vassilissa

Ironically, my point here comes from a blog post by Amanda Marcotte. I say ironically, because Amanda Marcotte has huge faily race issues of her own.

To summarise her article: it's useful to look at some men's reaction to rape issues as a framing problem where there are two competing frames: the people who see sex as a game to win, and the people who see it as an opportunity for collaboration. The people trying to win keep obsessing over rules and points, like "does it count as rape if I do X? What about X?" like sex is the ball and the men's team is trying to get control of the ball from the women's team. (For a good example of that, check out all the male/female relationships in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, argh.)

So, here's when the current discussion comes in: I think there's a similar set of frames going on here: the people who think the goal is for individuals not to be racist, and who are arguing (for instance) that matociquala intended in her book to subvert a racist cliche, and that any criticism of racism in the book not acknowledging that intention is invalid... Like the basketball players of Marcotte's post, they're trying to score points. Racism is about what you, a white person, can and can't do.

If there’s some ambiguity when the referee calls a foul, your teammates (other men) are supposed to clamor to your defense, regardless of whether or not you actually fouled. If the foul is called, then the woman team scores a point (or a free throw in basketball, but you get the idea).

In particular, I've seen a lot of this, of white people clamouring to matociquala's defense because they perceived Avalon Willow as calling a foul.

And there's the other frame, the idea that racism is structural and institutional and you can perpetuate it even while intending the opposite, because it's ingrained and pervasive and that POC see it everywhere because it is everywhere, not because they've got mean, faulty, POC goggles on. Racism is interwoven with everyone's history, and we all have to live with it and unmake it (or just survive it.) The goal for white people (but hint: the whole point of this frame is that it's not All About White People) is not to divorce themselves from their privilege by denying it, but to try to make things suck less for POCs, particularly by dismantling insitutional privilege where they can, and supporting POC's efforts to do so.

In this frame, clamouring to a white person's defense because a POC called her on something she wrote doesn't make sense, because it's not about matociquala losing something by being called racist, it's about Avalon Willow having her say, and matociquala listening and gaining understanding of her point of view. matociquala doesn't lose by that, she gains. As a writer, she gains understanding of how she's communicating with her readers, and that's critical.

And more importantly than what's happening with matociquala, Avalon Willow gets to have her say - without a posse of defenders, unwanted or otherwise, coming to her aid, I might add. The fact that matociquala has these defenders *is* a sign that her voice is privileged in this discussion and Avalon Willow's is underprivileged. (And to be fair, matociquala is aware of all that, but this isn't about matociquala, this is about Avalon Willow and the people trying to invalidate her voice in this discussion.)

Finally, for reference and because they should be read more widely: Avalon Willow's and deepad's posts.
Open Letter to Elizabeth Bear
I Didn't Dream of Dragons

(Administrative note: there's probably racist fail of my own buried somewhere in this post or elsewhere in my journal. It's nobody else's job to point that out for me, but if you do wish to, I promise I'll listen and not get mad.)

Edit: I wrote all this before reading deepad's later post, which expresses all this much better.