...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

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

But, you know, at some point I think it's important to understand that there are some things where finding common ground is not the point. If you want to go with the dead mother example: when my husband's mother died, my mom tried to empathize with him about it by sharing her experience of when her own mother died, and he got really, really angry.

My mom was offended, and at first so was I (she's my mom, she was just trying to be nice/helpful/condole). But at some point I realized, and told her, that in this case her similar experiences are not the point. The point was, his mother had died. He had had a particular relationship with her that was unique to his childhood; he lost her in a way that was uniquely tragic; and he didn't need anyone to try to share the experience, he needed his experience to be heard and comprehended. I also discovered that if I listened to my husband talk about that loss and talked with him only about what I heard him saying, that helped him a lot more than trying to interpret his words through my own filter.

...and that's the point at which the metaphor fails, because my husband can get past that event in his life. People of color, on the other hand, go on dealing with racism in all its forms.

I don't know. I'm not trying to offer a rule or interpretation or whatever. It's just that having tried to find a way to comprehend what I was hearing by using some kind of shared experience or other experience that I felt I had a better understanding of, I eventually got to the point where it occurred to me that it shouldn't be about me at all. I can't share the experience I was hearing, ever, in any form, because I'm not a person of color, and really it might be more offensive and/or more missing-the-point-entirely to try.

It's kind of like that conversational thing where the moral of the story is 'you're not listening if you're also already composing your own response in your head.' I.e., if I'm hearing something and trying to cross-reference with knowledge already in my mental filing system, I'm not listening. I'm not getting it. So I think maybe I should just only listen, whenever someone speaks.

And as far as eventually wanting to stop tying one's shoelaces and follow, I get that. But maybe this isn't necessarily a question of following. Maybe it's more a question of...after a while you find yourself tying your shoelaces in a more efficient, more secure way because you've been soaking in some ideas from someone else without constantly referring back to what you used to know about how to tie shoelaces. Or something. Er. Yeah, I'm not sure how to carry on that metaphor either. :P

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I had some thoughts with went endlessly off topic and in the interest of "don't litter other people's topics with your white person issues", I tried to collect them over in my journal, in case you want to check it out here (http://thelana.livejournal.com/607194.html). (be warned though, it's pretty rambly and boring)