Arctic Light

There's still a lot of posting going on, around the fandom blogosphere, on racism and the recent unbecoming actions of profic authors and their fans/friends/supporters. rydra_wong, lovely and hardworking person, is continuing to post comprehensive roundups a couple of times a day.

I'm reading, and thinking about it, and talking things over with a couple of friends outside the public circle of LJ. I think that's about all I can manage right now.

One post I wanted to link to, though, is this one by ciderpress. For all of it, but especially for this:

However, in the intense and almost singular focus on clueless white people in this discussion and the often repeated statement that this was an opportunity to dialogue, that there is solace in the fact that it has been worth all the pain and difficulty, that they are somehow *glad*, the underlying assumption is that:

* PoCs have emotional/intellectual catharsis after such discussions.

* PoC's pain being part of an educational moment for clueless white people is worth it to PoCs because it's worth it to white people.

* Anti-racism matters the same amount, in the same way to clueless white people, allies and PoC.

My own personal answer is, frankly no, I haven't felt any kind of catharsis. I'm pretty sure that the sacrifice of my dignity and watching other PoC being denigrated without any remorse isn't worth it so please stop talking for me and be more precise in your speech and own that you didn't really think about whether my pain and humiliation is worth your enlightening moment. And I can't walk away after a discussion and it's not about having a choice (even a forced one) about writing or not writing characters that are in my head. When we talk about race, we are often talking about our lives, it's deeply personal, it's how we related to the world, to people, to media, to everything.

This. Yes.

Right now I'm balancing my anxiety about being silent (and leaving the burden on others to argue, comfort, debate, cajole and explain) with my anxiety of trying to turn the internet into my Personal Arguing Machine (TM Warren Ellis) and engaging in debate for all the wrong reasons -- as well as balancing that with the need to disengage and take a breath and think about other things for a while.

I want to help, but I don't want to hurt under the guise of helping; that's worse than just staying out of it.

Forgive my linkspammage; this is something that I feel is important, and people are pouring their hearts and souls into these posts, this debate. This is far from the first time that debates like this have gone around; in the past, I've watched, and read a lot, and learned a lot. This time around, I'd like to help.

rydra_wong has excellent roundup link posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. There is also a comprehensive roundup at Aqueduct Press.

The Remyth Project looks completely awesome. In yeloson's words:

The Remyth project is this: You, as a person of color, as a person whose myths have been sidelined, removed, changed, altered, turned into movies, popularized and sold, you as a participant of your heritage (even divorced by many generations)...

You write up, draw, or ramble in whatever way befits you about a myth you can claim ownership to. You take back that myth. You tell us what you think it is. Reinterpret, reconstruct, or even revise- give it a rebirth, as you would.

It's a beautiful and powerful project. Please tread carefully and respectfully.

Something that I found particularly relevant (for me) is nojojojo's post We worry about it too. From the intro to that post:

So the great cultural appropriation debate returns, and one thing in particular has been bugging me. A lot of the people talking in all these comment threads -- clarification; a lot of the white people talking in these threads -- keep complaining that all this scary appropriation stuff means they're damned if they do and damned if they don't, they can never write people of color to the satisfaction of PoC so they're not going to bother, I guess this means white men should only write white men, o woe, o melodrama. That this is a false woe motivated in most cases by narcissism, spite, and no genuine interest in change is a given. But a few of the people voicing this complaint are sincere, because for various reasons they haven't yet realized something very basic: that racism infects the thinking of everyone, in a racist society. Everyone, including PoC themselves. White people are the most frequent perpetrators of stereotyping and "inappropriate appropriation", largely due to history and the power structure of Western society. But it's never been solely a unidirectional thing, however it might seem to those poor, confuzzled, put-upon white men (and others who think like them). PoC can stereotype and inappropriately appropriate other PoC. Hell, PoC can stereotype and inappropriately appropriate themselves. This is not some kind of intellectual-property race war, nor is it a game with winners and losers. It never has been, and the sooner everybody realizes that and gets on the same page, the sooner we can make some progress.

My writer/artist friend Jane is currently facing up to cultural appropriation issues in her own graphic novel. (“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” --Samuel Beckett)

Finally, I would really be remiss in my linkspamming if I didn't also link to another, slightly older, justifiably widely-linked article: Pam Noles' essay on the whitewashing of Earthsea, Shame, and her follow-up response to a clueless trolling idiot who is, as some of you know, me. (Glacierdust is the online pseudonym that I used to use for personal stuff, as opposed to Sholio/Friendshipper for fan stuff; I've since switched my personal blog to my real name, mostly because switching between all the different pseudonyms once I started spending a lot of time on the fan blog was confusing for me and probably everyone else as well.) Noles addresses many of the issues that have come up in this current round of debate in her essay. And she was also much more kind and gracious than a clueless white chick deserved, three years ago, when said white chick emailed her a mortified apology -- and then proceeded to argue with her via email. *headdesk x infinity*

I'm not posting this for self-flagellation purposes, but rather to point out that a) it's a fantastic essay, and everyone should read it, and b) you may be wondering, if you've been following these links, whether the sort of clueless stupidity that you've been seeing over the last few days is fixable, and I really hope that it is, because I think I've learned a lot over the last couple of years and become much less of an idiot than I used to be. 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. I fucked up, and the fact that this particular fuck-up kicked me onto a personal journey of self-discovery doesn't make up for having, through my own ignorance, insulted and knocked down another human being. I can't make up for that; I can, however, move forward and try very hard to do better, and that's what I've been trying to do -- reading a lot, educating myself, and eventually getting myself to the point where I feel able to participate in these discussions in a constructive way, rather than being part of the problem. I don't want to do that to someone else again.

