Mely (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} coffeeandink) wrote,@ 2009-03-07 19:46:00 |
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| Entry tags: | fandom, gcadod09, race, sf/f |
The People Whites Don't See: An Open Letter to Kathryn Cramer
Dear Kathryn,
This is in response to your email of March 5, in which you said:
I am writing to inform you that I have filed a complaint withLiveJournal against you for libel, harassment, and incitement ofothers to defame and harass me.You are aware that I consider your claim “Kathryn Cramer has beenlinking my LJ to my full name on wikis and in other people’s blogcomments” defamatory and you have been given several days to retract,apologize, or in some way correct the situation. Instead you haveincited your supporters to further harassment and defamation of me.Please remove my name from all sites with which you are associated;remove all claims about what you claim are my actions; remove alllinks to my website; remove all links from your site to others makingdefamatory or harassing statements.Please cease and desist from all further harassment and defamation ofme and from encouraging others to harass and/or defame me
You are incorrect in all particulars. My statements about you are not libel or defamation because they are true. I linked to your previous statements on Web sites including your own to provide proof of my claims. In my initial statement, I explicitly requested that visitors "not engage" with you, i.e., not to speak to you, as part of my overall stance against harassment.
Violation of privacy
You have attempted to link my full legal name to my LJ in contravention of my expressed wishes on the Feminist SF wiki, your Web site, and Will Shetterly's WordPress blog. (Please see initial post.)
Defamation
Your statements about me in this series of arguments have included:
Can I just say, for the record, that I think it is wildly unethical to flame, under a fake name that you refuse to associate with your real name and history, your former boss and people you formerly worked with at a company, especially like claiming to take the moral high ground on an issue like, say, race. I am appalled, just really appalled, & even more appalled by people who think this is a legitimate use of an alias. It is not.{Screen capture courtesy of bof at unfunnybusiness.}
Blogger Kathryn Cramer said...
You know, I just found out earlier this afternoon that one of the LJ combatants, who refuses to allow her alias i.e. false name to be public used to report to and work for people she's flamed and inflamed other to criticize. I think this is wildly unethical.
Is MORE of that kind of stuff hiding under other of these aliases?
February 6, 2009 2:40 PM
- Please explain to me what in this post and this update constitutes a flame. (As a bonus, please explain how Teresa Nielsen Hayden's post is not a flame, and why you think other people would not have criticized her behavior without my input.)
- You have strongly implied here and at various places in Will Shetterly's WordPress blog (which I am not linking to because I refuse to reread its comments) that I have participated in the series of discussions called "The Great Cultural Appropriation Debate of DOOM '09" or "RaceFail09" in order "flame" the Nielsen Haydens. Please explain how this works with the following timeline:
1/15/09: My round-up of GCADOD09 posts for the Aqueduct Press blog, cross-linked at my LJ
1/19/09: Patrick Nielsen Hayden's first participation in GCADOD09
1/22/09: My second round-up of GCADOD09 posts for the Aqueduct Press blog, cross-linked at my LJ
1/26/09: Teresa Nielsen Hayden's first participation in GCADOD09
1/27/09: I post The elephant in the room, on the GCADOD09, using Teresa Nielsen Hayden's post as an example "not because it's exceptional but because it is in fact typical of how debates on race and cultural appropriation get misdirected." - Please also explain how I was hiding my identity from you
or the Nielsen Haydens in a LiveJournal, with a user profile that lists my very identifiable first name, in a post that is signed with my very identifiable first name.pnh friended a few years ago** I have no idea how often[Deleted because.]pnh reads his LJ friends list, or with what filters, and have no idea whether or not he was aware of my previous involvement in GCADOD09. - Please address any of the points I have made in "The elephant in the room," up to and including how my work history bias has distorted the actual arguments, instead of resorting to the same kinds of misdirection described in the original post.
To discover this history, all you needed to do was look at my LiveJournal, or at the Aqueduct Press blog, where you posted in the comments, and which, up until yesterday, you have had linked on your blog sidebar as "a fine feminist blog."
Harassment
You have been insisting I've been hiding my identity from people who had a right to know when talking about an LJ which has my first name on the user profile and a post which I signed with my first name. If this is all about some certain section of people in sf fandom knowing my employment history, rather than all readers of the original post knowing my employment history, I don't understand why you didn't email, IM, write snail-mail or speak face-to-face those people to begin with. If it's about the general public knowing, I don't understand why you wanted the general public to know about me only up until the time I actually sent them to your page for information.
This suggests to me that your behavior (the outing, the encouraging Will Shetterly and his commenters to out me, and the defamation) have been an attempt to punish me for posting or blackmail me into taking down my post.
Racism
You've said:
However . . . I don’t see how there can be a coherent narrative over there of what happened without a simple who said what mapped, for the most part, to actual people. It is especially bizarre to have entries for people and discussions of things said by a particular LJ handle for that person without it being allowed to make a link between the two: a kind of simulated schizophrenia.
One thing I really don’t get: if this is supposed to be about race, how is the(white) Fearless Leader able to con her followers into being interested in it when she picks a fight with (white) me? Don’t they have, like, homework at these fancy schools anymore?
And also:
While her lizardoid minions were passing through my blog this afternoon, I took a whole bunch of screen shots. They go to Harvard. They go to Princeton. They go To Columbia. They go to NYU. They go to Oxford. They go to Cambridge. (I kept doing it until I got really bored.)
While surely some of those people are on full scholarship, it strikes me as highly unlikely that all of them are. It cost two hundred grand to get an undergrad degree at Harvard these days. Downtrodden? Yeah. Right. Suuuure . . .
The racism, classism, and general illogic of the second quote have been dissected by
darkrosetiger and delux_vivens, but I wish to also point out what they probably felt was too obvious to say, which is that referring to people of color as "lizardoid minions" [eta: see also] participates in a long history of racist imagery that debases people of color by referring to them as animals, as well as a long history of racist conviction that people of color must be "minions" or "followers"; that they cannot address their own oppression, or indeed anything about their own lives, without the assistance of white people.Your actions, Kathryn, are racist not because they are an attack against me -- white women cannot be the victims of racism, which is the institutional operation of white supremacy -- but because they erase people of color from the conversation. Because it is easier for you to believe the dozens or hundreds of posts made so far in this series of arguments are about one white woman's grudge against other white people than that people of color are involved in science fiction, that they have spoken up for themselves at length and repeatedly, that race and racism in science fiction fandom, literature, media, and publishing continue to be the elephant in the room.
This elephant, Kathryn, is a metaphorical construct made out of real people. You are looking right at these real people. They are right here. They are in this virtual room. They are speaking. They are reading books, and writing them, and writing about them. Why don't you see them?
eta: Also see Shutting Down Discussion Is Wrong.
