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"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963
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Now you'll notice I just moved that away from "people of color", because personally I don't think the issues of all people of color in this country are the same and I think if you try to address them all at once, you might be setting yourself up for failure. So. Does this problem statement speak to the root of the problem? No. I will post some discussion of the various roots of the problem next week.
It is definitely harder to address problems where the symptoms are not so obvious as having signs in windows saying that Negros are not welcome in stores. So developing a plan of action to take away the signs that are (somehow) present, that discourage blacks from trying to enter the genre as territory, requires first doing an inquiry as to what those signs may be. Only then can we develop a plan of action that might do MLK proud.
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My guess is that the problem that has been developing into such an online shitstorm is the lack of people of color as authors, publishers, and SF fans (that we know of; not coming to cons doesn't necessarily mean not being a fan).
Has anyone asked any of the current POC SF authors/fans how they feel about this? One public black geek/fan boy I know of is Ta-Nahisi Coats, who writes for the Atlantic online. He is a gamer, at any rate, so he might be a good source for people to ask.
Overall, I believe that President Obama gave an excellent opening to a wider discussion of race in his address last year. If we recognize that all sides have legitimate reasons to feel distrustful of each other and that many of the individuals on all sides just don't or can't care and don't want to be involved in the discussion right now, that seems to me to be a good start.
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It's not clear to me what quote you are referring to in your question. Can you clarify?
Has anyone asked any of the current POC SF authors/fans how they feel about this?
What do you mean by "this"? a number of current POC SF authors and fans just spent a couple weeks exploring, stating, and reiterating how they feel about all of this. Others are, I presume, not aware of that discussion. Do you know how to contact Mr. Coats? I'd be happy to ask him about how he feels about the lack of people of color as authors, publishers, and sf fans.
Now, personally, I don't believe "All sides have legitimate reasons to feel distrustful of each other." That is to say, I don't believe *I* have any reason to be distrustful of most POC authors and fans about this... (I don't know if it makes sense to describe us as being on different "sides" of this issue, either, though we have different perspectives).
Can you give me a clearer argument for why it's valuable to legitimize a possibly misplaced distrust before even getting started? (I'm considering distrust to be an active sort of suspicious stance, not simply a lack of established trust)
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Consider the possibility that there is an inborn instinct to classify an unknown individual as "Of my tribe/pack" or "Not of my tribe/pack". Such an instinct is present in animals, and would likely have been advantageous to survival throughout the vast majority of human history.
I don't assert that it does exist (I'll leave that to the sociologists), but the existence of such an instinct would be a "logical and understandable" basis for racism. It would not, however, mean that racism "is proper and acceptable".
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Now, I do have a legitimate reason, especially based on recent experience, to believe that a fair number of sf-interested people of color might also have been exposed to academic and other fields of thought and culture that I *haven't* been, and so I fear misunderstanding them and being misunderstood by them. But for me that is different than distrusting the person. That is distrusting that we have a common language - distrusting, in effect, my own ability to translate my good intent into positive results. It is that kind of distrust that I think it is especially valuable to try to validate and then find ways to eliminate.
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As for "distrust," I was working from the "logical and understandable" definition nicegeek refers to under this comment. Additionally, I was applying it in a general, societal context. I believe the "logical and understandable" distrust exists to a greater or lesser extent in most individuals who have grown up in this country (I can't speak for other countries). A lesser extent for people like yourself who has had positive experiences growing up in mixed-race neighborhoods; a far lesser extent for any POC who has been stopped for "Driving While Black," for example.
Given that fandom has its own set of operators, this societally-instilled distrust may not even be an issue in your conversation. But (referring to President Obama's address on race during the campaign) if the President's own grandmother told him she crossed the street to avoid other young black men, I believe it's necessary to at least be aware of the issue.
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"Despite the fact that the black population in America has a natural common cause with the genre of speculative fiction as a tool for imagining and envisioning massive change and a different future, the genre is not one that many black americans read or write in."
caused you to say that if the statement comes from a white person, "that statement becomes rather patronizing by definition"?
How would you interpret it differently if it comes from a POC?
