...and so I ask myself if I am the stone in your shoe.

[tielan]

"How could anyone love a stone in their shoe?"
~ The Stepmother, Ever After ~

*breathes*

It started with an author called Elizabeth Bear talking about writing the Other without being a dick. Unfortunately, someone pointed out a story of hers which features a magical negro who is 'tamed' by a white woman and stating that it was problematic.

It turned into a big argument about cultural appropriation: who has the right to write about non-whites, how our society perceives and stereotypes the Other (African, Asian, Indian, Oriental, Pacific Islander, Eskimo, Alien), how perfectly nice people can be racist without ever realising it, how it always comes back to the satisfaction and emotional catharsis of white people at the expense of the persons of colour trying to say "I am here, my pain is real, don't ignore what I have to say or dismiss it just because you don't want to hear that you put your foot wrong and might have to apologise."

I'm no good at talking about this stuff - I can't talk about a broader experience, I can only talk about my own experience.

One thing that's repeatedly come up is that white fans feel fandom is their safe space and their place to have fun. That to question the racial assumptions, cultural appropriations, and racist attitudes of fandom is to effectively deny white people their 'safe space', where they can happily squee and post fannishly and never have to question their choices or behaviours or feel guilty about the weight of history upon them regarding racist behaviours, a racist system, and how POC can't hide that they're POC.

And so I sit here and post these thoughts and try to broaden my perspectives and watch as the people who read this journal amble by without ever reading or commenting.

My f-list is primarily fannish. People who like my fic - whatever aspect that might be. People who once liked me. There are a handful of people who are both fannish and people of colour, but they're just that - a handful.

And so I watch the comments rack up on my fiction and wonder if I am the fly in the ointment of my f-list's f-lists.

Am I the crazy lady on the train?

Am I the stone in the shoe?

And if so, are the only options to wince and bear it or to throw the stone away?

Which do you choose?

Do you wince and bear these posts of mine and others like me? Or do you skip over them, safe in the knowledge that tomorrow, next week, next month, I/we/they might post something that you're actually interested in - something that's relevant to you, that doesn't challenge you and your way of looking at the world in any way?

Sometimes I wonder.

Comments

Re: The safe space metaphor

[blacksquirrel.livejournal.com]

cpwotc - lol

To some extent I think the point is the people saying something offensive rarely perceive it in that way - so it would be something other people warn you about - which, I think, is a fairly accurate representation of what we have now - a word-of-mouth system for warning people about writing/conversations that are racially problematic.

Do you remember the incident with the Supernatural RPS fic set in Cambodia awhile back? Something like that might have benefited from some kind of institutionalized warning system - if the author had to stop and consider whether to check a button to warn about potentially offensive representation of a culture not his/her own, that may have produced some deeper thinking - or, it might just have served as the sort of "don't like, don't read" justification that you mention.

But, yes, overall it's unfortunate when one person's quest for safe space undermines someone else's ability to feel safe.

Re: The safe space metaphor

[thelana.livejournal.com]

See, that to me is the perfect example of a fic that should just not exist. Not just on a race level, but on a "metaphorically making out on the bodies of dead people" level. I mean, if they had been having sex during a visit of Dachau wouldn't that have been just as precious?

*shudder*

If anything that is the kind of fic that if you want to write it should come with a whole slew of warnings plastered all over it and maybe only be shared on a request/email basis.

That's actually one category where I would wish people would realize that something like this really is on a level with, let's say extreme chan or "she was raped and really enjoyed it" fic. Of course nobody can forbid you to write and think it, but you should at least know that in public environment it is extremely distasteful and should only be posted with the strictest precautions and ideally not in a public forum (like those people who send certain stories out only by email or only post it under friendslock in their own journal).