Entry tags:

cultural appropriation, fandom, gcadod09, race, sf/f

Clean-up and hiatus
I'm going to try to take a break from posting on or reading the continuing RaceFail, although I don't know if I'll succeed. A few updates:

• I agree with spiralsheep's call for Will Shetterly and Kathryn Cramer to be shunned. By this I do not mean that their friends and loved ones should abandon them or retract their personal connections to them, but that they should shunned by the community for professional and social reasons. They have endangered the sf community, not just me personally, and unless and until such time as they can evidence an understanding of their actions, express contrition, and demonstrate rehabilitation, they are simply not safe to have in the community.
  
  
• I have filed complaints about privacy violations with WordPress about Will Shetterly and with LJ about Will Shetterly and greyorm, asking that posts and comments identifying my LJ as my full legal name be removed. I have not bothered to contact WordPress or her ISP about Kathryn Cramer's privacy violations, as she had taken all identifying information down before I could figure out how to contact the appropriate party, and I do not currently have any plans to file a complaint about her or Will Shetterly's harassment and defamation of me, which I do not feel should be submitted to ISP or blog provider arbitration.
  
  I am not particularly confident my complaints will be acted upon, but I've made them.
  
  
• A few people have apologized for unknowingly linking my full name to my LJ or disclosing my full name to people offline. That is kind, but no apology is necessary. As I said earlier, people have made that mistake before and I've simply requested they update their links. I continue to believe that this was, in fact, the nature of Will Shetterly's original posting; the problem for me is not that he made a mistake.
  
  
• I may change my userprofile name to "Mely" again. Strangely, I am feeling a little exposed.
  
  I will probably not be removing my name from previous posts, and do not ask other people do so, although at the moment I am inclined to ask that people refer to me in the context of this blog either as "Mely" or "coffeeandink" in the future.
  
  
• I may ask readers to Googlebomb my full name at some other Web site later, as some people have suggested.
  
  
• I put up the response to Kathryn because I said I'd do one, and I wanted closure, against the advice of friends. But as reprehensible (and as painful for me, personally) Will and Kathryn's behavior has been, and as deserving of censure, I do not want people to lose sight of the fact that this isn't simply a case of individual people acting poorly, or even individual people performing racist actions. It would be easy for white people to say, "Science fiction isn't racist; a couple of people just overreacted." But this overreaction comes out of and depends on white privilege and racism as a social institution, system of thought, and system of power and oppression. The racism in science fiction -- the ongoing erasure and denial of the people of color who are right here and speaking about their representation and misrepresentation -- is not the property of two individuals.
  
  
• I have seen more sf/f pros become aware of the debate and speak up since I made this post, and I regret that I became accusatory in my anger and pain. I'm ... not quite sure I want to apologize, but I do regret it, for what that's worth. Mostly I regret that I gave into the temptation to make the issue my own pain, rather than the more structural issues of racism and responsibility. oyceter says what I should have said here.
  
  
• I don't know if I will get to the comment replies I had planned to this weekend.
  

[Comments disabled because it would be too easy to turn this post into another sympathy-gathering fest.]