Moments of Permanence - On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt

From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 5th, 2009 12:42 pm (UTC) (Link)

See, dismissing the whole thing as "internet wank about minority politics" has been one of the things that's really been offending people, because, no, really, it's a hell of a lot more than that. Elizabeth Bear hasn't been an issue for months, really.

It went on to encompass an awful lot, much of it interesting and valuable.

The fullest archive is here (http://rydra-wong.dreamwidth.org/148996.html). A summary of the first few weeks is here (http://seeking-avalon.blogspot.com/2009/01/timeline.html). A brief summary of subsequent events is here (http://rydra-wong.livejournal.com/155427.html). But probably the best starting point is here (http://logophilos.net/blather/?p=1162), a themed summary of the early stages that explains the major threads of discussion.

The thing is, being able to say, "Oh, this endless wrangling about minority issues is so tiresome..." is a majority/privileged perspective. You can find it tiresome and not have to care because as a white, heterosexual, socially-and-economically-advantaged-by-circumstances-of-birth male, you're about as far from the possibility of this affecting you as it's possible to get. You don't exactly have to search very hard to find characters in fiction with whom you can identify, and the extent to which you can expect to feel cultural alienation is the extent to which mainstream Australian culture is beneath you.

I kind of thought that a reaction like this would also be beneath you, to be honest. You're an intelligent and thoughtful man, and dismissing outright issues that are very important to people because they're just minorities wrangling about representation... I just thought better of you.

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 5th, 2009 01:59 pm (UTC) ... deep breath ... (Link)

Right. What follows is going to look very much like a slam. However, I want you to know that it is not a slam of you. I am taking a dim view of several things today, and I take a dim view of some of the things you have just said, but I am not questioning you, your worthiness, your motivations, or your intelligence. I am going to get about as far as asking you a rhetorical question, which I hope will not give more offence than is warranted in a robust, but essentially courteous conversation about politics. That having been said, I now apologise in advance for the vigour of the comments which follow (this comment is prefatory -- they have, of course, already been typed and I'm not in a self-censorious mood).

"The thing is, being able to say, "Oh, this endless wrangling about minority issues is so tiresome..." is a majority/privileged perspective. You can find it tiresome and not have to care because as a white, heterosexual, socially-and-economically-advantaged-by-circumstances-of-birth male ..."

Explaining this to me is an insult to my intelligence. Not only have I been acutely aware of my personal social privilege for a very long time, I haven't had a conversation on any of these topics recently without someone involved (regardless of their relative privilege -- I've had this from people coming from positions of at least comparable social advantage, in context) taking it upon themselves to grab me by the ears and jam their mental model of me down my throat. Sometimes, they think all kinds of erroneous things about me. But you can rest assured that in general when I think about myself, I suspect if anything I tend to accord myself a position of greater relative privilege and advantage than I deserve. That pivot given up -- the acknowledgement of my educated, young, white middle-class heterosexual masculinity -- is treated as a place to grip on me, to define me and my utterances, by some people who like to participate in conversations like these, but it's not an infinitely long lever under the mass of reality. Whoever I am, there's still an outside chance I can speak the truth or the closest facsimile of the truth we've got.

I haven't looked into the Bear debacle since the first few days -- when I spent about eight hours in all wading through the gutter of its comment threads -- but if it is anything resembling what it once was, I seriously doubt it's doing much good to anyone. Simply because I'm a middle class white male doesn't mean my reasoning is invalid. Simply because the debate continues doesn't mean I should invest time in returning to reacquaint myself with its evolution. Simply because it is about race, about privilege, and because all our societies have problems around race and privilege, and because discussing problems might help, and because doing things that might help fix problems is important, doesn't mean this discussion is important or does help (or has already helped, as surely we should assess given the length of time it's been going on now).

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 01:01 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

It's not that I think you're stupid, and it's not like I didn't think you were aware of your privilege, it's that I think that awareness of it doesn't mean it can't affect your attitudes in ways of which you might not really be aware. Discussions like this matter even if nothing major comes out of it, because for people who are customarily silenced, for whatever reason, it can be a wonderful thing just to speak, and be heard, by anyone at all.

