Technical Difficulties

The fabulous Mary Anne Mohanraj has two excellent posts on John Scalzi's blog. She also links to Ampersand's post on How Not To Be Insane When Accused of Racism (which is, please note, from 2005).

rydra_wong is compiling authoritative link lists of posts about this debate on racism and cultural appropriation.

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

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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.

oyceter and matociquala are talking about anger and talking about being heard, and, being a literal minded sort of person, I'm thinking about voices.

Nobody has ever or will ever call James Earl Jones "shrill."

(It's quite deliberate when I describe Felix's voice as getting shrill, or say he shrieks. Not to feminize him, but to insist that, yes, those words can apply to men, too.)

Women's voices are, in general, pitched higher than men's. One of the stereotypes of Asians involves high-pitched voices. African-Americans are stereotyped by their use of Black English, i.e., the way they sound. And they are also stereotyped as being "loud." And I'm thinking about how easy it is for the physical to become metaphorical, for people to be dismissed as "shrill" or "rowdy" when they are trying to say something their audience doesn't want to "hear"--whether they're actually hearing someone speak, or reading their words printed on the page. There are also connotations--which are hard to tease out so bear with me--of these voices actually hurting listeners. Shrill, as a quality of sound, is painful to listen to. Ditto excessively loud. Think of fire alarms, which are both. So using those particular words and their synonyms ("strident" is another that gets thrown at women a lot) signals to the speaker--and metaphorically to the writer--that they're saying it wrong, that they are inflicting discomfort on their audience.

Now maybe, you object, that audience ought to be uncomfortable, and, well, I'm going to find it hard to argue with you. But unless you've set out explicitly to make your audience uncomfortable, it is very hard to keep going when you are accused of being too loud, too shrill . . .

These words, of course, also have connotations of being out of control--the implication from the audience is that of course the speaker/writer didn't MEAN to be shrill/loud/unpleasant--and this is where Freud's double bind (yes means yes, and no means yes) kicks in full force. Because the more you insist you are in control and you aren't being shrill, the more shrill you are going to sound to an audience who has already dismissed you as overemotional or overinvested or just plain crazy.

It's also got the bonus feature of making the speaker/writer feel gauche and awkward and juvenile. Because it's not adult, not cool to care about anything enough that your voice rises or you start overusing italics and caps lock the way I may have done in the preceding paragraph. And if you can catch someone caring about something, you can make them look dumb.

(This is, as Diana Wynne Jones points out in her excellent YA novel, Fire and Hemlock, the single hardest thing about being a hero. You have to keep going, no matter how stupid you feel. No matter how mortified you are.)

All of which combine to ensure that the speaker shuts up and sits down and starts thinking things like, Nobody else is upset. What's wrong with me? And interpolates themselves right back into the oppression they were trying, however shrilly, however awkwardly, to find their way out of.

At least, that's the way it's "supposed" to work.

Thank goodness it doesn't always.

How it works.

ibarw is and will be collecting links.

A seminal IBARW text: How To Suppress Discussions Of Racism

Last year, I wrote about my childhood.

There's been a lot of ugliness bubbling to the surface this month in a number of different arenas--the Jena 6, the "miscegenation" contretemps at the Daily Deviant, some appallingly arrogant people thinking they had the right to insist that Toby Buckell "prove" his multiracial heritage ... so, yes, clearly racism needs to be talked about and questioned and dissected and undercut and disassembled and exposed for the destructive nonsense that it is.

Go to it.

Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1996. New York: Vintage Books, 1997

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This is a very hard book to read, I give you all fair warning. The photographs, in particular, are hard to look at, hard to force oneself to understand. On page 407, that really is a German soldier posing for the photographer as he takes aim at a Jewish woman and her child. On page 224-25, those really are pictures, taken by a German soldier as mementoes, of Jews waiting to be massacred.

I don't understand antisemitism. I should say that, too. The Salem witchcraft trials make more sense to me than do the commonly held German beliefs about Jews Goldhagen describes in this book.

Goldhagen's thesis, reduced to the compass of a nutshell, is that the Nazis did not invent German antisemitism. He argues--and, I think, persuasively--that the Nazis reflected and acted upon beliefs that were quite widely held in Germany and had been for a hundred years or more, and that therefore, it wasn't a matter of the Germans obeying the Nazis (for whatever reason, fear or ingrained obedience or what have you) but--and this he never quite says, but I think it is a logical extension of his argument--the Nazis giving Germans permission, explicitly, repeatedly, and with approbation, to do what they wanted.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Because that's what Goldhagen proves, over and over again: that the Germans involved in the genocidal slaughter of the Jews were involved because they wanted to be involved. They weren't necessarily Nazis; they weren't necessarily in agreement with the Nazis (Goldhagen remarks that the men who plotted to assassinate Hitler were staunch antisemites; some of them participated in the extermination of Soviet Jews). They weren't coerced. They chose to kill Jews by the hundreds of thousands because--somehow--they believed, sincerely, that it was the right thing to do.

That "somehow" reflects a cognitive gap I can't bridge. I believe Goldhagen's evidence that these were beliefs sincerely and passionately held, but I can't put myself imaginatively into the shoes of someone who could believe those things.

Which, mind you, is not necessarily a bad thing, but it made the experience of reading this book rather hallucinatory.

I am not, of course, an expert on twentieth century German history, so when I say that Goldhagen's argument seemed persuasive, well researched, and compelling to me, you may take that for what it's worth. His writing style is pedestrian ranging to clunky, and he sometimes doesn't have the sense to let the atrocities committed by the Germans speak for themselves, indulging--albeit understandably--in rhetoric that is superfluous to the needs of his material. But these are surface flaws that do not detract from the achievement that is the book itself.

coffeeandink explains it and demonstrates it.

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I'm a white middle-class girl from east Tennessee. I am in fact what you might call hyper-white--not only do I have a kind of albinism that makes me markedly paler than the rest of my family, my ethnic descent is almost entirely English, Irish, and Scottish. WASP all the way, baby. The closest I come to minority heritage is an ancestor who was kidnapped by Indians way back in the day when such things happened.

So blonde, blue-eyed, ethnically "pure." (PLEASE notice the sarcastic quote marks there.) The Hitler Youth would snap me up in a heartbeat. I comfort myself with the fact that they wouldn't like me once they had me.

So if I'm uncomfortable talking about race, which I am, it's because I'm all too aware of my subject position. And I'm all too aware of how that subject position correlates with privilege in American society.

But what that privilege means is that I could ignore the whole subject if I wanted to. I have the luxury of not thinking about race. And that's a cop-out and a cheat.

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Felix and Mildmay are both white. However, native Melusiniens are not white--athough Melusine is such a melting pot that there are characters of other ethnic backgrounds (such as Monspulchra, where Shannon's mother was from) who are also very pale-skinned. But the people of the Grasslands (which is most of Kekropia, Marathat, and the eastern edge of Tibernia) are brown/olive-to-gold complected. The people of the Imari (the islands to the south of the continent) are Nubian black, although they have green eyes. We hear a lot about Felix and Mildmay's pale skin because it's unusual. Blondes are a commodity in Melusine because they're rare.

So my heroes fall into the tidy Default Fantasy Caucasian category (with bonus Mary Sue points for Felix's yellow eye), but the world around them doesn't. I didn't do that intentionally--it's just the way the world grew--but I'm retroactively rather pleased about it.