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]

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.