race(-class-sex)

[truepenny]

02/07/2011: I am turning off comments because of spambots.

---

Bear responds to an open letter.

I have decided that not posting about this would simply be cowardice and the exercise of my white privilege to ignore the problem la la la can't hear you la la.

So.

I. I admit, my first reaction is to be upset that someone is attacking my friend. That's human. Really, we should worry about me if I wasn't upset about that.

II. Is Avalon's Willow right about the portrayal of POCs in Blood & Iron?

That, my friends, is a red herring.

It matters that Bear's intention was to present the servitude of a black man to a white woman as a problem, as part of a larger thematic argument, that she was doing it mindfully. It also matters that describing Kelpie as a "black man" is in certain senses wrong. He's a phouka, and it's clear throughout that he is a anthropophagous horse-fae first, all other attributes second. If that didn't matter, Blood & Iron would not be a fantasy.

HOWEVER.

It matters that Avalon's Willow's experience reading the book does not match up with Bear's intentions. This is not Bear's fault. It is also not AW's fault. It is an unfortunate inevitability of the attempt to communicate. Listing--as I did in the preceding paragraph--all the ways in which AW is "wrong" is a way to shut down the argument, not a way to respond responsibly.

This is the thing about stories: nobody gets to say your reaction is wrong. If your reaction is based on fundamental, factual misreading of the text (this does happen), then actually it is a kindness for someone to say, "I think maybe you didn't understand X." But that's not what's at stake here either. AW has not misunderstood anything. She is responding to what is in the text.

Therefore, her subjective experience cannot be shouted down or denied or pigeonholed as "overreaction." (Well, it can be, because people can do any damn stupid thing they want, especially on the internet.) The question of interpreting the text is a literary one and can spiral off into "proving" that Bear did or didn't do X, Y, or Z. The question of responding to the text is a political one, and in that arena, Bear's intentions have to be divorced from the reader's experience.

"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.

(Notice that I'm still couching this as someone who wants to disagree with AW. Because Bear is my friend, because I love her writing, and because I felt that she was successful in her attempt to include race in the complex of issues surrounding Kelpie (that would be my reaction to the text). I want to disagree. But I don't get to.)

III. I dislike the word "valid," probably dating back to being told by a teacher that fantasy was not a "valid" genre. Specifying something as "valid" tends to carry the subtext of "we might have found it 'invalid' if we'd wanted to." But at the same time, it's an important word, because it says, "We have to pay attention here. We have to listen to this."

Everyone's experience is valid. Every reader's reaction is valid. Even if I disagree with them. I disagree passionately with many reader reactions to Mélusine, but that doesn't mean I get to tell them they didn't have the reaction that they did. In the same way, members of one group do not get to tell members of another group that they (members of the 2nd group) did not experience oppression because they (members of the 1st group) didn't mean to oppress them (members of the 2nd group).

If you're a member of the first group, it's not about you and your intentions, no matter how good those intentions are.

IV. I am a middle-class white woman. There isn't even a fraction of a fraction of non-Western-European ethnicity anywhere in my genealogy. The closest I get to an oppressed minority is Irish, and since all sides of my family have been American for more than a century, that's not very damn close. My great-grandparents may have experienced oppression on racial grounds, but that's not a meaningful part of my experience.

Which is to say, yes, I have no inherited moral high ground here. In point of fact, I'm up to my knees in the swamp and sinking fast. I recognize my white privilege (back in '06, I blogged about growing up aware of white privilege, even if I didn't have a word for it as a child), and I recognize that I can't disassociate myself from it. I can't take it off or make it somehow not mine.

And I'm not saying that in a bid for sympathy, because, hello? Privilege is not something one gets sympathy for. I'm owning up to it, admitting that it exists and that I benefit from it, even though I find it morally reprehensible.

V. I also recognize my class privilege, and the fact that racial privilege and class privilege frequently overlap, but are not the same thing.

