such_heights | (no subject)

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mood: fail!

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Here we go again! Patricia C. Wrede's alt-history YA novel, where getting rid of those pesky indigenous North American peoples lets her do cool shit like write about mammoths. And white people. In any case, it's easier just to scrap them than to try and write them like people. Holy wow. See the comments in that first link for a reasonably heartening proportion of cluebat-wielding smart people to idiocy. Discussion being collated by

naraht here.

delux_vivens at

deadbrowalking is putting out a call:

Let's make it really clear, people. If you identify as a POC/nonwhite person and you read or watch scifi or fantasy, give yourself a name check in this thread. I am particularly wanting shoutouts from people who do not live in the US and who have still managed to read genre fiction.

I'm tired of people trying to render us invisible unless they have been given a memo about our existences.

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I really dislike the term "white." It's like "black" (which I've come to realize is acceptable as a term in the UK more than in the US) or "yellow" or "red" for someone. It says nothing about where one is from, what ethnicity one is or recognize the huge variation of cultures and even genetic differences within everything that falls under "white." And I get that regardless of the origins of one's paleness, there are advantages that come with it. But 90% of the time I hear "white" used, it doesn't seem any more relevant than someone saying an Asian/Middle Eastern/anyone whose skin fits the color is "yellow."

I wouldn't say I am non-white because my skin is pale. But I am not white. I do not identify as white. I've looked into where my ancestors came from so that I am beginning to know who I am. White only rules out some backgrounds and makes me a color, not a culture.

/rant about "white"

Well, no, the generic label of 'white' doesn't tell you very much about any of those things. On the other hand, that's almost the point -- you and I can't choose whether we identify as white or not, because we are, and that has a continuous impact on our lives, the same way that being brown or yellow does. Institutionalised racism doesn't pay a great deal of attention to the nuances of your heritage (unless they make you a member of an oppressed group in another sense) -- we're white, and we benefit, and if you're not white, you lose out. Being white doesn't tell anyone the whole story of where I come from, but it makes a pretty big difference to my life whether I want it to or not.

I know about that stuff about white, when it comes to white privilege etc. And I get talking about it in those contexts. But white is just always used, commonly, even when it has nothing to with privilege and racism, et cetera.

It is a bit off topic from what you were posting, but given how rarely white otherwise gets mentioned, this post just reminded me.

Do you think? I'm trying to think of examples in my personal experience and struggling a bit, maybe that's why I didn't grasp what you meant in your previous comment.

Anything to do with race (but not racism, given I excluded that) - the label given is always white/Caucasian. Caucasian is not a true ethnic term, given its lost most if any it had when it got tagged along with white, to only mean that. And almost all pale-skinned people I know in the states don't really know clearly - if their family is not recently immigrated - where they are from. They lost their ethnic identity and cultural history. America isn't an old country. Where were their ancestors five hundred years ago? So many don't know. And I dislike that just calling people a meaningless term has led to so many people losing that.

On forms with race/ethnicity on it, at least in the States, most of the ones I've seen give true ethnic/cultural terms for all other colors (Latina, African-American, Asian, etc) but only "white" for pale people, as if that's all we are - a color, not more. It only encourages the stuff going on that you dislike.

And especially for those who have managed to keep a true cultural identity, those with pale skin really don't belong under the same umbrella (French v. German arguments between ethnic teachers of those type at my high school, arguments I've witnessed between ethnic Ukranians and Russians, etc). And even without thinking of it as countries people are from, slavs are very different from scots, etc.

I know that those who fall under the broad term "white" are united in regards to privilege and what not, but being lumped under it all the time ignores and encourages the erasure of so much culture.

I think that white/Caucasian in its current sense (and Caucasian particularly is a really fraught term), is almost always going to mean 'of European descent' -- and even if 'white' specifically doesn't denote that, that is the history that's taught about Australia, North America, other places with significant white populations. That doesn't go into much detail, but neither does Asian or African. I'd say they're all roughly equivalent. I agree that white people are by no means a homogeneous group, the chequered history of Europe alone being proof enough, but I think all ethnic and racial identifications suffer from the same problems -- when you've been somewhere long enough, you don't know that much about where you came from. I don't think there's much danger of anyone not being aware that the white people of the US were originally European migrants.

