Derailment Redux: Lois McMaster Bujold Hypocrisy Special Edition
The qualitative differences in my thought processes between ADHD-medicated and unmedicated is:
a) whoa, profound
b) hard for me to remember/believe/recognise when unmedicated.
Today I can tell because I've been reading/thinking about the same stuff since before I took my meds, and I can remember what I was thinking about, trying to put into words earlier, as opposed to now, and... yeah. I'm not sure words can describe the difference in experience between my unmedicated, off-the-charts-how-did-you-get-to-28-before-diagnosis self and my medicated self.
Anyway, on to the topic, in which I pick up Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, in the category of RaceFail '09 Version 2.0, The New Failbatch. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
naraht is taking the turn as Archivist of the Revolution this time.)
The thread of derailment I wish to cut today: Man, these people are totally over-reacting on the basis of one sentence in a review!
No. No, we're not.
The review sentence to which they refer:
Which is not to say it wouldn't be enough, but it doesn't actually preclude the possibility that the text itself is an instance of total failure. The chances aren't good, but it's possible for that to be an accurate description of a good book.
As it happens, it isn't a description of a good book, but nobody's disputing the accuracy.
Allow me (well, this is my journal; just try and stop me) to collate some of the things which are Known and cause serious problems with The Thirteenth Child. I've already made some reference to the ways in which the approach taken is just bad history, but I'm going to break it down a little harder here.
Quoting Lois McMaster Bujold, as a definitely non-hostile source of description:
OK, for a start: citation fucking needed. The current state of archaeology is not my personal area of expertise, but if the extinction of the megafauna is being blamed on pre-Columbian settlers, that is not the dominant view, at all, and with good reason: it makes no sense. Why would the same hunter-gatherer groups which later lived in harmony with their prey such that the plains of North America crawled with buffalo hunt even larger animals to extinction?
Lest I become what I seek to destroy, have a reference:
So... the groups who would later become native Americans moved into North America, spent five thousand years living in harmony with the megafauna, then set about exterminating them utterly. That makes perfect sense OH WAIT no it doesn't.
Secondly, the assumption that crossing the Eurasian land bridge into North America precludes human settlement is blatantly stupid; that's not the only route into the Americas. Potatoes got to Polynesia somehow. And "... it was BECAUSE OF MAGIC" is inadequate explanation for the barriers.
Moving on.
We now have the question of content within the text. As I said previously, it's not impossible to write this kind of speculative fantasy well - but you have to consider the ramifications of your choices. My own study of US history is some years ago now, was mostly focussed on the period from the Civil War to the end of the Cold War, so my historical credentials here are thin - and yet, I nonetheless know better.
Some key points:
1) Crops
Without the "New World" crops and edible flora of all sorts already having been identified and cultivated by the native population, the settlers are going to have trouble working out what's poisonous and what's not. Introduced-crop failures are going to cause mass starvation. This is skated lightly past in the text.
2) Labour
The colonies were severely short of labour. Part of the solution was the indentured servitude of debtors from Europe. (Interestingly, the New Yorker recently had an article on just this. (Abstract only without registration.) Debt to England was one of the issues that - it can and has been argued - produced the American Revolution. However, that wasn't enough, nor was the convict labour (the Americas received convict transportees before Australia did). The rest was slavery.
If you give the "Aphrikans" South America and don't include slavery, then you should have a desperate labour shortage. You should also have widespread starvation and disease in the case of crop failure. (If you have settlers in a land where there aren't any natives, crop failures should be near-constant early on, by the way.)
3) Nothin' but Names
In order to show that the native population was never ever there, all the places in America that have names derived from native sources have different names.
Consider the implication of this (it's a very short reach): the only mark the native population has left on America is place names. Nothing else.
I'm not sure how I can detail exactly what's wrong with that in less than two thousand words. Suffice to say that this is completely, utterly, horrendously inaccurate.
The cultural legacy of American history is complex. Too complex for me - I don't know enough to unravel it. Neither, I suspect, does Wrede, or at least she hasn't thought about it. See this post, again, for a summary treatment of why this is historically invalid.