VI. And then what about that whole "woman" thing?

VII. And this is where discussions of oppression get complicated, and need to get complicated. Because it isn't just race, any more than it's just class or it's just sex. Prioritizing one kind of oppression over another merely obscures the matrix of identities that we're all stuck in. Yes, some of us are stuck in better positions than others; my point is not "We are all helpless like flies! My white privilege isn't my fault!" but that the social matrix is complicated and large and institutionalized--reified, even. No, this is not an excuse to bail out on trying to change things. But my belief is that changing things has to start with understanding them, and simple binary models of oppression, any kind of oppression, don't further understanding.

VIII. I am noticing that some of Bear's commenters are advancing the "I write my characters as people first!" notion as a defense.

This ploy is different than the advice Bear gave in her Othering post, which encourages writers to remember that the exotic Other is a person. Bear's post is about tackling something big and scary and necessary, about undoing the prejudices that keep you from seeing over the fences of bigotry. The "people first!" defense is about being able to write all of your characters, regardless of race, class, or sex, as if they were people like you. Which you have the luxury of only from a position of privilege. You can be blind to the differences because they all work in your favor.

The personal is political. When I write a black, bisexual, lower-class man from the mid-South, I do so knowing that he is, like me, a human being with a subject position--i.e., not The Other. Definitionally, The Other does not have a subject position. I also know that he and his subject position are shaped, inexorably, by his being black, bisexual, lower-class, and from the mid-South. He's not any person. He's this person. You can't do an end run around oppression and prejudice by chanting "people first!" This will not score you a touchdown. You have to make the empathic leap (if you are not black, bisexual, lower-class, and from the mid-South) to imagine what it would be like to be a person in these circumstances.

IX. That, I think, is the obligation we all have as human beings: to try to make that empathic leap. Because otherwise, we're shut up alone in the very small rooms of our skulls.

X. But for some of us that empathic leap is a luxury because the world we live in reflects our subject position back to us. We don't have to negotiate a culture that doesn't represent us or even recognize us--or represents us only as a stereotype. And because it's a luxury, it's harder to do. And because it's both those things, it needs doing. Even if we fail, we need to try.

XI. And when we do fail, we need to try again. Fail better

XII. And keep dancing, because if you aren't dancing when you write, you won't create a revolution anybody wants to come to.

Comments

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

This is very thoughtful, and I agree with every bit of it.

[kate_nepveu]

The "people first!" defense is about being able to write all of your characters, regardless of race, class, or sex, as if they were people like you.

Nicely put.

[ckd]

I wish I could properly express how wonderful I think this post is.

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this ... it's helping a lot with a bunch of thoughts I am desperately struggling with, and not making a lot of sense of at the moment.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

I like this a lot. A very thoughtful approach to a fiendishly complex issue.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

There's a level on which the thematic argument of that book boils down to whether or not it's possible to exploit other sapient creatures without doing the moral equivalent of selling your soul. Or, at least, that was my intention in writing it.

And yet, if it doesn't come through, it doesn't come through. So yes, her reading is valid, even if it's exactly against my intentions. That's why we call them thematic arguments.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I read AW's blog and she does come on strong. She makes good points, then weakens them with examples that aren't all what I would consider accurate. Sure, T'ealc didn't have a love life. Then again, neither did pretty much anyone else on Stargate SG-1, but T'ealc was the one with a wife and son who were seen in a few episodes.

Then, to complain that Jason Mamoa, who has mixed ethnicity, replaced a black man (who actually has a white father, actor Don Francks), regardless of the role played by each, is what I consider disingenuous.

I haven't read the book in question, but I take books as they come. I try to not read more into them. As a Jew, I don't look for Jewish characters, though more in SF might be nice, but even I don't write them, or I don't write them being religious. We all have what we want to write. Our intentions, however, are rarely what the reader sees. And that's fine. AW is entitled to her opinions, but it's one thing to lobby for more, equal representation in mass media (TV, movies, plays) where casting is the issue as much as scripting is, than to complain about books. Even comics, which are also by committee are more deserving of such complaints than books. You want more books that fit what you want to see? Write them. Or convince other people to write them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

There is not a one true way to guarantee that no one will criticize the physics in your novel. There is not a one true way to guarantee that no one will criticize the linguistics in your novel. There is not a one true way to guarantee that no one will criticize the Byzantine history in your novel, or the benzene chemistry, or the use of New Jersey as a setting, if you've happened to use those things.

