Sitting behind me
On the back of the sofa
My cat is purring
It’s happening again: racial tensions have exploded across fandom, this time in response to an art/fiction community in the Harry Potter fandom. This is liviapenn’s roundup of links on the matter. Basically, the community posts a monthly “kink” prompt, chosen at random from a book, for its members to use in creating their fanworks. This month the prompt was “miscegenation.” It was pointed out to the mods that the word had racist history and its use was offensive. The mods cried “censorship!” and refused to change it.
This time around, the reaction I’ve seen is predominantly shock, anger and outrage at the community in question’s response. This time around, I have absolutely no trouble seeing where the offense is coming from and have no sympathy whatsoever for the community mods. The issue here is pretty clear-cut: it’s a bad word, and when it’s pointed out to you that it’s a bad, hurtful, insulting word, you ought to stop using it.
I am sad and disheartened that these things keep happening. When the SGA controversy happened several months ago, about the AU fic that cast Ronon as a barista while John and Rodney were professionals and Teyla was completely absent, I felt confused and sort of lost in the middle: I didn’t get it, on a gut level, why the story in question should be considered so offensive. For one thing, I don’t read SGA fic, and I don’t care for AUs, so I had no context for seeing that particular story as part of a pattern. And for another, this was a case of “racism by omission”—it seemed to me that the problem wasn’t that author cast a character of color in a particular role because of his color, it was that she failed to take into account the character’s color when she cast him in that role. And, honestly, the only thing saving me from making that kind of mistake is the fact that I don’t write AUs, so the characters are always going to be pretty much what they are in canon in any story I write.
See, when it comes to overt racism, I have no problem seeing it and hating it and being offended by it. But I can’t always detect the more subtle forms of racism. You can explain it to me and I’ll try to understand it. And if you tell me you’re offended by something I’ve done, I’ll always say I’m sorry and stop doing that particular thing. But I can’t promise I’ll never do anything offensive again. There’s a gut level of understanding that’s beyond me; I just don’t have the background and experience to get it.
So, what came out of the SGA discussion for me was: some frustration that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t really get a handle on it; my first donation to the SPLC, because it was something positive and concrete I could do about the situation in general, if not this particular discussion; and a reluctance to ever try to write SGA fic again.
When the Transformers discussion came along, I was on more solid ground: I’d been offended myself by some of the racial stereotypes while watching the movie, so I had no trouble understanding why anyone else would be offended. I didn’t get everything people were complaining about—I thought the soldiers were just being soldiers, and didn’t see the black soldier as being particularly stereotyped. And the thing about Jazz being the “black” Transformer went right over my head. Besides, I refuse to accept that Jazz was unrepairable. They’d have him welded back together and back on the road in no time. But I could easily see why the characters of Glen and Bobby Bolivia were problematical. (The one who offended me the most, though, was the Indian telephone operator, who didn’t seem to garner nearly as much outrage as the others.)
Anyway, I came away from that discussion with the feeling that it was really sad that the filmmakers resorted to using stereotypes for a cheap laugh, when they could so easily have left that stuff out without losing anything or substantially changing the story at all, and a lot of people wouldn’t have had to be hurt. (And the SPLC got some more of my money. I truly hope it’s doing some good somewhere.) And that I’m okay writing Transformers fic because there will be virtually no humans of any color in any story I write—I’m all about the robots!
This time, with the Harry Potter community situation, a lot of people whom I’ve never seen comment on racial discussions are coming out to express their outrage. I could be (and probably am) wrong, but this feels like some kind of tipping point to me. I hope it results in some people getting a clue, or at least trying to get a clue—in deciding to come down on the side of considering other people’s feelings, whether you understand them or not, rather than sticking to some set of arbitrary or misguided principles. I hope that more people will really think about the issues, and not just pull back into their knee-jerk positions with their eyes covered. But I’m really afraid that things are going to get worse, not better. And there’s going to come a time—if it hasn’t already—that people like me can no longer sit on the sidelines and try to avoid the issue, but will have to speak out, one way or another.
I’m getting close, but I’m not there yet, posting this here where only one or two people might read it, instead of on my LJ where it would count.
Spot says hi.