I hope by now I've established that the critiques of the book aren't operating on knee-jerk hostility. Please note that people who really get into this kind of discussion - the people who stay past "omg that's so racist", and don't in fact ever actually say that - can generally be relied upon not to be reacting on that kind of reflex, because that gets no-one anywhere, especially them. Because now we get to...
The Tone Argument.
I have trouble not inserting an obscene adjective before the word "tone" there.
*cracks knuckles*
Let's stay specific for now, shall we? Lois Bujold, again:
This is wonderfully archetypal derailment. There's a woman in one of my classes who does this - whenever I say something she wants to disagree with, but can't, because the facts are on my side and she can't actually refute my argument without redefining the terms of the discussion, she tries to do exactly that.
Fiction has many functions. Anyone who has ever thought about it or looked into it already knows that well.
Not to quote someone's own words against them, but - hell, why not? Bujold:
That one's from an interview, so it may be something she didn't get the chance to think through, so let's take one from an essay of hers, just to be fair (emphasis mine):
Questioning the moral background of fiction is entirely valid, and finding a writer's products problematic is something Bujold has, in the past, acknowledged to be only right and fair. And yet, criticising The Thirteenth Child is not. Anyone who finds that these well-discussed issues, based on undisputed facts about the content of the novel, are too problematic for them? They get told:
And finally, to finish on Bujold - who, by the way, is only one of many people failing hard on this, but she's the most famous, and the one who's hit the Tone Argument most blatantly, and the easiest to research, we have the comment where she claims to have thought about it more. Really, you need to read the whole thing to understand the magnitude of her wrongness, but:
The mind, it boggles.
Next:
Seriously, how does anyone type this stuff and get far enough to hit "post" without realising how incredibly stupid and wrong they're being?
Enter the sanctimony:
Secondly, one sperm over, and I might have been a man, I might have been a slightly different woman, but I would not have been my sibling, because my sister is two and a half years older than I am, and a slight sperm difference is not going to turn me into her. We had different gestational experiences - our mother was older, she was living a moderately different lifestyle, her body was different by virtue of having borne a child before. Even leaving out the difference in our life experiences post-birth, your statement is blatantly stupid.
Thirdly, one of the things ordinary people can do about "any given hurt in the world" is fight against it, and The Thirteenth Child is a "hurt in the world". Trying to deflect doesn't change that. It's not "just fiction", as you damn well know - stories have meaning, stories have power, and stories contribute to the ways in which we define the world in our "own self-centered (sic) universes". This means that - though it's not the biggest wound on the world, it's a wound, and all wounds need to be treated for the patient to recover fully.
She then goes on to list a bunch of charities she threw some money at, to demonstrate that her commitment to making the world a better place is so superior to everyone criticising this book, who obviously couldn't possibly be doing anything for the Native American population themselves - despite the fact that many do, despite the fact that many of them are Native Americans.
The next person to recommend I read Bujold... I can't guarantee I won't laugh in their face. I have standards, and she does not meet them.
And now it is time for me to switch my focus to the work I should be doing on my essay, before this post gets to the point where it's longer than the essay's going to be. (This is about 2500 words, but the essay is 4500 minimum.)
a) whoa, profound
b) hard for me to remember/believe/recognise when unmedicated.
Today I can tell because I've been reading/thinking about the same stuff since before I took my meds, and I can remember what I was thinking about, trying to put into words earlier, as opposed to now, and... yeah. I'm not sure words can describe the difference in experience between my unmedicated, off-the-charts-how-did-you-get-to-28-before-diagnosis self and my medicated self.
Anyway, on to the topic, in which I pick up Someone Is Wrong On The Internet, in the category of RaceFail '09 Version 2.0, The New Failbatch. (
naraht is taking the turn as Archivist of the Revolution this time.)The thread of derailment I wish to cut today: Man, these people are totally over-reacting on the basis of one sentence in a review!
No. No, we're not.
