Comments | poilass: RaceFail 09

poilass

RaceFail 09

Mar 06, 2009 13:47

I have been following this for some time but rarely commenting. However I do not want my silence to be taken for apathy or assent, particularly not assent with this piece of condescending fuckwittery (a more elegant response to that here, also here, here, here and hereIf you don't know what I'm talking about (srsly?), various timelines & summaries ( Read more... )

Comments 10

skywardprodigal March 6 2009, 15:12:18 UTC

Good post, poi.

Thank you.

poilass March 6 2009, 15:30:57 UTC

Oh god, please don't thank me. I should be apologising, I should've done it much earlier but I go all passive and silent when I'm depressed.

Anyway, how you doing?

skywardprodigal March 6 2009, 15:55:48 UTC

Okay, yeah, if it was all about me, I could have used this sooner. :D

There's a reason just about all my personal reflection has been under private locked or in safe spaces, and it's that conspicuous silence, but you said something. For which I am GRATEFUL.

Thank you.

I'm hurting but putting the pieces together. Doing what I can to connect with my better angels. Holding my peace and venting my spleen. Praying. Meditating. Writing.

poilass March 6 2009, 20:57:47 UTC

I do think many people have been seriously, astonishingly, awe inspiringly magnificent, and some good things like verb_noire have come out of it, but I know that doesn't balance out the harm that's been done. Good luck catching up with those angels.

dawnkiller March 6 2009, 15:51:11 UTC

Ahaha. I haven't been following this, but I'm guessing it exploded out of the white-washing of the live action Avatar movie.

This entire debate is interesting to me, in a "I want to stay away from this" thing. Don't get me wrong, being genetically biracial and considering myself culturally Japanese-American while generally being taken as white by society means I have a few opinions. But dear god, what a mess.

The thing is, I think the greatest damage is done by the parties who insist that there is no problem and people should lighten up on either side of the argument. If you want to piss someone off, tell them their opinion and own life experiences don't matter, or even flat-out wrong. A non-racial parallel would be to have someone tell you that clearly you can't be very smart if you didn't attend or finish college, HS, what have you. (As a cum laude graduate I feel I have some standing when I say assumption is complete BS.) And whites aren't the only ones guilty of this kind of behavior -- all those who rant about straight/white/ ( ... )

bookshop March 6 2009, 16:45:41 UTC

it actually did *not* explode out of the white-washing of the live action Avatar movie. That actually is a completely separate issue that fandom communities have also been dealing with. While our awareness of both issues happening at once has certainly contributed to the discussion, I do not know of any instance where those discussions have overlapped.

The issue actually began because of the advice you mention by matociquala, who unfortunately throughout this debate has not proved as willing to extend her advice about accepting the "other" to the role of accepting critique about how well she had practiced multiculturalism and non-appropriative techniques in her own writing. This began a debate that spawned outward from her journal and Seeking Avalon's (whose timeline that Poi linked to is essential reading if you want to get a good overview of the debate and subsequent upheavals/flounces/violations of privacy ( ... )

dawnkiller March 6 2009, 17:10:11 UTC

Um, yeah, I gotta agree with bossymarmelade there. Sometimes I think the other side can fail to understand that the reason many people pursue things like gay/women/race -rights is because it's not just an abstract cause, but a personal reality ( ... )

poilass March 6 2009, 20:47:35 UTC

Bear's book was criticised -- politely -- by all of two people, at least one of whom also said that she had enjoyed the book despite having some problems with it. Bear responded in a post that was widely praised, apologising and agreeing the book had failed in that respect. The fail began when people made racist comments in that post, Bear didn't call any of them on despite having promised to moderate the discussion, and eventually started agreeing with them, saying she was just "taking a hit for the team" and, god, I don't even want to go into it now, the details are linked above if you want to search them out. In her most recent post she now says that the original criticism was shallow and never valid, and she only *pretended* to believe that she'd made a mistake because she "felt it was important to serve as an example of how to engage dialogue on unconscious institutional racism ( ... )

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