Honestly, though I know ours is a small community and in the larger scheme we are not terribly important, I am continually embarrassed every time someone raises a rock and exposes how much prejudice is still crawling around at the bottom of the SFF world. I want us, whose job it is to chronicle the future and a wealth of alternatives to the here and now, to be better than this. Why are we not better than this? How can people who make it their business to imagine and empathize with the truly alien offer such meager treatment to other humans?
- Let's Go Downtown and Watch the Failparade!
catvalente- September 16th, 2010
Oh, Elizabeth Moon! How could you write a post like that knowing it was bound raise a stink? The only answer is malice. Good citizens don't do that sort of thing, you know.
Honestly, though I know ours is a small community and in the larger scheme we are not terribly important, I am continually embarrassed every time someone raises a rock and exposes how much prejudice is still crawling around at the bottom of the SFF world. I want us, whose job it is to chronicle the future and a wealth of alternatives to the here and now, to be better than this. Why are we not better than this? How can people who make it their business to imagine and empathize with the truly alien offer such meager treatment to other humans?
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
Re: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings."
I just...I feel blindsided by this when it comes from an SFF writer because I feel like my tribe has just been shown to be deficient. Ugh.
Uhm...
STOP READING IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERSSS!!!
Seriously... stop.
Okay, if you're still reading the summary is this: "Long diatribe about being a Good Citizen(tm) that is actually easy to agree with. Only Good Citizens(tm) don't upset people. Dirty Muslims building Park51 are upsetting people. Therefore, they aren't good citizens. And us white, middle-class priveledged Good Citizens(tm) are getting tired of extending Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness to them because we own them and can't you just THANK US FOR OUR TOLERANCE OF YOUR INFERIORITY!"
And, and an in-ept metaphor for that American Muslims are an ethnic group, not a religion. And something about Muslims being unfit for citizenship because of their religion.
...
I think that gets the salient points.
Well-played!
Oh gods, THIS! How can people who commonly write about the outsider and the fringes, and what happens when humans meet vampires and alien species and werewolves and elves and... how can they believe, let alone say, such things?
E. Moon wrote a very long-winded, overwrought
I agree with your opinion and although Moon's diatribe disgusted me, I still am glad you posted the link to it for me to read.
Re: E. Moon wrote a very long-winded, overwrought
Sad, and I share Cat's chagrin. But I'm not surprised; even the utopians are human.
I don't think, as many of the commenters on the OP seemed to, that writing this post makes EM a big ol' unforgivable dyed-in-the-wool racist whose books we should all boycott (or at whom we should blow raspberries at during her Wiscon speech, or whatever). But there is significant inherent (maybe unconscious) bias/bigotry apparent in her words and conclusions, and I do hope that the furor prompts her to reexamine her assumptions about such matters.
The power of memes
It seems to have taken root in way too many people who should really know better.
I'm glad I read it. I almost wish I had time for a point by point refutation.
But I really think that, when we write fiction, sometimes we become more than we are. (I strongly suspect that some writers become less than they are, too, but I'm not talking about them right now.) We say things we don't actually know, we make connections our regular brains haven't made. And sometimes all those insights do not follow us back to our circumscribed lives where we have the usual petty irritations, blind spots, distractions, and self- or other-imposed stupidities. So I'm very sad but not surprised that somebody who has written science fiction so well could write an entry like that.
P.