From the American Library Association: "To Kill a Mockingbird has been challenged and banned nationwide because it contains racial slurs and adult themes."

For more about Banned Books Week, see Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read at the the American Library Association's site.

Pattern recognition: A dialogue on racism in fan communities

The article is from Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 3 (2009). You will likely recognize some of the dialog participants.

(A tip of the hat to facetofcathy on the racism_101 LJ comm for posting about this.)

Photos by Kyle Cassidy

On one level, lots of geeky people having a great time. I wish I had been able to go. On another level, although I needed more than one hand to count the number of geeky people of color whose portraits were captured, I did not need two.

(The fact that the number of fans of color is actually quite large has already been established, so yes, other mechanisms are at work here.)

Well, artillie was right to be suspicious of the publisher's response in the case of the cover of Justine Larbalestier's book Liar. As unusualmusic has pointed out on Alas! A Blog and Angry Black Woman - yes, there is now going to be a young African American woman on the cover, but in point of fact, she still doesn't look like the protagonist of the story, and the cover is still problematic.

This just in from the LJ racism_101 community:

A New Look for 'Liar'
"Proof of the power of the web: Bloomsbury Children’s Books has told Publishers Weekly exclusively that it will change the controversial cover of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar ... 'We regret that our original creative direction for Liar—which was intended to symbolically reflect the narrator’s complex psychological makeup—has been interpreted by some as a calculated decision to mask the character’s ethnicity,' Bloomsbury officials said ... "
- Publisher's Weekly

OK, cynics - how'd you like them apples? Yes, protesting can help!

This is why Science Fiction can’t have nice things

(A post on Alas! Blog on Amptoons, by The Angry Black Woman (also cross-posted on her own blog))

Yesterday I showed the Young Lady, who is now 17, a piece from IBARW 4, called Unlearning Racism Adventure #1. I read aloud this part: "Comedian W. Kamau Bell notes that if 70% or more of the people in a place are white, it’s possible that place is racist. That place is my life. In Oakland, California, only about 35% of the people are white. So why couldn’t I think of anyone to bring with me to La Pena get the 2 for 1 discount for coming with someone of a different race?"

I said to my daughter, "This was pretty much my life too, until quite recently."

She said, warmly, "My life isn't like that at all! I could have taken K-. K- is black, and she is my friend!" She listed several more friends of color she could have brought. They were Asian: she hangs out with the Robotics Team, which skews heavily Asian and Jewish.

So, not perfect diversity - but better than her parents' generation. She then went on, musing: "It's hard to know what to call people sometimes. Some people say 'black' is disrespectful. Other people don't want to be called African-American, because they're Haitian or something and are proud of that. You have to get to know them."

Via too many good folk to list:

"Oyate is a Native organization working to see that our lives and histories are portrayed honestly, and so that all people will know our stories belong to us. For Indian children, it is as important as it has ever been for them to know who they are and what they come from. For all children, it is time to know and acknowledge the truths of history. Only then will they come to have the understanding and respect for each other that now, more than ever, will be necessary for life to continue ....

"Our hope is that by making many excellent books available to encourage many more, especially from Native writers and artists. Oyate, our organization’s name, is the Dakota word for people. It was given to us by a Dakota friend."

If Oyate can raise $5000 by August 1 (that's Saturday - the day after tomorrow), they'll receive a matching grant (page at link includes donation information) that will allow them to upgrade their Web site (which is already a great educational and activist resource).

Even small contributions add up. Please think about helping.

Looking for My Particular Brand of Unicorns
"There are talented actors of Persian or Middle Eastern descent in America. They would really like to play roles that do not involve terrorism. Us Middle Eastern people would like to see them play roles that do not involve terrorism. Why? Because media representation of our people fucking matters ... Because we're the ones who live the day to day reality of facing the ignorant stereotypes perpetuated by the media about our people. Because we're the ones who have to say with gritted teeth, no, I don't know any terrorists, or no, my family aren't fundamentalists, or no, that's a fucking offensive stereotype." - yasaman

