I emphatically reject the idea that deliberately erasing First Nations from history, as Patricia Wrede has done in The Thirteenth Child, is a safe or acceptable way of dealing with the issue. That is not ever okay, and we should never ever be asked to accept that it is, or that we are judging something harshly from the outset instead of withholding judgments until we've considered the entire work. If the harm has been done at the outset, then harm has been done, period.
I am not attempting to make this discussion about me, but I would like to apologize in tangent with the issue raised above, because I have been guilty of this as well - not of deliberate erasure, but of writing selectively, of only writing about predominently white, cisgendered European-Americans. I am immeasurably sorry for having predominantly avoided writing characters of disenfranchised identities. I apologize both for my failing, and for the fact that it has taken a discussion as painful as Racefail to bring me to a place where I can clearly understand and acknowledge it for what it is. I can and will do better than this.
In response to the recent discussion concerning conversation threads on
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rahmbamarama, the moderators have made a response on the community to our members, but if anyone has any ongoing issues or concerns I would just like to ask that they PM or email me at any time. 100 Best Books from - idek what this list is from, it's just one of those lists, y'know? it's easier for me to bold the ones i haven't read, so here they are.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling all 7
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare -- not the complete works... but most of the plays and sonnets
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger <-- UGH I HATED THIS BOOK *shuts up*
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis <-- never finished this, and I tried a bunch of times, and also 36 should not even be on here wtf
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown <-- i didn't read this so much as skim through the whole thing the night of the OTP book release in 2004, but I feel like I got about as much meaning out of it either way.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Not counting repeats, I get a 66/100, which is shameful. But dude, WHY SO MUCH THOMAS HARDY, every feeling revolts, etc etc etc. (I read The Mayor of Casterbridge! I have done my time! Thomas Hardy, why must you follow me around!)
May 11 2009, 16:45:25 UTC 3 years ago
OH GOD ME TOO. i couldn't finish it. and i always feel bad for saying it because fandom loves the friggin book. bleh.
May 11 2009, 17:21:13 UTC 3 years ago
Sister M just summed up my feelings on it, perhaps some healthy schadenfreude is in order! :D
May 11 2009, 17:01:58 UTC 3 years ago
May 11 2009, 17:17:09 UTC 3 years ago
and then there are like the random popular-choice books like freaking Dan Brown that just make you RESENT THE LIST, because come on, people, Captain Corelli's Mandolin? Really?
May 11 2009, 17:09:35 UTC 3 years ago
And I can't believe you haven't read Moby Dick because it is SO SLASHY. It's at Project Guttenberg.
How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.
Ishmael/Queequeg!
May 11 2009, 17:15:58 UTC 3 years ago
I keep starting it spastically and then not following through (lol). That book along with The Brothers Karamazov is my major 'have-started-a-million-times-and-never-f
But! I had this extremely memorable conversation with
Also: It kills me that it's Barack Obama's favorite book, because you just know he read it in high school and was like HEHEHE THIS IS AWESOME :D the whole time.
May 11 2009, 17:45:01 UTC 3 years ago
Me too! Really, really hated it. So much that I couldn't finish it.
May 11 2009, 18:33:33 UTC 3 years ago
May 11 2009, 18:44:37 UTC 3 years ago
sigh, no, i really wanted to comment on the list to say "i hate how much of this list is mostly white men," but:
a) i really just don't feel like i have the energy right now to qualify *everything i say* because if i *don't* say it, it can be read as tacitly not noticing some implied offense, or can be read as tacitly noticing but not caring said implied offense. I just. cannot do that right now, even though i kind of just did, so obviously I will if I need to. :/ Just, right now that cannot be my default behavior because I am exhausted.
b) i was like, commenting even to say that would give the list a clout and an authority it doesn't have, since, well, to me it's just a stupid internet meme i did to take my mind off the first two things in my post. Like, come on, DAN BROWN is on this list, so it really has no validity for me whatsoever, even if it did come from the BBC. :/
May 12 2009, 04:11:00 UTC 3 years ago
May 12 2009, 16:16:24 UTC 3 years ago
No, no! You are fine! Let me be completely clear, haha:
a) I am exhausted.
b) but still glad you said something because ultimately, exhausted or not, I would pretty much rather avoid looking insensitive.
