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

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

My setting is vaguely early to mid 17th century Polish so I'm guessing that it would be inappropriate to have a lot of African faces there, though Poland at that time seems to have been very accommodationg to other creeds and desoite being largely Catholic there's a high proportion of Jews and Moslems - at least in the major cities - and Gypsies , of course. (And I do have a Rom character.)

My African character, Dahnay, is not in there as tokenism. She's Ethiopian, a warrior, tall, strong, athletic and loyal and (surgically) sexless. She's quiet until she needs not to be and has a quality of stillness that almost makes her disappear magically at times (though there's no magic involved.) She's very dignified and the one woman who my main character, Jarek, can't have, but what she can't change, she copes with. I like her a lot.