RaceFail09: some short links

[tielan]

I admit, I struggle with some of the longer posts. They're good, but there's so much nuance to it all! And it's hard to draw people into this conversation when it all seems long and complicated.

So, a few shorter links - for myself and for those who are interested but haven't been keeping up. (I'm interested and I haven't been keeping up.)

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The class argument is bogus by kalima62:
Dirt poor Mississippi farmers, one white, one black. Both Americans. Think about it. The black one is going to have a harder time getting a loan. The white one isn't going to be stopped for "driving while white". There's a difference.

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This Is Your Nation On White Privilege by Tim Wise:
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

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I don't go to meetings - meetings are for alcoholics by iclysdale:
It’s not like any of us can wake up one morning and suddenly be enlightened, hip, and over the culture that we grew up in, it’s something that we either do our best to keep confronting, or that we ignore and let fester. And so, because it’s my journal, my friends, my support group, I get to stand up in this virtual meeting and talk about the various ways that I’m still deeply broken on the question of race.

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And one longer one, which touched a raw spot in me about the Avatar movie, and how there are almost no non-exoticised, non-sensualised, non-accented Chinese female protagonists in fiction, as well as why it's important that there are stories about people like me:

Let Me Tell You A Story by yuki_onna:
when we see story after story that has no one like us in it, a book entirely without women, a TV show where white people speak Chinese but there are no Asians visible, a movie set in California without Hispanics, image after image of a world where everyone is straight, and when we are told that it's no big deal, really, there is no race in future societies, that it's not anyone's fault if all the characters are white, that's just how they are, in the pure authorial mind, that we have no sense of humor, that we are ganging up on people because we speak our minds, this is what we hear:

You do not have a right to live. There are no stories for you, to teach you how to survive, because the world would prefer you didn't. You don't get to be human, to understand your suffering or move beyond it. In the perfect future society, you do not exist. We who are colorblind, genderblind, sexualityblind would prefer not to see you even now. In the world we make in our heads, you have been obliterated--even better, you never were. You are incapable of transcendance. You are not worthy of the most essential of human behavior. If you are lucky, we will let you into our stories, and you can learn to be a whore, or someone's mother, or someone's slave, or someone's prey. That is all you are, so pay attention: this is what we want to teach you to be.

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