 On differences in oppression, derailment, and the hierarchies of hurt
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Apr. 5th, 2009 @ 03:38 pm 
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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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Re: ... exhale ...
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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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Re: ... exhale ...
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"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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Re: ... exhale ...
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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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Re: ... exhale ...
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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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Re: ... exhale ...
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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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Re: ... exhale ...
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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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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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Where "this" is defined as science fiction and fantasy print fandom, - no, we're in this for the books. Improving the representation of non-white people is improving the books. Because if the books don't reflect the wealth of human experience, if the books don't offer anything to people who don't fit a narrow band of cultural background, then the books aren't good enough, which is the problem.
Being in sf/f for the non-white people would be a bit odd.
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I can't see how anyone could expect do anything of political value "within" sf&f without some personal investment in the literature. But you can stop your cast of "protection from normal missiles" now: the furore appears to have largely died down.
(Although I wouldn't be surprised if there was a large group of anti-derailing people somewhere on the net right now pointing and laughing at me. If they are, they're also at least doing me a favour by not telling me they're doing it.)
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Heh. You know I value you tremendously, but that one wasn't protection of you - I get irritated when people are wilfully misunderstanding things anywhere, ever, at all, let alone in my journal, and so will always be highly likely to slap it down.
Because I have standards.
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Well, I care about the books.
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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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What you said, yes.
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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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) 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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