Feeling silenced and unable to speak about things that cause you unhappiness can be miserable and pernicious. Ask Chas some time about what it took to get me to admit I didn't like the way Jen was giving me peas with my dinner - not the peas, and not the dinner, just the way they were presented together so the peas were in with my other food that was making me very sad - the most trivial thing imaginable, but it was many months of me eating food I was really not enjoying, because my background had led me to feel like I wasn't allowed to complain about my food.

Discussing the problem, in itself, helps fix one of the many problems, the problem of feeling unable to speak about things. Some of my emotional problems I've discussed more than once, even more than once with the same people; an individual discussion could seem tiresome, repetitive, and unhelpful, since it doesn't immediately fix what's wrong with me. Certain people can't deal with that, after a while, and so bow out of taking part for a while, which is okay. However, talking about it is what gradually fixes me, and the process is still important.

I pointed out your privilege because I don't think you're realising how much it hurts to be denied a voice, and how important just speaking can be, because, though it doesn't define you, your privilege Yahtzee means that persistent voicelessness just isn't something you're likely to encounter. Calling this kind of discussion "internet wank over minority politics" is exactly the kind of attitude that can be so hurtful.

As for dismissing the entire debate on the basis of its early stages - well, that's the Scalzi error (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/03/08/to-the-pathetic-toad-of-a-person-trying-to-use-my-site-to-settle-a-livejournal-score/), and even Scalzi - who's a braying ass of the highest order a lot of the time, in my view - managed to recover (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2009/03/11/walking-myself-back/) from that one.

And even if you disregard the above, which I hope you don't, because I think that it's important to acknowledge how important just speaking and being heard and recognised is to people often denied that - genuinely good things (http://popelizbet.livejournal.com/60703.html) have, in fact, come out of this.

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 03:56 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

"Discussions like this matter even if nothing major comes out of it, because for people who are customarily silenced, for whatever reason, it can be a wonderful thing just to speak, and be heard, by anyone at all."

Absolutely. However, the prominent speakers in the RaceFail discussion are, within that community of discussion, more or less the opposite of silenced voices. Is it really a "talking cure" for them?

As for the Scalzi Error (is that community terminology?), you could say that I resemble him in my feelings -- perhaps right down to the "braying ass" bit. His words, "complete waste of time", I think I've already used. In his recovery / backdown post, it's not as if he walks away from that assessment:

"The discussion was a big fat mess, and I still wish it had been better all the way around."

I agree with this remark, based on what I have read. And I did at one point spend over a day sitting on LJ reading the arguments, when I was off work after we returned to Perth.

Now I feel rather like someone who's put down an absolutely terrible novel after the first two hundred pages, said to a few people "Man that book was crap! I couldn't even bring myself to finish it!", only to be told that I'm jumping the gun because the last couple of chapters were honestly quite brilliantly executed.

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 04:30 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Heh, Scalzi Error isn't community terminology, that I'm aware of, just my own.

The thing is, you can wish that the discussion had gone better - I think everyone does, because an awful lot of it was frustrating battles to keep the white editors and writers (and their spouses) from derailing the conversation, and a lot of it ended up being about derailment and the silencing of disparate viewpoints, instead of being about the ways of representation in fiction.

Most of the prominent speakers in the RaceFail discussion aren't "the opposite of silenced voices"; the community was the broader area of sf/f print fandom, including involvement of professional writers, and the degree to which non-white people are unrepresented in that community is no more apparent than in the way that some major participants (K. Cramer being the worst for this, I think, but by no means the only one) declared that most of the non-white participants didn't exist. They flat-out said that the many, many people involved, people speaking out about their experiences, about feeling invisible and alienated, were just sockpuppets of white trolls.

And it did bring about some talking cure, in some areas. A lot of people became aware of the whitewashed nature of sf/f, including data points like the fact that books with Asian heroes won't get published because they "won't sell"; a lot of people got a lot of relief from realising their experiences were shared, and it brought about an active conceptual shift for some writers and even at least one publisher to make a point of trying to be inclusive.

