![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a plea to the sf-f fans
Mar. 8th, 2009 01:08 pmI'm going to make this very short.
If you're in SF/F fandom, or you are consuming SF/F content (especially books) and you haven't been following RaceFail'09 at all, I'm here to tell you that you should. Provided for you: Excellent summaries of the key events as well as a comprehensive list of links from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rydra_wrong. Please don't say it's too much to take in; please don't say that you're sick of listening to people bitching about race; please don't say that this is your happy place and you don't want real world issues intruding. Or, if you do feel that way, then please defriend me. I don't care if you have anything to say about or don't, but if you don't care about the experience of fans of color in SF/F, and you're an SF/F fan, then you don't care about my experience, and I'd rather we just stop pretending.
The calls for people to speak out are, I think, more directed at people within the professional literary side of SF-F, than at white folks in fandom, and I'm not really expecting my flist to have all these eloquent things to say about race. But I do expect that you get interested in it, see what's been going on and try to follow it as best you can. It's a very large issue—much larger than the usual fandom imbroglios, because it touches on how professionals behave, how the content gets created, and who gets to talk about it. I, for one, would rather not have another conversation where I say, "so how about this racefail?" and I get "oh, I haven't been following, it's so long, la!" reply. Because that reply, I'm willing to say, is privileged; you aren't following because you don't think it has anything to do with you. And I'm here to say, it does.
If you're in SF/F fandom, or you are consuming SF/F content (especially books) and you haven't been following RaceFail'09 at all, I'm here to tell you that you should. Provided for you: Excellent summaries of the key events as well as a comprehensive list of links from
rydra_wrong. Please don't say it's too much to take in; please don't say that you're sick of listening to people bitching about race; please don't say that this is your happy place and you don't want real world issues intruding. Or, if you do feel that way, then please defriend me. I don't care if you have anything to say about or don't, but if you don't care about the experience of fans of color in SF/F, and you're an SF/F fan, then you don't care about my experience, and I'd rather we just stop pretending.The calls for people to speak out are, I think, more directed at people within the professional literary side of SF-F, than at white folks in fandom, and I'm not really expecting my flist to have all these eloquent things to say about race. But I do expect that you get interested in it, see what's been going on and try to follow it as best you can. It's a very large issue—much larger than the usual fandom imbroglios, because it touches on how professionals behave, how the content gets created, and who gets to talk about it. I, for one, would rather not have another conversation where I say, "so how about this racefail?" and I get "oh, I haven't been following, it's so long, la!" reply. Because that reply, I'm willing to say, is privileged; you aren't following because you don't think it has anything to do with you. And I'm here to say, it does.
