RaceFail:Colonialism (the parts of E.Bear and E.Bull to be played by Wrede and Bujold)

[cimorene]

naraht has been collecting links for a new round of RaceFail which I have seen called RaceFail:Colonialism, or something like that. I haven't seen any one-sentence summations of the sequence of events going around, but basically Patricia C. Wrede, beloved YA fantasy author, has a new YA alternate history out:

This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered [by Europeans] empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

...and some people pointed out ways in which this was problematic, causing some other people (including Wrede's friend, well-known FSF writer Lois McMaster Bujold) to react with the Tone Argument, the Talk is Cheap argument, the Censorship argument, etc.

Patricia C. Wrede has always been a Euro-centric writer, which is common and even expected in the field of high fantasy. You might recognize her name, if you're unversed in SFF, from my user profile, where the beginning of Dealing With Dragons stands me in lieu of a biography blurb. My favorite novel from age 6, DWD is part of children's fantasy The Enchanted Forest Chronicles and stars Princess Cimorene, who was certainly the most important role model for me as a child (not counting people I knew personally - obviously my dad and mom were my actual most important role models).

If you Google "Cimorene fanfiction", all of the top page of results - minus one - have to do with me, not with Wrede. I've been Cimorene online for about 9 years now, so... I feel I should speak, although I have nothing to say yet that hasn't been said already, often by passionate and incredibly long-suffering fans of color who are less likely than I to accidentally wound someone through their own unconscious racism. As I read all of naraht's links, though, I post the ones that speak to me the most, with descriptive notes, to Twitter. Here are my links and notes:

• Seeking Avalon: There's Something About Tor Writers, aka There's Something About White SF Writers (My note: LMB is a Baen writer, so the 1st title is obviously not broad enough)


• Kaigou: Sleeping with the Status Quo (Long, but AWESOME - read it all!)


• Gloss: My Shame Was Only Exceeded by My Fury. "To claim that the Story transcends mere social concerns, as Bujold does here and others have done for a long, long time, is not just lazy and thoughtless. It's dangerous and selfish and reactionary."


• rensreality: Like Words on a Chalkboard... "Okay, I think an author should be able to tell the story they want to tell. I really do but, sheesh, why does it always have to make me either a magical creature, an exotic savage or erase me from history altogether?"


• Avalon's Willow comments at Tor.com: "White learning moments? Not actually all that special."


• sixquarters: [activism] The Thirteenth Child. (Exactly the refutation of the "Talk is Cheap" argument that I would want to make.) "How many of them have, in other contexts, talked about the power of words? Do words only have power when they want them to?"


• fiction-theory: You're Hurting My Head Again, SFF. "And let's not even consider the possibility of writing a novel where Europeans live and keep their hands to themselves and the people of the Americas get to ride the magic mammoths and have awesome adventures? Because that would require considering them as interesting and worthy of respect as Europeans, and obviously, that isn't happening."


• And finally, sami's Derailment Redux: Lois McMaster Bujold Hypocrisy Special Edition, a point-by-point refutation of LMB's two comments at Tor.com.

Comments

[anglepoiselamp]

Wow. It probably makes me a bad person that my reaction is the internet equivalent of "la la la la, I can't hear anything". I love said authors and don't know if I can stand to feel conflicted about them.

[cimorene]

That was my mom's reaction, but yes, I do think it's important to move past that impulse. It's what leads to Pants Redacted incidents where people go out on a limb defending the really quite indefensible actions of their friends and idols instead of saying 'Dude, that sucked - suck it up and admit it', which is far healthier for the person involved to hear.

[jennaria]

Argh, argh, and fucking argh.

I like Bujold. I enjoy her books. But oh wow is her unthinking prejudice showing.

[emilybyrd]

I'd followed the links from wembley's post, and stumbled over LMB's comments first thing, and boggled. I was hoping I hadn't figured out how the board worked, and it wasn't actually HER saying that.

Then again, after the debacle in SF&F circles this year, after teaching PoCo lit and theory for years, I still forget the FAIL, waiting to pounce.