Identity and Being a Person of Color
"My identity is based on stories, food, shared experiences, and all the things that make up culture. It's also really *specific*. ... All of that complexity and specificity is hand waved when I talk about the experiences of being a POC. I do think we share a lot of similar experiences, not the least of which is the toxicity of racism. That said, in the nitty gritty, there are differences in how racism is used to hurt us. More and more I'm feeling drawn towards talking to other POC about not just the things we share, but the ways in which it is different." - sparkymonster

Ethical Dating: Racist Interracial Relationships and Colorism
"Occasionally, interracial relationships are based on “exotic fetishism” of the “other.” The person of color becomes the embodiment of the majority person’s fetish. Instead of accepting the equality of the person of color, they become an object of what they desire. This has manifested itself in yellow fever (Asian fetish), the stereotype of the Latin lothario and the priapism of African-American men ... I’ll never forget the Jdate profile of a biracial Jewish (Black/Ashkenaz) male who explicitly stated that if the goal of a woman who persued him was to rebel from her Ashkenazi family, then they should seek a relationship elsewhere. I always wondered, what did he experience to make him state that so directly in his profile?" - A Mixedjewgirl World

Maunderings & Ponderings - My America
"My America is my sister living in a Chattanooga suburb in northwestern Georgia, just like thousands of other Mexicans.
My America is having nephews and nieces who are part Hawaiian, Chinese, Irish, Swedish, and Ashkenazi.
My America is having fewer and fewer people ask if my best friend's husband's family was okay with their marriage (because she's black).
... My America is larger than just one idea of who we should be." - hermetic

Extracts from the IBARW 4 bookmarks at Delicious. Read More ...

Daddy, don't you know that everything moves in cycles?
"... it's always about creating our stories and finding our voices, until we live in a world where we can be in our own stories, have our faces on the covers of our own books, and be more than someone else's lies." - yeloson

IBARW, Carl Brandon's Open Letter, and the cost of anger
"... 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 ... ." - nojojojo

It's Not The Same Thing (Or, Leave Your Irish Ancestors In Their Graves)
"... Like it or not, to be white in the U.S. is to have the privilege of being unmarked, and those of us with Mac or O' in front of our names enjoy that privilege right now just as much as those of us named Smith or Walker (and enjoy it more than many people named Smith or Walker, for that matter) ... " - evilprodigy

Extracts from the IBARW 4 bookmarks at Delicious. Read More ...

It's that time of year ... .

How to participate:
 

1. Announce the week in your blog
    
2. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of color, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back here is highly appreciated!) The optional theme this year is "global."
    
3. Let us know by bookmarking your post on Delicious with "for:ibarw," or comment with a link to your post in one of the link-collecting posts.

If you want to change your default user icon for the week as a way of showing support, and aren't into making user icons, there are plenty of them already available for you to snag.

The IBARW delicious site is here, with current and previous years' entries tagged and organized.

See the IBARW community site for more information.

So I found the following while poking around in some of the things rachelmanija had linked in her post about the on-the-cover whitewashing of the lead character in Justine Larbelastier's novel Liar. And coincidentally, I had already found it earlier today, on the previous break, when I was looking for people talking about Verb Noire on the Intarwebs. Clearly, Someone Is Trying to Tell Me Something:

White Readers Meet Black Authors
http://www.welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/
"Your official invitation into the African American section of the bookstore! A sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted plea for EVERYBODY to give a black writer a try."

To me, one of the strangest things about the reactions of some of the SF&F fans to Racefail (one summary) and Mammothfail (one summary) is their complete lack of willingness to try to put themselves in the shoes of the fans of color who have been hurt and angered by these incidents.

Think about it: we're talking fans of a genre that considers it a pleasure to read or watch works that put the reader into the minds of fantastic or alien creatures. Whether you're talking about Vulcans, Kzinti, and Atevi, or or elves, dwarves, and youkai, science fiction and fantasy readers like to get inside different types of minds.

Or at least, they say they do. But if that is the case, why do some of them find it so hard to get inside the heads of members of their own species who happen to have a different life-experience? If you're going to get involved and excited about the troubles and tribulations of fictional beings, the least you could do would be to make the same effort with your fellow human beings in this world we share - and not greet each exclamation of pain and dismay with "I don't see why that's a problem" or "It's just a story - stop whining."

