Technical Difficulties

Nalo Hopkinson has posted a brilliant essay about being a person of color in the SF community as part of foc_u's effort, both protest and celebration, to increase the visibility of people of color within SF fandom.

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.

A friend remarked today that it's very difficult to be out about being the survivor of abuse without seeming to claim victimhood.

And I thought about it. And I thought of two reasons for that to be true, both of which are more theoretical than immediate, but that's also what makes them harder to see, and thus harder to deal with.

The first reason is that, culturally, our cognitive models for dealing with abuse frankly suck.

Stephen R. Donaldson talks, in the introduction to the first of his Gap books, about how he'd wanted to take three characters and move each of them around the triangle from hero to victim to villain. And, you know, we can argue about how well he managed that, and whether it was an interesting thing to attempt or not, but what catches my attention is the kind of three way toggle system, which he is both using and trying to subvert--not entirely successfully. What those books--and even more so, the introduction to those books--show is the narrow categorization underlying our cognitive models. Hero. Victim. Villain. If you're not one, you must be one of the others. This is why I don't think Donaldson is successful in his subversion: because he moves Angus and Morn and Nick from position to position rather than arguing that they don't have to inhabit those positions at all. It's structurally really kind of cool, but it also reinforces the binary thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

Binary thinking? you say. Mole, can you not count?

Oh, I can count, and that's where we hit the second reason it's hard to be out about surviving abuse without being categorized as a victim.

Because "victim" is not a subject position. It is not a place from which one acts or has power, as both "hero" and "villain" are. It is a place in which one is acted upon.

It's an object position.

One could argue, in fact--hell, I could argue, this isn't academia and I don't need to elide myself from my argument. I am arguing that that that's the point of abuse, to make a person an object, to make them silent, to make them unable to act, unable to talk about who they are, about what's happened to them. To make them SHUT THE FUCK UP.

And all too often, it works.

And our culture colludes by refusing to relinquish the cognitive model of "victim." By assuming and insisting that anyone who speaks out is searching for pity. Because pity does not enable agency. Pity reinforces victimhood; it makes sure you stay right where you're put.

Pity is easy. Heroes and villains know how to work it.

What's hard is making eye-contact with someone who is willing to say, "Horrible things were done to me, but I'm better now." Someone who is asserting that having been abused does not erase their subject position. That they're still here. Someone who insists that they aren't a victim, aren't a villain, aren't a hero. That they're a person, just like you are. That what happened to them was not special--it did not happen because they were special, it did not make them special because it happened. That it could happen, could have happened, to you. That you are not exempt.

It's hard to face someone who insists that they don't deserve pity, as victims do, or loathing, as villains do, or admiration, as heroes do.

That they deserve respect.

As people do.

Culturally, we'd rather keep it at a distance, rather keep our nice safe categorizations of heroes and villains and victims. We scramble like mad to keep both villains abusers and victims survivors alienated from us, from who we are.

And that's why abuse survivors, when they speak out, have to worry about whether they sound like they are claiming victimhood. Because people assume they are. And they assume they are because they'd really kind of prefer it that way. Because it keeps the lid down on the box.

And it reinscribes the object position of "victim" all over again. Which must make the "villains" very happy. And lets the "heroes" continue to stare nobly into the distance, untouched and untarnished by our common humanity.

And that, in a nutshell, is why that cognitive model needs to die.

When I was in junior high, I was afraid of the black girls.

Not because they were black per se, but because they were aggressive and loud and whatever they valued, it wasn't books. It's the same reason I was afraid of the redneck girls.

(If I ran afoul of the black girls, though, it was only as collateral damage. To the redneck girls, I was a target.)

Let me unpack this a little.

( cut because, hello? long and complicated )