*sighs*

[cimorene]

I had some perspective restored recounting these events to my mother during our Mother's Day phonecall. She pretty much produced all the same arguments as LMB, and although this can partly be put down to her desire to think no ill of anyone she has any reason to like - I suspect part of it is that she's a woman who shares LMB's and PCW's race and class background, who went through university life and feminism at about the same time. I've noticed a generational element to RaceFail before and, well, if I'm not all THAT surprised that my mom holds these views why should I be surprised that writers I respect do? (I have more reason to respect my mom's integrity, ethics, and race relations record than I do theirs, after all - I don't even know them.)

[emilybyrd]

... which is why the whole debacle early this year made me squirm so much, rather than comfortably come down on the "writers" camp (that seemed to divide itself so staunchly against the "fandom" camp of readers).

I dunnow. Even being more sinned against (and being surprised each time), I can't seem to let go of this idea that, something about the Internet made discussions a bit... warped.

It does remind me of a weird conversation years ago among 4 grad students (two of them trying to write novels, and all of them staunch PoCo theorists AND non-white), and how the politics we teach didn't quite help in the "writing of" books we wanted to read. But that's another story.

[cimorene]

I think there's definitely a generational gap as well in the way we approach debate on the 'net. For one thing, there was that whole "Pseudonyms are Evil" bullshit. But for another, I think it's implicit in the medium of debate being the 'net that a wider context (beyond the World of Words) is lacking. There's a difference between writing someone off as a potential producer of respect-worthy political thoughts or writing (which does make sense on the basis of what we saw in the debate) and writing them off as a potentially worthwhile human being. I think that a lot of people did the former for a number of participants in the last round whose behavior was particularly shocking, and I think that was justified. But I think not many people actually did the latter.

[emilybyrd]

As to the generational race, class, and feminism of our older generation, it does well to TEACH third wave feminism as a given now, but I'm always reminded of the deeply kind (yet sometimes erring) white women professors who'd helped us along the way, while being part of exactly what we found disturbing.

[cimorene]

Yeah. I mean, the paradigm of second wave civil rights activists (I include feminism and the basically concurrent white-ally movement of the 60s for anti-racism/desegregation) is unquestionably limited, even capable of being deeply harmful, as RaceFail:CulturalAppropriation and RaceFail:Colonialism have demonstrated. But that's a necessary consequence because 2nd wave was the stepping stone on the way to where our culture is now. Many of the people who are unintentionally causing this pain are/were passionate activists and even anti-racists doing their best to 'fix' society. Maybe it's just not possible for their minds to go the last step to "-ism is a system" and "Everyone, including me, is a racist".

[isilya]

Thanks for making this post! You've been on my mind for the past few days as I watched this go down.

Responses like anglepoiselamp's are pretty much textbook what I would expect from my friends list -- I remember posting about Studio 60, John from Cincinnati and getting the response back "wow, I hadn't noticed until now how erased PoC were, but anyway, I'm really enjoying this show!"

So you can imagine how much I appreciate this post.

[thymindmaymove]

Nooooooo! Wrede, don't do this to me! I love your books, don't do this to me!

[isilya]

From here:

Wrede says:

The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate
both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel.

[cimorene]

I've had the impulse "Noo, I used to like you and I want to keep liking you!" many times. But then because I've thought that, you know, acknowledging the reality and things like racism were important, I struggled with that myself, and formed new opinions as far as possible. Sometimes I have changed my mind about writers and sometimes I have made more conditional decisions like "still going to read their stuff, BUT...", but one thing I've never done was considered even the possibility that I would be able to just keep enjoying something once I had a big honking problem pointed out to me.

And damn. look at how completely crazy that statement is. The sheer staggering and UNCONSCIOUS bigotry and stupid in it! It's so laughably wrong and yet so clear that she HAS NO IDEA that the idea that history could be only slightly "afield" without the indiginous population is MONSTROUSLY IDIOTIC.

[l_elfie]

i read a few of these as you posted them to twitter, and at this point i'm just... not surprised. when i think about my initial reaction, i'm way more disappointed about PCW than LMB, even though i haven't read any of the enchanted kingdom books since middle school--i figured from the vorkosigan books that it was very likely LMB had a particularly heterocentric, white-feeling way of building a world up, whereas i remember the enchanted kingdom chronicles as being excellent in part because cimorene was so independently awesome and heroic even when she had a kid. (though of course, most people get married and are predominantly white in those, too, but it doesn't seem quite as obvious as in the vorkosigan books; then again, i could be misremembering.)

[minoanmiss]

This is a brave and remarkable post for you to write. Thank you.