On this edition of RaceFail 2009
RaceFail 2009 is like a circle of hell where you end up going round and round and getting nowhere. This could be because it's so big, it's hard to keep up with what's been going on. Thus, this post.
Previously...
For the original January RaceFail 2009, check rydra_wong's Writing the Other/Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom 2009, which is an archive of links to the debate.
I've pulled all of these links from rydra_wong.
For a timeline of RaceFail2009 that's shorter than the archive, check Seeking Avalon's Timeline.
The Feminist SF Wiki: Race Fail 09 has a good explanation.
Currently...
In the March edition of RaceFail 2009, we have Will S.[1] and Kathryn Cramer outing coffeeandink by linking her online alias to her legal name. They also made wild speculations about vom_marlowe and others.
vom_marlowe responds to Will S. here on her real background: Fucking Will Shetterly Insults Me and My Family.
coffeeandink wrote in RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection:
Kathryn Cramer has been linking my LJ to my full name on wikis and in other people's blog comments and has repeatedly stated that my participation in RaceFail debates was an attempt to smear the Nielsen Haydens in grudgewank, even though I was involved in that discussion long before the Nielsen Haydens joined in, as is proved in numerous places, such as the dated entries in our own livejournals and in the well-documented and widely linked timeline of posts. Will Shetterly has been posting speculations about my family, my class, my history, and my political and personal beliefs that he has presented as fact, as well as repeatedly misrepresenting what I've said about him, failing to provide context to or links to what I've said, and claiming that I have taken his words out of context and not allowed him to represent himself, even though I have included links to his original words and to his later defense. He has also posted speculation about [info]deepad (even after apologizing and retracting his first statement), [info]veejane, [info]ithiliana, [info]vom_marlowe, and [info]icecreamempress. He posted my full name and LJ on his blog, even though I deliberately do not list my last name on my LJ.
coffeeandinkdescribes how she wants things NOT to be handled.
Links to evidence:
Since Cramer has been moving the links around, and redirecting the links to different sites, here are the posts that have taken screencaps, saved the evidence, and give a timeline or summary of the events.
zvi_likes_tv's Shorter Kathryn Cramer has screencaps and updates.
bossymarmalade has a summary and timeline in her post by *my*standards, I won fair and square
On Blogging Safely:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's article on How to Blog Safely.
tackytramp on PSA: Protecting your pseudonymity:
If you like to keep your online pseudonym separate from your legal name, please, please take a moment today to Google yourself and flip through the first 5-10 pages of results. It had been a year or two since I did this thoroughly, and since then, some new information- and identity-aggregating sites have gone online. Meaning some dumb crap I posted to an obscure forum five years ago now shows up on page two of my search results. Fortunately, these aggregators update regularly, so if you can get the information deleted at the source, which I have successfully done several times, it will fall off their site.
Discussion links:
vitoexcalibur's Will S. & Cramer: Once More, with Failing has a summary of what happened, links, and a deconstruction of their arguments for how using an online pseudonym is an indication of malicious intent.
shewhohashope's Cultural Appropriation and SF/F: Once More, with Apathy sums up what happened, and also says:
I don't think that there is a shadowy conspiracy. There doesn't need to be. This is what happens when white people with social capital make racist remarks and are called on it. The people who do the calling out are punished for it. Every. Time. Not necessarily by the person who was originally called out, but by their friends and allies who wish to defend their behaviour because they cannot countenance that it may be unacceptable for white people to say whatever comes into their heads, without any consequences.
ciderpress's post, You mean those giant brains on Earth are making everyone stupid?, explains why the outting of pseudonyms is a big deal in media fandom, how this fits into the larger pattern of racism and cultural appropriation debates in media and sf/f fandom, and talks about what it takes to make a space for PoC/non-white people.