The review sentence to which they refer:
This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.Which is, yes, the oft-quoted summation, but is not the entire basis of criticism.
Which is not to say it wouldn't be enough, but it doesn't actually preclude the possibility that the text itself is an instance of total failure. The chances aren't good, but it's possible for that to be an accurate description of a good book.
As it happens, it isn't a description of a good book, but nobody's disputing the accuracy.
Allow me (well, this is my journal; just try and stop me) to collate some of the things which are Known and cause serious problems with The Thirteenth Child. I've already made some reference to the ways in which the approach taken is just bad history, but I'm going to break it down a little harder here.
Quoting Lois McMaster Bujold, as a definitely non-hostile source of description:
The book actually began with a contemplation of the what-if question, "What would happen if the megafauna survived into historic times...?" The theory presently being argued in archeology is that the pre-Columbian settlers wiped out said megafauna, and that's the one Pat chose to follow up; so if one wants mammoths and short-faced bears and terror birds, the Bering land bridge human immigration needed not to have taken place, 13,000 years back. From that, the rest followed, q.s. to the limits of a necessarily slim volume.From the tor.com discussion thread.
OK, for a start: citation fucking needed. The current state of archaeology is not my personal area of expertise, but if the extinction of the megafauna is being blamed on pre-Columbian settlers, that is not the dominant view, at all, and with good reason: it makes no sense. Why would the same hunter-gatherer groups which later lived in harmony with their prey such that the plains of North America crawled with buffalo hunt even larger animals to extinction?
Lest I become what I seek to destroy, have a reference:
The extinction of megafauna around the world was probably due to environmental and ecological factors. It was almost completed by the end of the last ice age. It is believed that megafauna initially came into existence in response to glacial conditions and became extinct with the onset of warmer climates.Source: The Australian Museum, factsheet on megafauna extinction.
In temperate Eurasia and North America, megafauna extinction concluded simultaneously with the replacement of the vast periglacial tundra by an immense area of forest. Glacial species, such as mammoths and woolly rhinocerous, were replaced by animals better adapted to forests, such as elk, deer and pigs. Reindeers (caribou) retreated north, while horses moved south to the central Asian steppe. This all happened about 10 000 years ago, despite the fact that humans colonised North America less than 15 000 years ago and non-tropical Eurasia nearly 1 million years ago.
So... the groups who would later become native Americans moved into North America, spent five thousand years living in harmony with the megafauna, then set about exterminating them utterly. That makes perfect sense OH WAIT no it doesn't.
Secondly, the assumption that crossing the Eurasian land bridge into North America precludes human settlement is blatantly stupid; that's not the only route into the Americas. Potatoes got to Polynesia somehow. And "... it was BECAUSE OF MAGIC" is inadequate explanation for the barriers.
Moving on.
We now have the question of content within the text. As I said previously, it's not impossible to write this kind of speculative fantasy well - but you have to consider the ramifications of your choices. My own study of US history is some years ago now, was mostly focussed on the period from the Civil War to the end of the Cold War, so my historical credentials here are thin - and yet, I nonetheless know better.
Some key points:
1) Crops
Without the "New World" crops and edible flora of all sorts already having been identified and cultivated by the native population, the settlers are going to have trouble working out what's poisonous and what's not. Introduced-crop failures are going to cause mass starvation. This is skated lightly past in the text.
2) Labour
The colonies were severely short of labour. Part of the solution was the indentured servitude of debtors from Europe. (Interestingly, the New Yorker recently had an article on just this. (Abstract only without registration.) Debt to England was one of the issues that - it can and has been argued - produced the American Revolution. However, that wasn't enough, nor was the convict labour (the Americas received convict transportees before Australia did). The rest was slavery.
If you give the "Aphrikans" South America and don't include slavery, then you should have a desperate labour shortage. You should also have widespread starvation and disease in the case of crop failure. (If you have settlers in a land where there aren't any natives, crop failures should be near-constant early on, by the way.)
3) Nothin' but Names
In order to show that the native population was never ever there, all the places in America that have names derived from native sources have different names.