Even the new existence of verb_noire, a small press that's starting up with the deliberate goal of publishing work that features non-white, non-straight heroes, gives people hope and encouragement and joy and validation. (Note: They'll accept work from anyone - but their subject matter is specific.)

I think a better analogy might perhaps be an anthology, or a book series. I hesitate to suggest it's more like tossing aside Lord of the Rings because you found the opening section in the Shire boring, because the whole Sam and Frodo Trek Through Mordor plotline is lethally dull, but then again, there was a lot of crap later that just sucked, so maybe the analogy holds.

Hopefully, so will the part where it goes on to spawn a massive, overall-positive shift in the nature of the genre.

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From: (Anonymous) Date: April 6th, 2009 05:42 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Well, since I'm already here...

I'd say that ataxi's analogy is more like if someone who dislikes Lord of the Rings decides that everyone who does like the book must be an idiot. Because if he doesn't find it interesting, it must be a bad book.

Then again, I think that the only way to deal with racism (or sexism, or homophobia) is to talk about it. As loudly and as frequently as possible. Just because you (general you, of course) may not want to hear someone say, "I'm angry," doesn't mean that it shouldn't be said, or that the act of saying it has no value.

-Amanda (who, sadly, has a lot more to say)

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 05:56 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

*laughs for reasons you cannot know*

I love him dearly, but he is fully capable of declaring that a book he dislikes is crap even if other people like it, and saying, as an act of rhetorical hyperbole, that anyone who does like it is an idiot.

Then again, I'm capable of the same thing, and may have gone to further rhetorical extremes against The da Vinci Code. But - and the analogy still stands - making that statement in the company of friends doesn't necessarily mean total sincerity. That doesn't mean someone nearby won't be offended by it or that they'd be wrong to be offended, even though he and his intended audience would know he was kidding... analogies can be fun.

(Also, seriously, this LJ is a wildlife sanctuary for teal deer. Say as much as you want.)

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From: (Anonymous) Date: April 6th, 2009 06:16 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

You're his friend so obviously you know him better than I do, but this didn't sound like rhetorical hyperbole to me.

There's a difference between saying, "How could anyone like Lord of the Rings? Nothing happens for the first two hundred pages," and "How could anyone like Lord of the Rings? Obviously they're too stupid to understand what good writing is." The first example is about the book, while the second is about the readers. Most of Ataxi's comments have been focused on the people involved in Racefail, usually on their negative motives, rather than on its actual content. As a general rule, I don't like sweeping generalizations, especially when they're used to dismiss a huge, months long series of discussions.

- Amanda (this has been fun, but I'm going to bed now)

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From: alias_sqbr Date: April 6th, 2009 06:48 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Right. What follows is going to look very much like a slam. However, I want you to know that it is not a slam of you. I am taking a dim view of several things today, and I take a dim view of some of the things you have just said, but I am not questioning you, your worthiness, your motivations, or your intelligence. I am going to get about as far as asking you a rhetorical question, which I hope will not give more offence than is warranted in a robust, but essentially courteous conversation about politics. That having been said, I now apologise in advance for the vigour of the comments which follow (this comment is prefatory -- they have, of course, already been typed and I'm not in a self-censorious mood).

Is that..a disclaimer? :D

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 08:17 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Yeah, I know. But look, it needed one didn't it? But fair play, I'm beginning to understand why you're so nice about these things now!

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From: alias_sqbr Date: April 7th, 2009 06:49 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Excuse me, I need to take a moment to be unbearably smug.

HA! I was right all along! See, people should just listen to me to start with! WHEN WILL YOU ALL LEARN?!

*cough*

But yes, with stuff like this where feelings are high and so many people are arguing in bad faith etc you really can't assume people will figure out what you mean and give the benefit of the doubt.