Racefail '09 has now been completely re-imaged and repackaged by these people as a "flame war", wherein they repeatedly claim there were very few (supposed!) PoC involved and it was all about white people, grudge-wank and pseudonymity. This is what they wanted, after all, to derail and hijack a dialogue, an online discussion about race and the problematic attitudes and issues there are in race representation and even in a dialogue about such issues. They wanted to render non-white people/PoC invisible and turn it into a chance for white "ladies" to clutch their pearls and white men turning up like the knight gallant to protect them from the uncivil hordes. If it didn't make me so angry, I'd laugh at how this is a carbon copy of the behaviour exhibited last year by Amanda Marcotte/Hugo/Seal Press.
spiralsheep posts In which Kathryn Cramer should be shunned for our own safety and the sake of our communities:
It is my intention to shun Kathryn Cramer and W!ll Sh£tt£rly, not as a punishment but because they deliberately choose to threaten and damage real human beings (in this case for merely speaking out against racism) and I do NOT want to be anywhere near them or to be responsible for anyone else being placed anywhere near them. This shunning extends throughout their personal and professional life as I do NOT want to support their dangerous sociopathic behaviour towards real live human beings in any way, in any place. I'm not adding "at any time" because if they manage to make full apologies that demonstrate they fully understand their sociopathic behaviour AND subsequently act in accordance with that understanding for a significant length of time without issuing more threats or doing real human beings further damage then I might revise my assessment of whether or not it's safe to be near them.
tielan asks in Dipping a toe in the water: safe spaces:
What worries me is less that RaceFail09 is still going, and more that someone thought that personalised hassling and targeting was acceptable behaviour simply because the target disagreed with them.
What worries me still more is that the two people targeting [info]coffeeandink are probably scaring people of colour out of fandom, sci-fi publishing, and even out of voicing their own opinions.
Where is the safe space for people of colour?
My reaction:
I went through several reactions, before settling onto this one.
You know what? I think it's better for my general well-being if I take a break from mainstream scifi/fantasy/horror [2] fandom. And by mainstream sf/f/h fandom, I mean the white-dominated part that can't seem to hold a discussion on cultural appropriation and writing the Other in terms of non-white characters, without the entire thing being diverted into whiteness: white guilt, white defensiveness, liberal white colorblindness, Oppression Olympics, personal attacks, reframing the issue to be about something else, confusing membership in a white subculture as equivalent to being a Person of Color/non-white in a white mainstream culture--the list goes on even as I got sick of making it.
Right now, when I pass through the sf/f section of the library or bookstore I don't think about childhood favorites, alternate Earths where Neanderthals flourished, Chthulian monsters, secret immortal groups, FTL travel, alien encounters, fantastical cities built out of the bones of angels, Big Thorny Questions About Deep Stuff, or supernatural creatures in an urban setting. When I pass through the sf/f section I think about the online debates. I think about how much harder it is to read about a fictional world that makes white the default; and erases, marginalizes, or distorts characters of color.
I'm going to see if I can go the whole year with just reading books by PoC/non-white people. For sf/f/h I still haven't read Tobias Buckell, Walter Mosley's sf/f works, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, David Anthony Durham, Nalo Hopkinson, Brenda Clough, Ted Chiang, Marjori Liu, or Steven Barnes. I've yet to read other works by PoC authors like Tananarive Due, Samuel Delaney, Linda Nagata, Michelle Sagara, and Sonia Singh. I've got PoC writers who I hope will put out more books like Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Marta Acosta, and Ulysses Silva. I've been meaning to retackle Andrea Hairston's Mindscape.
I have anthologies to get through when I'm in the mood for short stories: Dark Dreaming (African-American horror), the two Dark Matter short stories by African-American writers, Cosmos Latinos (Latino from Latin America and Spanish writers), So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Phillippine Speculative Fiction sampler.
If I run out, I can look for recs at the Carl Brandon Society. verb_noire, a small sf/f press featuring characters of color, is about to go up. I can also read PoC authors outside of the genre like Yxta Maya Murray, Sherman Alexie, and Natsuo Kirino. I just read an awesome book by Nina Revoyr, called "Southland". I've been meaning to read Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz for the longest time. I've also been meaning to read more translated works. I can browse through entries and tags at 50books_poc and add more PoC authors to my reading list.
I want to see what scifi/fantasy/horror looks like when you re-center it around PoC/non-white people.
[1] Will S. has a tendency to google his own name, and respond to the posters. I do not want to engage with him, thus the altered name.
[2] Yes, I know that some SF/science-fiction fans' heads explode if you use scifi. I like the term because it's short, and isn't confused with other abbreviations. Deal with it.
