Taking Time Out From Being Depressed About BP

To be depressed about RaceFail.

My kid absolutely loved Avatar: The Last Airbender.  After every episode, she would give me lengthy disquisitions on what had happened, her favorite characters, why what was going on was important, why she thought this person had done this thing, why it mattered.  I saw only random episodes, but I read enough critical work on the show to be deeply impressed.  When I heard a movie was being made, I was pleased -- as much for the kid as because we'd have a show we could see together.

However:  Here's why you should NOT go see the movie.

Summer

And I am mowing lawns.  Our lawn is not so immense as TOLP's lawn, but OTOH, I frequently neglect to mow it for weeks at a time, so that when I finally drag out the ancient lawnmower (also TOLP has not only a riding lawnmower but a husband who does the mowing -- curse you, TOLP!), the grass is usually a foot high.

Mowed and mowed and mowed this evening.  I'm beat.

Then I came in and read blogs.  What a mistake.  Many, many examples of FAIL on the 'sphere tonight, but here is my favorite: Karynthia of Verb Noire went to WorldCon and sat on a panel with this charmer who insists racism is not an issue in her 'verse, because she and her friends just don't see color, and if we could all just learn to be like her.... 

Here's her book, btw, which has possibly the whitest woman in the universe on its cover.

Among other things, in her tasty post, she tells us, very earnestly, that story I have never heard before, about how her kid's bestest friends are a black kid (only she calls him a kid  "the color of pitch") and a Spanish kid "who barely speaks English" and a Korean kid.  See?  See?  Some of her kid's bestest friends aren't white (though how she would know this if she can't see color I do not know) so she can't be racist!

The other story she tells I like even better.  She has these two friends, see, from DC, who were married for ever so long, and until they went on this trip down south, when some redneck pointed it out to them, they never even noticed one was black and one was white!  That's how colorblind she and her friends are!

Which, okay, you might not believe this story.  But I totally do, see, because the exact same thing happened to me. Well.  Not the exact same thing.  But close.  See, one of my cousin's bestest friends was gay.  Well.  We didn't know he was gay, because we're sexblind.  We're not homophobes!  We never notice stuff like that!  Also he didn't know he was gay either.  Neither did his boyfriend.  They were just people to us.  That's just how we were raised, not to judge people on who they did sex with, or how many musicals they owned the DVDs to but on the content of their character.  But!  Once we went to this rodeo in Oklahoma and the cowboys there called my cousin's friend and his friend faggots.

But! We never ever ever used that sort of language.  Not raised that way!  So my cousin's friend and his friend got SO confused.  They thought it meant they were bundles of wood.  (That's what it says in the OED!) You can imagine the resulting confusion, all those attempts to start fires by rubbing themselves together at BoyScout jamborees and so forth.

Luckily another of my cousin's bestest friends found this on Urban Dictionary and all became clear, but still!  I totally see how Arhyalon could FAIL to see or comprehend or understand why someone's race or the issue of racism might matter in America in 2009.

Don't you?

Crap, This again

So this SF editor, Mike Ashley, who I am sure means very well, puts out this anthology of SF.

The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing Science Fiction!

Except, as plenty of people notice, of the 21 stories he puts in his anthology, which he claims contains the finest stories ever, all are by not just guys, but white straight guys.

And, as ABW explains, in insightful and hilarious detail, uproar ensues, with those who object to this patriarchial SOP pointing out that writers of mind-blowing SF who aren't white straight guys exist, and Mike Ashley making not-helpful comments such as he doesn't know any stories by women or black people (or I guess by gay people) and he thought about looking around for some, but, you know, he didn't want to included women as tokens (because, you know, that's the only way girls can ever get into anthologies, as tokens, it's not as though we're actually decent writers) and women just don't write the sort of SF he was interested in (um, mindblowing?), they write that squishy stuff about feelings, not about, you know, science.

Other pro-status quo SF leapt also into the fray. Nothing wrong with this picture! These writers are fine writers! What's yo problem, bitch! Go write something else if you don't like how we do SF! This is writing, not politics!

And etc.

Well. That is something, in my libertarian youth (yes, all right, I admit the dark secret to you: in my youth I was a libertarian. I blame Heinlein, who, in my youth, I was mad enamoured with) I also believed: that literature had nothing to do with politics. Indeed, in graduate school, I remember struggling with notion that all literature was political. I remember sitting in the library, reading my Intro to Graduate Studies text, which introduced that odd idea, the one which told me that any text which claimed to be without politics was simply ignorant of its politics -- was relying on its unmarked state, its priviliged ability to ignore its dominant position*.

"Bullshit," I remember grumbling. "Nothing I'm writing has anything to do with politics..."

Yeah, right.

Literature is political.

I do not say it is only political; but political is one of its modes.

Further, nothing Mike Ashley nor any of us do is without consequences. He acts, results acrue. Maybe it's no deal to him whether women or PoC or gay people are people who matter; to me it is. He has a position of power in the world of publishing. (Yes, that's what an editor is: someone with a position of power.) It's his job to know something about people writing in the world of SF, and not just about some of the white straight guys who are writing.

Here's what I do, every time, these days: I pick up an anthology, and I turn to the table of contents. If at least four of the stories aren't written by women, if there's not at least one PoC, I put the book back on the shelf.

See also this.



*Thus, in the recent RaceFail09 debate, some speakers scolded others for using aliases online, ignoring that those using their real names could do so because they spoke from a position of privilige: they had nothing much to fear, since they spoke from positions of power, whereas those of us who use aliases online frequently do so because we have a great deal to fear, and much at risk.