I do not appreciate being part of a "teaching moment"...

[roseembolism]

I was surprised to see that RaceFail 09 was still going on, and saddened if not surprised to see that the conflict had escalated in the way that fannish conflicts do, to the point of the point of legal and other threats, and even the outing of an a LJer's real name out of revenge.  More and more overtly racist comments and responding anger, and all that.  Not surprising at all, really when fans and authors are involved.

But I was more than a little annoyed to find out that Elizabeth Bear didn't actually agree with the critics of her writing, but  was doing a little teaching experiment to show how to deal with people of color when they complain about their portrayal in one's stories.  And oh gosh, she's totally saddened by how things blew up from her oh-so-generous attempt to be inclusive.

I've lost my sympathy for Ms. Bear in all this.  It's a bit like walking into a domestic argument, and you've been nodding your head at what one person says, yeah, she seems reasonable, it's sad how it all exploded this way...and then finding out you've been played. 

I agree with the poster who said this is no longer RaceFail 09, but more like Race Clusterfuck Katamari 09.

Comments

[mithriltabby]

*shrug* I haven’t been following the kerfuffle. To me, it looks like she wanted to try to navigate the minefield of race issues in our country and move things one more tiny increment toward a better state of affairs, and she put a foot wrong. Boom. The first thing to do when someone steps on a mine is: don’t set off more mines. It looks like she knows she made a mistake and is attempting to learn from it; are there better outcomes than that from this kind of situation?

I’ll be surprised if there’s even a panel on this at BayCon.