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Regarding RaceFail ‘09
(Situation-dump here.) Not that my opinion matters, but I feel vaguely like a wuss for not saying anything. In order from easiest to hardest:
1) Will Shetterly and Kathryn Cramer are assholes.
2) Teresa Nielsen-Hayden is also an asshole. Whether she intended that stuff she said to sound threatening or not (and I think she did) is moot, because it did sound threatening. She’s an idiot if she thinks it’s not going to affect the kinds of submissions Tor gets and the kind of things people feel safe discussing with her. She can pretend otherwise if she wants, but she’s in a position of power within the industry and the community. She has a responsibility to think about what she says, because it can do damage.
3) Elizabeth Bear’s original post was lazy and naive. Her later turn-around makes it unlikely I’ll ever be able to bring myself to read anything she’s written again. Irrationally, I feel bad about this, as if I shouldn’t bring personal feelings into my nerd-reading habits - that it’s somehow unprofessional of me, as a nerd. I imagine that this little guilty impulse is a version of one of the Geek Social Fallacies, I don’t know.
But, you know, I can get over it. My enjoyment of the vampire detective thing is seriously hindered by the knowledge that the person who wrote this paragraph about bloodstains here, also wrote certain incredibly stupid paragraphs about race on her LiveJournal over there. I will not ever finish the vampire detective thing.
4) It’s less than encouraging to me that it apparently took an attack on coffeeandink (white person) to get a lot of people paying attention to this. I appreciate that this is an awful thing, but I can’t help but think that TNH threatening professional repercussions on people who complain about racism is the worse problem and is going to have bigger long-term consequences.
5) I’ve only mentioned white people’s names and white-people-related problems in this post so far. Semi-randomly-selected good/useful posts: here, here, here, here, here, here
(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)
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I however, have nothing useful whatsoever to add about the fail of white people in understanding what went wrong. I just....I read these comment threads and am like, oh my god, just shut up, the point, you are missing it....and then I get sad.
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I think that what kind of person a writer is doesn't affect how good their work is. I have seriously considered doing grad school for world lit, so I have to feel that way. But it does affect how I feel about their work.
I wish people did not have to be jerks.
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And Orson Scott Card....I did that too...well, I still love the first four Ender books too much to give them away, but I found out what an ass he was and I had just bought like the next three books in the Enderverse. Never touched them, just donated them. It's weird that it feels wrong to read the works of people you know are in fact asshats. I wonder why exactly. It's not like I'm punishing these writers by not reading them....
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