Consider the implication of this (it's a very short reach): the only mark the native population has left on America is place names. Nothing else.
I'm not sure how I can detail exactly what's wrong with that in less than two thousand words. Suffice to say that this is completely, utterly, horrendously inaccurate.
The cultural legacy of American history is complex. Too complex for me - I don't know enough to unravel it. Neither, I suspect, does Wrede, or at least she hasn't thought about it. See this post, again, for a summary treatment of why this is historically invalid.
I hope by now I've established that the critiques of the book aren't operating on knee-jerk hostility. Please note that people who really get into this kind of discussion - the people who stay past "omg that's so racist", and don't in fact ever actually say that - can generally be relied upon not to be reacting on that kind of reflex, because that gets no-one anywhere, especially them. Because now we get to...
The Tone Argument.
I have trouble not inserting an obscene adjective before the word "tone" there.
*cracks knuckles*
Let's stay specific for now, shall we? Lois Bujold, again:
Which begs a larger question: what is the function of fiction? Social engineering? Propaganda, sermon? Or something else? Windows? Mirrors?Give me a break.
People who come down on the social-engineering side do tend to value a book by how well it serves some agenda outside of itself. I see that as a slippery slope, myself.
This is wonderfully archetypal derailment. There's a woman in one of my classes who does this - whenever I say something she wants to disagree with, but can't, because the facts are on my side and she can't actually refute my argument without redefining the terms of the discussion, she tries to do exactly that.
Fiction has many functions. Anyone who has ever thought about it or looked into it already knows that well.
Not to quote someone's own words against them, but - hell, why not? Bujold:
More and more as I read I have the sense not of entering another world, but of entering another writer’s head. There are some head-spaces I enjoy occupying, others I don’t. If the scenery is ugly, I don’t hang around.
That one's from an interview, so it may be something she didn't get the chance to think through, so let's take one from an essay of hers, just to be fair (emphasis mine):
Every writer writes their world-view; we cannot escape it, unless we're writing utter hack work to order in every detail, and even there it will leak through. And world-view is not limited to writers.Unless they're rejecting something of which Bujold approves, apparently.
It follows that every time a reader reads a book, two world-views meet, or collide. There are, I think, four possible interactions between the reader's world-view and the writer's.
...
Second, the world-views can collide. In this case, the reader will find his world-views denied or disconfirmed by the text, which can be unpleasant, uncomfortable, or even infuriating. The reader will in this case heap scorn on the book, and sometimes its author, as when a left-leaning reader rejects the political scenarios in a book by a right-wing writer or a woman derides a book by a man who portrays women in ways she finds idiotic. That same angry reader mentioned before may reject with scorn a book that portrays the world as "too nice". It challenges his world-view, and he rejects it. "People aren't really like that! I know people, and people are scum!" Most people, most of the time, respond to challenges to their world-view and the extreme discomfort it engenders by defending their world-view, and finding some "good reason" to reject the challenging data as false, weak, biased, or wrong. Sometimes, obviously, the rejecting reader is quite right.
Questioning the moral background of fiction is entirely valid, and finding a writer's products problematic is something Bujold has, in the past, acknowledged to be only right and fair. And yet, criticising The Thirteenth Child is not. Anyone who finds that these well-discussed issues, based on undisputed facts about the content of the novel, are too problematic for them? They get told:
My mother -- born in 1912 -- used to have a phrase for this: "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts."Because it's ignorant hypocrisy to respond to the facts, apparently. Also, it's not for critics.
A stance of moral superiority really cannot be floated over an abyss of ignorance. (Though I admit, people routinely try.) It's especially not a sound footing for this book which, within the limits of its scope, actually does some very interesting things with subverting assumed Avyrupan dominances.
The book deserves better than to be pored over by an inquisitor only seeking evidence for a conviction already decided upon."Inquisitor." Yeah, she went there.
