My Response to the Racism Ruckus

Your family's ethnic background is Cuban, no? You paint characters of different colors and shapes. You write about characters of different colors and shapes. You've touched on some very interesting issues of interspecies dynamics in your fiction and nonfiction. I think it's the immigrant background that lends depth and color to your Alliance setting, and the Tsipia-aliens, and even the Jokka.

I drew from African-American, Asian, Native American, and Chicana cultures in assembling my list. Oh, and one of the artists is aboriginal Australian. I didn't go crazy trying to cover the whole globe, just get a good sampling. Those are the underlying parameters for the list.

If you don't identify as a person of color and want off, I can edit the list. But you fit my parameters, and I'm unlikely to be terribly impressed by the opinions of people who don't think you "count" as a person of color. Humanity is a many-splendored species, not a monochrome.

I'm glad you found the post useful. I can't blame you for not wanting to wade into the muckfest; I didn't either.

I'm glad that I could contribute something worthwhile.

I'm glad you found this useful. You're welcome to use my description from that last paragraph, if you wish, or point people to it, or whatever.

I'm glad you found this helpful.

>>I think it is hard to pull ourselves away from gut-feel/deeply ingrained feelings when it comes to racism. Theory is one thing. Being in it is another.<<

It can be hard. The heart is a powerful thing. So is the mind, though, and some people deal with difficult emotions by dissecting them for root causes. Other people live so wholly in their feelings that they can perceive neither the surrounding logic nor the causes.

To be a sociologist studying people is to be a fish studying water. It is the pursuit of the ellusive and the enigmatic. But I do not think we will solve this problem until we have learned to perceive it, to describe it, to define, and to communicate its nature to others. Only then will we understand how to dismantle it.

I'm good enough to figure out a lot about how oppression works, even when it tries to hide, for I see what there is to be seen. I can see how to weaken it. I can illuminate parts of it very effectively, to one person or a few people ... or rather more, in a venue with a potentially wide audience such as this one. But I can't light up all of it at once, nor make everyone understand it. It's too big, and there is far too much benefit for far too many people in perpetuating this system. It's far more difficult to connect the damage done to people who benefit from the system with the benefits to those same people so that they perceive them as part of a whole inimical system. The human brain and psyche are designed -- very effectively -- to insulate us from painful truths, especially things we can't easily change. So there is no simple solution.

There is only the steadfast carrying of the light.

It started out as a way to distribute your own genes more widely, by favorite people who looked visibly similar (and were thus more likely to be relatives). This is an atavistic instinct observable in some animal species who will reject members with a different color or other odd trait. Some species, like housecats or pigeons, don't seem to care about variations.

>> I especially don't understand what is the point of trying to attack racism by accusing of it everyone who isn't black and tries talking about it in any context whatsoever. <<

That's actually one of the more obscure supports of racism. Let's see if I can describe the dynamics ...

Racism at this stage is mostly very subtle, like a deep river that will drown you by not letting you swim out of it, rather than a white-water river that will beat you to death against rocks. Fair-skinned people are more likely to enjoy privileges because of their genetics, and less likely to be aware of the how the system benefits them and harms others. It is as if the deep swift river brings them fish, and they cannot see the people in the middle quietly drowning. When someone points out that the river is killing people, all they know is that the river brings them fish, because they've never been out in the middle of the deadly current. Maybe they've waded or paddled along shore, where it's safe and the eddies are minor. So they say the current isn't dangerous or doesn't exist, because that fits their experience -- and the people who have exhausted themselves swimming in deep water, and watched people drown, are upset by the dismissal of their experience. So then the people get angry and frustrated at each other, and they yell, and they storm away hating each other all the more. And the river runs on, so smooth on the surface, so wide and deep, so deadly and so full of fish. It is the same river, and it runs through all our lives, but we do not experience it in the same way -- because some of us are born on the banks, while others are dropped into the deep water.

Did that make any sense?