Of course that doesn't mean that long disclaimered tl;dr is always a good alternative, but the concept of sometimes not saying anything at all is rather against my nature and I'm still working on it :)

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 7th, 2009 07:00 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

Well, it seems to me one has a few alternatives. Two of them are to be nice, polite and somewhat tentative (according to your fashion), and to simply be unbearably correct and defensible about everything (in which case it doesn't matter so much if one is nice). And there's the spectrum in between, and there's many other factors. But when is neither nice, nor particularly right (as in my case yesterday), there's a blood in the water effect.

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From: alias_sqbr Date: April 7th, 2009 11:03 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

simply be unbearably correct and defensible about everything

Nice work if you can get it :D

But that's the thing: even if you're correct you also have to be unambiguous, because if there's another interpretation of your words which is incorrect (or racist or whatever) people will often interpret you (or at least me :/) that way, and if they don't know you (and your tendency to be almost-but-not-quite always right :)) it's entirely reasonable for them to do so.

Of course unambiguous is not necessarily the same as nice.

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 08:19 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

*laughs*

I'd say you win the internet, but I suspect you only win that fraction of the internet that reads both of our journals closely. ;)

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From: alias_sqbr Date: April 7th, 2009 11:02 am (UTC) Re: ... deep breath ... (Link)

I shall keep this small section of internet tubing as a momento for always :)

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 5th, 2009 01:59 pm (UTC) ... exhale ... (Link)

If anything, calling "debates" like that surrounding the Elizabeth Bear gaffe(s) and the responses of various actors in the debate "tiresome" would be an understatement (a comment which I base solely on my aforementioned survey of the early stages, carried out in January). They're an ineffective, scattershot, individually focused, and self-indulgent way of discussing the issues involved. For every good point made there's ten self-indulgent rants, witty perhaps but insubstantial or counter-productive, one hundred idiotic comments and one thousand blind agreements ("Yes. This."). Most people involved are only there for the thrill of the chase. Even the POC. Because people who spend a great many hours -- hours every day -- on blogging communities, people who forensically analyse comment threads with hundreds of entries, people who read every word and then summarise for the benefit of others -- tend to be defined as much by their willingness to argue as by any other trait. I should know: I'm one of them. If there was a gender, ethnicity or sexuality called "needlessly argumentative", that'd be me.

From your archive links I note that the people controlling and parametrising debate via link-blogs competing for "official record of the wank!" status are the same as at the start of the "Bear thing". I note that the summary of events on "Seeking Avalon" focuses almost entirely on "personalities not issues", and I note that the overriding tone is still one of blind self-regarding snark. Take a step back and consider: are you sure it's not all a big waste of time? I mean, really sure? Are you sure this is the best way all these articulate, active people could be using their powers of communication?

"I kind of thought that a reaction like this would also be beneath you, to be honest. You're an intelligent and thoughtful man, and dismissing outright issues that are very important to people because they're just minorities wrangling about representation... I just thought better of you."

Thanks for the baseline rating anyway. I'd rather be viewed as "basically ok, but wrong here" than "being an idiot according to type". As you note, comments like these are relatively atypical for me. However, I have thought about what I'm saying. As for "dismissing outright issues", I'm far from dismissing the issues in whole or in part, it's the whole ecosystem of communication -- supposedly about said issues -- which I'm saying, sucks. Blows, sucks, whatever. And that has a lot to do with the tools, the texts and tracts of communication that the community of interest around race-activism in the blogosphere has developed, the cheat sheets, framing terms and argumentative strategies, the cheap shots, gloss-overs and kneejerk reactions, and it has a lot to do with the people in that community themselves, and the weird trolls who want to wind them up, and the arrogance of writers from bigger blogs, like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who like to step in over their pay grade everywhere they're not needed. For a community with such a minute interest in setting the terms of argumentation, it seems to be capable of carrying out remarkably few sensible arguments.

