Wednesday, June 04, 2014

Thank You for Telling Me This

Here. Read this, accept it, internalize it. Believe it and try to be the kind of person who would stand with the person who wrote it. If you want to play Devil's Advocate with it, explain that #NotAllFans are like that, or suggest that maybe she's exaggerating because "you know how those people are about political correctness"...read it again and look for yourself in it.

And Ms. Jemisin...your comments are closed, quite sensibly under the circumstances, so I can't thank you for writing that speech on your blog. So I'll do it here. Thank you so much.

3 comments:

El A said...

Indeed. It's kind of crazy to me that a genre that I saw in my youth as generally progressive has spawned this nasty side. But I guess these folks saw a niche market ripe for exploiting.

Tony Laplume said...

Well, I'm pretty sure there have always been bigots in the audience. But it's terrible to hear about it today, although of course the bigots still exist, especially on the Internet (Home of Bigots!).

John Seavey said...

@Tony: Yeah, my theory is that...have you seen the TV show 'Coupling'? Specifically, the episode where Steve insists that porn can be a legitimate artistic medium, and Susan calls his bluff and asks him to describe the plot of the pornographic film he was watching, and he stammers through an explanation as everyone else watches him? And after he gets through it all, Sally says, "That sounds lousy. Why would you watch that?" And he bursts out with, "Because it's got naked women in it, okay?" And then goes on a long rant about how men like to look at naked women, and he's sick of pretending otherwise, and and and...

I think that's how racists are today. They've been trying for decades to pretend that they're not irrationally prejudiced--they have logical, sensible reasons for hating people different to them. And that worked for a little while, but all their arguments have huge holes in them, and they're finally just falling back on bursting out with their irrational rants because they just can't pretend anymore.