Previously...
For the original January RaceFail 2009, check rydra_wong's Writing the Other/Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of Doom 2009, which is an archive of links to the debate.
I've pulled all of these links from rydra_wong.
For a timeline of RaceFail2009 that's shorter than the archive, check Seeking Avalon's Timeline.
The Feminist SF Wiki: Race Fail 09 has a good explanation.
Currently...
In the March edition of RaceFail 2009, we have Will S.[1] and Kathryn Cramer outing coffeeandink by linking her online alias to her legal name. They also made wild speculations about vom_marlowe and others.
vom_marlowe responds to Will S. here on her real background: Fucking Will Shetterly Insults Me and My Family.
coffeeandink wrote in RaceFail: Once More, with Misdirection:
Kathryn Cramer has been linking my LJ to my full name on wikis and in other people's blog comments and has repeatedly stated that my participation in RaceFail debates was an attempt to smear the Nielsen Haydens in grudgewank, even though I was involved in that discussion long before the Nielsen Haydens joined in, as is proved in numerous places, such as the dated entries in our own livejournals and in the well-documented and widely linked timeline of posts. Will Shetterly has been posting speculations about my family, my class, my history, and my political and personal beliefs that he has presented as fact, as well as repeatedly misrepresenting what I've said about him, failing to provide context to or links to what I've said, and claiming that I have taken his words out of context and not allowed him to represent himself, even though I have included links to his original words and to his later defense. He has also posted speculation about [info]deepad (even after apologizing and retracting his first statement), [info]veejane, [info]ithiliana, [info]vom_marlowe, and [info]icecreamempress. He posted my full name and LJ on his blog, even though I deliberately do not list my last name on my LJ.
coffeeandinkdescribes how she wants things NOT to be handled.
Links to evidence:
Since Cramer has been moving the links around, and redirecting the links to different sites, here are the posts that have taken screencaps, saved the evidence, and give a timeline or summary of the events.
zvi_likes_tv's Shorter Kathryn Cramer has screencaps and updates.
bossymarmalade has a summary and timeline in her post by *my*standards, I won fair and square
On Blogging Safely:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation's article on How to Blog Safely.
tackytramp on PSA: Protecting your pseudonymity:
If you like to keep your online pseudonym separate from your legal name, please, please take a moment today to Google yourself and flip through the first 5-10 pages of results. It had been a year or two since I did this thoroughly, and since then, some new information- and identity-aggregating sites have gone online. Meaning some dumb crap I posted to an obscure forum five years ago now shows up on page two of my search results. Fortunately, these aggregators update regularly, so if you can get the information deleted at the source, which I have successfully done several times, it will fall off their site.
Discussion links:
vitoexcalibur's Will S. & Cramer: Once More, with Failing has a summary of what happened, links, and a deconstruction of their arguments for how using an online pseudonym is an indication of malicious intent.
shewhohashope's Cultural Appropriation and SF/F: Once More, with Apathy sums up what happened, and also says:
I don't think that there is a shadowy conspiracy. There doesn't need to be. This is what happens when white people with social capital make racist remarks and are called on it. The people who do the calling out are punished for it. Every. Time. Not necessarily by the person who was originally called out, but by their friends and allies who wish to defend their behaviour because they cannot countenance that it may be unacceptable for white people to say whatever comes into their heads, without any consequences.
ciderpress's post, You mean those giant brains on Earth are making everyone stupid?, explains why the outting of pseudonyms is a big deal in media fandom, how this fits into the larger pattern of racism and cultural appropriation debates in media and sf/f fandom, and talks about what it takes to make a space for PoC/non-white people.