May 11 2009, 18:38:58 UTC 3 years ago
You won't appreciate this comment, but I felt I had to say it \:
The main Race!Fail '09 brought up some serious points from both sides that hit me pretty hard. This? Sounds similar to "well, we had so much 'fun'/outrage with that one, let's try again!" Seriously? Most of the people offended have not even flipped through the book yet. And I wonder why this book in particular is getting so much flack when there is a whole genre dedicated to alternative history, not all of which is all that well-researched.Not to mention that, as Mris says in comment 10 on the main review site,
Yet other posters in the thread conveniently ignore this and continue talking about the "erasure." It's not that an entire racial group has been eliminated, so it seems as though, if they are paying attention at all, these posters are at some level angry that this basically turns the Native American ethnic group into Northern Asians, no matter what myths, legends, ways of life, philosophies, may have ended up developing similarly. This...really strikes me more as people looking for a reason to feel hurt, or to lash out in a reaction to a deeper-set pain. True, I've also not read the book. But I have a hard time believing that Wrede is doing this in order to set forth facts, or indeed that she has any responsibility to do so. She's a *fiction* author, and her specialty is *fantasy*. Yes, fiction and fantasy can very much affect our lives—I've certainly been heavily influenced by them. But what we read *contributes* to who we are, it does not *define* it, and I can't see the sense in expecting fiction to have such a primary role in doing so. I'm not really sure why fans of a genre which is built on suspension of disbelief are so up in arms about that.
I also disagree with the "if harm has been done at the outset, then harm has been done" reading. I feel that ties into the "well, *I* find this offensive, so why don't you?" (when said to me by someone not understanding why I either don't care about or don't find X East Asian joke to be racist or offensive) argument, which has always infuriated me because I absolutely do not see why I should let *anyone* tell me what I should and should not be hurt by—because I find that sort of thinking to be counterproductive to any real attempt at understanding and equality. Someone can *tell* me that X person has done Y thing that hurts me, but it would be completely immature of me to react and take umbrage without *knowing* that that is what actually happened.
The atmosphere of "if you're not offended by this, then you're racist, so where is your outcry" that has cropped up of late is not one I agree with or feel comfortable in at all, and, while I'm on RaceFail!peeves, let me mention that I personally find the term "PoC" HIGHLY offensive (thanks, we're 1) all the same, 2) defined only by not being white, and 3) an acronym. way to go, us non-white "pocks"). And, as there are those involved in this whole thing who disgustingly require "credentials" for people to be able to say certain things, let me note for the record that I am straight, female, Vietnamese, and first-gen American.
Also, while I've been a fan for a while, I do have to say I'm...not really a fan of your apology. Not because I don't feel it's sincere, but because I don't think you really need to apologize, and it feels as though you've pressed yourself into it because of other peoples' pain. It's obvious that other peoples' pain affects you deeply, but I really can't see any way in which you have "offended" (other than, I don't know, writing what you know?). Writing a character of a different skin tone just because you feel that you've been writing too many white folk is not...really...any sort of a fix.
May 11 2009, 19:02:04 UTC 3 years ago
Re: You won't appreciate this comment, but I felt I had to say it \:
I can't really speak for anyone but myself, but.When I heard the premise of The Thirteenth Child, I was all "no First Nations people? They've been replaced by scary wild animals? Oh dear." It's kinda an... inherently squicky premise. While I have only read Walton's review, Walton's review made it fairly clear that the book chose not to engage with said squickiness. If the debate were over whether or not the book engaged with its squick well, then I agree that it might be intellectually dubious to criticize it before reading. But that is not what the debate is about. The debate is about whether the book's premise is squicky. To talk intelligently about that, one really only needs to read a summary of the book's premise.
May 11 2009, 19:59:40 UTC 3 years ago
Re: You won't appreciate this comment, but I felt I had to say it \:
I both agree and disagree. I do think that Racefail brought out the best and worst in people. I'm glad everyone had the discussion, it did need to be brought up. We do need to look at what we're saying about minorities and how they're being represented. And that I agreed with. What I wasn't a fan of was the indignant overreaction that was running absolutely rampant. I don't think that people need to apologize for having stories with only white characters, just like I don't think they need to apologize for writing stories with only any race or ethnicity. Should Pearl S. Buck apologize because The Good Earth only had Chinese people in it? Not writing characters of color may be bad, but adding in gratuitous PoCs are worse. To me, it feels demeaning, like a pat on the head. If you're writing a story that's a regency fantasy, of course your characters are going to be all white. That's not exactly a problem. And that's not something anyone should have to apologize for.As I said in the post that was linked about the Patricia C. Wrede book (but the comment was screened, and if it ever gets unscreened I... will be surprised), she's honestly one of my favorite authors. I recommend her to anyone and everyone who's literate. I do feel a little "Oh, Patricia" about the whole thing, and yeah, she does deserve to have someone sit down and say "look, this is semi-offensive for the following reasons". She's been a very inclusive, open-minded, amazing author in the past, and I highly doubt this was done maliciously. And I doubt she'll do it again. And I do feel like people are now pre-disposed to just jump at any possible sign of racial discord, and I hope this doesn't turn into a whole fiasco. I really do.
I feel like an unfortunate side effect from RaceFail is EXACTLY what's described above,the whole "if you're not with us, you're racist and against us" mentality, which made me grossly uncomfortable. I don't like the extent to which people are falling all over themselves to be non-offensive. I find that way more offensive than whatever people were doing before. And that...brings me to my whole rant on how race is handled in liberal America with ridiculous over-prominence on guilt and erasing the past instead of looking at the now and the future, which is sort of off-topic. But yeah. Both agreeing and disagreeing.