So why do we all want a one true way to write about race (ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality) that no one can criticize? Because I admit it, I want it, too. I want to be able to say, "Okay, now this story is done, I have read the page proofs, and I did the things I was supposed to do, and now nobody will ever find anything wrong with how I handled race (ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality)."

Possibly because being a great big racist is generally worse than being a total ignoramus about Byzantine history. Still and all.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It's right next to the magic get-published button.

Oh, look! The Hindenberg!

[mattador.livejournal.com]

This articulates a lot of how I've been feeling about this really well. Thank you.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Good thoughts, definitely. But I don't think I can say that Avatar Willow's and Deepad's readings of Blood and Iron deserve the same consideration as anyone else's. They deserve consideration, certainly. But they're not much use for evaluating the book they're talking about.

The underlying story of Blood and Iron, and all the Promethean Age books I've read so far, is the story of a potentially fatal, potentially tragic imbalance in two societies that mirror each other. It is, in fact, exactly the story that AW complains Bear is not telling.

In other words, the book AW read is the one he/she was afraid he/she was going to see. But it wasn't Blood and Iron.

I can't give a lot of weight to a critique of a book and its author that's based on a shallow reading of the book, that doesn't take into account all the text, but substitutes the reader's own expected subtext for what's actually there. I'm pretty sure AW has plenty of cause to be angry. But I have to say that I do think AW objects to this book based on a fundamental, factual misreading. I believe AW's analysis is objectively wrong, in the same way I would say that someone who declares that Lolita is a glorification and justification of pedophilia is wrong.

In other words, I think Bear is a better writer than AW is a reader. That does happen all the time in the world of literature. It has nothing to do with class, race, gender, or sexual preference. But I don't want to go as far as to say that an opinion based on a shallow reading and a reaction to cultural injustice is as insightful as an opinion based on careful consideration of the text.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

You DO all have a magic get-published button. I knew it!

[chickenfried-jo.livejournal.com]

Like you, my first instinct was to not comment. But that is cowardly. The thing, for me is, that the rapid fire defenses, of what ever content, don't really address that there is a gap in perception by the the privileged commentors on Bear's post. Their first response is to throw every thought process they can into defending what's being done and to criticize the critics, instead of finding out what the frell they're all talking about. Of course they don't see what's being said, that's the nature of privilege and of course they see the responses as overreaction, that's also the nature of privilege. What they don't know, and they should, is that as the privileged, they forfeit, in my mind, the right to define racism, sexism, ableism and privilege and any and all responses they might have when called on it. Because the downside doesn't affect them.

I did like Sparkymonster's comments with links to previous conversations. It is up to those who are being criticized to go and find out what's being said to them so, in my opinion, they can comment from a more aware standpoint.

The fact that nearly 100% of what's written, shot, video'ed and sold to us in the US is by, for and about white guys is so pervasive, so NATURAL, it FEELS hard to refute. I've pointed it out at work and been told that that's because it's true. That's the WAY THINGS ARE. Well, that's the way things are for white guys. As a woman in an almost all male kitchen, it's very apparent to me how privilege of both the white (most of my fellow cooks are hispanic) and male aspects of privilege work on the street level.

There is no 'one true way', but there is a way that is open to other ways. The opposite of the way you do something is not not doing it or doing what other people tell you to. Opposite lives in polar world that's either black or white. There is a lot to learn from this conversation. Shades of gray. I wish there were a better less painful way to go through it. But there isn't.

[saltypepper.livejournal.com]

XI. And when we do fail, we need to try again. Fail better

Was there more to this thought? Because it bears expounding upon. Or not.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Well, arguably, all of writing is the slow and painful process of learning to fail better.

[mac-stone.livejournal.com]

Yep. That.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Well, I do agree that AW was perhaps reading the book somewhat shallowly.

On the other hand, that might, given AW's post, be in part because AW's experience is not Bear's experience, and AW triggers on different points than Bear does, so AW was less /able/ to read it as deeply as Bear would have liked.