Here are some stories to get you started. Some of them may be familiar, but perhaps others of them may be new to you:

• Stories of Native American children and parents, and their encounters with the usual U.S. school curriculum and "classic" U.S. children's books, among other things
• Many, many stories by people of color the world over are reviewed and tagged for you at 50books_poc, so that if SF is your passion, you can find that, and so on.
• The Remyth Project, in which people of color take back the myths that other groups have appropriated and use them creatively.
• The justly famous essay Shame, in which African American writer Pam Noles takes us back to her fantasy- and SF-loving childhood.
• I Didn’t Dream of Dragons, in which the Indian-born author remembers, with love and pain, the effect of reading Western mainstream fantasy during her childhood.

And throughout the day today, at the newly created community Fans of Color United, you'll find many more stories posted.

Stories are important. Stories, in fact, are life. Read. Learn. Grow.

See this.

I keep running back to see how it's growing. One of the loveliest things about it is how many of these fans got the bug from their parents or other family members.

(Do read and follow the original poster's caveats/directions in the main post, however, if you are tempted to respond.)

I have not been posting here very much, and I am way behind in replies. A fair amount of my online time has been taken up with the RaceFail09 situation. I am having a lot of trouble looking away. The draw is irresistible enough that I really have to be careful at work. On Friday, I took a little break before the final push of the day, and when I looked up, it was time to go. So I had to spend the first 90 minutes of what should have been the weekend making up for it.

Part of this is the "train wreck" fascination. There were a number of people involved in this situation - authors, columnists, editors - who use communication as their means of earning a living. And yet somehow they were managing to dig themselves deeper and deeper with every statement (summary here). But the main part of it is the eloquence of the people who have either been hurt by this or outraged by this or both.

Edited to fix wonky links. Thanks, stoneself!

I've been reading some remarkably well-written posts on this subject this week, and feeling sad and uncomfortable about whether I'm being part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

Copy this sentence into your LiveJournal if you're in a heterosexual marriage, and you don't want it "protected" by the bigots who think that gay marriage hurts it somehow.

One of the things that is striking about most English-language story-telling endeavors - whether we're talking written fiction, comics, television, or movies - is how uniformly Caucasian the casts of characters are. And if people of color appear, they're in stereotyped roles: the Native American tracker, or the black housekeeper. If the setting is historical, the justification is "that's the way it was then." For IBARW, here's a little online research about the Old West of the United States, and why it's actually more historically accurate to have people of African, Native American, Hispanic, and other types of descent among a cast of cowboys, gunslingers, general store owners, and other classic Western archetypes during the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.

It's already Tuesday and I haven't posted squat about this. I fail. I have a sort-of article in process, which I hope I will be able to post tomorrow.

If you haven't run into this before: this is a week to use your LJ, blog, or other online journal to consider, talk about, and otherwise air the subject of racism in the world. Real-life experiences, literature, history, current news: it's all grist for the mill.

There is an LJ community for IBARW right here, and it says that if you want to participate, you should:

1. Announce the week in your blog.
2. If you use a blogging system that allows post icons/pictures, switch your default icon to either an official IBARW icon, or one which you feel is appropriate. To get an official IBARW icon, you may modify one of yours yourself or ask someone to do so. Here's a round up of IBARW icons.
3. Post about race and/or racism: in media, in life, in the news, personal experiences, writing characters of color, portrayals of race in fiction, review a book on the subject, etc. (Linking back [to the IBARW community] is highly appreciated!) The optional theme this year is intersectionality.

For more information, you should check out the community, which will tell you about getting your IBARW blog entry included in the IBARW del.icio.us account and on the IBARW round-up posts.

No, I did not realize that it was Blog Action Day! Fortunately, my librarian colleague Abbie told me about it.

I don't claim to be a tremendously good environmentalist, but we try. Here's a quick list of things we do manage to do, without feeling like we're putting ourselves through the wringer at all. I realize, however, that a lot of these things are possible only because we live in an area that has moderately good support for these kinds of efforts. But a lot of time, people think "nothing I can do will make a difference anyway, and it's all such a pain." It can make a difference, and it doesn't have to be a pain.