jlh | Not helpful for pilots, either (Reply)

I'm using my chibi icon—it's a chibi of me, drawn by

bhanesidhe—because I'm going to talk about race for a moment, so it's fair to say, I identify as biracial, or in somewhat ironic moods a "tragic mulatto". (Great thanks, as KO would say, to Carrie for letting me use her as an example.)

So as some of you may know there was this whole race kerfuffle in the SGA fandom—go look through back issues of

metafandom if you want to see it in action, as it went on too long and had too many feelers all over the place for me to recount here. But in the midst of all the debate, there were claims by some folks that they are "color blind."

You know who claims he's "color blind", or says, "I don't see color"? Stephen Colbert's character on The Colbert Report, who's a satire of far-right news hosts. So right there is an inkling that the term "color blind" isn't really the best "I'm not racist" statement.

Here's a parallel. My good friend

wordplay grew up in Texas, lived there much of her life. She has a really great accent, too; go listen to her phone posts. Anyway, when I think about Carrie I don't think, "Oh, I don't think of her as southern." Of course I think of her as a southerner; it's part of who she is. If I see something that is saying something about the South that she might find interesting I send her a link. (And when she sees things about race in fandom, she'll send me the link—I was aware of the SGA thing from the start because she's in SGA and sent me the link to the original post that started the whole thing.) What I don't do is think of her necessarily as any of a bunch of loaded stereotypes about southerners, like, I don't know, that she's not well educated or backwards in her thinking or a big racist or whatever. Or, for that matter, think of her as any of the more positive stereotypes like that she's more ladylike or whatever. I don't have to think of her as not-southern in order to think of her as just, well, a person.

In plainer language, if you "just don't think of Clio as black" that's disrespectful, because I am, and you shouldn't have to deny my race in order to see me as a person just like you. In his famous speech Dr. King said he didn't want people to be judged by the color of their skin, but he didn't say that he wanted everyone to forget about it. You can move beyond being essentialist—thinking that all black folks, or whateverelse folks, are the same in certain ways—without leaving race behind. Race matters, in both good ways and bad ways, and deciding that it means nothing to you isn't actually moving the conversation forward.

And it's tough for everyone! It isn't about guilt, but about knowledge. We all have stereotypes in our heads, picked up from living in our culture, and we all have to fight against them. I definitely have my heteronormative moments, my times of forgetting about simple things I could do to be more understanding of people with disabilities, and hell, my own racist moments. When it's pointed out to me I stop and think, apologize if necessary, and move on with more knowledge than I had before. Oprah has this saying, that you do the best you can with what you know, and when you know better, you do better. So, now you know.