Also, I think that was the point where the complete interconnectedness of the Internet really hit home for me. The idea that Noles or anyone who knew her would read my selfish blitherings about her essay had honestly never occurred to me, and I still remember very vividly my mortified horror when I realized that this was not true. Yes, you do have to answer for everything you say online, and if you don't want to stand behind it or at least be willing to fix your own mess, don't say it in the first place. WORDS TO LIVE BY, PEOPLE.

There's an interesting discussion on cultural appropriation and otherness currently going around the fan and pro-writer blogosphere. SF/fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear wrote a post a couple of days ago on writing the "other" in speculative fiction. rydra_wong has a good link roundup of the posts and discussions that have resulted. If you read only one of them, the one that I've saved and copied and delicious'd and taken to heart is deepad's I Didn't Dream of Dragons, on cultural appropriation and erasure; I would do a disservice to try to sum up the OP's words in my own, so just -- read it. (And there's also a later post of deepad's that is a response to some of the criticisms that she and others have received.)

One thing that I keep seeing coming up over and over again in these discussions is a wide assortment of variations on this complaint:

"So, all storytellers should shut up because they can never tell everyone's story for them, correctly and exactly as that person would tell it, if they could? And we shouldn't even try, because we'll only Get It Wrong?"

"I'm a white male, and this suggests that I'm not allowed to write anything but white males."

... and so forth.

My knee-jerk reaction is "Right, because it's all about you, buddy; way to derail the conversation. Stuff it and grow up." But I remember that not too long ago, when I first started doing a lot of reading about cultural appropriation, I ended up tying myself up in creativity-stifling knots because of precisely that fallacy. I still go through regular fits of guilt-ridden "Am I doing this right? Should I be writing about this at all? AAAUUUUUGH" (though I seem to mostly manage to keep it to myself or channel it into actual, constructive questions to ask people).

I get the general, maybe unfair impression that most (white) writers who post that sort of comment are afraid not of actually screwing up what they write, but of being unfairly accused of doing so. It's like saying "I can't write about space travel! People will accuse me of knowing nothing about physics!" Bzuh? X does not imply Y, at least not if you do your research and don't write such a rushed hack job that it's blatantly obvious that, yeah, you really don't know anything about physics and can't be bothered to learn ... in which case you kinda deserve to be taken to task for it.

That's a frivolous comparison, though, because it's much less important to get your physics right than to try not to screw up when you're writing about people's lives, people's identities. You're not going to break someone's heart if you misremember the Planck constant. And yet people research the hell out of their physics, and then turn around and half-ass the most fundamental aspects of their cultural research, if they bother to research at all and don't just base their "other" characters on media stereotypes, or leave them out entirely. The bookstore shelves in the SF/fantasy section are groaning under the weight of generic Eurofantasy, and science fiction with all-white main casts and stereotyped, flat, undeveloped, ultimately doomed characters of color. And still you have a lot of white writers complaining that, when it comes to writing characters who aren't like them, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't.

Well ... yeah. We all are. Because we've all got the weight of history on us -- the things that we, as a society, have done over the years, and the stories we've told ourselves to explain what we did. And all of that, all together -- it's heavy. It weighs heavier on some, pressing them down and crushing them flat; on others, it's so deceptively light we can ignore it and ignore people who complain about it. We can pretend it isn't there, waving it aside because it's inconvenient or uncomfortable, but whenever we write anything, that history is there, invisible, pressing down, no matter how much we try to pretend it's not. It influences how we write race (and gender, disability, sexuality); it influences how our readers are going to respond to it. Unfair? Yeah, it really, really is. Wouldn't it be great if nobody had to worry about it? Wouldn't it be awesome if we could make it go away? But it's there, pushing our hands towards certain keys on the keyboard, quietly guiding our minds down well-worn tracks that lead to the same tired old stereotypes and cliches. You can ignore all of that and stay within your comfort zone and only write what makes you comfortable -- and that is a loaded, political choice, too. Everything that we do (when we're writing, or just going about our daily lives) is loaded with meaning; it all takes place within that historical, cultural framework. There's no way to separate it out, no way to write in a cultural vacuum, or to expect your readers not to be towing the same massive barge of historical baggage that you yourself were dragging when you wrote the thing in the first place.

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.

Maybe if we can get angry enough, we can push back hard enough against the weight of history to give ourselves the breathing room to tell different stories, better ones, until eventually the old narratives are pushed aside as they deserve to be.