On being a nice white lady

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So. I really, really don't like racism. I get very upset when people around me say or do (to my mind) racist things. I've recently decided that I'm sick of feeling vague and powerless about the whole thing and am going to see what I can do to fight against racism in the society around me, specifically local fandom since that's my real social home. I decided about a year ago to start the ball rolling by doing a panel on depictions of race in sff (since it's a really interesting and important topic, and not something I'd seen much discussed), this post is a vague meander on how that turned out, and is a follow on from my previous post about the general way certain POVs get under-represented at Swancons. I've kind of discussed it with stephiepenguin but she and dabear (my co-panelists) may still have very different perspectives on the whole thing.

I've been reading various (mostly american, since there aren't any australian ones afaict) blogs etc on racism, mostly because I still quite frequently have these moments of "Oh god how did I not notice that before?" and the idea of not finding out about the injustices etc I still haven't noticed is all too disturbing. Something I've seen discussed a few places is the way theoretically anti-racist white liberals say a lot of very nice sounding rhetoric, and make a show of criticising the "bad" racist white people, but actually do very little to really combat racism in any significant (or inconvenient) way, or listen to what actual not-white people have to say(*), or (god forbid) let them speak for themselves rather than speaking for them.

So I was a little self conscious when planning my panel (also, you know, Not An Arts Major) But I decided a hamfisted but not-actively-offensive panel was better than nothing, if only to encourage more qualified people to do one next year, and I got very attached to my idea (the way sff uses metaphors to talk about real life racial/ethnic/cultural things)

And even now, in this post, I'm sure I'm being way over-simplistic etc, but if I wait till that's not true I'll just say nothing, and be yet another australian not talking about race because it's all too hard. So.

Now the way I do panels is I create a synopsis, which I run by my co-panelists to see if they want to add anything. Although I try to incorporate input from the audience and my co-panelist(s), my default state is just to talk through the points in my synopsis for an hour, and it takes some effort to budge me from this (yes, I am aware this is All Bad)

Then stephiepenguin started talking on her lj about doing her own panel on race on a different topic, as far as I could tell on the depiction of non-white people in sff. We volunteered for each others panels but worked on them separately until it turned out they were going to be merged. I sent Stephie a synopsis of what I was planning to talk about so we could incorporate it with her ideas, she said it looked good but didn't have time to add anything (it was on short notice and she's getting married in two weeks) Also I think she decided it was just easier to do a broader version of my panel than try to create a true fusion of the two, even though to me they didn't seem that inimical, just two sides of the same coin. (I
didn't get around to emailing it to dabear at all, because I suck :/)

And so during the panel itself...we basically did my panel, and it was mostly me talking. During the panel, and after watching dabear's very interesting academic paper (which was unfortunately after the panel), I got some inklings of the sort of things Stephie might have talked about, on ethnicity and identity and culture and..stuff. And it really was coming from a completely different POV to my panel.

And I thought...here we are, and I'm a white person talking about race, and the not-white person's(**) POV has been completely ignored in favour of mine. HMMM.

And it struck me that when you exclude all the cases of deliberate racism, and all the cases of unconscious racism, you're still left with stuff like this: where a bunch of white people have the power to make a decision, and they make the decision that makes sense to them, on the basis of what they think is interesting or whatever, and so the non-white POV is ignored, or elided, not out of any ill-will, but because we just don't see that it's necessary. We may not see that the POV exists at all.

Obviously it's incredibly wrong to categorise I and Stephie's POVs entirely by our respective ethnicities. I think they have as much if not more to do with our respective fields of study, there are lots of complex humanities concepts I have trouble getting my head around, dabear certainly seemed to get it fine. (Plan for next year: shut up about race and let someone more knowledgeable have a go)

And when you get down to it the reason I get so het up about race, and got so protective and over-prepared with my panel, is to do with my own partly-jewishness. I was brought up on stories of the way Grandma's family was treated in Poland, and my mother's conviction that if the Holocaust is to mean anything then we who lost family must fight to the last breath against racism and intolerance, and I often have a fairly visceral reaction to racism when I encounter it (or have it pointed out to me. Caring doesn't stop me being clueless :/ )

But still. Here we are. As I said in my previous post, racism is about death by a thousand cuts, and any "perfectly reasonable" justifications for each individual cut don't make them go away.

(Oh, and if you're wondering where the post title comes from, search for it on youtube)

(*)I realise the white/not-white dichotomy annoys a lot of people, but I'm not up to
going into that right now, so imagine I have inserted some disclaimers about
counterexamples and replace as necessary with "The people who benefit from
injustice" and "the victims of injustice" or whatever.
(**)Of course here we hit the fact that, like a lot of people, neither I nor Stephie
fit perfectly into neat little racial categories. But I'm certainly a fair bit
whiter than she is, especially if you're just talking about identity.