maychorian | with their crooked stares

For the interested,

jujuberry136 has good thoughts about those Season 6 Criminal Minds casting spoilers. Well, more like good rants. But I found them very articulate and thought-provoking and I agree with everything she said.

In her extremely excellent link round-up on the recent unfunny business,

amazonziti said something in this thread (which is also an excellent example of derailment) that really impressed me, and I felt compelled to share it here.

This incident is nothing like the first of its kind. These things tend to follow a pattern. A white person is racist -- usually unintentionally, but always hurtfully. A person of color points this out. The white person tries to shrug off personal responsibility. The person of color doesn't like that. And then all the bystanders take the white person's side -- certainly she was racist, but think about how she feels!

The idea that a white perpetrator of racism deserves as much empathy and consideration from me as a PoC victim of racism is absolutely preposterous, especially because there is never just one person of color who is harmed by an incident of racism. My attention and energy and feeling belong to the people who have been hurt, not the person who did the hurting and now wants comforting for how badly they feel.

The idea that I, as a person of color, am obliged to respond to hurtful, shocking, angering incidents of racism with patience and politeness is also preposterous. And offensive. All this sympathy you have for this racist white person who didn't mean to hurt anybody is sympathy wasted. What I hear you saying is that the hurt a person experiences as a consequence of being called out as racist is equivalent to, or trumps, the hurt a person experiences as a victim of racism.

I, as an anti-racist person of color, am not in fact obliged to spend my life making racist white people feel better about themselves. Nor am I obliged to guide them gently and inoffensively through a sanitized education on racism, anti-racism and white privilege. If you would like to spend your time doing this, rather than crying at me about how hard it is to be privileged, white and racist, you are more than welcome. I myself will be putting my energy into making people of color feel better about themselves, and making the internet safer for them.

Please take your tone argument and leave.

Yes, that about sums it up. Why must we--in fandom, in politics, in real life, everywhere--always pile injury on injury by being hurtful (in our attitudes, our defensiveness, our misplaced sympathy) AFTER something hurtful has already happened? This is a stupid thing, my friends. A stupid, stupid thing.

And if you think that I or anyone else who is continuing to blog about this issue several days later are "dogpiling" on the person who started this current round of discussions (whose name I have deliberately not mentioned here because THAT'S NOT THE POINT), if you think I am being self-righteous or holier than thou because I feel compelled to add my voice to the small chorus saying "This is not okay.", if you don't like anything I write about at any time, no matter what it is... If any of that applies, feel free to defriend me so you won't have to see it on your flist. You can still track my "fanfiction" or "supernatural" tags if that's what you're interested in, or come back every now and then to see if I've posted anything that will interest you. I won't hold it against you and in fact I would prefer that you make a clean cut with me whenever I do something you don't like. Any time. I totally mean it.

ETA: And here is a copy of a comment I made on a different post, because I think it applies and I want to make it clear that I'm not just quoting someone--this is how I feel, too.

I've read the excerpts of THIS story, the one that's being talked about right now, and they are indeed offensive and hurtful. The premise itself is hurtful. The author's notes and the very mindset that can lead to someone writing this are hurtful. She HURT people with this story. I don't believe for a second that she did it on purpose, but the fact remains that her thoughtless actions caused HARM for real, living people. In our community, the fandom community. THAT is what people are talking about.

Yes, I have no doubt that some people are being hurtful and insulting and offensive back to her, and that also is wrong. But I really don't think that this current round of discussions can be classified as a "witch hunt" or anything similar. Maybe I'm just not in the right corner of fandom, but all the posts I've seen on this subject have been more about the issues than the person at hand. Yes, this story is used as an example, but often that's just a stepping-off point to start talking about the larger issues at play. People need to know what is harmful and inappropriate. We learn by sharing and talking.

It's unfortunate for the writer that she is becoming an example in something so much larger than herself that casts her in such a very unfavorable light. But her embarrassment is not more important than the pain of those she hurt or the need of others to understand how this happened and how to prevent it in the future. For the record--I fall into the latter group. I was not personally offended by the story, but I saw how it could be hurtful, and I am doing my best to understand the whys and hows. And how not to do it myself. This discussion is valuable for me, and while I feel sorry for the author, I am not passing up an opportunity to learn.