And finally, to finish on Bujold - who, by the way, is only one of many people failing hard on this, but she's the most famous, and the one who's hit the Tone Argument most blatantly, and the easiest to research, we have the comment where she claims to have thought about it more. Really, you need to read the whole thing to understand the magnitude of her wrongness, but:
... despite the fact that Native Americans are over two million strong, voting citizens, fellow exiles in the 21st century, and many are educated, articulate, and perfectly able to speak for themselves (most of the major tribes have websites now, a thought both hopeful and boggling) poverty and discrimination do still fall disproportionately upon many others.Why is it boggling that the tribes have websites? Because the savages shouldn't be part of the Internet? Because tribal identity shouldn't persist into the digital age, because everyone should have abandoned that primitive barbarism and adhered to nice, civilised European-American constructions of identity by now?
The mind, it boggles.
Next:
I still have a profound problem with any argument that leaps from hearsay to condemnation without any intervening stop at “evidence”. It doesn’t matter *what* the subject is, the *form* is wrong, even if the conclusion after examining the evidence bears out the initial belief.So, anyone criticising this book was doing it with no evidence, so they're wrong, even if the evidence actually supports their criticisms. The fact that they're right doesn't matter, the way (she believes) they arrived at their rightness is flawed therefore the thing they're right about TOTALLY DOESN'T MATTER.
Seriously, how does anyone type this stuff and get far enough to hit "post" without realising how incredibly stupid and wrong they're being?
Enter the sanctimony:
The past is beyond anyone’s reach, and history is fractal -- one sperm over, and we would all have been our siblings, and our own self-centered universes would never have sprung into being at all -- so what can an ordinary person do right-here-right-now about any given hurt in the world?First of all, bollocks. "History is fractal" - no, it isn't. It just ISN'T. Do you even understand what these words mean, Bujold? History is many things, and my love for it is deep and pure, and my knowledge of it, I'd wager, is substantially greater than yours... but history is not "fractal".
Secondly, one sperm over, and I might have been a man, I might have been a slightly different woman, but I would not have been my sibling, because my sister is two and a half years older than I am, and a slight sperm difference is not going to turn me into her. We had different gestational experiences - our mother was older, she was living a moderately different lifestyle, her body was different by virtue of having borne a child before. Even leaving out the difference in our life experiences post-birth, your statement is blatantly stupid.
Thirdly, one of the things ordinary people can do about "any given hurt in the world" is fight against it, and The Thirteenth Child is a "hurt in the world". Trying to deflect doesn't change that. It's not "just fiction", as you damn well know - stories have meaning, stories have power, and stories contribute to the ways in which we define the world in our "own self-centered (sic) universes". This means that - though it's not the biggest wound on the world, it's a wound, and all wounds need to be treated for the patient to recover fully.
She then goes on to list a bunch of charities she threw some money at, to demonstrate that her commitment to making the world a better place is so superior to everyone criticising this book, who obviously couldn't possibly be doing anything for the Native American population themselves - despite the fact that many do, despite the fact that many of them are Native Americans.
The next person to recommend I read Bujold... I can't guarantee I won't laugh in their face. I have standards, and she does not meet them.
And now it is time for me to switch my focus to the work I should be doing on my essay, before this post gets to the point where it's longer than the essay's going to be. (This is about 2500 words, but the essay is 4500 minimum.)
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OMG the Native Americans have websites?!
Pshh. And a good couple of them play WoW too, woman!
PS: Good post.
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THEY PLAY WoW?!?!
Next you'll be saying there are girls on the internet and people can be both dark-skinned and literate. AND THEN THE WORLD EXPLODES.
(Also, thank you.)
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(I think that was the bit that made me throw up in my mouth a little.)
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For her to say that?
She sick. She sick like sick dog.
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(Hmm, I was wondering why I keep seeing NDN crop up for Native Americans. First link that comes up on Google: National Desexing Network. That was an odd moment of cognitive dissonance right there.)
(They're talking about pets.)
