Point A to F

Excuse me while I boggle on how a conversation about writing the Other, and racism in SF&F, has now become "a cast of mostly pseudonymous thousands...Aliases are for people on Wanted posters. Aliases are for con-men and crooks. Give it up. Come out."

I have to be honest, seeing all this fuss over the hurt feelings of a white man who can't admit he made a misjudgment is very amusing. It's a role reversal. Usually it's a fragile, oh so delicate and precious white woman for whom all sorts of arguments get dragged out and put on chargers and made to dash headlong into things.

Even more interesting to me, is this statement:

Certainly, most of you believe that I am a fat black CIA agent sitting in a bunker in Arizona and not actually the slim blonde in Pleasantville, New York I claim to be.

It's interesting because I begin to wonder just what kind of conversations are going on behind the scenes. It's an interesting juxiposition, isn't it? Fat and black vs slim and blonde. I mean when one considers the continuing online saga of Teresa Neilsen Hayden: Silences.

She's behaved as if there aren't any at all intelligent black speculative fiction fans who're online and there's no way they could have developed community, building upon post colonial theories and anti-racism dialogues of the past. Everyone who responded to her husband, thus driving him to swoon, and blush faintly, throw a hand over his forehead and retreat from public life on Livejournal (in particular - he seems to be doing fine on his regular blog), simply must be a sockpuppet; an imitation person controlled by another who is hiding behind aliases.

So now, for the sake of one man (sounds very Mr. Movie-voice doesn't it), there's the stirrings of a movement; a real names online movement. And it all came about because denial of white privilege and unconscious racist thought is so needed.

Then again, maybe this 'movement' has another purpose. Maybe there's also been talk behind the scenes of how one can't properly pigeonhole who's a PhD and who's a PoC due to the relative anonymity pseudonym brands have on the internet.

I must do some research to discover what other movements have come about because of the need for white denial and white comfort.

Meanwhile I'm going to recharge for February and try to figure out how I want to handle the 'Summer of Fiction'; so I can continue to have the conversation I WANT to have.

PS: "Total shout out to the anonymous orcing hordes. I say Hooooo manflesh!"