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From: distantcam.livejournal.com Date: April 5th, 2009 05:24 pm (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

For every good point made there's ten self-indulgent rants, witty perhaps but insubstantial or counter-productive, one hundred idiotic comments and one thousand blind agreements [snip semi-witty self-indulgent rant]

Was there any point to these rants beyond "just cause I'm a white guy doesn't mean I don't have issues too" and "people overanalyze and rant too much without really thinking about what they're saying"? Because if so surely you could have explained it better in your original post then this banal comment.

*sigh* Totally over internet wank about minority politics.

You know what I'm totally over dude? People like you saying they're sick of reading crappy long rants. If you're sick of it stop reading.

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 01:06 am (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

"Was there any point to these rants beyond "just cause I'm a white guy doesn't mean I don't have issues too""

If that's my only point there's a problem, because that's not part of my point at all as far as I'm concerned.

"If you're sick of it stop reading."

I stopped reading "it" over a month ago. It's a complete waste of time.

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From: lady-ganesh.livejournal.com Date: April 6th, 2009 07:24 pm (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

If anything, calling "debates" like that surrounding the Elizabeth Bear gaffe(s) and the responses of various actors in the debate "tiresome" would be an understatement (a comment which I base solely on my aforementioned survey of the early stages, carried out in January). They're an ineffective, scattershot, individually focused, and self-indulgent way of discussing the issues involved. For every good point made there's ten self-indulgent rants, witty perhaps but insubstantial or counter-productive, one hundred idiotic comments and one thousand blind agreements ("Yes. This.").

Well, you see, the thing I find truly frustrating is that this is the only way race and sci-fi apparently gets talked about at all. Scalzi, for example, who does try to be inclusive, only started talking Racism 101 because the dogpile came to his door, so to speak.

The only way it seems like these issues often get taken seriously is if the message comes from the ground up. And the ground up is often not pretty. It's often a giant clusterfuck of bullshit and ridiculousness. But, at the same time, the Gateholders were not going to be open to this conversation-- I think PNH and TNH's comments on the whole mess were quite instructive in this regard. In a sense the tools we're using, which can be blunt and not always productive, are a result of the situation, rather than the cause. At least as I see it.

(The tone argument is actually a really good example of this. I am a Nice White Lady with Privilege, and I think you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but about the twentieth time you see someone behaving perfectly reasonably and their opponent flying off the handle about 'tone' you start understanding why it's a bingo space.)

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 7th, 2009 01:19 am (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

After all my missteps and idiocies and flak from yesterday, I'm not really sure how to comment further. I need to learn how to communicate properly.

But to put it in context, the RaceFail09 way of doing things reminds me of Usenet in the mid-90s, except with everyone cross-posting, and people with conflicts of interest moderating every forum. I also have lots of other problems with some of the phatic tics of discourse, particularly the numbered lists / manifestos / cheat-sheets of "you're using X tactic so have Y response", but it doesn't really matter because I'm not going back to investigate more anyway. As someone else pointed out, I "have the luxury of ignoring oppression". Or perhaps I just don't think reading RaceFail would be the best use of my time ...

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From: lady-ganesh.livejournal.com Date: April 7th, 2009 01:53 am (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

Or perhaps I just don't think reading RaceFail would be the best use of my time ...

And yeah, that's fine. But to say that everything's a giant pile of shit and you have no interest is a bit different (which I realize you understand). To you we must be the kid in that story with the shovel, looking for the pony.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is that there are conflicts of interest in every forum. If this was all done on Miss Mama's Ideal Blog, we'd run into many of the same problems, people trying to game the refs, etc. And that the very chaotic nature of the beast is one of the reasons anything good's happened at all.

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From: ataxi.livejournal.com Date: April 7th, 2009 02:20 am (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

Yeah, I know. You're correct of course. And as it turns out it has shaken up the system. Now I await some great SF&F books with appropriate representations of POC: after all, we're in this for the books aren't we?

"To you we must be the kid in that story with the shovel, looking for the pony."

I wish I knew that story -- it's going to take a leap of imagination I don't have in me at this moment to work out what a kid with a shovel would want with a pony.

Got to get back to work I'm afraid -- thanks for being a moderate voice.

