Dream with Our Eyes Open

(The band formerly known as the Dixie Checks.)

You might find that today* is a good day to donate to the Carl Brandon Society or Con or Bust or the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund. See John Scalzi's blog for a round up about the matching that's going on, and Jim C. Hines' blog (jimhines) for related news.

*Yes, today is nearly over. Sorry, it's been a long one. :-(

After trying and failing three times to post this in debunking_white (I understand that it was going to be screened, but I couldn't get it to post at all - it kept trying to make me log in to LJ when I was already logged in), I figured I'd just post it here.

In comments on one post, someone from the U.K. had asked about the current status of the KKK. The Southern Poverty Law Center is an anti-hate group that (among other things) tracks the activities of groups like the Klan and makes the information public. Their page on the KKK is here. The KKK is still, sadly, quite active.

The SPLC has lots of info on this subject. See, for example, the Hate Groups Map.

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.)

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!

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.

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!

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.

Today I'd like to introduce my favorite science fiction and fantasy artists/illustrators: Leo and Diane Dillon (who are an interracial couple) and Kinuko Y. Craft (who is Asian American).

I think one of the most common reasons why well-meaning people might not try to take action against an issue as big as racism is a simple feeling of being defeated before we start. There's a tendency to think, "The forces of prejudice are so massive and have such inertia that nothing I can do will make any sort of difference."

But I think that in this, as in so many other things, small steps should not be discounted or dismissed.

You might want to ask yourself, "To how many people do I need to make a difference before I can count it as worth while?"

Is "one" really too small a number?

Maybe not for a start.

I am talking to myself here as much as to anyone else. Once upon a time, perhaps more than 20 years ago, I made the day for one young man at a science fiction convention simply by making it clear that there were people of color among the pre-made player characters I had prepared for a roleplaying game I was running in Open Gaming. I don't know exactly what was going through his head when he grinned widely and exclaimed "He's black! This dude is black!" but it was something pleasant.

But now I think, wouldn't it be even better if a young person of color wasn't astonished to find him- or herself among the characters or a game - or a book - or a comic, because it was the norm?

I need to do more. I need to do my part so that the day I've just described will arrive.

International Blog Against Racism Week: August 6-12, 2007