The Asian people I know (regardless how many generations in the States) know if they are Chinese or Korean or Japanese or what combination thereof. The latina's I know have a culture they identify with and know where they are from. I am not quite as confident about all/most of the African-Americans I know, but still they have more of a culture. "European immigrants" is incredibly vague to me. It doesn't give a culture, a sense of history. And every single white person in the States I know who KNOWS exactly where they are from do not identify as white - they identify as Dutch, German, French, Irish, Ukranian, et cetera. The only people I know who identify as white are those who do not know where they are from. The past of Europe shows how being from one country or the other is a huge difference. And I just dislike how 'whites' more than any other group I know just get sloshed together as if there were no difference, as if all white Americans are just some average blend of all the European states.

The idea about being somewhere so long making you forget can happen, but somehow - for example - Jews are very good at keeping track of who they are, even when they are not religious. I have been told before, by people of all color, that I do not have an ethnicity, a culture (beyond American), etc because I am white. And I dislike that and disagree.

as partial native american, i feel i should be outraged or something (but it's early in the morning)

one thought... if you wanted to write a book about traveling to a new land devoid of people but full of magical creatures and whatnot, then why not just MAKE UP A WHOLE NEW WORLD? honestly, to me that seems way easier

Heh, yeah -- not that there's a good time of day for these sorts of shenanigans.

Well, exactly! Instead, she seems pretty set on writing our world, but 'better'. How skeevy. :/

now see, better would have been if she decided to eliminate mosquitos - that's a world i'd be down with

..... wow, i had no idea someone was already collating! i should've figured. *g* it's nice not to be the only one ranting, heh.

I love our archivists of the revolution!

How sad.

It really is.

Oh, I'd seen some of the other discussions about this yesterday but hadn't read the comment from Wrede about her rationale until I followed you link just now and I...wow.

D:

Thanks for the post.

I know. It's just so blatant! What the hell.

I really wish some of my favorite authors WOULD JUST STOP making asshats of themselves. I don't know what to do with it, and it is breaking my heart.

D: Seriously.

ALSO. UM. which came first, the indians or the mammoths? (http://keeva.dreamwidth.org/6755.html) has just made my head EXPLODE. AGAIN. that comment i quoted? was apparently not even close to the first iteration of FAIL, oh dear GOD. talking about retroactive erasure- if there was some way to retroactively erase her books from my childhood so it doesn't fucking sting so much, i'd take it. D:

Oh my god, what. She's doing so many things at once there! Mostly I have this image of her sticking her fingers in her ears, happy in her own little world, a world gleefully founded upon fail!

I've been talking racism all weekend; this sort of thing isn't just confined to fandom, unfortunately. It's sad that there can be so many major gains in equality and have so many incidents like this exist. On the plus side, it's made me more vocal in standing up to my friends when they're being stupid about it.

She erased those pesky non-white people; I'm erasing everything she wrote from everything I read when I was wee. Easy!

How upsetting! This is all just so gross.

Fail, fail, fail. After everything we did to the Native Americans this is especially appalling, not that it wouldn't have been if this hadn't been true.

I'm reading a book called Ceremony for English right now; it's about how "America" basically raped the American Indian culture, about their loss of cultural identity, etc. etc. This really brings it home. The devastation that Anglo-Saxon and Spanish disease and violence wrought upon the native people of North America is truly monstrous; some estimates place the population drop at almost 90% due to white influence.

Here, Martha will tell this woman what's what.

I've been trying to follow parts of this discussion via

emily_shore's link collection, and even as the clueless white girl that I am, I think that Patricia C. Wrede and Lois McMaster Bujold have been making complete fools out of themselves and have offended lots of people (including their own readers) with their ignorance and their casual dismissals.

The rollcall at

deadbrowalking was also quite the eye-opener for me: There were people on that list whom I recognized because I had come across their fanworks or their meta or their squee -- and I had never assumed them to be FOC. Unless someone quite explicitly talks about their ethnicity or culture, I still seem to regard "White female of European stock" as the LJ default. Which is rather telling, I suppose, and I should work on that. :(((

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