In which I cannot tell which icon to use

[zeborah]

There's my pretty rainbow-zebra icon which I use for posts about privilege and such.
But then there's my Diddums icon, which I don't get to use very often.

Hmm. I'll go with Helen (whom, incidentally, Facebook recently recommended as a friend for me).

So Avalon's Willow wrote an open letter to matociquala about race issues, and matociquala responded gracefully, and matociquala's commenters promptly started off with things like:

1) "The open letter was an overreaction."

2) "Us poor oppressed white writers just can't win: if we don't include people of colour we're racist and if we do include people of colour but get them wrong we're racist. What's a poor white writer to do?"

Oh, wah wah wah.

1) As a person of 100% white extraction, I feel I can speak for my race in saying that the open letter wasn't an overreaction.

2) Of course white writers can't win. No writers can win. If you don't write any words you don't have a novel, and if you do write words but get them wrong you have a bad novel. What's a writer to do?

Learn how to write better, you freaking idiot.

Of course people will always criticise you. That's life. Listen to the criticism, learn from it, and keep improving.

Edited to add: Some people seem to think this is all about telling people what to say and what not to say. It's not. It's just about me telling people who say words like 'overreacting' that they're freaking idiots. They can still say it. They're just freaking idiots.

Anyway, I'm bored with talking about censorship, so I'm going to exercise it instead.

Any future comments that are primarily about how woeful the plight is for the white writer, and how repressed those politically correct people are being, will be summarily repressed.

Any comments, however, that are primarily about "Yes, this is an issue, and I want to do something about it without being a freaking idiot," are most welcome. Because I'd quite like to have that discussion if I can do it in an environment where I don't have to continually justify why I feel that myself.

If you think I've repressed your comment unjustly you can put it up on your own LJ.

Comments

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

I am quite resistant to being told what to write about and who to write about.I don't really see that it is up to me to redress society's ill or make my characters people who fulfil readers' very particular requirements.
I am interested in equality and social injustice but I explore those things in a way that suits my stories and my way of looking at the world. No one has to buy my books (and indeed an unimaginably large number of people don't.)
I explore ideas that are interesting to me. I am ill equipped to start exploring other people's.
Re writing better - sorry writing in a way that would suit the letter writers is not writing 'better' by my aesthetic only writing more appropriately by theirs.

[zeborah]

No-one's telling anyone what to write about or how. They're just reserving the right to say what they think about the product, without being accused of overreacting. The same way anyone has the right to say what they liked or disliked about any book.

"writing better" was specifically within the context of people who argue "Damned if you do, damned if you don't, so what am I meant to do?"

If you're not arguing in that way (and it sounds like you're not, since you explicitly reject the idea that anyone has the right to tell you what you're meant to do), then it wasn't aimed at you.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that making too much of the issue means that the safe route (for white writers) is to avoid writing non-white characters. You'd only be damned faintly, if at all. Also writing well is hard enough without handicapping oneself with extra weight in the form of going too far beyond people like oneself, so the temptation is to not even try. Therefore I think making too much fuss can be counter productive as it might put off the more sensitive sort of writer that the protesters really wanted to encourage. Not raising the issue at all, of course, just leads to the status quo continuing, so the protesters are also damned if they do and damned if they don't!

Or in the words of oursin, "It's all much more complicated!"

I am careful not to enter such debates as a rule because the situation in the UK and the US is very different and though we have issues here, they're not the same as the issues in the US, though writers from elsewhere, like the LJ poster from India, don't seem to recognise that and people in the US often seem to assume that we must be like them when we're not. To add to the complication, I live in a rural area with very few non-white people and where the English/Welsh conflict re culture and language is the one that dominates. I thus feel very unqualified to provide what the non-white posters seem to want.

Having said that, the main POV character in the magic FE college seems to want to be black, so I am proceding cautiously and with much trepidation!

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I'm either writing fantasy or future SF and I largely don't mention skin colour unless it's in passing. My characters could be black, pink, brown, yellow or red.

For the science fiction I figure that a few thousand years in the future it's not going to be an issue - or if it is it's not going to be driven by the same issues as now (which as you say are very different in the US and the UK and probably in India and South Africa and Germany and, well, everywhere, too).

