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

[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.