The essay I'm working on at the moment for uni is about the anglicisation of Scottish culture after the Act of Union in 1707. The odd thing is, the annihilation of Scottish culture happened in such a way that not only did a number of Scots actively participate in it - my lowland Scottish, incredibly knowledgeable and intelligent and analytical history Ph.D. lecturer didn't think it happened to anyone but the Highlanders. I'm fairly sure I've actually convinced him otherwise, in our discussions of the subject. (Which is both awesome and intimidating. When you know that your lecturer is looking forward to reading your essay because he thinks he might learn something from it... no pressure or anything.)
Anyway, one of the most important ways this happens, I'm finding, is with language. If you control the language, get to define what's "correct" and what's not, and in doing so can disconnect a people from their cultural heritage, so that what came before is incomprehensible to them, you've just about already won.
Which leads me to wonder about something I'd never consciously thought of before.
Why does just about every notable Native American leader I've heard of have a name in English?
Sitting Bull. Black Kettle. "King Phillip". Big Foot.
Something there is very wrong.
(This may become a post all its own when I really get into collating my essay data.)
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Naming has power. And it's a way of imposing their cultural standards on many.
I hope your essay writing goes phenomenally.
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Try pronouncing the letters out loud and see what they sound like, and all should be made clear. ;)
It's slang of the sort that works primarily on the textual level, since it obviously sounds the same as one of the usual terms when spoken out loud; so you'll see it used a fair bit online as something of an in-group marker, with the happy side effect for folks who recognize it of somewhat averting the confusion that can be caused due to the namespace collision with people-from-India. Usage is probably heavier among younger wired folks, as it follows formation patterns similar to 133tspeak, IM/texting shorthand, and lots of other forms of online slang; note also the parallel to the use of "AZN" for Asian. I don't know just how far back its usage goes but in my experience it really started exploding in native web boards, mailing lists and Usenet groups like alt.native and soc.culture.native in the late 1990s.
- with regards from another one of those educated, articulate, SF-reading, computer-usin' NDNs whose mere existence seem to make LMB's poor boggled head explodiate. And a raving Saiyuki fangirl to boot, so much love for the Goku icon, BTW! ^_^
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- pronounce things in my head to see if they parse like a word
- scan any organisation name to see if the acronym makes a word (this may be a product of reading Retief books as a child)
- always try to find out if something is an acronym, in case it is and there's something I'm REALLY MISSING if I don't.
That makes sense, it does, and it has the advantage of making me much less uncomfortable than "Indian" does. (Because in Australia, the perception is that "Indian" is kind of racist, and also confusing, because Indians come from India, and that "Injun" is to "Native American" as "Abbo" is to "Indigenous Australian". e.g. really damn racist. And I'm learning that American perceptions have shifted since Australia redefined its terms, but I'm not sure entirely what's correct now.)
Although I'm not sure I'd call it quite parallel to AZN, because - again - the experience I have with AZN here is that it's not actually a good term... AZN is a term used largely by thugs appropriating the most unpleasant, caricatured elements of hiphop culture, whereas Asians are the people I see around every day. (Who, individually, are more likely to identify as "Singaporean" or "Japanese" or "Chinese", but are also under the umbrella term, etc. Sort of like being Belgian vs being European.)
(Of course, the "European" thing can get terribly complicated when you are talking about people from the British Isles, but those arguments border on formulaic by now.)
Man, language around race gets complicated when you factor in regional/cultural differences. The guy from stuffblackpeoplehate.com, who's black/Indian, uses Indian and distinguishes by "dot" or "feather" but that seems so very, very strongly to me to be the kind of thing you can only do if you actually fall into one of those categories.
Thanks for your comment - it's always nice to hear from mythical creatures like educated, computer-literate genre-reading man I was going to finish this sentence but I seem to have had an aneurysm. It's so BOGGLING that people who aren't white have come into existence since the Internet was invented! I'll just have to go away and think about how awesome Saiyuki is instead.