For the fantasy it's only a problem if anyone relates the setting to a historical situation and starts quoting context, though my settings are always 'a bit like' but not exactly _that_ place and time.

[zeborah]

My characters could be black, pink, brown, yellow or red.

No they couldn't. If the skin colour isn't mentioned, then it's white.

The majority of readers - and I include myself in this - if they aren't told otherwise, they'll assume white. Everyone in Cora and sequels - in my mind, they're all white, because you didn't say otherwise.

That's because we live in a society where white is the default. In fantasy and sf in particular, white is the default.

So if, as a writer, your intention is that not all of these characters are white, then you have to say so explicitly. Because otherwise your readers will be visualising white.

It just the same as the sky or the grass. If you don't say they're not blue and green respectively, the reader will assume those colours. If you want green sky, you've got to say it's green; if you want purple people, you've got to say they're purple.

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I don't think the default is necesserily white - much depends on the way it's written. Names, for instance. Ramirez wouldn't necessarily be white WASP, and neither would Patel. I'm going to doublecheck my names list and make sure I have some in there that definitely sound more ethnic.

[zeborah]

Yes, this is true: names are important and useful.

(I consider first names just as important: if there's a mixture of ethnic surnames but all the first names are Anglo-saxon, then I know the world is culturally, even if not skin-wise, white. And I'd like to see more worlds that are as culturally as skin-wise ethnic.)

In the stories with Paul (Faith, Hope and Respectful Attachment and its sequel) I did the mix of names. I still want to describe skin colour more because I'm convinced that Paul is some shade of brown _but I haven't said so_.

The other thing I did was, when there were jokes and stories being tossed around, to try and have some non-European-tradition ones. I got a Mongolian one in there, and I think I was trying to do something with the tiger, but I'm not sure how successful I was.

[brownnicky.livejournal.com]

IME putting a book out there means that anyone can say what they damn well like about it. Some of the comments you will get, if you get any at all, will be rude and hostile, others sweet or barking mad, some will criticise the writer for not writing the book the commentator wanted the writer to write. I am only surprised that the writer in this case responded to what was effectively another version of the latter.

I don't see why it is OK to have an opinion but not OK for other people to have an opinion on the opinion. If anyone is free to write whatever they like about an original piece of writing, why isn't anyone free to write about the criticism? I don't think criticism/review/comment should be regarded as privileged writing.I would argue that no one has the right not to be accused of overreacting.

(frozen)

[zeborah]

Because "overreacting" is a euphemism for "hysterical", and secretly means "Stop telling us that we're hurting you because we're tired of hearing it and having to worry about the fact that it might be true."

Only privileged people get to define what "overreacting" means.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I agree. I'm one of those people who hates being told what to do, even if it's what I'd do, anyway! :)

I find the open letter to Bear and the resultant discussion of interest because it might spark imagination or inspiration. It might just be food for thought.

What I try to not be is judgmental, at least in public, because my judgment is based on my prejudices and expectations.

And I think there's enough of a difference between works by committee (movies, tv, theater, where more than one person is responsible for the work) and works by individuals (books, although editors do get a say). I think there's a difference in trying to ensure that TV gives equal opportunity to minority faces and views and what people write in books.

[zeborah]

"Trying to ensure" I don't know. You're probably right.

But if books don't give equal opportunity (and they don't) then I think there's discussion to be had.

I've never seen anyone tell anyone else they had to do anything. Seriously, I've never seen that. It's a straw man.

[nycshelly.livejournal.com]

I agree. The topic is worth discussion. It won't change what I write or like to read, mostly because I have the awareness. I don't like creating and writing characters I'm not comfortable with, because they drive the story. If I don't get them right, the story will suffer. But I think more needs to come from the publishers, in buying a larger variety of books, which might encourage more submissions of the kinds of book we need more of. Right now, books (fic and nonfic) by Indian, Pakastani, Afghani, and other mid-east regional authors (from there or those who were born there and emigrated elsewhere) are getting published in mainstream fic and are proving very popular across broad reader demographics, which encourages more of that sort of book.

The tell someone what to do tends to come from advice that says what you should do. And from the tone of posts that come across as rants rather than thoughtful essays. And as differentiating between those is subjective, it's not for me to say which is what.