Whitewashing

I've long been of the school of thought that if you aren't part of the solution, you're part of the problem. As I read more about racism in science fiction, anti-racism, and whitewashing, I've come to a dilemma:

All of the central characters in my YA novel are white. Yeah, sure, one of them isn't human, one of them is bisexual, one of the secondary characters is trans, I address mental health issues to some extent. I tried to actively include things that could be othering to young people and have those people affected by them kick ass. I was careful to have female characters retain their agency regardless of romantic attachment. I avoided the icky cultural narratives of romanticizing quasi-abusive relationships as best I could. I thought I was doing pretty well on showing a variety of people doing awesome things.

And then I realized that all of these characters were white. They're from different socio-economic backgrounds and some are immigrants and there's an age gap between people who would sociologically be considered the same generation, so I got to address a bunch of things I find interesting. I don't think about race a lot, because I don't have to: I am white. I also try to deal with people as individuals, and when they mention something race-related (delicious collard greens their grandmother makes, or parents having a hilarious Mumbai/Halifax accent), that gets tagged in my head as something related to their culture of origin, much in the same category as my parents being hippie journalists.

That's one of the reasons one of my characters is Polish: I think the idea of 'white culture' is crap, because there are so very many different cultures. But I've been reading a lot about social justice in the past year (thank you, Tumblr, I think), and have been reminded that having heroes that look like you is really, really important. Belle was my favourite Disney Princess because she looked the most like me (and also because I have an absurd weakness for that fairy tale).

So it kind of sucks that all of these characters are white. I didn't set out to write a perfectly politically correct novel. But I kind of want to rewrite it so that one of my characters (the all-American football star) is African-American. So I am dithering.

Another part of the argument is that I don't want him to be token, I don't want him to be 'just' inclusion of people of colour. Additionally, I'd kind of envisioned him as an American mish-mash: part Ojibwe, part French, lots of German, some Lakota, some English, a fair portion of we're-not-really-sure. Tanned and tall, but not particularly easily pinpointed in terms of subculture of origin. But he'd still read as white, so that would make him not particularly perfect as the All-American Hero.

There's also the really tempting part that, if I'm not changing him, the book is ready to go. I started on this four years ago, so being done is a really, really tempting thought.

Alpha Males

Romance novels and pickup artists have something in common:

They both tend to simplify complex sociological forces about attraction and mate fitness into really easy sets (I'm sorry, A Beka, for the upsetting theories). The most common sets are 'alpha males' and all other men. What are alpha males? Well, depends who you ask. Pickup artists think one thing, romance novel enthusiasts think others, but the term comes from ethology. It is not a concept that is historically or anthropologically relevant to humans, but it is easy shorthand.

What's it shorthand for, though?

Well, judging from what I know of the protagonists of this list, mostly it's shorthand for white (American, Russian, or English, for preference), tall, confident, securely employed, intelligent, physically competent, and handsome. Oh! Also able-bodied and with no crippling mental illness. Alpha male is just a much shorter term, and less problematic to say in public.

The term also connotes leadership, and speaks to people's desire for clear hierarchy as opposed to the complicated morass of actual human interaction. Werewolf romance novels are probably the most explicit in this. They break everything down so the reader gets both clear hierarchy and clear happily ever after, because simple and straightforward and forever is in dire short supply.

Hashtags

Trillian is one of the few programs I have constantly running on my computer. Partly because it allows me to keep most of my IMing in one program (I got sick of the 'what is beeping what the hell is beeping oh wow I have no idea what's beeping, guess I'm not talking to anyone' dance), but also because it is a great way to passively follow Twitter.

If any of you follow me on Twitter, you know that I do not engage a whole lot there. I post things! Every few days or so. I have occasional, usually short conversations with friends like Kim Nayyer and Suzanne. A large part of that is that most of my writing support system is to be had over more private channels, like a forum or IMs. I find it easy to forget that social media and getting a bunch of people to read your writing involves things like making sure people know you exist.

Even so, I follow a few hashtags. Hashtags, for anyone who has been assiduously avoiding Twitter for the last few years, are ways to mark that a tweet is about a certain topic. Sometimes hashtags will trend, becoming popular with a large number of people for a while. Right now, a trending hashtag is #removeoneletterfilms. The hashtags that I regularly follow are #yyj, for events and news in Victoria, #myWANA, for the author support network Kristen Lamb started, and #amwriting, because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Both of the latter I follow at least in part to see emergent memes in the kind of indie writer culture that uses hashtags on Twitter, because they are sometimes also memes I will see at least partly reflected in news articles or brought up at meetings of the Victoria Writers' Society.

With Trillian, any tweets that include those hashtags pop up in the bottom right part of my screen. I can glance over and read and glance back and then it fades away. If I feel it necessary, I can reply to or retweet the tweet in question without ever switching tabs.

The curious thing about hashtags like myWANA and amwriting is that I see some people using them to market their books.

This is interesting to me, because yes, of course, writers read, but these hashtags seem to be only peopled by writers. I'd think that marketing could be more effectively directed at readers who are not already writers themselves: your writing support network probably already knows all about your book.

Meta: Snowglare

This is undoubtedly one of the cruelest things I've ever written.

I wrote it in the summer of 2011, and, like so many things, it was for Adam's contest. The prompt was parody, so I wrote a parody of a person.

She's since become a friend, but at the time I was having a lot of difficulty connecting with her. She'd initially taken critique very badly, and then become reliant on getting critique (mostly from me or another friend of mine) before turning in, and hadn't had a particularly good English education (which is something I shouldn't hold against people, but tend to in writing-oriented settings). She'd also written a story with me as a character in it, with particular attention to my bosom. I was neither pleased nor comfortable with this. Since then, she's grown in leaps and bounds, and joined me in the semi-finals this year, as well as being published several times over the course of the year. She and I have also talked a lot more.

Her username is The Solarized Night, which gave root to a lot of the imagery: the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis, are the result of solar flares, and are most visible at night.

Luminosity is a term for self-awareness.

She lives in the Southern hemisphere, while I and Adam live in the Northern hemisphere.

With that knowledge, everything else about the poem kind of falls into place: from vague imagery about long nights and the Northern Lights to excoriation of someone I did not consider as acting rationally or particularly intelligently and considered attention-seeking.

What's worse is that she liked the poem, but did not understand the meaning (I will probably link her this post).

Also I got a perfect score for this, the only one I've ever gotten. It is the reason I'm one of five people in the Hall of Perfection, and it can also be read here.

In sum: cruel and petty idea, well-executed.