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It's not just you folks in Australia: even in the U.S., a lot of non-Indian people have somehow gotten the idea that "Native American" is now the overwhelmingly preferred, polite modern term and "Indian" is somehow seen as being outdated and offensive like "Oriental" or "Negro". I've seen remarks to that effect cropping up two or three times just in recent MammothFail discussions, and I'm not even *trying* to follow each and every link. But while it definitely seems to be the preferred term in some venues like academia, and amongst well-meaning non-native folks who want to show willing, actual usage and preferences amongst native folks is a lot more varied. This article sums it up pretty neatly: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aihmterms.html. While the survey mentioned there is more than ten years old, so far as anecdata goes the patterns of mixed usage, lack of strong preferences and offense not commonly being taken at either of those general terms is very much in line with my own observations (and my own usage, for that matter -- I'll use either one, and a range of other slangier terms, depending on the situation and audience, but "Indian" is definitely the more comfortable default of those two for me. But I'm not at all bothered by being called NA instead, especially since I know a lot of the people using it are doing so precisely because they're trying to be polite and respectful.)
Although I'm not sure I'd call it quite parallel to AZN, because - again - the experience I have with AZN here is that it's not actually a good term... AZN is a term used largely by thugs appropriating the most unpleasant, caricatured elements of hiphop culture, whereas Asians are the people I see around every day.
*nods* Countries divided by a common language, etc. -- the main impression I have of the folks in the US using that formation is that they're mostly on the younger side, leaning heavily towards the teenybopper MySpace sort of demographic. (And probably from the mainland, because I grew up in Hawai'i where the Asian population is vastly larger than in most parts of the mainland U.S., and the cultural zeitgesit around identity was very different. I'm guessing there's probably less of a deep sense of need to form pan-ethnic identities as a form of solidarity amongst tiny minorities in a place where you are essentially closer to the majority yourself.) "NDN" I suspect first took root amongst a similarly young-and-wired crowd, but it seems to have spread a lot further past that initial youthful demographic than "AZN" has. (And hip-hop is HUGE in Indian Country too, along with plenty of intra-POC skanky race issues about "acting black", but oh man that could be grounds for another sprawlingly huge rant entirely...)
I'll just have to go away and think about how awesome Saiyuki is instead.
Always an excellent choice, especially as an antidote to headache-inducing fail! Too bad this OpenID thingy won't let me use my huge selection of LJ Saiyuki icons, which I of course lovingly and traditionally hand-crafted with trade beads, buckskin, and quills since graphics editing programs would be far too much for my savage brain to cope with. ^_~
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I have a sort of complicated reaction to the issues around non-black people and hiphop, because on the one hand, yes, cultural product, on the other hand, I'm very much in favour of cultural appreciation by and for everyone. I think there's an important distinction between appreciation and appropriation, and I think that, where due respect is paid (and due respect includes recognition for marginalised cultures, and efforts towards sociopolitical equality, etc), the world would be a better place if we appreciated everyone's cultural variations.
I would love to see Chinese New Year being celebrated as a Major Event in the same way the Gregorian New Year is. I want the Hindu festivals happening where everyone can see them. That kind of thing - I know Christianity isn't the world's only religion, but I don't want Christmas to stop being a widely-shared celebration, I just want everyone else's festivals recognised too. (Bonus positive: If there were more events and festivals throughout the year, we might be able to cut down on the duration of the Christmas season, which currently seems to start in October, and the degree of commercialisation, which is obscene. And Easter, which is, technically, the holiest event in my religion, could be left to its mix of solemnity and joy if everyone could just be celebrating Golden Week instead.)
So it's not like I want cultural prohibition on stuff - it's more that where hiphop has problems with glorifying violence and misogyny, which are things of which I disapprove sufficiently that I don't care if it's cultural, it's damaging - that's the aspect that "AZNs" embrace, in my experience.
To me, it seems like Asian people are all over the place, here, but I sometimes forget that that's not the case in all areas - it's just that I go to university, where there are a *lot* of Asians (we have a lot of international students from southeast Asia), and so it's just that *my* environment is so plentiful in people of other cultures, living in harmony because we're all students at a place that has an anti-racist campus culture and because being overtly racist is one of the few things that could get you permanently expelled from the university. (Mere course failure merely gets you excluded for a given number of years. My university is quite hard to get into, but once you're in, it's hard to get kicked out permanently.)
