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By now, I imagine that a large chunk of my flist has seen the latest bit of race-fail, in the form of ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
asteroidbuckle's J2 story set in Haiti, immediately post earthquake. If not, I first suggest you go to bossymarmalade's excerpts post here, and then to amazonziti's link list here.
I don't think I need to point out to anyone on my flist that casually using the deaths of thousands of people, and the still massive amounts of devastation and pain that the Haitian people are working with, as a pretty backdrop to an AU story about two angsty white guys is wrong. Or that it's not okay to repeatedly talk about how big and scary (purely because of his size) your trusty Haitian sidekick character is. Or to have him speak in a slow pidgin English, smile all the time, and practically worship at the feet of your primary angsty white guy character. Or to refer to people in a crisis situation, speaking their own language in their own country, as either gibbering or jabbering, instead of simply speaking. (These all come as examples from the direct quotesbossymarmalade took.)
For the most part, fandom has been quick to speak up and rebuke this story as being offensive, for buying into a lot of colonialist tropes and stereotypes, and for being racist as all get out. (Those people who chose to call the author a cunt, or used other misogynistic language to simply belittle her, thanks for playing and making this an inter-sectional fail, not just a race fail. Yell at the story and the racist tropes, yell at her for buying into the racist/privileged mindset, yell at her for the non-apology apology where she shows that she fails to understand how any of what she wrote could possibly be understood as offensive, but please don't attack her because she's female.)
But there's one area where parts of fandom are continuing to fail. And that's where we're hitting that "damned if you don't/damned if you do" piece of garbage that I ranted about with last year's Racefail. The answer to people failing to write POC well is not to stop writing POC at all. That's called whitewashing, and it's just as offensive. The answer is to take a little more time, and a little more care, and actually push yourself to write the characters correctly. And that means treating them as living people, with race as one factor in their lives, but not the only one. It means trying, and occasionally failing and getting called on it, and apologizing and moving on to correct that mistake in the future. (And of course, the same goes for writing women, GLBT etc characters, disabled characters, and so forth.)
I want to close this by pointing tomedie's post on the subject. I left SPN, both canon and fandom, at the end of season three because I couldn't take the canon's race and gender fail. But fail is not confined to SPN fandom. And the less we look at why people don't think about the implications of their stories, the more likely it is that we'll see these stories throughout all of fandom. I'd like to think we can do better than slapping less privileged members of fandom in the face every time we turn around. If that means giving and receiving a few more Gibbs!slaps to ourselves, as wake up calls, and calling each other on fail before we get shove it in everyone's face, well, I think that's more than fair.
ETA: further thoughts found here.
asteroidbuckle's J2 story set in Haiti, immediately post earthquake. If not, I first suggest you go to bossymarmalade's excerpts post here, and then to amazonziti's link list here.I don't think I need to point out to anyone on my flist that casually using the deaths of thousands of people, and the still massive amounts of devastation and pain that the Haitian people are working with, as a pretty backdrop to an AU story about two angsty white guys is wrong. Or that it's not okay to repeatedly talk about how big and scary (purely because of his size) your trusty Haitian sidekick character is. Or to have him speak in a slow pidgin English, smile all the time, and practically worship at the feet of your primary angsty white guy character. Or to refer to people in a crisis situation, speaking their own language in their own country, as either gibbering or jabbering, instead of simply speaking. (These all come as examples from the direct quotes
bossymarmalade took.)For the most part, fandom has been quick to speak up and rebuke this story as being offensive, for buying into a lot of colonialist tropes and stereotypes, and for being racist as all get out. (Those people who chose to call the author a cunt, or used other misogynistic language to simply belittle her, thanks for playing and making this an inter-sectional fail, not just a race fail. Yell at the story and the racist tropes, yell at her for buying into the racist/privileged mindset, yell at her for the non-apology apology where she shows that she fails to understand how any of what she wrote could possibly be understood as offensive, but please don't attack her because she's female.)
But there's one area where parts of fandom are continuing to fail. And that's where we're hitting that "damned if you don't/damned if you do" piece of garbage that I ranted about with last year's Racefail. The answer to people failing to write POC well is not to stop writing POC at all. That's called whitewashing, and it's just as offensive. The answer is to take a little more time, and a little more care, and actually push yourself to write the characters correctly. And that means treating them as living people, with race as one factor in their lives, but not the only one. It means trying, and occasionally failing and getting called on it, and apologizing and moving on to correct that mistake in the future. (And of course, the same goes for writing women, GLBT etc characters, disabled characters, and so forth.)
I want to close this by pointing to
medie's post on the subject. I left SPN, both canon and fandom, at the end of season three because I couldn't take the canon's race and gender fail. But fail is not confined to SPN fandom. And the less we look at why people don't think about the implications of their stories, the more likely it is that we'll see these stories throughout all of fandom. I'd like to think we can do better than slapping less privileged members of fandom in the face every time we turn around. If that means giving and receiving a few more Gibbs!slaps to ourselves, as wake up calls, and calling each other on fail before we get shove it in everyone's face, well, I think that's more than fair.ETA: further thoughts found here.