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From: handyhunter.livejournal.com Date: April 8th, 2009 03:43 pm (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

after all, we're in this for the books aren't we?

Funny, I thought "we" were in it for the non-white people.

[here via rydra_wong's linkspam.]

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 8th, 2009 11:50 pm (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

There are a number of versions, all with the same punchline. Many involve an optimist kid and a pessimist kid, but the important part is the optimist kid: Most versions involve the kid at Christmas or his birthday finding a pile of crap. (Which always seems like an incredibly bizarre setup to me.) Others involve a researcher. (Again...) Etc.

The important point is that the kid excitedly grabs a shovel, and starts digging through the manure, and exclaims: With all this manure, there must be a pony around here somewhere!

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From: tevriel.livejournal.com Date: April 7th, 2009 05:45 am (UTC) Re: ... exhale ... (Link)

Given you seem to be a bit stressed in general, it might not be ideal at that; it's aggravating and frustrating to see people being so comprehensively stupid in such widespread ways. Energy and time are finite - if you can't spare yours for this, that's not inherently bad.

Of course - as I suspect you've now discovered, etc - the only way to avoid engaging with RaceFail without copping quite a lot of flak is to stay right out of it. Replying even to relatively tangential posts to criticise the discussion itself has been a common enough tactic of people trying to suppress the entire concept of discussing the problems with race representation of sf/F that everyone who's been paying attention over time gets extra narky about it. (And I know how you hate to find you're retreading the path of fools, even with different intent.)

And, you're right, it does rather put you on the back foot for further involvement. I respect you tremendously so I want to think well of you, and will always try to interpret your actions and words in the best possible light; people who don't know you are going to form a different impression, one that I can't say is exactly false, just incomplete, and the fragmented glimpse of you that showed in the first impression made in this thread is more-or-less you at your worst.

The discourse has been flawed, and those somewhat memetic bingo cards and cheat sheets and generic responses are a bit problematic, but at the same time, they're a function of a couple of things, I think:

- Repetition avoidance and the expectation of bad faith. The same arguments and errors keep happening, over and over again, and the differences are small enough that people stop caring, especially since the people making those arguments aren't usually that interested in engaging with counter-argument anyway. They're just not listening, so people stop thinking it's worth making the effort to speak directly to anyone who hasn't demonstrated that they're really, truly willing to think about what's said to them.

- Rhetorical assistance for the rhetorically disabled. A lot of people aren't that good at engaging in these (or any) kinds of debates, and so they're reliant on other people expressing the arguments for them. That's what all the "Yes. This." is about - overt recognition that they share the viewpoint, that this person's words speak for them too, where otherwise one person can be dismissed as speaking only for themselves. (Also done by people who are capable of expressing themselves freely, but don't see the point in repeating what's just been said in an already-repetition-beset hypertext when they can just add support to it.) It's also what some of the linking is about - if someone else has already constructed an excellent refutation, it's easier for someone to link to it than to try and construct their own, especially if they're not confident in their rhetorical skills.

It's not really like Usenet arguments. It's a newer paradigm yet - interactive hypertext. Usenet arguments can thread out and get repetitive and be at crossed purposes, but a hypertext debate is cross-linked, and it's rather the point that in the discussion at large, there is no moderator at all. Attempts - most visibly and notably by Elizabeth Bear around the same time she revealed that she'd disagreed all along with the critique she'd said she agreed with so she could act as an example of how to deal magnanimously and kindly with the little darkies (I may be paraphrasing) - by individuals to control the terms of the debate, and even to decide when and if it should be taking place at all, were roundly and deservedly mocked.

A hypertext this extensive becomes awfully hard to follow, though - hence all the summaries and introductions, establishing entry points into the text, were spawned. It wasn't about being the official archivist of the revolution (apparently to her own surprise, it was quickly concluded that rydra_wong was the Keeper of the Links, and so she stopped merely collecting links she agreed with and took on collecting all links that were relevant, and people assisted her by, rather than keeping their own lists, supplying her with anything that seemed relevant).

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