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.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2009-03-06 02:11 pm (UTC)Other than that I haven't followed it, and probably won't, because it makes me really sad. It makes me sad in part because I do know that I am a part of the problem, even though I also know that I can easily be part of the solution by doing the same things you plan to do. And at least you and I acknowledge the problem instead of calling it "whining" or something. It mostly makes me sad because of the legions of people who simply do not, WILL not understand, who DO label it "whining", and who equate the term "racism" with the term "lynch mob" and to them anything less, anything more subtle, does not exist.
Since I can't possibly change their minds I'm staying out of it. But I will look for the recommendations you've mentioned. And this is something that, while I haven't precisely noticed it consciously, once it was pointed out I immediately knew it was true... The whole "Avatar" movie kerfluffle (I feel it's wrong to write it off like that, actually) probably helped prep me on that... I *had* noticed it and even written a paper about it some time ago in horror movies but that's because it's legendary in that genre. (Black people die first!) And it's stayed a running joke, in a way, with me and my husband whenever we watch a horror or even just action film with a group that has a POC in it that is not the main character. "And there they go!" we'll say, and usually the movie is not on our "let's watch it again!" list. :P
I just don't understand, really, how people can argue this. The same way I can't understand how people could argue the Avatar casting. "Well, why SHOULDN'T they be white? If you deliberately make them non-white, isn't THAT racism?" How do you explain it to someone with blinders on that heavy? *sigh*