that they are being made to feel that way. I know that my comments have been construed as attempts to silence people of color; all I can say is, no. That is never what I want. -
- wrdnrd: reading the referrer log entrails - What i will say is that it seems to me that smart, non-stupid people who otherwise privilege academic/scholarly discourse shouldn't have to go rooting around in a person's personal life to find a reason to discredit what that person has to say. -
- littlebutfierce: Internet was down in our house this morning--& lo, the continuing, massive FAIL in sff fandom rolled on - WisCon was pretty much the only con I'm interested in going to these days, because compared to other cons that I've been to it always felt closest to that utopic safe space. It probably still would come closest. And what's any community w/o a few people that you can't stand, right?//And yet. I'm just... wary. Warier than I have been. Which is sad & infuriating. -
- lefaym: Meta: Sometimes I feel like a tool of phallocentric hetero-male-supremacy, and sometimes I don't. - I can see that my slash (and much of the slash I enjoy) is highly problematic from a feminist perspective, but I can also see that there's plenty of potential there to subvert heteronormativity, to show that these roles are never easy (even though a lot of people, including myself, do not live up to that potential). -
- j_bluestocking: the doom; or, for the love of god don't make me regret this - It saddens me very much that racism cannot be discussed in a corner of the world I love and respect, without degenerating into the awful thing that -- I'm sorry, not a discussion, much of time -- became. But more than that, I'm sorry when anything can't be discussed. It depresses me for human beings. Of which, you know, I'm one. -
- steelbrassnwood: Racefail??? Are you kidding??? - As a straight white man I have the privilege of deciding when to engage with problems like this, and when to ignore them. If I were, say, a speculative fiction writer of color, I would have to choose between having to be an angry change agent in order to follow the vocation I'd chosen, or giving up something I loved because of the resistance I was meeting. That's an unfair choice for anyone to have to make. -
- thelastgoodname: The difference between being pseudonymous and not being pseudonymous online - My personal favorite group of people who used pseudonyms because they weren't in a position not to use them were Jay, Madison, and Hamilton. They couldn't use their names, even though they were white, well-educated, upper-class men, because they were committing sedition and eventually, treason.//At the time, it was the only way to get things to change.//Maybe that's [info]coffeeandink's plan as well.//If so, I'm all for it. -
- mirabile_dictu: Happy birthday to my baby sister, plus some horseshit - What stands out for me is that professional science fiction authors are lining up against fans and fanfiction authors. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think we're watching the revelation and clarification of a serious divide between people who (try to) earn a living from their writing and those who write for love and to participate in the fannish economies of community and friendship. -
- alexandraerin: Race Fail and The Importance of Being Aliased - At the end of the day, though, this entire essay is superfluous, because privacy should be considered a basic right and not outing somebody's real identity in the absence of a compelling "public good" reason to do so (scam, danger, etc.) should be the most basic piece of netiquette. The fact that these simple tenets aren't being observed only illustrates how powerful the reflexive defensiveness that leads to Race Fail can be. -
- peaseblossom: Twisted Empathy - People with privilege empathize more with the perpetrators of racism (also applicable to sexism, ablism, heterosexism, agism, &c.) than with its victims, because they can more easily put themselves in their shoes. They think, 'Hey, I'd hate to be thought of as a racist, because I'm not! I'll bet that really sucks for them! They're probably not racist, either. They're just being misunderstood, and they probably feel really, really bad right now." Which, because of racism and privilege, can easily and quickly become resentment of the victim for making the perpetrators feel guilty. -
- asim: The R-Word - Think on that, for a second. King -- the Great Peacemaker -- calls out White Progressives, his supposed allies, for actions that are not ally-like. Why would he do such a thing, and more than once?//matociquala, that passage, written not too far from Death's door, is for you. It's about you. and it was written almost 2 Generations ago. It's about allies who can only carry you "so far", because criticism of themselves isn't something they can take. It's about people who've learned unease at the term "racist", causing them to fail to understand the true nature of it -
