Racism

Comment of the Weekend: growing up multiracial

Media, Racism
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One multiracial child responds to that Louisiana judge’s foolishness about not wanting to perform mixed marriages because it’s so hard on the children not being normal:

White people are funny like that; they think they are the normal, and everyone else is “multicultural” and “ethnic” and strange; they think they are the only way to be. But we outnumber you, you know. Right now, we outnumber you in volume of numbers – I’m an Indian woman, one in twelve of living humans is Indian and female, and one in six is brown (and stands up straight, and is strong, intelligent and beautiful, despite not being pale like you). Right now, we outnumber you; mathematically, we are the normal, and it’s only accidents of history that make you so proud of being white. (Even if we weren’t, we sing, dance and tan better than you. Deal.)

As you can see from the handsome picture on the left hand side of your screen, I’m somebody who has grown up seeing people who look like me on television, in the movies, in magazines and so on all the time, whose race, skin colour and gender were defined as normal by the media I grew up with. Worse, I grew up in the most whitebread part of the most whitebread province in the Netherlands, where a full three quarters of the average school class would be blonde haired, blue aryans and the rest would have dark hair. And although the reality of life even there has become much more …colourful… the media have lagged behind. White men are still the norm, anybody else the exception. it’s no wonder that we think we are normal, as people like m grew up with the priviledge of seeing our natural assumption of being the norm affirmed all around us.

But even the flawed reflection in the media of our multicultural societies has made that illusion less and less easy to maintain. The US never was a purely “white” country, the UK and Holland haven’t been one for a long time, but for a lot of people, like that idiot in Louisiana, this is a hard truth to swallow. Especially when the world turned scary again in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the War on Iraq and locally, the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh. This fear and discomfort forms what I think is the reason for Geert Wilders’ popularity, as well as a more widespread change of attitude in the Netherlands.



The Netherlands has long had a reputation for being a tolerant nation, but this tolerance has quickly disappeared in the past decade. It’s not just Islamophobia, though that’s a large part of it, but it’s a general shift in attitude towards all foreigners. There’s much less willingness to accomodate strangers, less pride in being able to speak to them in their own language and a more explicit demand that they learn our language if they come over here — and that goes for Moroccan as well as English immigrants.

The governmental commercial shown above is a good example of this new attitude. It shows several “obviously” foreign people (i.e., not-white) trying to ask questions in their own languages of an authority figure only to be stared at uncomprendingly before the patronising voiceover starts talking about how much easier it is to learn Dutch. The focus is on the duty of these people to adapt, not on the government’s role in helping them adapt.

This change in attitude is widespread, not limited to Wilders voters, — I’ve heard plenty of supposedly liberal people saying that of course everybody who lives here should learn Dutch and that the government shouldn’t waste money offering information in any other language. I’m not sure what can be done to change this attitude again, but it would help if the government didn’t encourage it in its propaganda.

Playing the race card: not actually fun

Activism, Racism
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Nora explains that, no, she actually doesn’t like to become angry and outraged at casual racism in science fiction:

But I don’t understand why anyone would think I want to do this. Why anyone would think I like watching my blood pressure numbers inch up week by week. Why anyone would think I happily, eagerly “play the race card”, whatever that means — or that doing so would actually benefit me in any way. Why anyone would think I’m glad to spend hours of each week reading up about the latest imbroglios, writing responses to them, posting clandestine reviews of problematic books (and worrying about how those reviews will come back to bite me on the ass), preparing for difficult panels at cons, and bracing myself for uncomfortable interactions at every single networking event I attend. Why anyone would think I gleefully await the next instance of a stranger feeling up my hair, or a favorite author showing his ass on race and gender issues, or an established pro shouting at me that this field is a meritocracy dammit, or an even more established pro using the n-word on a woman just like me. I’m boggled by the idea that some people think I find this work desirable, much less fun, when it hurts me every damn day.

Quoted largely because I can lose sight of this too easily myself, as you can see from looking at that handsome picture on the top right, I don’t need to deal with this unless I want to. Others do not have that luxury.

Oh No Lois Bujold No!

Racism, science fiction
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There’s a lot of wisdom in the old saws that readers should not meet the writers of their favourite books nor writers respond to criticism, as has been proven once again by what started as an enthusiastic review on the Tor website when Jo Walton shared why she like Patricia Wrede’s Thirteenth Child. The trouble is, Thirteenth Child, as Jo puts it takes place in “an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.”

Which may very well be an interesting setup for a story, but quite understandably rubbed quite a few people the wrong way as a story that has magicked away the native inhabitants of America to make way for the happy guilt free adventures of white folk. Patricia Wrede may have used this idea in all innocence, but as a writer in a country that has been founded on the murder of its original inhabitants and which has a long tradition of ignoring and silencing the voices of the survivors, of denying there was a history before the Pilgrim Fathers, that’s not enough. In the end the Thirteenth Child still fits neatly in this tradition of denial and for many people, including myself, this is enough to dismiss it without reading.

As you might expect, once the first few people expressed their discomfort with the premise of this novel, you got the usual debate between them and those who saw little if any problem with it. For many people a story’s just a story and any attempts to “politicise” it is scary or wrong. In short, we got Racefail II: the Quickening. All of which wouldn’t be so bad but then Lois Bujold showed up and well, made a fool of herself…

First she told people to just read the book, then she accused people of wanting “a sermon” as well as having made up their mind. Her next post was the worst though, patting herself on the back for doing something to improve the world while saying her critics just talked. Things went worse from there…

I’m sure Lois Bujold only jumped in to defend a friend from being, as she saw it, unfairly slandered, but unfortunately the way she went about it only confirmed the worst suspicions of people already suspicious of white sf/fantasy writers due to the huge clusterfuck that was Racefail 2009. The discussion about Thirteenth Child isn’t really about the book or its writer, but about a pattern in fantasy and science fiction that excludes people of colour, whether unconsciously or otherwise. To deny or belittle this as Bujold did doesn’t help. So yeah, she didn’t do herself or Wrede much good jumping in and I like her slightly less for it.

