{"id":2651,"date":"2010-12-08T10:23:36","date_gmt":"2010-12-08T15:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2010\/12\/08\/racefail-not-just-for-science-fiction-anymore\/"},"modified":"2010-12-08T10:24:48","modified_gmt":"2010-12-08T15:24:48","slug":"racefail-not-just-for-science-fiction-anymore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2010\/12\/08\/racefail-not-just-for-science-fiction-anymore\/","title":{"rendered":"Racefail: not just for science fiction anymore"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nRoxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories<\/cite>, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\nWhat I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story about a mechanic, to bring in that working class perspective and there was a story set in Africa, but most of the stories were uniformly about rich white people (often rich, white old men) doing rich white people things like going on safari or playing poker and learning a painful lesson or lamenting old age in Naples. Each of these stories was wonderful and I don\u2019t regret reading them, but the demographic narrowness is troubling. It\u2019s not right that anyone who isn\u2019t white, straight, or a man, reading a book like this, which is fairly representative of the work being published by the \u201cmajor\u201d journals, is going to have a hard time finding experiences that might, in some way, mirror their own. It\u2019s not right that the best writing in the country, each year, is writing about white people by white people with a few splashes of color or globalism (Africa! Japan! the hood!) for good effect. Things have certainly improved over the years but that\u2019s not saying much.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nAt the same time, she also find her own succes being questioned<\/a> for the usual reasons:\n<\/p>\n

\nAnytime you achieve even a little bit of success there\u2019s going to be someone who suggests you earned that success because you\u2019re a person of color (or a woman, or both). Even though you might know you achieved your success because you\u2019re awesome, because you worked hard for years, because you beat down doors until one fell down, you are stuck with the niggling doubt that they\u2019re right. You worry that everyone thinks that way so you can never really enjoy your success, you always push yourself to do better, to do more, to be the best, to be so good they have to stop saying it\u2019s just because you\u2019re a person of color. It is exhausting.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nAll of which confirms the superiority of science fiction and fantasy fandom, as\n<\/p>\n

\nMost of 2009, the science fiction\/fantasy community was embroiled in a contentious debate about race that was so extensive and ongoing that it even got its own name and wiki: RaceFail, but hey, at least the SF\/F community is talking about these issues which cannot be said for other writing communities.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\nWhich is surely the most important point to take away from these two posts. More seriously, it’s strangely heartening to see that the problems sf and fantasy struggle with (the representation of non-white\/male\/straight voices and viewpoints, the problems with appopriation, systemic racism and underrepresentation of people of colour and so on) are not unique to it. It means that it’s not impossible for science fiction\/fantasy to change for the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roxane Gay reads this years Best American Short Stories, finds almost every story in the anthology was about rich or nearly rich white people: What I felt most while reading BASS was a profound sense of absence. Sure there was a story about black people (written by Danielle Evans, coincidentally) and there was a story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,230,137,199,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature","category-art","category-fantasy","category-racism","category-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2652,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2651\/revisions\/2652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}