Time for
Saiyukiessay work. *sigh*no subject
Anyway, the thing with NDN hip-hop, and let's see if I can manage to condense this into something not too unwieldy when this is a subject that's very rant-inducing, isn't so much about outside accusations of cultural appropriation (because frankly, NDN rap isn't even on the map for most non-native folks). And while there are some indeed some native musicians who are emulating the worst materialism-and-misogyny aspects of the most stereotypical sort of gangsta rap, and I would heartily get behind them being called out on putting forth such negative messages that are incompatible with traditional cultural values...but all too often, the criticism is couched in terms of "acting black", as if the negativity of one subgroup of the hiphop scene was emblematic of black culture as a whole; and what's even more troubling, those same sorts of accusations of "trying to be black" are aimed at native rappers who are putting forward positive, culturally and politically aware messages in their music. I've seen this crop up over and over again for years, and it's troubling; all the more so when held up against the comparative rarity in which folks playing, say, country-western, or punk, or indy rock, get accused of "acting white", or blues players getting similar accusations of "trying to be black". Some of it's likely to be generational, I'm sure, blues and rock and country have all established themselves while hip-hop is still a young enough genre to be getting a lot of fogeyish "dang kids, that's not *real* music!" disdain; but it's still an ugly pattern of too many native folks speaking as if blackness were something intrinsically bad in and of itself, or equivalent to the most negative rap stereotypes.
This bothers me on so many levels -- there's a long history of close, positive black/Indian relations that's largely been erased from the history books and public consciousness, and some really recent ugly money-and-power-grubbing political attempts at disenfranchising some of the few formally recognized black subpopulations of particular native nations, and it's all just really discouraging and rage-making to see how the racist attitudes of the dominant culture, and the historic divide-and-conquer tactics and historical erasures used against us, are playing out here. And it's not just a distant, abstract rage at injustice, because that doubly invisible black NDN population includes folks I'm honored to call friends, and artists I've deeply admired for years; so hearing about the snubs and prejudice they've encountered from folks who should welcome them as family just gets me furious on both the personal and political levels. And the sort of phrasing that crops up from other Indians in the "they're trying to be black" sneers at native rappers reeks of that sort of ugly attitude.
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As for DW code stuff - it's up to you. I like talking to you, so I'd like to see you on DW; you get icons and shinies, and it's easier to interact with other DW people than it is on LJ. (I kind of love DW more, myself, not least because it's got a very extended-family feel right now - everyone you see, you know someone who knows someone who knows them, at worst. And also because I recently had some nastiness from trolls who are acquaintances that has kind of tainted my own LJ for me for the time being.) The handy thing about DW vs LJ is... you don't have to make a choice, since crossposting is so easy. *g*
On the other hand, openID works pretty well here, so!
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(And ha, lookee what I found I can do just poking about on the OpenID side! It seems I don't need to steal one of your codes just for the sake of having icon shininess after all. They only give you six for an OpenID account, but considering how much I'm not paying for it, that's more than generous IMO...)
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(PS: You can also, on Dreamwidth, set up a reading page of your own, as well. Pretty much all you can't do is post.)
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That word is so odd. I rarely see it used in a non-academic sense (e.g. I have been described as articulate, because I'm good at expressing complex arguments, etc), except when either being racist (describing, say, Native Americans as articulate, with the implication that it's surprising they could be articulate at all, SINCE THEY'RE SAVAGES AND ALL), or describing Obama - which, at least for most of the cases I've seen, carries the rider "... for an American president" rather than "... for a black man."
It's so rarely an actual compliment. (It's not even one for Obama - he is exceptionally well-spoken, it's true - probably the best speaker on the world stage right now - but given his immediate predecessor, the bar for "articulate", it is not high.)
... Oh look, it's time for my ADHD meds. *cough*
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