RaceFail '09
Mar. 5th, 2009 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clodia_risaI'm writing this because I've been following the RaceFail situation for almost two months now, and I think I've made two comments total. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, go to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wrong for a comprehensive series of links. The question that I've seen recently is what are you going to do about it?
Let's put this bluntly - I don't post very often, and few people read my journal. This isn't going to get picked up and put into the links. As much as I read SFF, I don't participate in fandom. I had no idea who TNH and PNH and all of these other people were before it started. To a large extent, I stay out of all online communities. This is evidenced by how much I write (little-to-never), and how often I read (several times a day).
So what am I going to do? I'm reading, listening, and trying to learn. I'm trying to learn not to be that white girl who needs it explained to her why that book or video game she loves is problematic. I'm trying to take the same critical feminist eye that I learned in college, and apply to everything I watch or experience, and I'm trying to create an equivalent focus for racial issues. I'm trying to speak up when I hear people say things in person, and sometimes online. It takes a lot of effort for me to write anything online.
What I'm going to do is to take all these recommendations that people have set out for clueless white people, and try to implement them. I'm having discussions with my husband as to why this or that is problematic, and explaining why POC are not being "oversensitive". He listens, and it helps. I'm planning on making my next book purchase a SFF book by a POC, as recommended to me by the dozens of links that I'm getting a day. If I'm getting nothing else out of this, I'm getting awesome book recs.
What I'm doing is learning. And I may sometimes drop the ball, because that's my privilege showing. I can not think about race for a single day while watching Pirates of the Caribbean in a way that I can't not think about gender while watching Death Note. But what I want to do is to notice that I'm dropping the ball and to do better next time. And when I'm brave enough to enter a discussion online or off, and if I ever say something racist, I want someone to be able to call me on it and my response to be, "Shit, did I just do that? I'm so sorry. I screwed up."
Because the thing that I've learned from this, most of all, is that my privilege shows a lot. And that being well-meaning isn't all it's cracked up to be. And that even if I understand what the issues are, being able to be silent when I shouldn't be is probably a more insidious form of privilege than not understanding what's wrong at all.
rydra_wrong for a comprehensive series of links. The question that I've seen recently is what are you going to do about it? Let's put this bluntly - I don't post very often, and few people read my journal. This isn't going to get picked up and put into the links. As much as I read SFF, I don't participate in fandom. I had no idea who TNH and PNH and all of these other people were before it started. To a large extent, I stay out of all online communities. This is evidenced by how much I write (little-to-never), and how often I read (several times a day).
So what am I going to do? I'm reading, listening, and trying to learn. I'm trying to learn not to be that white girl who needs it explained to her why that book or video game she loves is problematic. I'm trying to take the same critical feminist eye that I learned in college, and apply to everything I watch or experience, and I'm trying to create an equivalent focus for racial issues. I'm trying to speak up when I hear people say things in person, and sometimes online. It takes a lot of effort for me to write anything online.
What I'm going to do is to take all these recommendations that people have set out for clueless white people, and try to implement them. I'm having discussions with my husband as to why this or that is problematic, and explaining why POC are not being "oversensitive". He listens, and it helps. I'm planning on making my next book purchase a SFF book by a POC, as recommended to me by the dozens of links that I'm getting a day. If I'm getting nothing else out of this, I'm getting awesome book recs.
What I'm doing is learning. And I may sometimes drop the ball, because that's my privilege showing. I can not think about race for a single day while watching Pirates of the Caribbean in a way that I can't not think about gender while watching Death Note. But what I want to do is to notice that I'm dropping the ball and to do better next time. And when I'm brave enough to enter a discussion online or off, and if I ever say something racist, I want someone to be able to call me on it and my response to be, "Shit, did I just do that? I'm so sorry. I screwed up."
Because the thing that I've learned from this, most of all, is that my privilege shows a lot. And that being well-meaning isn't all it's cracked up to be. And that even if I understand what the issues are, being able to be silent when I shouldn't be is probably a more insidious form of privilege than not understanding what's wrong at all.