Mary Anne Mohanraj gets you up to speed, part I

[prog]

After choosing to avoid direct exposure to RaceFail2009, I enjoyed this summary, by Mary Ann Mohanraj, of some of the key points that have bubbled up.

Much of this sounds rather familiar to me, and I recognize that this is directly due to some of y'all. I've been quietly reading your writing over the last year or three on, for example, what "white privilege" means, and what it doesn't mean, despite what people tend to infer from the term alone. If I've been tacitly absorbing all this, you can assume that many others are, too. So feel free to feel good about that!

(Oh, and please consider comments-reading on the linked post to be more optional than usual. Because: racefail.)

Comments

[ruthling.livejournal.com]

yeah, all of Scalzi's posts/comment threads on this have been useful to me, even if horrifically time consuming. Other aspects of the racefail thing I'd seen before made me too confused, mad, weirded out for me to be able to intake them, mostly in that I saw a lot of people getting really hurt and I didn't really know why.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

One of my kids was commenting the other day how being born white, English-speaking and Canadian was such so hugely fortuitous, identifying "white privilege" without really having a name for it. I'm going to point this out to him, as it might give him a bit of perspective on how his good fortune looks to the majority of the planetary population.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Her part 2 is up now, with specific advice for writers on writing people of other ethnicities and cultures. This is interesting in that it's more personal, and actually somewhat at variance with some other such essays I've seen; parts of it could also be taken as critical of Scalzi's own efforts in this direction (he's talked before about his tendency to write purposefully-race-neutral characters and had been somewhat surprised when it was considered problematic).

It'll be interesting to see how it's received apart from Scalzi's readership.