Racefail '09 has now been completely re-imaged and repackaged by these people as a "flame war", wherein they repeatedly claim there were very few (supposed!) PoC involved and it was all about white people, grudge-wank and pseudonymity. This is what they wanted, after all, to derail and hijack a dialogue, an online discussion about race and the problematic attitudes and issues there are in race representation and even in a dialogue about such issues. They wanted to render non-white people/PoC invisible and turn it into a chance for white "ladies" to clutch their pearls and white men turning up like the knight gallant to protect them from the uncivil hordes. If it didn't make me so angry, I'd laugh at how this is a carbon copy of the behaviour exhibited last year by Amanda Marcotte/Hugo/Seal Press.
spiralsheep posts In which Kathryn Cramer should be shunned for our own safety and the sake of our communities:
It is my intention to shun Kathryn Cramer and W!ll Sh£tt£rly, not as a punishment but because they deliberately choose to threaten and damage real human beings (in this case for merely speaking out against racism) and I do NOT want to be anywhere near them or to be responsible for anyone else being placed anywhere near them. This shunning extends throughout their personal and professional life as I do NOT want to support their dangerous sociopathic behaviour towards real live human beings in any way, in any place. I'm not adding "at any time" because if they manage to make full apologies that demonstrate they fully understand their sociopathic behaviour AND subsequently act in accordance with that understanding for a significant length of time without issuing more threats or doing real human beings further damage then I might revise my assessment of whether or not it's safe to be near them.
tielan asks in Dipping a toe in the water: safe spaces:
What worries me is less that RaceFail09 is still going, and more that someone thought that personalised hassling and targeting was acceptable behaviour simply because the target disagreed with them.
What worries me still more is that the two people targeting [info]coffeeandink are probably scaring people of colour out of fandom, sci-fi publishing, and even out of voicing their own opinions.
Where is the safe space for people of colour?
My reaction:
I went through several reactions, before settling onto this one.
You know what? I think it's better for my general well-being if I take a break from mainstream scifi/fantasy/horror [2] fandom. And by mainstream sf/f/h fandom, I mean the white-dominated part that can't seem to hold a discussion on cultural appropriation and writing the Other in terms of non-white characters, without the entire thing being diverted into whiteness: white guilt, white defensiveness, liberal white colorblindness, Oppression Olympics, personal attacks, reframing the issue to be about something else, confusing membership in a white subculture as equivalent to being a Person of Color/non-white in a white mainstream culture--the list goes on even as I got sick of making it.
Right now, when I pass through the sf/f section of the library or bookstore I don't think about childhood favorites, alternate Earths where Neanderthals flourished, Chthulian monsters, secret immortal groups, FTL travel, alien encounters, fantastical cities built out of the bones of angels, Big Thorny Questions About Deep Stuff, or supernatural creatures in an urban setting. When I pass through the sf/f section I think about the online debates. I think about how much harder it is to read about a fictional world that makes white the default; and erases, marginalizes, or distorts characters of color.
I'm going to see if I can go the whole year with just reading books by PoC/non-white people. For sf/f/h I still haven't read Tobias Buckell, Walter Mosley's sf/f works, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, David Anthony Durham, Nalo Hopkinson, Brenda Clough, Ted Chiang, Marjori Liu, or Steven Barnes. I've yet to read other works by PoC authors like Tananarive Due, Samuel Delaney, Linda Nagata, Michelle Sagara, and Sonia Singh. I've got PoC writers who I hope will put out more books like Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, Marta Acosta, and Ulysses Silva. I've been meaning to retackle Andrea Hairston's Mindscape.
I have anthologies to get through when I'm in the mood for short stories: Dark Dreaming (African-American horror), the two Dark Matter short stories by African-American writers, Cosmos Latinos (Latino from Latin America and Spanish writers), So Long Been Dreaming: Post-Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Phillippine Speculative Fiction sampler.
If I run out, I can look for recs at the Carl Brandon Society. verb_noire, a small sf/f press featuring characters of color, is about to go up. I can also read PoC authors outside of the genre like Yxta Maya Murray, Sherman Alexie, and Natsuo Kirino. I just read an awesome book by Nina Revoyr, called "Southland". I've been meaning to read Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz for the longest time. I've also been meaning to read more translated works. I can browse through entries and tags at 50books_poc and add more PoC authors to my reading list.
I want to see what scifi/fantasy/horror looks like when you re-center it around PoC/non-white people.
[1] Will S. has a tendency to google his own name, and respond to the posters. I do not want to engage with him, thus the altered name.
[2] Yes, I know that some SF/science-fiction fans' heads explode if you use scifi. I like the term because it's short, and isn't confused with other abbreviations. Deal with it.