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That clause needs qualifiers, particularly if the quote is coming from a white person. "While the genre of speculative fiction as a tool for imagining and envisioning massive change and a different future would seem to be one with which black Americans have a natural common cause, the genre is not one that many black Americans read or write in."
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My only issue with that as a problem statement is that I'm not sure who that is a problem for - is it a problem for the industry because they aren't making inroads into a demographic group, or is it a problem for African-Americans because they are feeling excluded from the genre? Or is it both?
So developing a plan of action to take away the signs that are (somehow) present, that discourage blacks from trying to enter the genre as territory, requires first doing an inquiry as to what those signs may be.
I think the first step, and this is one that is being discussed - even if the signal-to-noise ratio isn't good - is whether the signs exist at all. There are other forms of entertainment that have never taken hold in some cultures, and the reason has nothing to do with racism. Cricket and soccer have never been popular in the United States, but that isn't a racial issue. Different cultures have different tastes in music and film.
I'm not saying there isn't a problem here - just that someone will have to make a calm, rational, convincing argument of what it is before a movement will form that can solve it.
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Cricket and soccer have never been popular in the United States
What United States do you live in? Cricket, sure, has never caught on here, but soccer? According to this (http://usa.usembassy.de/sports-soccer.htm), "the United States has more official soccer players than any other nation in the world - almost 18 million. No other sport crosses so many cultural boundaries, and it no surprise that it is the fastest growing team sport in the United States."
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"Soccer is the most popular women's sport in college."
Of those 18 million official soccer players, 78% are under the age of eighteen, so the upsurge in soccer that started in the '90s may not yet be visible to you major league sports reporters, but I'm betting it will be soon.
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The one where soccer games get lower ratings on TV than fishing, poker and college softball. The one where professional soccer struggles terribly to stay afloat, and where women's pro soccer was a massive flop, even though we have the best team in the world.
Of those 18 million official soccer players, 78% are under the age of eighteen, so the upsurge in soccer that started in the '90s may not yet be visible to you major league sports reporters, but I'm betting it will be soon.
That's been the case since the NASL's glory days in the 1970s. Everyone talked about how 80% of soccer players in the United States (including me) were under 18, and how they would be the future of the sport. They are still saying that 30 years later, and it has still never become a niche spectator sport. It's popular at the youth level, because it is cheap. It's popular as a women's college sport, because it is a place to put the scholarships demanded by the NCAA.
I want soccer to be popular in the United States - it is my favorite sport. I played youth soccer, I've coached youth soccer, and I've covered it from every level from high school to the World Cup.
So, your snark aside, I actually do know what I'm talking about here.
"Soccer is the most popular women's sport in college."
By what measure? Maybe in sheer numbers of players, but arguing that women's college soccer is more popular than women's college basketball is insane.
"the United States has more official soccer players than any other nation in the world - almost 18 million."
That's an old number - it is now over 20 million, but the U.S. has fallen to second behind China. A lot of that has to do with the size of the population - India is third, and soccer isn't even vaguely important to that culture - and some of it has to do with the way that the United States organizes youth soccer to a ridiculous extent.
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That's cool that soccer is so popular in China, too. It's certainly not unpopular in the US, especially not as compared to cricket. But maybe the people who grew up loving soccer like to play it and, like me, don't even watch TV most of the time.
I certainly appreciate it when soccer is playing at a bar I'm at. If any other sport is on, I will most likely ignore it (I'm a bit of a sucker for car racing, but that really takes applied attention and the voiceover to keep good track of, so it's not the best sport to watch in the bar. I also enjoy watching basketball).
Soccer is harder to capture on video than a lot of sports; I bet it's harder to cover live for television -the field is huge and the ball can move from one end to the other fairly quickly - unlike football, where possession of the ball is pretty easy for a spectator to track and most plays move forward down the field in a pretty predictable manner, or baseball, which is also predictable much of the time - you don't know if they guy will catch the ball or not, but you know which guy to aim the camera at. We don't have nicely built up soccer stadiums, and we already devoted money and real estate to baseball, hockey, basketball, and football. To lay the burden of responsibility for the success of soccer as a pro sport purely at the foot of its popularity is to be a little heavy-handed, in my opinion.
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:P