May 12 2009, 02:47:57 UTC 3 years ago
Mammothfail =/
I think there is a difference between feeling insulted by something and knowing that something is insulting or racist and saying back the fuck up. For example, do I give a shit if some failboat calls me a racist name? Not really But will I think it's okay and not racist just because I've learned to be a thick-skinned bitch? Not really. It won't make me cry, but I'm still not going to be cool with it. (Humor is a bit different for me since I actually think that comedy is one of the only way the mainstream dares to talk about race anymore, but not everybody's Paul Mooney.)I understand if you think that erasing Native Americans from the American (Columbian?) panorama is part of the suspension of disbelief in reading this type of genre book, but for a lot of people it's amazingly squickful because their ancestors had to deal with the very real threat of erasure through either re-education of massacre. IMO, it's too much of a coincidence for a culture that's constantly fighting to be seen and heard to be absent once again and for someone to think this is harmless. As long as we have Mammoths who needs Native Americans?
How about you're not racist just because you don't feel insulted by this and they're not race wankers trying to gang bang some innocent writer just because they do? Just because you don't care, don't see what the big deal is, don't sympathize, whatever doesn't necessarily mean you're not racially aware. Just because they do, doesn't mean they're in it for the ragegasm and the dog piling.
May 12 2009, 16:08:39 UTC 3 years ago
Re: You won't appreciate this comment, but I felt I had to say it \:
It's not that I don't appreciate the comment, but I think that the point for most of the people engaged in this discussion is that we shouldn't have to look beyond the moment at which harm is done for a larger context.
So, we acknowledge that P.W. has not completely removed them from history but instead just migrated them over a bit, but that doesn't make it *better* or more acceptable for us. In fact, I feel like this is on a fundamental level almost more offensive, and offensive to more groups of people: because she basically *made them North-Asian so they'd be easier to deal with,*- and I can't even start unpacking all the privilege in that.
Above all what offends me the most is the idea of this - the fact that her European characters were more important to her than the entire race of people she had to literally move out of the way in order to make it easier for her narrative to function. As a vehicle for white people.
I agree with you that the atmosphere of "if you're not offended by this, then you're racist, so where is your outcry" that has cropped up of late is not one I agree with or feel comfortable in at all - because there are extents to which I feel like the entire environment has degenerated into one of thought-policing. It's so hard to grapple with this idea. On the one hand, I feel like the atmosphere is so charged, so volatile, that right now fandom (at least my corner of it) is an unsafe place for people to just act naturally. I think that is almost as detrimental to the dialogue, and to race relations in general, as one which reinforces silence.
But on the other, I really do believe that if even one person is harmed or made to feel unsafe by a prevailing mindset, then harm has occurred, period. There is no "you just made it up" for me; there is no level at which "you only hurt yourself by being oversensitive." If something hurts you, then that something is hurtful. Period.
I think one thing you're trying to express here is the idea that your offense at the ways other people are expressing their *own* offended reactions to treatment of race is equal to or negates their offended reactions. And I strongly disagree with that idea. Just because Person A is offended or angered about the *way* Person B is expressing their hurt/rage, it doesn't mean Person A should refute or refuse to acknowledge the pain and hurt that Person B has experienced.
Not that this is what you're doing; I think you're trying to guard against hysteria. But still, the pain caused by the premise of a book like Wrede's can be real; and when it's acceptable to publish books like these while glossing over the whitewashing of their content, it sends an extremely regressive message.
I can't always objectively judge when something is or isn't offensive - even thinking that I *can* judge is a privileged attitude. My annoyance at the outrage of a group of disenfranchised people is in itself a privileged response. And out of respect for them, I feel like I need to try my best to be an ally to their anger.
I definitely see your point about the term "PoC", and agree that defining ourselves through what we are *not* rather than what we are is always problematic; but it's more important for me personally to adjust to the safety/comfort levels of *as many* of the people who are victims of disenfranchisement as possible. So if the majority of disenfranchised fans want to self-identify as Bicyclists for Christ, then I'm okay with calling them that, even though I'm not all that into ten-speeds or Jesus.
Basically I think any time we can reaffirm to ourselves our commitment to become better allies, then only positive things have happened. So if you want, please read my apology as purely a personal vow to do better.
(I don't think that writing a character of a different skin tone *just* because they're not white is a fix at all. But I do think freeing yourself of hesitation, letting yourself explore characters of all backgrounds and cultures without thinking 'what if I do more harm than good' *is* a positive move forward.)
Anyway, thanks for letting me hash through all this. It's been a tense past few days; a lot of this has been weighing heavily on my mind. :)
May 12 2009, 02:23:52 UTC 3 years ago
Thank you anyway. Good post.