- jmtorres: Authorial Intent is Dead: root assumptions - I tried to think about what would I do, as a creator of a published work, if someone who'd seen my work told me there were skanky race issues? [..] And I realized that I have a fundamental, root-level disconnect in philosophy from all the pro sf/f people I've read here. I believe that authorial intent is dead. I believe that once you finish a work and publish and put it out there, it speaks for itself, and you do not speak for it, and if it what it says isn't what you meant to say, then an an author you were not communicating well. But you don't get takesies-backsies, it's out there, and it says what it says. And it says many different things to many different readers. And all readings of a text are equally valid. I think a lot of creative fandom operates on this base assumption, whether or not they've had any background in literary criticism or thought about how they think about their fandoms at all. -
- badgerbag: Legal rights as a blogger - If someone is threatening to sue you for defamation and libel, for something you said on your blog, please read this: The EFF Guide to Bloggers' Rights -
- raanve: More FailI submitted a comment on Kathryn Cramer's [also: [info]kathrync] most recent blog post on the topic of what has happened to [info]coffeeandink. My comment read as follows:
//Can you please clarify why your original posts in question can no longer be found on this blog - or at least, can no longer be easily located?//Can you also please clarify why permalinks (such as one that I posted to my LiveJournal) to some of the posts in question were redirected to "Push Button Health"?//It makes it very difficult to see both sides of the issue and come to some sort of conclusion if the conversational trail is obfuscated. - color_blue: for some incomprehensible reason I had a sudden urge to write a letter to my flist (TWICE) - So, oh dear flist. In my offline life, if I thought I had been treated unfairly by someone (lets call this person, I dunno, W. or perhaps K. or T. no, W), and complained about them to someone else (lets call this person *once again picking a letter at random* E), and E said - "omg, really? he did that? he must've gone completely frothing at the mouth crazy for a moment, he's such a nice person, just ignore what happened because that's what I'm going to do" - unless E had previously risked life and limb killing flying cockroaches for me, I'd hold quite a grudge. -
- ithiliana: Niceness: highly overrated - I'm tired of nice people, and I don't really give a damn about whether or not I or anybody else is nice enough to appeal their egos beccause there's not a single documented example of "nice" changing racist actions. -
- elusis: On anonymity/pseudonymity. - You know what characteristic a lot of the alias-ed people I know from Usenet and BBSs and goth clubbing and Renn Faire and other places have shared? Being fans of science fiction and/or fantasy. You know who should understand people who use funny names that are not their birth names and who are well-understood to be real, actual people and not some latent manifestation of a small group's delusion of persecution? SF/F people. -
- yhlee: I KILL YOU WITH MY IMPROBABLE SLOW-MOVING LASERS - So. Hello, world of sf/f. I'm not saying I'm coming from anyplace else that looks like paradise. But seriously--who do you want in your community? What standards of behavior do you consider worth upholding? -
- rosefox: "The only neat thing to do" - I'm calling on everyone involved in this industry, and everyone who wants to be involved in this industry, to step up and say: "This is poor behavior and we will not tolerate it. -
- inalasahl: Because There Aren't Enough Spoons on the Planet - Dear [Clueless Newbie / Agony Aunt / Internet User #1,574,313,184 / Person Who Eschews Labels and Is Quite Hurt that I've Just Assumed He or She Is a Newbie or Clueless / Person Who Is Offended by My Tone / Person Who Is Offended at Someone Else's Tone / Person Who Wasn't Offended Until I Linked Them To This, but Is Now Quite Prepared to Bristle / You]://Welcome to discussions of race on the internet! -
- rilina: Not so briefly - if you value your uncomplicated friendships and sf/f networks more than the real violence done to real people (because online != unreal), please ask yourself whether you should really believe you are welcome here. Does that statement make you feel unsafe or uncertain? Maybe it should. -
- bossymarmalade: sees fire - The funny thing is, I ended up making more friends than anything else from this fight. Because I was finally able to see that I *wasn't* alone in feeling the way I did, and even though some white "progressives" will panic and act poorly when they think they're being accused of racism, actual white allies will not. -
- yahtzee63: Racefail has made Sydney's head hurt - So I just wanted to say, to all the people who have put themselves out there and taken so much flack, thanks. The patience, courtesy, thoughtfulness and thoroughness you've shown in making your points and remaining on-track puts most other people (including me) to shame. -
- cofax7: On the Sudden Onset of Pantslessness - Dear Members of the Science Fiction Community://I'm so sorry for you. It must be awful to see friends and colleagues, well-respected members of your community, show their asses in public, the way they're prancing around that way, pasty white buttcheeks and shriveled junk hanging out there in the cold breeze. -
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