Perhaps the most unhelpful suggestion in this discussion was the idea that people need to “read the book” before they can criticise it. I’ll end this post with Bruce Baugh explaining why:

But that makes me quite an outlier in the hardcore of fandom. Boasts about the size of unread-book stacks remain ubiquitous, the subject of amused consideration. And yet people who take a self-deprecating pride in all the books they’re not reading keep insisting that others who decline to read this book here are clearly being cowards and wimps or the slaves of political correctness, because otherwise of course they’d be reading this one and never mind their own tastes and judgments.

I am not impressed. At least not favorably.

The fact is that we do all make our selections, and so nearly as I know nobody actually reads purely and only the works they believe are most meritorious by some general standard. We skip classics for the current fad; we read for comfort, and cheap thrills, and prurient curiosity, and lots of other reasons. And you know, this is all quite okay, because as a species we can’t run in top mental gear all the time. People who are stuck unable to take mental vacations succumb to a variety of physical and psychological impairments, and doing things that make rest (mental as well as physical) impossible is torture.

That BNP membership list

Racism, wingnuts
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Via Lancaster Unity: entire membership of the BNP online:

Hands up if you feel your human rights threatened

Not only does the data, now available online, include the entire membership list with full names (and former names where there have been changes for any reason), addresses, contact numbers, email addresses and in many cases the member’s age, particularly where those members are under eighteen. Yes, that’s right. This list includes members as young as fourteen, male and female. Where a family membership is bought and paid for, the whole family is listed.

As if this isn’t bad enough, the notes that are attached to many of the entries leave a lot of the members open to difficulties in their jobs, some of them being in the armed forces or the police and the BNP too – an illegal combination, and where not illegal, frequently frowned upon. Other members are noted as construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, police officers, company directors and teachers among many others.

Like this wasn’t enough, the BNP has also listed hobbies or interests where for some reason they are deemed relevant. Thus we have short-wave radio hams, amateur historians, pagans, line-dancers and even a witch (male).

The BNP and/or allied organisations have for years been spying on and outing British leftists on their R*dw*tch site, which in the past has led people to be beaten up because they were featured on it. It must be karma that this is now happening to themselves. Of course, despite the BNP always wanting to play the persecuted victims, the likelyhood of BNP members being beaten up because they appeared on this list is small. A lot of people in sensitive positions will have some explaining to about their membership.

So we shouldn’t shed too many crocodile tears about this leakage by the way. These are people who have not just decided to vote for a racist party, which can –barely– be excused as protest voting, but are so hardened in their racism as to join the BNP. These people are not just a theoretical danger: they act on their odious policies and the BNP has always had ties to fascist terrorist groups like Combat 18. If you’re Black or Asian or gay or in some other way a target of the BNP, this list is a godsend, as it can help you avoid these people. Thanks to whoever leaked this lists these fascists can no longer hide themselves. And they’re very upset about it, as this comment thread on Northwest Nationalists shows.

Can’t get the list yourself (it’s on bittorrent via Mininova and Piratebay)? Then use the very web 2.0 BNP proximity search. Enter your postcode and see if there’s a BNP member living near you…

Monkeys at the zoo

Auntie Beeb, Racism
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Owen Hatherley on what the BBC’s reducing of the experience of the “white working class” to having a bee in one’s bonnet about immigrants means:

This middle-class reductiveness (pioneered in Michael Collins’ sentimentalist The Likes of Us) is something that I find particularly infuriating, as it constantly declares that the white working class that make up most of my family – mostly politically active, with an autodidact or two amongst them, committed to working class solidarity and education – don’t exist, never did exist. Similarly, the history of the East End has to be rewritten in a way that ensures that the Great Dock Strike, Cable Street, decades as one of the few places in Britain where ‘Communist’ wasn’t a pejorative, are all secondary to a Sun reading bestiary. All particularly grotesque in an area that has seen the mass social cleansing that is gentrification expel working class inhabitants, black or white, off to the peripheries.

That is perhaps the core appeal of this whole white season: watching monkeys at the zoo slinging poo, only in this case the monkeys wear flat caps or hoodies and hurl racial abuse. Both the vicarious thrill of being racist by proxie and the moral superiority of knowing that you aren’t like those people, as if the readership of the Daily “welfare cheat bogus asylum seekers bearing aids force drop in house prices” Mail isn’t largely middle class. The racism and bigotry of a large part of the English bourgeoisie projected on the working classes.

The real plight of the working classes and its causes is not investigated. Asians riot and whites vote BNP and that’s just the way it is, and that misjudged racial visionary Enoch Powell saw it would be this way. Ignored remains the virtual destruction of Britain’s industries from 1950 onwards, the hollowing out of the unions, the abandonment of the working class –white or otherwise– by all political parties, the development of a two tier health system, a two tier eductation system, a two tier…

If only the BBC had taken a real look at what has happened to the working classes in the forty years since Powell, instead of falling into the same old easy middle class cliches, instead of looking at monkeys at the zoo.