So once again, white writers are crying tears and needing hugs and cocoa because they don't know how to write characters of color and they did it wrong and everybody hates them and their fee fees hurt.
Let me give an analogy.
If every time I spoke about women, I painted them as some mysterious other- magical and wise, vicious and cruel, stupid and helpless, lusty and animalistic, unfathomable and alien? You'd tell me I'm crazy and a sexist dick and you'd be right. (and yeah, there's guys doing this still.)
You'd say this not only because I'd be telling lies, but because these falsehoods are so easily shattered that I would have had to went through considerable effort in mental gymnastics, in not interacting with women (either literally or practically by behavior), that in the end, "But, but, no one pulled my head out of my ass, I NEVER KNEW" would not be a valid excuse. My not knowing would be the result of a lot of work on my part.
Women are everywhere and the only person I could blame for such fuckwittery at this point would be myself.
So. When you tell me that you couldn't possibly write any characters of color because they're so strange and you can't identify with them at all? Or that's why you had to fall back on stereotypes? You've just told me you've spent decades of your life doing mental gymnastics and avoiding people.
And, after a lifetime of aversive racism, and, you creating media that helps perpetuate lies, you want me to do the work FOR you of pulling your head out of your ass and then give you a cookie and tell you that you're a good white person, even though you're not willing to do any effort to undo what you've done to yourself?
So, no, the answer is neither to stop writing characters of color or to read a lot of books about POC and try to study them from afar or endlessly demand we educate you.
Get your head out of your ass and meet us as people.
And then you'll see why, "But X are people too!" is a phrase that only works if you start from an assumption that only your people were people to begin with.
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Re: It's been a fortnight of FAIL, hasn't it?
2009-01-16 02:00 am (UTC)
It's really the only way to understand how so much fail continues to happen. On the internet, people form sentences, but that doesn't mean they form thoughts.
"Real Life" too
2009-01-16 02:46 am (UTC)
This is exactly why the thought of going on to grad school made me seriously contemplate driving off a bridge. Four years of dealing with this from fellow classmates and too many professors as a Phil major had made me want to drive off a bridge rather than go to class many times already, there was no way I could handle more years of taking it ratcheted it up many notches, (and I didn't have the resources to do what I really wanted, which was go to art school anyway over parental unapproval and unhelpfulness) so I called it quits at a BA despite massive peer disapproval ("There's no POINT in majoring in Phil if you're not planning on going to grad school" I heard a lot.
I mean, there's only so many times you can go "But, but, but, this doesn't make any sense! This isn't even a coherent statement! It has no connection to any objective reality, nor even to any subjective ones outside the author's own head! I don't CARE if he has more degrees than I have fingers, it's STUPID!" and then think "I'm paying HOW MUCH for this?" before the Diminishing Returns thing kicks in.
(BTW, you mention Miller, well apparently he managed to work in the word "whore" in the opening monologue of "The Spirit." Shortpacked seems terribly prescient...)