Which is not criticism, merely fact.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

It is up to those who are being criticized to go and find out what's being said to them so, in my opinion, they can comment from a more aware standpoint.

Sorry, this struck me. Do you know if there's any sense out there as to how often, well, that actually happens? That being the proactive seeking of resources by people who're being criticized on a privilege-related issue.

[chickenfried-jo.livejournal.com]

No apology needed. How did it strike and you what perspective are you looking from? I'd say, bottom line, not often enough. When it comes to privilege, just getting the privileged to acknowledge something's going on is difficult enough. Getting them to do their own legwork is much harder. But POC, in my experience, are damn tired of educating them and the comments I see usually say, go read about it and come back when you have something of substance to add that's not naive. And if you want a really good understanding of the conversation, take a look at the links provided by sparkymonster in the original post.

I'd like to add that the statement of mine that you quoted is somewhat counter-intuitive. Normally, I'd say the burden of proof is on the accuser. But, when it comes to privilege, that just adds to the privilege of the situation. Putting the burden on the victim. See what I mean?

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

This comment reminds me of Anne Rice's diatribe against the negative reviews on Amazon--the readers were "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective."

I suppose what bothers me most about your comment is that you assume your reading is deep and AW's is shallow. I disagree. All literature is written in context.

When Joss Whedon killed off Tara, he didn't kill off a minor but significant character in some kind of vacuum. Many, many people read it that way. To many others, however, it was just another Faster Pussycat Kill Kill. Lesbians die. That's what happens in stories. I saw a lot of people try to say (much as you seem to be saying) that if only people would ignore their negative expectations (all lesbians must die), the plot point would be poignant, interesting, and effective. But I call bullshit and here's why. The whole of Buffy is a big game of interacting with genre tropes; she's the girl who screams and dies. Many people would like to accept the nice/good/positive/whatever view of Buffy's politics (blonde girls don't die, they can fight back) but negate the negative (lesbians die).

My perspective, that the lesbians must die trope happened in Buffy, is a perspective that gets negated as you negated AW.

It does not mean I read the Buffy text shallowly or from the wrong perspective; it means that my reading may be deeper than those who don't see it, because I am seeing patterns others may not notice.

If you want to say that your close reading is better, then that's fine, but nowhere in your argument do I see that you have *shown* how your reading is deeper or that AWs is inferior. I just see you saying 'No that's wrong' and that their perspective is shallow.

I have learned that sometimes my perspective is shallow--I don't understand the larger context, but others do. I often find this to be the case in race issues. The 'White Honky saves the day' trope was not one I noticed on my own, but when I truly thought about it, I could see it all over the place. It's worth reconsidering, I think, whether AW might be seeing things--contexts, tropes, cliches--that you have missed.

Bear is playing in a wide field, a very complicated context.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that's Avalon's Willow, not Avatar. Apologies for that.

[chickenfried-jo.livejournal.com]

Thank you. This is a great response. Also? Who gets to define what is deep reading, right perspective, shallow reading, wrong perspective? Wrong for who? Why? That right there is privilege talking.

[avalon's willow (from livejournal.com)]

truepenny, you've written something very accessible and very true. I'm glad my post managed to bring about something like this, even if you did have to fight the urge to thwap me 'round the head.

I would respond to some of your commenters, but despite your clarity they seem to have missed the point of my post; example? The comment about how Rainbow Franks is half white but Jason Mamoa is all MoC therefore wtf am I talking about.

I've read Bear's reply to me, (and will respond to it in a moment), but your post caught my attention the hardest because you addressed the most depressing thing I find happening in discussions about this topic; namely the round of 'But my characters are people! And individual! And have nothing to do with a history of anything!'.

So thank you.

[avalon's willow (from livejournal.com)]

Thank you. You're not wrong.

Bear's book does not, in fact, come with a bright yellow sticker saying "Inside! This author wrestles with imperialism!" I read as much as I could but in the end I was too disappointed to go further. Maybe that's a facet of Bear's writing, or the high (but non specific)send up given to her work by people I respect.

[coffeeem.livejournal.com]

I hope publishers won't decide to put explanatory stickers on the covers of books any time soon. I kind of like to figure them out for myself, from the text.