Fail here there and everywhere

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I am feeling sick and grumpy but also chatty. So, some links from metafandom with rambly commentary.

Failboat! The Cruise Ship of the Damned Sails On summarises a bunch of stuff.

veejane asks what sff fandom is going to do about this crap.

On safe spaces talks about, well, safe spaces.

Re the Will Shetterly/Kathyryn Cramer vs coffeeandink thing(*): outing someone under their real name because they disagreed with you and banned you from their lj? Is unbelievably low. Dismissing the opinions of everyone who disagrees with you "because all their IPs come from Ivy league colleges"? Low and stupid. Arguing against the use of pseudonyms on the internet? Just..argh. The stupid burns.

Also, given that Worldcon is in Australia next year I find myself putting together my opinions on aussie fandom with all this stuff going on in international fandom. I feel a bit stymied about what I can do personally to try to cut down on the fail, though, apart from trying not to contribute to it myself and encouraging anti-fail.

So since coffeeandink asked people to focus on positive things: I am currently reading "Devil in Blue Dress" by Walter Mosley after being recced it on 50books_poc. It is quite good, even if it's not spec fic :)

(*)People are avoiding saying their names because apparently they google stalk and harrass them, but if NOONE says their names noone will know whose been talked about. I feel too obscure to be worried, but incase they do: seriously, you're going to pick on a no-name australian rambling while sick? This will not help your PR.

Comments

Part 2

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And I always, in my head, bring this back to the central Australian indigenous experience... it is not just that middle class voices dominate the debate, but also that middle class people are almost exclusively the subject of the debate as well

Yes, that is unfair.

For a start, as you well know there are a lot of vocal, educated-about-class working class people (white or otherwise) out there with very strong opinions about race and class and many other things(*). They are given less voice than they should be, but are not so voiceless that we can only project imaginary beliefs onto them. There's even some in fandom.

Me, for example.

(well, partly. I'll admit I've been upwardly mobile for quite a while). And my opinions about race grew from my experiences with working class aboriginal classmates growing up, and with my working class jewish family's direct experiences with antisemitism. And speaking to those people, and meeting with and reading the opinions of aboriginal and other nonwhite australians, and looking at the (undeniably white middle class dominated) anti-racist movement with a jaundiced, anti-middle class eye..I do not see what you're seeing, and I do not see anyone else seeing what you're seeing. So on the one hand we have the opinions of actual working class people, and actual POC, and actual working class POC, and on the other we have your gut feeling and no evidence. And even if you were right and there was a bias towards concentrating on the racism experienced by middle class POC, as with the middle class bias of feminism the solution is to talk more about (and to!) working class POC, not less about middle class ones.

So again I ask: how is this relevant? How is this helpful? In what way are your actions here helping fight racism, in fandom or elsewhere?

And I have to say, derailing discussions of race by talking about class is a sneaky trick. Will Shetterly did it (though what you're doing is more like this), and my father does it ALL THE TIME (he once tried to convince me that sexism was caused by the industrial revolution, and that feminism is largely a CIA conspiracy) and I really don't like it.

Seriously, Dave, up until a few days ago I thought you above this sort of concern trolling. To be honest I'm not sure this conversation is achieving much apart from making me angry.

(*)And the less vocal and/or educated ones still have opinions, and those opinions are also not entirely undocumented