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January 20th, 2009
01:44 am
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bossymarmalade: Okay. I haven't posted anything about the cultural appopriation conversation - Apart from the blatant, mind-boggling way in which an issue that supposedly began with an interest in respecting the Other has suddenly and aggressively become yet again All About the Hurt Feelings of White People, I am astounded that so many people wanking about their precious academic credentials are completely ignorant of how goddamn OFTEN PoC have seen these same generalized dismissals. Too emotional, too loud, too angry, too uneducated, TOO FUCKING COLOURED. -
- ultranos_fic: The Current Race Discussion and That Caught-in-the-Middle Feeling - in these discussions about race and being Othered, I never see anything from the perspective of those of us who are painfully caught in the middle. Those of us who have a foot in two worlds on the race discussion. Those of us who get scrutinized in sandwich shops at the check-out line and asked "what are you?" Those of us who always have that little moment of grief and confusion whenever we fill out a form and are asked to check one box for "Race".//Yes, I'm talking about the mixed kids. -
- ithiliana: Most recent racism imbroglio - I am an academic. I teach tools for reading. I also am aware that these tools, my courses, and me exist in a racist (not only racist, but let's not derail to other areas) system which by design and function (on the micro level of literary studies, but on the whole system) was designed to exclude. And for a white academic to tell a fan of color (or white ally) that they cannot critique a book without the kind of reading I routinely assign in my college classes is just......wrong on so many levels -
- friendshipper: Cruel little lies - You want to get angry at someone -- don't get mad at the people who are doing the hard and thankless work of pointing out the places where history is still fucking us over. Get angry at the ones who did it to us instead. Get angry at all the atrocities and the genocides and all the nasty little lies that we told ourselves to justify it -- all the many ways that we wove our self-justifications into popular entertainment until we, as a society, created a whole rogues' gallery of cruel caricatures that still spring up on the written page whenever we relax and stop watching out for them. -
- shewhohashope: Cultural Appropriation and SF/F: Once More, With Feeling - If you do not care about how you represent people from marginalised ethnic groups in your writing, if you think your God given right to play with whatever cultures you like, to use people's lives and history as you see fit, to take things that people hold sacred, things which are already ignorantly dismissed, or demonised, or on the verge of being destroyed, or have already been destroyed by the dominant culture of which you are a part? To carve up pieces of people's souls to move your narrative along, is more important than taking the time to do some research, stepping back and thinking about the consequences? Then you are a racist. -
- truepenny: race(-class-sex) - "I can only grade you on what actually makes it onto the page," I used to say to my students, and that goes double for published texts. We, as authors, can't run alongside them and offer an interpretive guide when readers start to wander off our straight and narrow path. AW's reaction is just as correct, just as valid, as anybody else's. -
- cryptoxin: Cultural appropriation - It's so infuriating to see white people turn the issue into a drama with themselves at the center, where it's all about their conflict, their angst and anxiety, their needs and desires. Where people of color are only conceived of as undifferentiated masses of potential critics with impossible standards, whose sole form of engagement as readers is to scrutinize fiction for traces of racism to be denounced -
- shewhohashope: Cultural Appropriation and SF/F - Cultural appropriation is not about individuals, it's about... cultures and power (im)balances.//That's right, I'm going to try to help you understand, if you don't already, why this is such a big issue. -
- coffeeandink: Resistance and individuality - Willow, Tara, Zoe Washburne, to a lesser extent Charles Gunn and Robin Wood--they do, in fact, work for me as humans, individuals. This does not stop Tara's death from fitting into the Dead Lesbian Cliche. This does not prevent the oddity of a mostly white-washed LA, with the only significant black character coming from a poor black background -- from which he is systematically cut off in order to be integrated into the white world of the show and allowed social advancement. -
- cereta: Note to my fellow academics - One of the reasons I defend the appropriateness of academic discourse in fandom is that it is, for me, a tool of learning.//So I say this to (some) of my fellow academics: you are forgetting that part of your job. You are forgetting that expertise in one area can me squat in the area just a few sections down the shelf. You are forgetting to shut up and listen as well as speak. -
11:32 pm
- matociquala: don’t want to put you in a pop coma - So, no, writers of pinky-beigeness, nobody is telling you you can’t write characters of color. They’re telling you, please listen when (and after) you do. I know that’s not what it feels like you’re being told, but that’s because you are missing the context of existing marginalization. If you do choose to write characters of color, you are also choosing to accept the criticism of same. However, if you choose to write for publication, you are choosing to accept criticism of your work. Period. -
- friendshipper: Some more cultural appropriation links - If you’ve been participating in these (or similar) discussions and feeling like you’re beating your head against the wall in these debates, wondering why you’re taking the time to explain the same thing fifty times to people who Just Don’t Get It, sometimes those words do fall on receptive ground ... eventually. -
- veejane: We Ride the Failboat - it wasn’t till Sunday that I remembered why my roots remain in media fandom: there’s no money in it. Where there’s money there are careers, and power, and that skews discussion. Sure, SFF can kick puny William Sanders in the ass when he’s so obnoxiously racist you wouldn’t let him into the parlor with your sainted grandmother. But can it do the same when one of its most powerful editors implies that people who object to racism are "not-so-bright" -
- karenhealey: SFF, Racism and Criticism. - The current imbroglio seems to have become, more than anything, about who is permitted to criticise a text. Those who are smart enough, academic enough, calm enough, and good enough readers are allowed to critique - or to praise. Those who are too unacademic, too (presumably) stupid, too emotional, too angry, or those interrogating the text from the wrong perspective are not. Or rather they are, but their actual arguments may be discarded as we neatly slot the author into one or many of the less-desired categories. -
- splash_the_cat: O.M.F.G. - I’ve seen plenty of the women involved in this debate react with anger, with rage, with deep emotion on gender issues and other issues. I’ve seen those women call bullshit when they’ve been told they’re over-reacting, told they’re not thinking logically, that they’re too emotional about the topic, that they’re interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, that they should be worrying about more important issues, that they’re just not thinking about it the way it was intended, that they’re too angry, too abusive, just too mean. -
- arallara: NO. This is NOT OKAY. - FUCK THAT BULLSHIT. Really, fuck it. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it. We (as in: white women, white fans, white educated people, white people in general, white-dominated societies in general, all of the above) can do better than this, we can be smarter than this, we can be more empathetic than this. -
- vassilissa: About the current racism and Othering discussion - I think there’s a similar set of frames going on here: the people who think the goal is for individuals not to be racist, and who are arguing (for instance) that matociquala intended in her book to subvert a racist cliche, and that any criticism of racism in the book not acknowledging that intention is invalid... Like the basketball players of Marcotte’s post, they’re trying to score points. Racism is about what you, a white person, can and can’t do.[...]And there’s the other frame, the idea that racism is structural and institutional and you can perpetuate it even while intending the opposite, because it’s ingrained and pervasive and that POC see it everywhere because it is everywhere, not because they’ve got mean, faulty, POC goggles on. -
- deconcentrate: notes from the underworld - I find it really fascinating, and by "fascinating" I mean incredibly disheartening, that in the recent discussion on race and racism in fiction of all kinds, when well-intentioned, smart, thoughtful white folks get up and say you know, I thought I got it right but in listening, I clearly got it wrong and these are, again, smart, thoughtful people, that barely two comments in other white people jump on them and say YOU HAVE NOTHING TO APOLOGIZE FOR THESE MINORITIES JUST WANNA WHUP SOMEONE FOR BEING WHITE -
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metafandombot.livejournal.com: Monday, January 19, 2009