Stress Fracture

I have the unusual experience of being asked to post some things that I said off-hand in some livejournal comments as its own blog post, and so, well, here goes. The context is a broad conflict going on amongst speculative fiction fandom, writers and editors about topics such as race and cultural appropriation and if you’re not up on it, then I’m just going to leave you to check it out on your own rather than try to sum it up.

Much of the debate is technical, if you will, but I think there are some larger considerations that make a lot of the drama — let’s face it, all of the drama — unnecessary. So here’s what I said over in the livejournal of part-time author Haddayr Copley-Woods, while fervently agreeing with her, distilled into something that makes sense on its own.

You probably know what I look like. If you don’t, you aren’t trying very hard, as my photo appears on my Livejournal, my Facebook, and the About page of this blog. My appearance has caused some speculation, including internally, all my life, about what ethnic backgrounds might be included in my family tree. My vain genealogical investigations haven’t come up with anything except an Irish branch (and very like an English one.) But you know, whatever. It doesn’t matter.

Because I am WHITE, baby, WHITE. There’s no question about it. With all the upsides, with all the occasional embarrassment of having those upsides, and yes, with all the downsides such as exist. When I check a checkbox, I check white. (Or Caucasian. You know what I mean.) It may turn out that I’m X% Latino (as some have suggested), but I don’t know the first thing about the Latino experience. I may be Y% Native American (as some have suggested), but I don’t know anything about the Native American experience. Maybe I’m a little bit Semitic, maybe I’m a little bit black, maybe something else, but it doesn’t matter, because what I know is what it’s like to be a white man in the United States of America. That doesn’t make me proud. It doesn’t make me ashamed. It doesn’t make me guilty nor does it make me defensive. It just is what it is, man. Why is that so tough?

Here’s a couple of lessons it seems to me that some of my white brothers, and probably sisters, to an extent, need to absorb: Know who you are. Live with it. Don’t use it as an excuse to jerk other people around. And know that not everybody is going to approve of everything we do and we are neither entitled to that nor should we go out of our minds over it. Everybody else is used to that; only privilege ever insists on being loved and approved of by everyone.

Thanks to those who I could name and those I couldn’t whose comments and observations over years and years have helped form these imperfect ideas. And to those currently throwing hissy fits because someone didn’t like something they said, wrote, or did: I worry that you are going to have trouble in anything you do, the moreso in writing and publication, a vocation where you put more of yourself out there than almost any other I can think of. Please, learn to be comfortable in your own skin, learn to be comfortable with others being in theirs, and stop thinking that the world revolves around you and your comfort level. Do your thing. Let the rest sort itself out.

Yours,

R

…an object lesson in how not to use the Internet.

Mr. Reardon, aka Cole Adams, is a writer with some publications in his portfolio, which would seemingly be to his credit. Sadly, he appears to be fairly sensitive about said publications, as he chose to respond to an off-hand mention by an anthology editor discussing what stories from another anthology he would and would not use by, well, publically encouraging the editor in question to commit suicide, then again to kill his cat while commiting suicide, and eventually allegedly threatening said editor’s life.

So, bad form, that, I think we could all agree.

What is it about the Internet that brings this stuff out? Gabe of Penny Arcade has a theory which I will paraphrase in order to keep the language strictly family friendly. We’ll call it the Greater Internet Idiot Theory, stated as a formula: NORMAL PERSON + ANONYMITY + AUDIENCE = TOTAL IDIOT. (If you want to read the original, and you’ve been warned about the language, Google on “greater internet theory” and you’ll find it.) And what provides anonymity along with audience like Internet access?

While Gabe was making a specific reference to online gaming, there’s clearly ample evidence that this goes for blogging and other online communication. One of the reasons I have all but abandoned anonymity online personally is to keep myself honest about this sort of thing, hoping that perhaps by removing ANONYMITY from the above equation I can stave off, well, TOTAL IDIOCY. What makes Mr. Reardon special is that, when called out for his behavior, he dropped all vestiges of anonymity as well, but only plunged further into the TOTAL IDIOCY. Arguably this is evidence that NORMAL PERSON was never in the equation in the first place, yes?

Anyway. The moral of today’s story is “don’t do this,” or even “don’t do this in particular if you want to stay off of editorial blacklists,” or even “don’t do this if you don’t want Google hits on your name to all become articles about how you threatened an editor’s life” — a wonderful irony, since Reardon’s actual gripe was, in part, that Google directed people to the original offhand editor’s comment. Irony, it’s a wonderful thing.

I hesitate to give people who behave in an undeserving way the notoriety that speaking about them provides (what little-to-none would come from me speaking about someone, anyway), but this kind of thing deserves the light of day on it. I am a strong proponent of online privacy and, if one desires, anonymity, but an old guy in a comic once told me that with great power comes great responsibility. And the Internet has given us all great power to communicate. Use it well.

R